My Favorite Movies of 2018: 100-1
Iâm not running out of things to say about movies. I may have run out of things to say about these movies. But not in general, not yet. Some time around 2017, the movies became more than a hobby and more than an organizing principle and more than a sideline. My day job is still largely editing, shaping, co-conceiving, managing, and experimenting with The Ringer. Itâs the best job imaginable, literally. I used to daydream about a job like this; maybe even exactly this. Movies were always a respite from the grunt work required to get a chance at an opportunity like the one I have now. After endless days spent hand-hacking bad HTML or sending email queries to publicists or haggling with corporate management two time zones over or squabbling with writers over deadlines or waiting on hold for several hours with tech support to have my gatekey unlocked to obtain a new login code from the central server, I would go to a movie and decompress. Ten-plus years of bureaucracy, and the movies were a salvation in micro. I came to appreciate their power in new ways. Intellectual charging stations that force uncommon ideas into your lap. Emotional turnstiles that push you across a feeling youâd forgotten you could experienceâtears, rage, mouth-agape awe. Heat, sex, depth, even love. Getting worked up at the movies is a rush that writers have been trying to communicate for a century. Iâm still working on it.
This year I got more chances. Maybe too many. I wrote a lot of movie columns and a handful of feature stories. Some sucked, the product of self-imposed deadlines and dim conception. Some were better. The more movies I see, the more fascinated I become by how we see them. I canât stop talking about thisâNetflix, MoviePass, FilmStruck, box office, IP, expanded universes, streaming. These are structural concerns, but they also dictate the art, both its profligacy and rarity. Sometimes that interest gets the better of me, of what brought to the dance. But this year forced that thinking, that urge to unpack the How as much as the What or the Why on unsuspecting viewers. We are a platform nation, as interested in the vehicle as the ride. And so sometimes I wrote about the ideas that bind Black Panther and make it more than just a worthwhile comic book movie, but an epic story with modern implications, a sign of the market allowing, not limiting creativity. And sometimes I blogged about sequels making money. All in the game.
Itâs possible Iâm doing too much, straining toward angles, trying to fill stat sheets. Iâm getting that sense. Which makes this venture sort of obviated. When I started publishing this list seven years ago, it was a lark masquerading as memoir covered in gifs. I was trying to find ways to write about myself and the way movies made me feel because I didnât have an avenue for it, and Tumblr, at the time, felt like a natural extension of feelings, a platform to emote. Writing about movies every week grinds you to a finer dust, the kind you sometimes hear sports writers identify when they explain why they no longer have a rooting interest in the teams they grew up with. (Not to worry, I havenât thrown in the towel on PTA.) I found movies that moved me as before, but I processed them more quickly, and in the service of ideas. I looked for the approach too often and wondered why certain things didnât stick. Some did, like First Reformed, a movie I canât shake. Others, like Unsane, vanished almost immediately. All this, and Iâve got the podcast humming at a frequent pace, a new receptacle for all these ideas. So Iâve not broken down each movie with analysis or a bon mot or a quippy shaded personal anecdote. Iâve just listed them again. Best I can do right now. So here is a long list of movies I loved this year, but maybe not why.
With apologies to all the 2018 films I havenât yet seen: Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, The Hate U Give, Colette, Of Fathers and Sons, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Bisbee â17, The Great Buster: A Celebration, Searching for Ingmar Bergman, Never Look Away, Anna and the Apocalypse, Mortal Engines, Holmes & Watson, Life Itself, Dumplinâ, The House With a Clock In Its Walls, All About Nina, Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski, Science Fair, Peppermint, The Long Dumb Road, and, of course, The Wife.
100. Solo: A Star Wars Story
78. The Land of Steady Habits
62. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
52. Donât Worry, He Wonât Get Far on Foot
47. Three Identical Strangers
42. You Were Never Really Here
37. Avengers: Infinity War
35. The Other Side of the Wind
30. Wonât You Be My Neighbor?
27. Ralph Breaks the Internet
23. The Price of Everything
15. The Old Man & the Gun
14. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
10. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse
9. If Beale Street Could Talk
6. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
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