My Top Ten Movies of 2018

As I watched this strange movie, I wasn’t sure what to think. I felt like Alice getting dragged through an almost nightmarish Wonderland.

Everything in The Favourite is so deliciously horrible, so warped and demented. Anne is a prisoner to her own chronic pain, and her whole court seems shaped by her endless suffering. It’s a place where all wit is barbed, every entertainment rooted in cruelty.

The film is so well crafted. I loved the repeated use of fish eye, giving the audience the idea that we’re constantly looking through a peephole, spying on a private world where everything is grossly distorted. The score is powerful, too.

But the structure of the story impressed me most. (I hope Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara’s screenplay gets some Oscar recognition.) The meteoric rise of Abigail corresponds, as it must, with the agonizing fall of Sarah. I’ve never seen a film before that so clearly explored what it means to be a royal favourite. Love it or hate it, you can’t say the movie is not aptly titled. And the film’s illustration of the unpleasant climate created by two political parties who refuse to work together seems pretty relevant to our present moment, too.

Olivia Colman gives one of the best performances of the year (arguably the best), Emma Stone carries much of the movie with her always flawless comic timing, and Rachel Weisz somehow makes a thoroughly unpleasant character so sympathetic that by the end I practically fell in love with her myself (even knowing her propensity for verbal and physical abuse).

This is my favorite of all Oscar-baity movies of 2018, and I hope it continues to win awards (though at this point, it is running out of awards to win).

Points Against It:
No matter how much I love this movie, some people are always going to hate it. And I don’t mean that as a disparagement of those people. This is one of those movies that arouses hatred and disgust. That’s one of the dangers of letting the audience wallow around in those types of negative emotions for so long. They sometimes stick and negatively color the viewer’s experience of the movie. The Favourite is the strongest film I’ve seen this year, but I still don’t like it as much as my favorite film last year, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

2. Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

In footage from an earlier interview, Rogers says earnestly that we must find a way “to make goodness attractive.” Rarely is such insight matched with corresponding authenticity. What a brave, unusual television star!

Thinking of calm, soft-spoken Mr. Rogers makes me remember that story about Elijah in First Kings when The Lord is not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire. And then comes the still, small voice.

Fred Rogers did amazing work, and this film does an excellent job of honoring him without devolving into the worst kind of sappy hagiography. How do we make goodness attractive?

Points Against It:
The documentary is a bit manipulative. I’m not sure it needs to show footage of horrific tragedies just to let us know that Mr. Rogers addressed them to help children work through their feelings. The footage of Christa McAuliffe’s own students watching the Challenger explode is very moving, and I did enjoy the catharsis of my tears, but does all tragedy belong to this documentary? I’m not sure.

3. Mary Poppins Returns

A sequel to Mary Poppins? That’s like making a new Star Wars. Only Disney would do something so crazy (and they would do it for money), right?  But mere seconds after the start of the opening number (“Underneath the Lovely London Sky”), I completely believed that love of Mary Poppins motivated Rob Marshall to undertake this project. I could see that Lin-Manuel Miranda was genuinely into it, too, going all out to put on a marvelous show.

I love London, and I love musicals, and I’ve loved all musicals set in London, and (surprise, surprise), I love this one, too. It is by far my favorite of Rob Marshall’s movie musicals. (I like his work, but usually his films have a cramped, boxed in quality that is missing here.)

I love the supporting cast. (How can anyone not love Ben Whishaw and Julie Walters? I’m (somewhat shadily) counting Paddington 2 as last year’s movie, or that impeccable children’s film would make this list, too.)

I adore the songs. (After listening to the soundtrack of A Star is Born in the car since October, we finally switched over to Mary Poppins Returns the week of Christmas, and we’ve been driving around in delight ever since. Even my three-year-old loves to sing along with the songs now, and he didn’t go with us to the movie!)

It melted my heart with joy to watch ninety-three-year-old Dick Van Dyke leap onto a desk and start dancing. I love that they gave him the opportunity, and I love that he threw himself into it with such glee. (I’ve read that he was offered multiple options for choreography and chose the most difficult, physically taxing one.) And Angela Lansbury’s brief turn as the balloon lady enchanted me beyond belief. I love this scene to the point that I sometimes weep uncontrollably while listening to the song, no doubt causing other drivers to assume that I am insane. (Lansbury is also ninety-three, but she still sings beautifully, almost too well, really. When you hear her iconic voice, you’re like, “Emily Who?” It was extremely kind of Julie Andrews not to do a cameo.)

Don’t get me wrong. Emily Blunt is magnificent as Mary Poppins. (For her sake, I wish she were in the movie a bit more.) I hope she gets an Oscar nomination. She thoroughly deserves one. This is my new favorite performance by Blunt, a gifted actress I’ve loved since The Devil Wears Prada. I think she made the right choice not to attempt to copy the iconic Julie Andrews performance but to make the character her own by basing her interpretation on the novels by P.L. Travers. In the books, Mary Poppins is a bit eerie, other, weird, yet she also has humor, wistfulness, glee, snark. (“She’s so sassy,” my daughter commented with approval.) Blunt captures the character perfectly (well, practically).

I love Mary Poppins Returns, and so does my ten-year-old. (Even my three-year-old raves about it, and he’s never seen it.)

Points Against It:

You could (easily) make the argument that Disney is trying to tug on our heart strings by parading beloved veteran actors before our eyes (and ears). Yes, this is terribly manipulative, but the thing is, it works. And if you think Dick Van Dyke was not 100 percent into this, you don’t know Dick Van Dyke. He never passes up the opportunity to delight an audience through dance (whether it makes sense or not). Anybody who has ever watched Diagnosis Murder knows this.

Mary Poppins Returns delighted me with its humor and charm, and it genuinely warmed my heart during that amazing balloon song. When the admiral set sail, I nearly died (of joy). 

4. Crazy Rich Asians

Honestly, I went to see this movie for two reasons: 1) For months, every time I went to the theater, Awkwafina told me it was highly anticipated and that I needed to watch it 2) How often do we get big Hollywood movies featuring an entirely Asian cast focusing on the Asian experience?

To my delight, Crazy Rich Asians turned out to be such a good movie. It’s basically just a well made romantic comedy, but I haven’t seen a lot of those lately, either.

What fascinates me most about the film is that it is a romantic comedy. Then I read the Kevin Kwan trilogy that inspired it and discovered that the books are a completely different genre, much closer to being satire!

Despite being so fundamentally different, both the books and the movie are excellent.

The movie is great because of its emphasis on how women help themselves by working with, lifting up, honoring, and appreciating other women. Tearing others down is ultimately self-destructive. The film also shows that feminism and self-sacrifice are not incompatible. And in the end, professor of Game Theory Rachel Chu triumphs by offering her opponent the winning move. It’s so clever and so well done. And the ending made me so happy that I forgave any imperfections that came before.

The film also treats us to the vibrancy and flavor of Singapore, revealing a world that I knew literally nothing about before watching.

On a first watch, I loved the comedy of Awkwafina and completely fell in love with Michelle Yeoh and her great performance. (Her character, Eleanor Young, is so different in the books. I like the way the movie makes her three-dimensional and sympathetic.)

Then when I watched the film again, I realized that Constance Wu is giving a pretty magnificent performance herself as Rachel.

This is a great film for so many reasons and one I could watch a million times because the experience is so pleasant and so rewarding.

Points Against It:

5. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

This latest film by the Coen Brothers may be my favorite since Fargo. (I’m not committing to that, but I really do love it.) The film is presented to us as a physical book of six short stories about death in the American Old West, and I’ve never watched a movie that felt so much like reading a short story collection. Each story is pretty intriguing on its own (some more than others, arguably, though I personally like them all). But what’s really great is how the collection comes together as a whole. This is one work, and to understand it, you have to watch it that way. The final story is the key that ties together all that has come before.

After watching on my own, I showed the film to my husband, my daughter, my parents, and they all loved it. Like an actual work of literature, it’s replete with symbolism, foreshadowing, all sorts of delightful devices. (I personally am a huge fan of the aural echoes like, “Pan shot! Pan shot!” “Dog hole! Dog hole!”)

The cinematography is also lush, just gorgeous. It makes you fall in love with the Old West. And even though the movie is a Netflix Original, it features an all-star cast giving great performances. Tom Waits and Zoe Kazan are particular standouts. I’m a fan of the score, too. This is another movie I could joyously rewatch again and again (particularly if I were showing it to new people each time).

To get the hang of the movie, you have to give it some time.

6. Annihilation 

Here’s a crazy thing. Writer/director Alex Garland decided to write an adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s eerie sci-fi novel without re-reading the book! He basically wrote a movie based on the stuff the book made him feel and imagine and dream. (Another odd point is that VanderMeer had not finished writing the trilogy when Garland started making this movie. In book two, we learn that Natalie Portman’s character is Asian. But Garland had know way of knowing that from book one alone!)

So the movie and book are quite different, and in this case, I prefer the movie. As I watched, I loved its eerie, unsettling vibe, the strong lead performance of Natalie Portman, and (especially) the outstanding supporting turn by Jennifer Jason Leigh. (In retrospect, I like to flesh out the movie with elements of the book cherry picked by me. Then I throw out all the stuff that doesn’t support the crackpot theories my husband and I dreamed up about the plot in our post-movie discussions. I figure if Alex Garland can do it, so can I.)

Annihilation also has stunning visuals (which were of lesser importance to me) and a score that becomes memorably bizarre. (I’m still not sure if one of the speakers in the theater where we saw it was broken.)

What I did not realize about the movie at first is that it’s a sci-fi/action film following the adventures of an all-female band of explorers. I honestly did not notice that at first because the characters are so different from one another that I wasn’t focused on their commonalities. But when I finally did notice, I was like, “Congratulations to the movie for pulling that off so inconspicuously!”

After the film was over, my husband and I were initially stunned (and our ears hurt), but we quickly started spinning theories about what certain things meant, and we ended up talking about this movie for hours. I was very excited to show it to my parents when it became available for purchase.

Points Against It:

7.Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

But he loved this one. He was absolutely glued to the screen the whole time. Occasionally, some of the action got a little scary, so he sat on my husband’s lap and covered his eyes. But he was determined to keep watching. And he left the theater insisting that we call him Miles, because he was the real Spider-Man, Miles Morales.

Into the Spider-Verse might be a little over-hyped (and over-hyphenated), but can you blame the critics and fans who love the movie? It’s so much better than most other animated films this year. (The very different Isle of Dogs is also excellent. Incredibles 2 is good. The Grinch is not bad. The end.)

Working in the movie’s favor, of course, was our general household enthusiasm for Spider-Man since we had just finished playing that absolutely awesome new Spider-Man video game. It also helps that my three-year-old has somehow become obsessed with watching videos about the Mandela Effect. (There are worse things on YouTube!) So the idea of a multi-verse is deeply intriguing to him.

I’m also deeply intrigued by the idea of a multiverse (though my take on the Mandela Effect is more Orwellian. Collective mis-remembering is fascinating, a human frailty that can so easily be manipulated.) It’s very exciting to think that someone would pull in a bunch of random other Spider-Heroes from different universes and then fight them. (If I had the technology, that’s certainly what I would do with it.)

Joking aside, I love the way the villain’s actual motivations and backstory are revealed to us, so quickly, so elegantly. This movie makes such good use of its comic book origins. The art style is fantastic, and it’s also dynamic and plot advancing. It’s just so cool.

And we’ve all been waiting forever to see Miles Morales in a movie. I don’t know why my family has been collectively so excited about this for so long. I can’t remember how this fervor first overtook us. But we were all so thrilled to see Miles put on the spider suit at last.

And what’s really exciting, too, is that this is a new origin story, one we don’t know like the backs of our hands. How often does that happen in Spider-Man?

That’s another great thing about Into the Spider-Verse, its endearing, tongue-in-cheek, self-referential humor. It also has fairly well drawn characters voiced by a talented (and famous) cast, plus genuine surprises, and meaningful action.

I’ll be stunned if this doesn’t win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, though Isle of Dogs would also be a worthy winner.

Points Against It:

The obvious solution to that is to make more movies like this in which he is the only Spider-Man. Sony should also make a bunch of spin-offs about all the other versions of Spider-Man introduced in this film. (I’m positive Nicholas Cage will gladly reprise the role of Spider-Noir.) The only unfortunate aspect is that none of these new films will feature a Stan Lee cameo, but they could never top the one in this movie, anyway.

8. BlacKkKlansman 

So I think Spike Lee is a genius.

And, of course, just as a movie goer, I was extremely excited to see a film called BlacKkKlansman that tells the (mostly) true story of an African American police officer who infiltrated the KKK. I mean, how could you not want to see that movie? On paper it sounds so tantalizing, you’d guess it was a Simpsons joke, not a real movie.

This film is extremely well crafted. I’m quite impressed by how artfully Spike Lee makes his point. Like Do the Right Thing, it not only holds up to multiple viewings, but, I think, demands them.

It fully deserves its SAG nomination for best ensemble cast since it features so many strong and varied supporting performances. For me, the standout is Adam Driver as Flip Zimmerman, the “white” detective who pretends to be Ron Stallworth when meeting Klan members in person. Flip has never spent much time thinking about being Jewish until he’s forced to deny that he is. Driver does a great job of showing us Flip’s frustration and confusion as he consciously thinks about some aspects of his identity for the first time. For the job, he’s pretending to be Ron, but has he spent most of his life just pretending to be Flip, marginalizing important parts of himself just to fit in?

Denzel Washington’s son John David Washington is also pretty compelling as the actual Ron Stallworth. Meanwhile, in a year when Tom Hardy played Venom, Topher Grace has graduated to playing David Duke.

Even if the rest of the movie were a mess (which it’s not), the film would be worth seeing for the scene of Harry Belafonte describing a horrific hate crime. Also worth hearing is the speech by Corey Hawkins as Kwame Ture, comprised largely of Ture’s own words.

Points Against It:

Boots Riley wrote a scathing critique of the film that raises some points worth considering. I’d definitely recommend reading it and also watching Riley’s film Sorry to Bother You (another movie in my top 15).

9. Can You Ever Forgive Me?

The premise is kind of brilliant. Basically a woman no longer able to sell her books and frustrated that her agent and publishers refuse to present her as a literary celebrity is told, “Stop being yourself. Nobody likes you. Try doing something else.” So she tries being other people, and everybody loves it until they find out she’s actually herself. Then they hate her more than ever, but because they’ve punished her and compelled her to admit that she’s awful, she at last attains a dimmer version of the literary celebrity she always sought.

Since I’m a writer myself and I flirted with academia for a while, the crime of literary forgery holds so much allure for me. Plagiarism is odious! Claiming credit for someone else’s writing is wrong. But what about giving others credit for your own writing? In some ways, it’s a self-effacing masterstroke.

It is pretty amusing (and sad) that nobody gives what Lee Israel writes a second glance, but as soon as she starts claiming her own writing is the work of acknowledged wits and giants, people start falling all over themselves gushing about its genius. They won’t give her an advance for her book, but they’ll pay thousands of dollars for a one-line post script by Noël Coward.

Lee Israel finds this new life of crime revitalizing and rewarding. She enjoys the praise, the thrill, the money. And I think she also enjoys exposing the hypocrisy of the literary world. (Most people are already aware of such hypocrisy, but Israel seems to boost her own self esteem a bit by finally realizing the full truth of it herself.)

Melissa McCarthy gives a fantastic performance and deserves an Oscar nomination. And her co-star Richard E. Grant is simply magnificent as her charismatic but sketchy associate Jack Hock. I personally hope that he wins the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

Another intriguing aspect of the story is that both Israel and Hock (as well as many other characters) are gay, simply because they are, and this is completely incidental to the plot.

Points Against It:

10. Roma

The truth is, I find key elements of Roma’s story off-puttingly sad. If the story were presented in a less compelling way, I probably wouldn’t consider this film a favorite of the year.

But as you watch, you can’t deny that what Alfonso Cuarón does with this film is brilliant. He works with a level of artistry that I will probably never achieve (and the “probably” is groundless optimism). Sometimes works so controlled seem mechanical, but not Roma. How can you not heap praise on a movie that equates the mundane activity of a domestic servant washing dog poop off a floor with the vastness of the ocean and the profundity of life itself? Not only does the first scene of the film foreshadow the ending in a literal way, but it also makes the strong statement that these mundane little chores are life, that those who take care of us, those who love us show us the meaning of life and save us from vast, meaningless desolation.

It’s a really beautiful film, so effective visually and aurally that it doesn’t actually need subtitles. Meaning is conveyed through what we see and hear. The story is easy to follow.

Self-proclaimed non-actress Yalitza Aparicio carries so much of the film, and I wish so much that Marina de Tavira would get an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. (They should nominate her frequent scene partner, the equally dramatic family car, too.) I’m now curious about Marina de Tavira’s other films.

Points Against It: