The 10 Best Films of the Year
It was a year when a Mexican family drama got in the mix with Lady Gaga, a black Marvel superhero and an eighth-grader to make film history.
1. Roma
What makes a movie the best of the year? See Roma, a poetic, profound and resplendently beautiful masterpiece that director Alfonso Cuarón carved from his memories of growing up in the Roma suburb of Mexico City in the 1970s. The filmmaker contrasts the drama of his divorcing parents with the era’s politics, including a student revolt that ended in violence. Then there’s Cleo (the unforgettable Yalitza Aparicio), a housekeeper who quietly holds the family together while her own life crumbles. It may be true that Cuarón, an artist at the height of his powers, will face resistance in the awards race. He’s made a black-and-white indie in Spanish that most people will see on Netflix, the streaming service that released this masterwork in a few theaters to qualify for Oscars. Just wait. In the shifting landscape of how we see movies, Roma is not only a great film, it’s a game-changer.
2. A Star Is Born
Bradley Cooper’s all-systemsgo liftoff as a director and Lady Gaga’s dynamite debut as a movie star powered this fourth retelling of the she’sup/he’s-down showbiz fairy tale. Under the fine hand of Cooper — acting up a storm, and a surprisingly downhome singer — a remake that many worried might be a dumb gloss on 21st-century rock emerged as intimate and indelible, with an out-ofthe-shallow soundtrack that killed. Don’t you just love it when that happens?
3. Black Panther
It was a year in which a Netflix family drama from Mexico got in the mix with Lady Gaga, a black Marvel superhero and an 8th-grader to make a new kind of film history
Marvel dawdled for ages about turning its first black superhero into a real-deal movie franchise, thinking there was no market for it. Ha! Black Panther, with Chadwick Boseman crushing the title role as the crime-fighting king of the fictional African country Wakanda, is not only a global box-office phenom ($1.4 billion worldwide), it’s the best Marvel Cinematic Universe movie ever, period.
Director Ryan Coogler ( Fruitvale Station, Creed) led a cast of champs, including Michael B. Jordan as the ultimate badass villain and a quartet of powerhouses (Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Letitia Wright, Angela Bassett) to give the men a run for their money. What’s that about a comic-book epic not being good enough to earn a spot in the Oscar lineup for Best Picture? The revolution starts now.
4. The Favourite
You’ll savor every note of delicious, depraved, comic malice in this 18th-century hellzapoppin’ from Greek provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos ( The Lobster), who gives history a welcome #METOO edge. Olivia Colman is diabolically funny — and sometimes just diabolical — as Queen Anne, a gout-ridden, body-scarred monarch who grants power to a pair of rivals, Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz) and Lady Abigail (Emma Stone), in exchange for sex and shameless flattery. That you come to care for these scheming vixens is a tribute to three marvelous actresses on whom Academy honors should be bestowed forthwith.
5. BlacKkKlansman
Spike Lee’s best film in years brilliantly took off from the 1970s true story of Colorado police officer Ron Stallworth (the excellent John David Washington), who called on a Jewish cop (a superb Adam Driver) to help him infiltrate and expose the KKK. Lee invests his considerable humor, heart, smarts and righteous rage to make this real-life incident resonate for the current era, in which race hatred festers in our un-fake news. It’s hard not to cheer when Lee sticks it to Trump with all he’s got. Bravo.
6. If Beale Street Could Talk
Director Barry Jenkins follows his Oscar-winning Moonlight with a tone-perfect, tragedy-tinged, touchingly hopeful adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel about black love and the forces rallied against it. KIKI Layne and Stephan James excel as the Harlem couple at the center of a racial storm. And Regina King is hardcore funny, fired-up and fab- ulous as the girl’s mother, a fighter who is hellbent on getting her future son-inlaw released after he was framed for rape. For Baldwin, Beale Street represents the blues. And Jenkins, a true poet of cinema, uses his wrenching, incurably romantic film to hit you where it hurts, and also where it heals.
7. First Man
Damien Chazelle’s soaring drama about astronaut Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling), the first man to walk on the moon, isn’t finding the audience it deserves. Objections have been raised to a 1960s right-wing worship of whitey on the moon. Huh?
Chazelle did not make that movie. Gosling shows us the stoic Armstrong coming apart inside. And Claire Foy, in a stunningly realized portrait of his wife, reveals the emotional toll that repression takes on a family when a husband and father straps himself into a death-trap rocket for reasons that have little to do with waving a flag.
8. First Reformed
The main thing about Paul Schrader’s extraordinary, elemental film about a pastor (Ethan Hawke) on the verge of losing his faith in a world that’s losing its values is the way it grabs you and won’t let go. Hawke, in his best-ever screen performance, commits totally to Schrader’s cinematically exhilarating vision of existential despair.
When people ask me to recommend a film by a first-time director they know nothing about, Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade is my go-to choice. It’s about a 13-year-old girl (the astonishing Elsie Fisher) trying to survive adolescent angst in the digital age. It’s also like nothing you have ever seen.
10. Green Book
Here’s the sleeping giant of awards season. Why? Green
Book is impossible to resist. In telling the true-ish story of how, in 1962, black classical pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala
Ali) hired goombah Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen) to drive him on a perilous concert tour through the Jim Crow South, director/co-writer Peter Farrelly only paints inside the box.
What earns this reverse spin on Driving Miss Daisy a place in the 2018 film time capsule is the team of Mortensen and Ali, both flat-out fantastic in roles sure to cover them in Oscar glory. Does Green Book sugarcoat the message about race in America? Maybe. But it doesn’t stop these two live-wire actors from pumping the gas and driving it home.
9. Eighth Grade