Ranking Every Movie of 2018 (all 135 of them)

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Matlida Lutz in "Revenge".

Yesterday, the Manifesto unveiled its list of the 10 best movies of 2018. Today, per annual tradition, we’re expanding that list and ranking every single movie of the year, or at least every single one that we saw. This is a deeply silly exercise, but it’s also a fun one, designed to inspire frivolous debates and indignant arguments, which are of course what the internet does best.

It’s also meant to be something of a service. For each title, in addition to embedding a hyperlink to my full review (where applicable), I’ll include a parenthetical identifying the movie’s director, its Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores (to see whether I conform with or diverge from the critical consensus), and—most usefully—a notification if it’s currently available on a particular streaming service. The idea is that you can continually refer back to this list over the coming years when you’re craving something to watch and you’re too lazy to Google the latest Indiewire poll. You’re welcome. Read More

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The 10 Best Movies of 2018

Jeremy BeckTop 10 Lists
Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible—Fallout"

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

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On the Basis of Sex: Fighting for Equality, Through the Law and Gritted Teeth

Jeremy BeckReviews
Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in "On the Basis of Sex".

Last year, the documentary RBG attempted to honor the extraordinary life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, charting her path from able young mind to Harvard Law student to U.S. Supreme Court Justice to feminist icon to internet meme. It was a well-intentioned effort that suffered from the usual pitfalls of cinematic hagiography, struggling to compress 85 years of the life of one of the most important legal figures in modern American history into a tidy 98 minutes. On the Basis of Sex, the new Ginsburg biopic from Mimi Leder, takes a narrower approach, homing in on two key periods in its subject’s life: her challenges as one of the few female students at Harvard, and her early labors as a litigator striving for women’s equality. Where RBG’s impact was glancing—to borrow from Supreme Court terminology, it felt more like a syllabus than a full opinion—Leder’s film lands a blow with something resembling force.

If the boxing metaphor seems peculiar, bear in mind that, despite trafficking in bookish disciplines and legal arcana, On the Basis of Sex is essentially a sports movie. Its heroine, played with poise and pluck by Felicity Jones, is the proverbial underdog, fighting to rise through the ranks and topple an entrenched dynasty. Its villains, most notably personified by Sam Waterston as Harvard’s dean of students, are pillars of the establishment, wielding their superior resources—money, power, connections—to extend their unbroken streak of competitive dominance. There are triumphs and setbacks, eager rookies and cagey veterans, strategic coaching maneuvers and breezy montages. There is even a Big Game, with a climactic moment designed to be as suspenseful as the final jump shot in Hoosiers. Read More

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The 10 Best TV Shows of 2018

Jeremy BeckTop 10 Lists, TV Rankings
Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh in "Killing Eve".

Beginning this past Monday, the Manifesto started ranking every TV show that we watched in 2018. We’re wrapping things up today with our top 10. If you missed the prior posts, you can access them here:

#s 93-71
#s 70-51
#s 50-31
#s 30-11

10. Better Call Saul (AMC, Season 4; last year: 8 of 108). As Better Call Saul inches closer and closer to the events of Breaking Bad, it becomes increasingly endangered of being swallowed by its predecessor’s shadow. So it’s kind of amazing that the show remains as consistently good as it is. Or maybe it’s “shows”; this has really become two series in one, with one following Mike Ehrmantraut as he solidifies his fateful partnership in crime with Gus Fring, and the other tracking Jimmy McGill’s long slow slide into legally sanctioned amorality. The Mike material is stuff that we’ve seen before, and while it’s executed with patience and panache, it can’t help feeling like a perfectly constructed echo. Jimmy’s descent, on the other hand, is the heart of the show; even though we know the sad destination, the journey remains fascinating, as Better Call Saul continues to pave his road to the dark side with thrilling complexity and ambiguity. Bob Odenkirk continues to do great work, and he’s matched in Season 4 by Rhea Seehorn, who’s turned Kim Wexler from a one-note love interest into a quietly tragic figure of misguided optimism. Eventually, Better Call Saul will have no choice but to finally rip off the band-aid and abandon Jimmy McGill for good. But for the time being, his fall keeps reaching new heights. Read More

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