The Best Movies: 2018 Edition

As usual, house rules apply. I consider these year-end lists as acts of subjective curation rather than mathematical proofs. It’s simply a list of what I loved in 2018, in ranked order. Nothing about these lists makes much sense anyway. So enjoy the madness.

10. You Were Never Really Here

YWNRH is at once quiet and emphatic — an apt description of Lynne Ramsay’s work in general — a film that doesn’t rise or fall but simply simmers the whole way through, always seeming to be on the verge of something, then holding back… until. Ramsay bottles the oddball verve of Jaoquin Phoenix and sells its wholesale in this poetic and gloomy character sketch of a ruthless hitman who really is a nice guy deep down, you know? Only a filmmaker of Ramsay’s caliber could make this adaptation work. And it works wonders.

9. Unsane

Utterly unpretentious as ever, Steven Soderbergh has a blast with the plot of Unsane. You might walk away thinking you’ve experienced a gripping (if a bit silly at times) and taut thriller about identity, mental health, and the true nature of madness. But I think to Soderbergh, it’s just a genre romp, something fun to do. He shot it on an iPhone. Claire Foy registers the year’s most underappreciated lead performance, not to mention the most awesome character name of the year: “Sawyer Valentini.”

8. BlacKkKlansman

A morally serious deconstruction of hatred (as well as a hymn to competency in our institutions) shouldn’t be this funny, but Spike Lee’s film is one of the funniest of the year. (As well as one of the most harrowing, to be sure.) It’s probably all the dunking on racists that’s done just in the minor mannerisms of Topher Grace’s portrayal of David Duke. Or it could be John David Washington’s mannered pronunciation of the word “white” (he really hits that “wh-” sound). Lee is never subtle. But we don’t live in subtle times.

7. First Man

Damien Chazelle’s biopic of Neil Armstrong is extremely un-biopic-y. Like its star, Ryan Gosling, First Man is downbeat and morose and utterly mesmerizing. La La Land won the box office over. This, a far better and more humane film, did not. It’s the first Chazelle film about which I’ve been unequivocally enthusiastic. The guy can do endings, I’ll give him that.

6. First Reformed

Ethan Hawke and Paul Schrader have teamed for, at the very least, the best plot twists this year. At best, Schrader’s brooding film acts out his love of Bresson and Dreyer more than anything he’s ever done. The wayward and damn-near insane Reverend Toller has a heart too pure for mainstream religion, and bad habits that make him fit right in. What the ending signifies, much in the tradition of Schrader’s European heroes, is up to you.

5. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

I don’t know what I was expecting when I heard the pitch for the Coen brothers’ latest movie. A series of western short stories that, truth be told, looked fairly cartoonish in the trailer. It is cartoonish. The titular character (Tim Blake Nelson) ascends into heaven playing a harp the way Bugs Bunny used to. But the trailer sells the film short. What the Coens’ inimitable brand of alchemy has created here is easily one of their best films. (“The Gal who Got Rattled” is my favorite, if you care.) And the best dialogue of 2018 is found therein.

4. America to Me

After screening at some festivals, Steve James’ latest documentary aired on Starz earlier this year. America to Me is a ten-hour docuseries that takes us inside Oak Park River Forest High School just outside Chicago. The racially diverse student body and faculty allow themselves to be followed (and followed home) by James and his crew. Where Frederick Wiseman might hang back and capture, James probes, asks questions, delves into the lives of the students and adults as they live through questions of race, class, and justice. It’s amazing how James, who possesses such a soft touch, has social conscience that hits hard.

3. The Tale

Jennifer Fox’s autobiographical film about coming to terms with having been sexually exploited as a child veers toward magical realism but is at its best when closer to the ground. The plain old matter-of-fact realism Fox achieves with her actors — particularly Laura Dern and Elizabeth Debicki — is searing and intense. Fox doesn’t spare us the details, which makes for a most uncomfortable film. (The actual molestation scenes were achieved with deft editing and the use of an over-18-years-old body double for the child actor, Isabelle Nelisse.)

2. Madeline’s Madeline

I bristle when I see Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline described as “art house fare” or “experimental cinema.” It’s the most narratively coherent movie I saw in 2018. A teenage girl (the scary-good Helena Howard) is part of an adult’s acting troupe that specializes in experimental theater. Its director (Molly Parker) thinks it’d be a great idea for Madeline’s real-life personal turmoil to be material for the troupe’s art. Typical descriptions point out that the lines between the troupe’s art and Madeline’s inner world “begin to blur,” but what blurs is our ability to play favorites with the characters. People don’t behave logically in this film, but somehow their surprises are what one would expect. It’s not artsy so much as it’s about artsy.

1. The Mule

Clint Eastwood’s reputation as a conservative firebrand has to be in some kind of jeopardy at this point. This is a film about, among other things, white privilege, the futility of the war on drugs, and the ways in which economic pressures can disintegrate families. It’s also the funniest film of the year. Eastwood’s casualness as a director, the ease with which things play out and the low-key feel of the images, mirrors his own demeanor as an aged actor, one who still has the singular grit and grimace of The Man With No Name.

Phantom Thread

Reynolds Woodcock is surrounded by women. Each one knows exactly where they stand with him. He dictates the terms. When one of them tries to assert her own rules of engagement, interesting things happen.

This is the basic dramatic situation of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. Indeed, it’s not terribly complicated. Anderson’s bailiwick is constructing simple conflicts that combust in intricate ways. In his last few movies it’s often debatable what a character’s motives are, or even what is being said. Phantom Thread is in a sense his simplest movie, which is to say it is his most intricate movie. It’s his most effortless as well.

Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) is the namesake of the House of Woodcock, a top-notch fashion designer in 1950s London. We meet Reynolds as he’s dressing, preparing for the day. If breakfast isn’t right, we later hear, he cannot recover the day’s momentum. Immediately we’re shown the main categories with which Anderson will be working, a cycle of routine and disruption.

Having established Woodcock’s fastidiousness and regimented existence — to say he is a “creature of habit” would be an understatement — Anderson, who also wrote the screenplay and served as his own de facto cinematographer, shuffles us right on to the nature of Woodcock’s relationships. The House of Woodcock is a literal house, one paid for by a wealthy benefactor. Its patriarch enters a room and his dutiful craftswomen, who actually sew the dresses together, stand at attention as their work is inspected. Woodcock is lord of all he surveys, the delicate genius who moves through the house as the Pope might move through the Papal Apartments.

Woodcock’s spinster sister, Cyril (Lesley Manville) serves as his second in command and chief psychologist. As is Anderson’s wont, we’re not told as much as we’re asked to deduce. And we deduce that Woodcock, who describes himself as a confirmed bachelor, requires a female muse. An early scene sets the template. A muse annoys Woodcock at breakfast, leading Cyril to later ask “Would you like me to as Joanna to leave?” They’ve been through this before. Woodcock hates distractions even though he’s never more passionate than when he’s being distracted.

Anderson’s direction, Ophuls-like yet non-flashy here, seems to take its cue from Jonny Greenwood’s elegant throwback score. (“House of Woodcock,” is gorgeous in its simplicity.) The craftswomen ascending the stairs of the House of Woodcock in the morning compels the camera to tilt up and take in a swirling staircase, recalling a similar shot of a queue of shell-shocked sailors seeking medical care in The Master.

We don’t notice the bravura filmmaking footwork at play here. At one point the camera follows Lesley Manville into a room of craftswomen and swirls 360 degrees around to end up back on Manville, and it feels as natural as walking. Shot on 35-millimeter and blown up for select 70-millimeter presentations (I first saw it in 70), the film is visually breathtaking but also a bit muted in its colors, giving the sets and costumes a handmade quality that successfully fixes us into the world of the 1950s.

As the film’s time-jump/voiceover framing device foretells, a woman named Alma (Vicky Krieps, excellent) comes into Reynolds’ life as his new muse and lover. Their meet-cute takes the shape of an exquisite restaurant scene. Every so often the apparently bipolar Woodcock gets depressed for several days before being better again. When Cyril suggests a few days in the countryside, Woodcock meets Alma, a guileless hotel waitress. Immediately two things are clear. One, Alma, an immigrant, is a sweetheart, but one who has the confidence to not take Woodcock’s shit. And two, Cyril moves aside for no one.

A love triangle of sorts is what we expect. What happens, though, is far more original. “I must love him in my own way,” Alma tells Cyril. The power struggle that ensues spins the compass of emotions round and round. Alternately disgusted and enthralled by one another, Woodcock and Alma are very much in love, and their tug-of-war kind of love is very much sick in its own disease.

The three leads — Day-Lewis, Krieps, and Manville — are a triad that constitute, together, the single best performance in any Anderson film. On a second viewing, I noted just how much of the conflict in the story is concerning food. When Alma sends the denizens of the House of Woodcock away for the evening so she can have a night alone with Reynolds, we’re treated to perhaps the most well acted argument I’ve ever seen. Krieps doesn’t just hold her own with the mighty DDL here. She steamrolls him. Asparagus never caused so much trouble.

Alma does find out how to love Reynolds in her own way. And it’s… unusual. She wants him realize just how much he needs her. The way in which this diabolical stuff plays out represents new territory for Anderson, whose recent movies have seen him evolve from young auteur hotshot to a kind of philosopher king of cinema for grownups.

Anderson’s late work is not polemical, not trying to teach us anything. Rather, there is a penetrating contemplation quality to the films, particularly Phantom Thread and The Master, a desire to hold ideas up to the light and observe the refractions as opposed to instruct us on how photons work. And there is an admirable modesty in that. Phantom Thread‘s ending is both disturbing and oddly romantic, raising questions that don’t have ready-made answers.

We’re left wondering: if the only way Reynolds and Alma can be good for one another is by being poison to one another, is that a bad thing? Woodcock says, “I’m incurable.” Turns out that may not be true. Alas, sometimes the medicine is indistinguishable from the disease.

Phantom Thread — FOUR STARS

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Rated R

Annapurna Pictures

Focus Features

130 min.

The Top Ten Films of 2016

This year, there were many films that almost made my top ten list. I usually find these things easy, but not in 2016. This was a year of top-notch runners-up. They include “Little Sister,” “Toni Erdmann,” the unforgettable “The Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” and Pedro Almodovar’s sumptuous “Julieta.” Leaving off Terence Davies’ “Sunset Song” was an all-time heartbreaker for me.

10) “Arrival”

Denis Villeneuve’s parlor trick of a film ends up being a pretty neat, thematically smart parlor trick. Amy Adams has garnered nominations for what is a mostly unremarkable performance, but the real hero here is Eric Heisserer’s screenplay, which achieves what Christopher Nolan is always after without the pomp and circumstance.

9) “Nocturnal Animals”

“Nocturnal Animals” is the kind of film Hitchcock would have liked. A woman (Amy Adams again) reads a novel manuscript written by her ex-husband (Jake Gyllenhall) and find herself moved deeply by a story of brutality and loss that stands as an analog for their long dissolved marriage. Michael Shannon rings up one of the year’s most under-praised performances as a local police investigator who stopped giving a good god damn years ago.

8) “Hell or High Water”

David Mackenzie’s “Starred Up” was a good film, but his follow up is better. Chris Pine and Ben Foster are two Texas boys, brothers and bank robbers being pursued by a sherrif (Jeff Bridges). Simple. Exquisitely directed. Like Godard said, all you need to make a movie is “a girl and a gun.”

7) “Elle”

Paul Verhoeven’s half-crazy essay on trauma and identity seems calibrated to scandalize just about anyone who watches it. That’s because it is. But there’s more going on here than mere button-pushing for the sake of. Good art is composed of ideas, but sometimes those ideas can be contradictory, landing more as open-ended questions than sure-footed assertions of fact. Verhoeven’s story of assault and catharsis is meant to upset you, then asks you to meditate on why you were upset. “Elle” also features the year’s single finest performance, that of Isabelle Huppert.

6) “Moonlight”

One can watch American movies for a lifetime and never see a film like Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight.” It is, at once, a character study, a period piece, a polemic, and a love poem — and in each of those genres, it innovates. Unforgettable, essential viewing.

5) “Sully”

Clint Eastwood’s beliefs are better expressed in his art than in political speeches. “Sully,” which recounts the heroic water landing on the Hudson River by Captain Chesley (played by Tom Hanks in a terrific we-take-this-guy-for-granted performance) Sullenburger, is compulsively watchable. Eastwood doesn’t go for easy answers in his examination of hero worship, celebrity culture, and good ‘ol American know-how. He gives the film a flat, near-storybook ending because sometimes storybook people walk among us.

4) “O.J.: Made in America”

Ah, the year’s finest documentary, which some are disputing is even a proper film. Seven hours is its running time. It’s well earned. Ezra Edelman’s re-examination of the trials, tribulations, and sins of O.J. knows exactly when to deep-dive into the details and when to take some excursions into cultural context and footnotes. Edelman has made the essential documentary on the subject, and perhaps the essential documentary on race in America.

3) “Manchester by the Sea”

With the exception of some overblown music cues, everything “Manchester” does is beautiful. Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan shows us how it’s all done — flashbacks, expository dialogue, setups and payoffs. Lonergan’s characters are forever burdened by a pain or emotional conflict they cannot express. Many times, in the film’s key moments, people literally cannot say what’s on their minds. “Manchester” leaves you with that same feeling — that you can’t quite put into words what you’re feeling, but you know it’s true.

2) “Hail, Caesar!”

Infectious and extremely funny, the Coen Brothers’ latest film casts cinema in religious terms. Their hero, Mannix (Josh Brolin) must make a choice between being a studio fixer and being a corporate man for Lockheed Martin. Good and evil, fun and… not fun. Famous for being cagey, here the brothers say exactly what’s on their minds, complete with highly memorable musical numbers, kidnappers and ransom suitcases, and a dog named Engels. There are scenes here as good as any the brothers have done in any of their prior films. Dare someone to watch the “Laurence Laurentz” scene without doubling over.

1) “Certain Women”

Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women” should be viewed once, then immediately viewed a second time. Most of its scenes pass in a way that is so realistic that they seem to be in the room with you rather than up on a screen. There is poetry in every moment. Three somewhat linked stories play out, for the most part, in real time.The bare Montana landscape seems to rhyme with the characters’ quiet loneliness. These women are stressed out, but still ever reaching out. Most viewers have declared the third story, one of unrequited love, the most compelling, but for me the first (in which Laura Dern plays a frazzled small town lawyer) is the best. The film seems to think so as well, since Dern’s character returns later to check in with her problem client (Jared Harris). Lily Gladstone, who plays the lover whose love goes unrequited, drops a performance so poised, so unmolested by self-consciousness and ego, that it’s almost unbelievable.

 

The Best Movies of 2014

 

This year’s Lewis On Film list begins with nine honorable mentions.

19. Life Itself

Steve James was the ideal candidate to tell Ebert’s story. James’ work is smart without being snooty, deeply felt without being maudlin — just like Roger’s work. Roger was a Chicago guy, and “Life Itself” is a Chicago film directed by Chicago’s best documentarian.

Read my original review.

18. Mr. Turner

Mike Leigh doesn’t give a damn how other filmmakers make biopics. Leigh shows us J.M.W. Turner as those who knew him saw him. Timothy Spall crams more truth into one of his grunts than most actors do in an entire monologue.

17. Force Majeure

The jokes don’t always land in this Swedish film by Ruben Ostlund, but its portrayal of contemporary middle-class malaise is a truthful poem about all kinds of things, including male identity, gender roles, even human biology and survival.

16. Inherent Vice

Paul Thomas Anderson’s overlong adaptation of a second-rate Pynchon novel earns its place here with jokes alone. Phoenix and Brolin are hilarious, fully at ease with the material. PTA does noir on his own terms — the shadows hiding not only criminals but larger-than-life druggies, hippies, and burnouts of every stripe. Come for the Pynchon; stay for the Martin Short.

Read my original review.

15. Selma

Ava DuVernay’s homage to the Selma march does the impossible — depicting MLK realistically, with a reverence that never boils over into fawning. Its message is that progress is work, actual work. DuVernay’s snub for a Best Director nomination is egregious.

Read my original review.

14. Citizenfour

It’s hard to make a good documentary film without access. Laura Poitras got access. But it’s too simple to say that’s half the battle. A doc like this doesn’t make itself. Poitras tells Snowden’s story with the elegance and sobriety the subject deserves.

13. The Lego Movie

Phil Lord and Chris Miller deserved a Best Director nomination for the year’s most delightful movie. One can analyze the themes to death, but in the end “The Lego Movie,” with all its twists and turns and pleasant surprises, embodies everything that makes going to the movies still worthwhile in 2014.

12. The One I Love

Charlie McDowell’s criminally underrated Twilight Zone episode of a film has much to say about relationships but doesn’t overstate its case or overstay its welcome. Elisabeth Moss is sublime.

Read my original review.

11. Enemy

I originally gave “Enemy” three stars. If given the chance, I’d amend that. Denis Villeneuve’s Gyllenhall vehicle is a puzzle film, and I like puzzles. When considered alongside “Nightcrawler,” it becomes clear Gyllenhaal is one of our essential movie stars.

Read my original review.

10. Boyhood

Despite some wonky acting and cheesiness, Linklater’s film is a singular achievement. Something this ambitious is bound to have its flaws. But taken as a whole, there’s too much good stuff in “Boyhood” to ignore.

Read my original review.

9. Tim’s Vermeer

Teller’s portrait of the artist as an obsessive techie was widely misread. In his zeal to understand how Vermeer worked, Tim isn’t numb to the ineffable majesty and meaning of art. Rather, his experimentations are borne of the same awe and wonder that animate all art cognoscenti. Tim simply expresses his wonder through his engineering prowess and curiosity to know how things work. The documentary becomes the sincerest of tributes to all who make our world bigger with their ingenuity — both artistic and technical.

8. Two Days, One Night

The Dardenne brothers treat the smallest instance of human interaction with the sensitivity it deserves. Their films brim with humanistic wisdom. “Two Days, One Night” is one of their great masterpieces. Its heroine, Sandra (Marion Cotillard), is their most fascinating character.

Read my original review.

7. Foxcatcher

Bennett Miller’s “Foxcatcher” is the kind of patient, intelligent film that used to be commonplace. Miller’s gift is being able to present true-life stories with the same ambiguity that attends real life.  Mark Ruffalo, Steve Carell, and Channing Tatum never hit a single false note.

Read my original review.

6. The Babadook

In an era of tawdry, artless horror films, “The Babadook” is the smartest kid in the class. Here was a movie that managed to frighten without manipulating or insulting the intelligence of its audience. Throughout the film, Essie Davis’ lead performance is the platonic ideal of an actor selling it. “The Babadook” is not, as some have insisted, heavy-handed in its symbolism. Rather, the imagery is pitched just right for the genre.

Read my original review.

5. Nightcrawler

“Nightcrawler” features the year’s best screenplay, best cinematography (by Robert Elswit, who turns nighttime L.A. into a morally nihilistic hellscape not even Michael Mann could have envisioned), and best instance of onscreen chemistry (Rene Russo and Gyllenhall’s “date” scene). Directed by Dan Gilroy, it is also the best first film of 2014.

Read my original review.

4. Gone Girl

Ben Affleck is, for once, perfectly cast as a douchey numbskull. His portrayal of an American doofus is the main reason the film works. David Fincher and Gillian Flynn literally take a dark view of suburban affluence, where two-car garages cast deep noir-like shadows and everyone has something to hide. As in “Fight Club,” Fincher’s careful direction makes the absurd feel vaguely plausible, and thus all the more disturbing.

Read my original review.

3. The Grand Budapest Hotel

Anderson seems at his best when focusing on the unmistakable fatuousness of males who live to impress others. Like Max Fischer and Royal Tenenbaum, Mr. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) is a victim of his own haughty ridiculousness. The pomp and circumstance of a Wes Anderson film increases with every Wes Anderson film. Yet GBH exists for me as the magical curative for “Moonrise Kingdom,” which was adorable but inert. Here, the historical backdrop (although fictional) is more compelling, the stakes higher, the jokes funnier.

Read my original review.

2. Ida

Now up for Foreign Language Film and Cinematography Oscars, “Ida” will be and deserves to be seen by more people. Pawel Pawlikowski’s elegant, emotionally raw film about history and identity is as relevant a story as any told in 2014. I rooted for no character this year more than Ida, a simple Polish nun. I wanted her to make a particular choice at the movie’s end, and when she didn’t, I nearly jumped out of my seat. Aside from being that engrossing, “Ida” features ghostly black-and-white photography by Lukasz Zal and Ryszard Lenczewski, not to mention the year’s single best performance by Agata Kulesza.

Read my original review.

1. Under the Skin

Complex as it may be, Jonathan Glazer’s psychedelic portrait of a mysterious interloper relies on our most basic impulses of empathy to achieve its effect. Its themes involve everything from our ideas of beauty, gender, and fame, but the genius of it all is in the simplicity of execution. This includes Scarlet Johannson, whose brave, poised performance doesn’t oversell anything. Glazer is a director who doesn’t work nearly enough. “Under the Skin” has been described as a Kubrickian masterpiece. This is an apt comparison. Yet the film feels fresh, not derivative in the slightest.

Read my original review.

The Babadook

“The Babadook,” Jennifer Kent’s new horror film, features one of the year’s finest performances, that of Essie Davis. Davis stars as Amelia, a morose, widowed single mom who goes through the motions of caretaking both at home with her son, Samuel, and at work, where she dully reads off Bingo numbers to the elderly.

Davis and Kent are of similar genius — both women give us the normal frights and jumps we expect from a horror story, but both execute their moves with such a steadiness that they set “The Babadook” well above par for the genre.

Amelia still mourns the passing of Samuel’s father. She is equally haunted by his ghost and by the macabre freak show that is being a single parent to a hyperactive son. When Samuel chooses a disturbing volume for his bedtime story, “Mr. Babadook,” Amelia, in what is a nicely subtle bit of acting, doesn’t recognize the book.

Both mom and son are freaked out. What happens next is a series of horror story flourishes and close calls drenched in heavyhanded symbolism. As Samuel and his mum face down the evil presence who has invaded their home, they also confront their own feelings of loss and resentment toward each other, and toward life.

Based on imagery from Kent’s 2005 short film, “Monster,” Mr. Babadook is a frightful specter, half Nosferatu and half Freddy Krueger. Not only does this demonic ghost lurk in the shadows of Amelia and Samuel’s home at night, his unsettling figure pops up during daytime scenes, as when a coat and jacket hanging in the police station suddenly grows long, spooky claws.

The best horror doesn’t so much present us with alien imagery but instead recommends to us that which is familiar, domestic, and therefore more disturbing. This film does that as well as any in recent memory. Though “The Babadook” flexes its metaphors too hard, one cannot help but admire its meticulously sculpted physique. It is one of the year’s best movies, of any genre.

“The Babadook” — FOUR STARS

Directed by Jennifer Kent. Not Rated. Causeway Films, Smoking Gun Productions.  93 min.

The Best Movies of 2013

I didn’t want to post my Best of 2013 list until the Oscar race was in full freakout mode. Which is now the case.

My top ten are:

10) “Captain Phillips”

9) “Gravity”

8) “Frances Ha”

7) “Inside Llewyn Davis”

6) “The Wolf of Wall Street”

5) “The Act of Killing”

4) “Stories We Tell”

3) “Her”

2) “Blue is the Warmest Color”

1) “12 Years a Slave”