Top 10 Lists

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

As the world burns, the movies remain unfazed. Or maybe they remain properly fazed; many filmmakers, recognizing the eternal topicality of their art form, have cannily shifted their priorities to speak to today’s troubled times. That cinema can serve as a sounding board for social anxiety is nothing new, but in 2017, the reflective surface that is the movie screen bounced back particularly acute images of our reality, even if it also functioned as a temporary escape from it. Yet as I survey my favorite films of the past year, what strikes me is not consistency but variety. Movies can exist in a thrilling multiplicity of forms, and this year’s best—epic war films, slender family dramas, chilling domestic horror, a whopping three sequels—demonstrated the enduring versatility of the medium. As every day seems to bring with it new horrors, it’s no minor comfort to remember that artists will continue to tell their stories on the big screen, wielding their imagination and technique to create a sort of compass, a celestial roadmap that lights the way to our better selves.

Here are my 10 favorite movies of 2017:

(Honorable mention: Get Out; The Girl with All the Gifts; I, Tonya; It Comes at Night; Logan; Princess Cyd; Star Wars: Episode VIII—The Last Jedi; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; The Villainess.) Read More