{"id":1543,"date":"2018-12-12T16:43:57","date_gmt":"2018-12-12T21:43:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=1543"},"modified":"2018-12-14T18:41:02","modified_gmt":"2018-12-14T23:41:02","slug":"favorite-movies-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=1543","title":{"rendered":"Favorite Movies, 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"

These are my favorite movies of 2018. I won\u2019t call this a best films list, since there are so many movies I still haven\u2019t seen (for instance, Mandy<\/em>, Let the Sunshine In<\/em>, A Star is Born<\/em>, Vox Lux<\/em>, If Beale Street Could Talk<\/em>, Suspiria<\/em>, and others I am probably forgetting). But among the ones I did catch so far, these are the ones that most impressed me, more or less in (vague) rank order.<\/p>\n

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  1. Sorry to Bother You<\/em> (Boots Riley). Clearly my choice (despite all the ones I have not seen yet) for best film of the year. The closest we may well come to a comprehensive vision of racialized capitalism today: both how it works and how it feels. Satirical, surrealistic science fiction is the only way to be adequate to contemporary social reality.<\/li>\n
  2. Bodied<\/em> (Joseph Kahn). Social commentary on race combined with exuberant formal inventiveness. Kahn is a great music video director, and his earlier feature film Detention<\/em> (2011) is one of the most important American movies of the twenty-first century. I reviewed Bodied<\/em> for Cinema Scope<\/em> journal: http:\/\/cinema-scope.com\/features\/joseph-kahns-bodied\/<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  3. The Other Side of the Wind<\/em> (Orson Welles). Though Orson Welles shot this movie, and began editing it (until it was taken away from him) in the 1970s, it is still remarkably prescient about our media situation today. I won\u2019t say it is as great as Citizen Kane<\/em> or Touch of Evil<\/em>, but it does update Kane<\/em> in the light of the new media landscape that was just emerging then, and that is in full force today. Dazzling more than moving, but definitely brilliant and relevant. I discussed it at greater length here: http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=1532<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  4. Annihilation<\/em> (Alex Garland). Beautiful, speculative, and depressive. Different in many ways from the novel by Jeff VanderMeer on which it is based; but it makes a similarly resonant statement about the alienness of the world that is a (counter-intuitive) consequence of the ruination imposed by the Anthropocene. Filled with haunting moments, like when Tessa Thompson becomes a tree, and when Natalie Portman confronts her spectral double. “It wasn\u2019t destroying. It was changing everything. It was making something new.”<\/li>\n
  5. Blindspotting<\/em> (Carlos Lopez Estrada, Daveed Diggs, Rafael Casal). Another brilliant take on race (the inescapable central subject of American life today) and gentrification. Embedded in social reality, but at the same time brilliantly stylized (as when the dialogue turns into hip hop rhymed lyrics). Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal have rightly been praised for their screenwriting and performances; but I would like to give props as well to Carlos Lopez Estrada, one of our best music video directors, who powerfully articulates the story in his first feature film.<\/li>\n
  6. Blackkklansman<\/em> (Spike Lee). Spike Lee has been struggling in the past few decades, compared to his earlier successes. But even his misfires have consistently been cinematographically fresh and formally inventive. Here he plays it straight more than he has for a while, and the result is an effective, audience-arousing, pop-mainstream movie on a subject (yes, racism once again) that big-budget Hollywood still won\u2019t touch. This is a far better old-fashioned movie\u2014 the kind with characters you can root for and identify with \u2014 than any of the ones that overtly reach for that role.<\/li>\n
  7. Madeline’s Madeline<\/em> (Josephine Decker). All I can say is that this movie actually delivers on something that all too many experimental films unsuccessfully strive towards: it makes us see the world in a fresh new way. Unprecedented, and yet something we have long needed without realizing it. Something of a 21st-century update of Jacques Rivette, with similar concerns about the nature of performance, or the relation of acting to actuality. I have written a bit about it here: http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=1501<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  8. Mom and Dad<\/em> (Brian Taylor). I haven\u2019t seen Mandy<\/em>, but it is hard to imagine Nicholas Cage giving a more stirringly and crazily over-the-top performance than he does here. I will never think of the \u201cHokey Pokey\u201d the same way again. And the movie works effectively as social commentary, as the best horror films so often do \u2014 here, a reflection on the dynamics of the suburban nuclear family. (A vision I cannot fail to be disturbed by, speaking as a parent myself). Sharply directed, inverting and deconstructing all the cliches of the genre, by the great Brian Taylor.<\/li>\n
  9. Cam<\/em> (Daniel Goldhaber, Isa Mazzei). A clever and well-made (semi-) horror film about sex work, and what happens when your online account is stolen and you are locked out. In other words, everyday life. (It is refreshing how the movie treats sex work as everyday life in the manner of any other job). This is the sort of movie that I find emotionally compelling and (as my students would say) relatable.<\/li>\n
  10. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc<\/em> (Bruno Dumont). The best French-Catholic-movie-by-an-atheist (yes, that is a thing) since at least Godard\u2019s Hail Mary<\/em> (1984). I have never much cared for Dumont\u2019s slow-cinema movies: I saw the first two, and then gave up on him. I watched this only after John Waters called it his favorite movie of the year<\/a>; and I immediately fell in love with it. What\u2019s not to love about a spare, but beautifully photographed, avant\/heavy-metal musical, set in peasant landscapes of the early 15th century, with mystical visions and acrobatic amateur dancing, and with a screenplay taken from the gorgeously hyperbolic and pleonastic poetry of Charles P\u00e9guy?<\/li>\n
  11. Black Panther<\/em> (Ryan Coogler). The only recent blockbuster since Mad Max: Fury Road<\/em> that I can really get behind. Here the action editing is serviceable (though not anywhere near as good as Mad Max<\/em>), and the plot is just okay (I am in agreement with those who say that Killmonger\u2019s anti-imperialism ought to have been given more sympathy and attention). But the worldbuilding is stupendous, creating the vision of a Black world not crippled by colonialism and enslavement.<\/li>\n
  12. Upgrade<\/em> (Leigh Whannell). Cartesian dilemma: Logan Marshall-Green\u2019s body does all this slick martial arts stuff, while his face registers his mental horror and pain at the fact that he is killing all these people without wanting to.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    These are my favorite movies of 2018. I won\u2019t call this a best films list, since there are so many movies I still haven\u2019t seen (for instance, Mandy, Let the Sunshine In, A Star is Born, Vox Lux, If Beale Street Could Talk, Suspiria, and others I am probably forgetting). But among the ones I … Continue reading “Favorite Movies, 2018”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1543"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1553,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1543\/revisions\/1553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}