Top 10 Lists

Cinema is dead. Long live cinema.

I don’t mean to be glib. These are turbulent times in the film trade. The ever-fluctuating artistic topography that is the movies somehow felt even more precarious than usual in 2019, with industry-wide fault lines cracking into seismic shifts. You’ve heard the cries of panic: about a sequel-saturated marketplace, about a dearth of original screenplays, about viewers watching new films—or, really, digitized reproductions—on their couch (typically via Netflix) rather than in the theater. Sure, some formulas remain sacred; after all, we can still count on Hollywood churning out safe products of hagiography, particularly where musical legends are concerned. (After Bohemian Rhapsody claimed four Oscars in 2018, this past year gave us Rocketman.) Yet there is nevertheless an uncertainty gripping global cinema, a sense of shifting currents and irregular tides. Even if 2020 is set to see Timothée Chalamet play Bob Dylan, I’m compelled to note that the movies, they are a-changin’. Read More

There may not have been a ton of great movies released in 2018, but 2018 was still a great year for movies. It was one of the most fertile cinematic years that I can remember, full of challenging, fascinating films that were far from perfect but were resolutely good and—more important—interesting. Even as the industry continues to undergo seismic change, the movies themselves remain a vibrant cultural center, a thriving bazaar where viewers can converse, promote, argue, and discover.

It was also a year full of exciting and diverse voices, varied not only in terms of race and gender, but also with respect to age, style, and even mode of distribution. Black directors made themselves heard, and loudly, from the stirring adventure of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther to the fiery agitprop of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman to the scalding satire of Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You to the youthful anger of George Tillman Jr.’s The Hate U Give to the piercing melancholy of Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk. Women, too, continued to assert themselves as equals in a marketplace that has treated them as inferiors for far too long; Kay Cannon’s Blockers made us laugh, Chloé Zhao’s The Rider made us cry, and Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? made us do both, while Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer and Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here made us tremble in fear and awe. Read More