(Emma Stone and Olivia Colman in Fox Searchlight’s The Favourite / Fox Searchlight)
In all the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen a better year than 1993 nor a worse year than 2010. Everything else falls somewhere in-between, and 2018 was, on balance, pretty average. That said, I have no problem owning my traditional outlier status on films everyone else loved but which bored me to tears (Roma, Burning), nor my love for at least one film (Life Itself) which others are ranking among the year’s worst. But that’s what makes this job fun and special. I don’t have to apologize to anyone or justify my list to anyone but myself.
1. The Favourite – The year’s best film by a wide margin, this astonishing melange of otherwise incongruous talent comes together like a master chef’s confection. Full disclosure, I am not normally a fan of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos whose penchant for being shocking and weird just for the sake of being shocking and weird (Dogtooth, The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer) always felt like he was trying too hard for the Von Trier/Godard trophy of “Most Pretentious Euro-Enfant Terrible.” Here, however, his stylistic acrobatics and irrepressible weirdness is deployed in the service of material that is more than up to the task. Twenty years after novice screenwriter Deborah Davis first tackled the 18th Century palace intrigue surrounding England’s Queen Anne, her close advisor Lady Sarah and Sarah’s ruthlessly ambitious cousin Abigail, this proto-feminist tale of political chicanery arrives on the screen with Oscar-winners Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone as Lady Sarah and Abigail, respectively, and veteran British actress Olivia Colman’s performance as Queen Anne very likely to elevate her to the Oscar-winner club as well. Precisely where Davis’ original script leaves off and re-writer Tony McNamara picks up is impossible to tell — and probably doesn’t matter. Like Marc Norman’s and Tom Stoppard’s similarly bifurcated Shakespeare in Love script, all that matters is that the result is brilliant. Like that earlier and similarly audacious Oscar-winner, The Favourite is both rigorously historical and audaciously avant-garde at the same time, recalling the very best of such classics as Tom Jones, Barry Lyndon and Dangerous Liaisons. By turns tragic, hilarious, bawdy, moving, compelling and just plain weird, The Favourite is a masterpiece.
2. A Star is Born – Bradley Cooper’s stunningly assured directing debut may well earn him the coveted Oscar “quad” previously attained only by Orson Welles (Citizen Kane) and Warren Beatty (Heaven Can Wait and Reds). If he is nominated in all four categories for which he is eligible — acting, directing, writing, producing — it’s a good bet that he’ll take home Best Director, which has been the preferred prize for movie stars — especially first-timers — moving to the other side of the camera. Since 1980, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson have all been so rewarded, and Cooper appears likely to join their ranks — and for good reason. This fourth incarnation of the famous tale previously filmed in 1937, 1954 and 1976 is a dazzler, in large part because it acknowledges its debt to the three previous films — and builds on them accordingly. It’s a familiar story with few surprises (2012 Best Picture winner The Artist also paid homage) that really only needs to hit three or four emotional beats to work. Thanks to the casting of Lady Gaga, and superlative photography from Matthew Libatique, A Star is Born sticks every landing. Guaranteed to leave a lump in your throat if you’re any kind of human being, Bradley Cooper’s heartfelt, old-fashioned melodrama should walk home with a handsome haul of Oscar gold, including Best Picture.
3. On Her Shoulders – Alexandria Bombach’s restrained but masterful portrait of 2018 Nobel Peace Prize-winner Nadia Murad is both one of the most grueling and rewarding films of the year. The typical “portrait” doc would celebrate Murad’s journey from ISIS sex slave to world-celebrated human rights activist in routine, predictable fashion. Bombach’s film takes a different, more circumspect path, for Murad never asked to become a celebrity, an activist or an icon. Her more modest aspirations were stolen from her, forcing her to rise to a different calling which proves to be difficult and often unwelcome. With almost no intrusion or editorializing from the filmmakers, On Her Shoulders is a look inside a wounded human soul, a woman wrestling with a life she never wanted, a calling she knows she must embrace and an unthinking, self-congratulatory world beset by “best intentions” that too often do more harm than good.
4. Borg vs. McEnroe – Upstart distributor NEON might be forgiven for totally bonking the release of this extraordinary movie if not for the fact that last year’s I, Tonya was handled so brilliantly — which leads to the inescapable conclusion that they simply had no idea what they had or what to do with it. Centering on the 1980 U.S. Open Tennis final that would pit reigning champion Björn Borg against the temperamental, up-and-coming bad boy of tennis, John McEnroe, this technically dazzling, dramatically compelling effort from Danish director Janus Metz (Armadillo) and Swedish screenwriter Ronnie Sandahl (Underdog) does far more than expertly recreate one of the great tennis matches of all time (which it does). It’s also about more than the greatest changing-of-the-guard in sports history. This is about celebrity, greatness, discipline and two men whose inner drive and haunting demons were more alike than not — and who tormented each other with a grand, existential realization that perhaps they saw in each other what they might have been had they chosen differently earlier in life. That’s a lot for a sports film – or any film – to try and tackle, but Borg vs. McEnroe manages to do it without breaking a sweat. Give no small amount of credit to Sverrir Gudnason and Shia LaBoeuf for capturing not only the physicality and the temperament of Borg and McEnroe – but their souls.
5. Life Itself – Send your hate mail. I don’t care. Dan Fogelman’s much-maligned tapestry of interwoven lives, indefatigable dreams and generational fate is one of the year’s best films. Revisit this one in ten years, when the bile and angst of our current social and political moment has dissipated, and realize just what a profound, meaningful movie this is. Fogelman is no hack — having begun as a screenwriter on such animated hits as Cars before touching the hearts of millions with his equally ambitious television series “This is Us.” Life Itself, however, goes a step beyond. A sprawling, globe-trotting, multi-generational epic that aims to wrap the arms of its all-star cast around ideas and emotions as vast as its story, Fogelman’s challenging, unconventional story has been accused of being too saccharine, too cloying, too melodramatic — everything but “too original,” which is what they’re really saying. When critics spend so much energy bemoaning the lack of truly original scripts only to turn on the most original and ambitious script of the year — it’s hard to take their protestations seriously.
6. Never Look Away – My top tens used to be loaded with foreign films, not because I’m a snob — which I am — but because foreign-made films are simply better, and have been for decades. Their visibility on American screens, however, has diminished over the past fifteen years for a variety of reasons — chief among them the disappearance of specialty distributors and the rise of streaming and specialty streaming services. Still, the handful of foreign-language films that do get screens continue to manifest some real gems, and this is one of them. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck won an Oscar for his first film, the 2006 film The Lives of Others, which he followed with a misbegotten English-language debut, 2010’s The Tourist. The eight years since have apparently been devoted to crafting this brilliant, three-hour melodrama loosely based on renowned German artist Gerhard Richter. Tom Schilling portrays the Richteresque Kurt Barnert as he endures the oppression of Nazism and subsequent East German communism on his way to finding his artistic voice and and the love of his life (Paula Beer), who unfortunately comes with a father (Sebastian Koch) with his own dark baggage. They don’t make them like this any more.
7. Crazy Rich Asians – Picking up where 1993’s The Joy Luck Club left off, John M. Chu’s smash hit needs no introduction and no further praise. A flawless adaptation of the popular Kevin Kwan novel, it helped shatter Asian-American stereotypes and tear down any lingering notion that all-Asian casts couldn’t cross over to the mainstream. The first, best Hollywood romantic comedy in a generation, it also made stars of Henry Golding and Constance Wu, showed off rapper Awkwafina’s acting chops and gave Michelle Yeoh her best role in years. Add in the beloved Ken Jeong, the always brilliant Lisa Lu and to-die-for production design and costumes — this is as deliriously entertaining and irresistible as movies get. They should all be this fun.
8. Private Life – Tamara Jenkins’ first film since 2007’s The Savages was worth the wait. Starring Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti as a couple struggling with fertility issues, this is a devastatingly honest movie populated with an uncommonly committed cast. Jenkins’ direction and writing has never been more accomplished — there isn’t a false note anywhere in this astonishing, emotionally brutal and consistently surprising movie — a rarity in an increasingly homogenized movie marketplace. Denis O’Hare, Molly Shannon and John Carroll Lynch furnish equally flawless supporting turns. A gem.
9. Wildlife – Real-life couple Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan took time out from their acting careers to borrow a page from Kazan’s famous forebears (parents and grandfather) and write an absolutely remarkable screenplay adaptation of sparse but difficult material — in this case Richard Ford’s 1990 novel of the same name. At first glance, Wildlife may not seem like unusual movie fare — a teenage boy’s (Ed Oxenbould) coming-of-age in 1960s Montana where his father (Jake Gyllenhaal) searches for gainful employment while his increasingly restless mother (Carey Mulligan) looks for stability and companionship. Flawlessly shot, directed, acted and written, Wildlife triumphs precisely be cause it is able to evoke the novel’s sparseness — this is a movie that lives between the lines, in the silences, unspoken thoughts and increasingly awkward physical spaces between characters.
10. A Boy. A Girl. A Dream – Easily the best 2018 picture that almost no one will have heard of, the third film from writer/director Qasim Basir received the clunker of all releases from distributor Samuel Goldwyn, who couldn’t have made the film harder to see in theaters if they had buried it in a graveyard. Seamlessly filmed in a single continuous shot (courtesy of cinematographer Steven Holleran), it details the evolving relationship between a club promoter (Omari Hardwick) and a young woman (Meagan Good) after they meet one evening outside a Los Angeles club. That the night just happens to be election night 2016 adds an unexpected layer of tension, but the script by Basir and Samantha Turner doesn’t go where you might expect. Over the course of the night, the two grow to trust one another and bare their souls — life, love, fears, hopes and dreams all come out in the wash of an evening that verges on pure poetry. Comparisons to Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and its sequels are valid — but that in no way diminishes the uniqueness of this effort, which achieves something rare in its uninterrupted performances, culminating in a climactic moment that is as pure and emotionally satisfying as anything in any other movie this year.
Honorables: If Beale Street Could Talk, Paddington 2, BlacKkKlansman, The Incredibles 2, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, The Insult, All is True, Blaze, Godard Mon Amour, Shirkers, United Skates, Colette, The Heart of Nuba, Back to Burgundy, The Bleeding Edge, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Capernaum, Cold War, The Female Brain, John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
The Best Films of 2018 – According to Wade
