Ranking Every 2018 Movie I Saw + Top 15

This year I want to do things a little differently. It's always a tough question every year of whether I should I rank Top 10, Top 15, or even Top 20. How about this time we go balls-deep and do a Top 60? The traditional Best of the Best Top 15 will lie at the bottom of this post in its usual bloated many thousands of words glory. But before that, there's forty-five other movies to talk about. Plus, I didn't review of most of thhese besides maybe a tweet somewhere, so there's a lot of unfinished business to talk about.

2018 was a very good year for movies. We are still deep in the Late 2010s Horror Renaissance. People are going to get nostalgic for this era once it ends. I bet in 2040 we'll see a new Stranger Things set in 2018. Superhero movies still rule all of existence to a frightening degree. And it seems like the traditional Oscar Bait studio drama circle has totally dried up, leaving only things like Green Book or Mary Queen of Scots, which were too bland for me to waste my time seeing.

But the most interesting stuff seems to be how movies are distributed versus how they're made. Netflix is a monster that seems to grow ever more monstrous as time goes by. They don't even need to market their movies and somehow #BirdBox will end up trending almost immediately. It almost feels like Netflix is the new mainstream and actually going out to see a movie is some kind of rebellious anti-social activity. It also doesn't help that Netflix movies are still mostly terrible. Sometimes you'll get a Roma, but mostly you'll get things like the No. 60 on my list. Also let us not forget the failure of MoviePass. I don't know where movies are going, or where society is going. But even as the world breaks itself apart into chaos, we're getting good shit at the movies. I already told you what my Favorite Movie of the Year is back in the winter, so don't be too surprised

Sadly, it's a long way down to that No. 1. We instead start with the Worst Movie of 2018:

60. Mute - Netflix wins Worst Picture twice in a row thank to last year's Bright, a terrible wrongheaded metaphor for racism, and this year's Mute, a terrible wrongheaded something, I don't know what. Mute is a movie so bad I couldn't tell you what the direct intended this to be and I can't even tell you what emotion it was supposed to elicit. Mostly my emotion was boredom. Mute is a muddled and confused mess, mixing the worst parts of cyberpunk with the worst parts of a Guy Ritchie crime movie with a tasteless pedophilia subplot. Who the protagonist? Who was the villain? What is this? The script comes off like the first script a seventeen-year-old kid would have written. Sadly that kid was Duncan Jones, a director I thought I liked. Maybe during the ten years Jones spent making Mute, he should have written a second draft at some point.

59. Ready Player One - Mute is the worst movie of 2018 but Ready Player One is the film I hated the most. I have not despised a movie this much since Batman v Superman, in fact. Ready Player One is theoretically a celebration of Eighties pop culture but really is a cringy celebration of Warner Bros corporate synergy. It's a nightmare dystopia, not because of the evil corporations, but because of the how this film views fandom. It's a vision of what Hollywood want its viewers to be: passive consumers, absorbing pointless trivia, and mindlessly worshiping sacred cow franchises. The fans never question the works, never produce their own reactions, and have nothing to say of their own. They just turn on the TV and turn off their brains, like good little slaves to the movie machine. They can recite every line of The Shining but have no understanding of the text. It's hideous, I hate this movie. Plus in the future apparently people will cosplay as Battleborn characters? No way.

58. Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich - I'm a huge fan of The Puppet Master series. There was nothing like being bored at Grandma in Philadelphia's house in the Nineties and renting some shitty horror movies from Blockbuster because there was literally nothing else to do. The Puppet Master franchise got a lot of rotation on my grandma's VHS player. However, this newest reboot is balls. The appeal of The Puppet Master movies was in rooting for the killer puppets. They were fun and had a lot of personality. Instead this version turns them into Nazis because that's what 2018 needed more of, Nazis. Add to it an obnoxious script that's trying to be Kevin Smith but even worse. I just wanted to see a fun puppet movie, not this ironic "too cool for the subject" coy nonsense. Fuck irony, fuck Nazis, and fuck this movie.

57. The Cloverfield Paradox - The Cloverfield Paradox is a really bad movie, but I actually had a lot of fun with it. This movie uses time paradoxes the same way that Final Fantasy XIII-2 does. There are no rules and everything can be justified with "time paradox", including crudely re-editing an unrelated SciFi movie to fit into the Cloverfield franchise, or ripping-off like twelve different better horror films. There was no better hilariously bad movie in 2018.

56. The Seagull - I really like the Anton Chekhov play this is based off of. And I love Saoirse Ronan. This 2018 version of The Seagull wastes both Chekhov and a great cast.

55. BlacKKKlansman - This is a controversial pick right here, I'm sure. BlacKKKlansman is on a lot of Best Lists and it will get nominated for Best Picture, might even win. I'll stand alone against it if I must. Not because I think Spike Lee was unfair to racists, but for two reasons: 1) The movie cannot square the circle between its make-believe of the police as an ally of black liberation and their actual history with black America. This is why the protagonist bullshits his radical girlfriend and spies on her for his white superiors, yet we're told he still has the best intentions. (jerk-off motion) 2) The N-word gets thrown around so often that BlacKKKlansman turns into a KKK-spoitation movie. Spike Lee is having worryingly too much fun with his monsters. So the racist shitbags come off as more real than our hero. There were far better "woke" movies in 2018 than this.

54. A Silent Voice - (sucking in air) ...I am not happy about how I feel about A Silent Voice. For an hour I thought this could have been one of the best movies of the year. I'm a sucker for beautiful anime films, especially ones about personal relationships and ones that are very well-made. If A Silent Voice ended a half hour earlier with a big happy kiss, this might have made the Top 15. However, there's a third act twist in this involving a suicide attempt that ruins everything. It comes out of nowhere and it's never properly addressed. The whole thing is clumsy and wrongheaded in the worst ways. No, I'm not on board with treating suicide as "selfish", and I really don't like how this movie effectively blames the victim. In fact, fuck you, movie. Maybe this should rank lower on second thought.

53. Tau - I have nothing to say about this movie. I don't know why Netflix made this and I don't know why I saw it.

52. Hold the Dark - Hold the Dark is a lot like Mute except competently-made. Hell, they both even star Alexander Skarsgård. But just like Mute, I don't know what director Jeremy Saulnier was going for. It's just bleak and unpleasant.

51. Rampage - Meh.

50. The Predator - Somewhere in the studio's butchering of The Predator there might have been a good movie, but that did not show up in theaters. I'll never see what film Shane Black wanted to make. Also we officially need to stop using autism as a superpower in fiction.

49. Ant-Man and the Wasp - Why did I even see this? I knew I wouldn't care about it.

48. First Reformed - I'm not really down for movies about depressed middle aged men. First Reformed is also very boring. Imagine Taxi Driver but after twenty years of a Xanax addiction.

47. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch - I want more choose your own adventure movies. But maybe better ones than this. Bandersnatch has a steady uptick of craziness as it gets more and more meta. However then the true ending is trying to be bittersweet unsuccessfully, which just shows I didn't actually care for this story at all outside it's gimmick.Try again, Netflix.
 
46. Eighth Grade - I had to walk out of this one. I don't take pride in that. I can only take so much cringe and embarrassment until I've had it. I don't think is a bad movie but just not for me.

45. Unsane - Unsane is all about the tension of whether the protagonist is crazy or not. The movie blows that tension almost immediately. Also it's shot entirely on an iPhone 7 as some kind of gimmick and so every shot looks flat, blotchy, and hideous. It's like it was filmed on Steve Bannon's skin.

44. Mary and the Witch's Flower - This movie wants to be Hayao Miyazaki so hard, and it just isn't. Still, very pretty.

43. Incredibles 2 - It's The Incredibles. Again. Why did Pixar wait ten years just to make the same movie again?

42. Creed II - It's Creed. Again.

41. You Were Never Really Here - I'm still not down for movies about depressed middle aged men. This one is at least grisly and intense.

40. Wildlife - Wildlife is a movie about a white family's quiet desperation in the Fifties as their gender roles fall apart. We've seen this all before. Big props to Carey Mulligan who is the main reason to see this. I thought this going in an incest direction, it might have not better if it did, but it would have weirder and more interesting.

39. Bohemian Rhapsody - It is exactly what you think it will be. Every scene is predictable. That said, it isn't a bad one of these, I guess.

38. Aquaman - I really love the wonderfully mad imagery of underwater Star Wars here. You got dudes riding sharks, crab people, jellyfish dresses, a giant monster, an octopus that drums, Amber Heard has beautiful Princess Ariel hair. Iit's a wild spectacle that needs to be seen. However, everything else isn't all that great.

I don't want you to all to think that just because it's 39/60 that Aquaman is a bad movie. At this point every film on this list is worth seeing without reservations.

37. Bumblebee - Easily the best Transformers movie. I could imagine a hypothetical five-year-old nephew of mine being absolutely in love with this movie. And you know what, I'd be fine with that. Enjoy away, metaphorical child.

36. Solo - It is a shame that we all decided that we didn't need Star Wars right before we got a really good Star Wars movie. Uch.

35. Overlord - A squad of soldiers on D-Day stumble into a crazy Nazi experiment and kill Nazis. Overlord accomplishes everything it aims to do. It is a perfectly solid B-movie. I recommend this to everybody who wants a good little horror flick.

34. Ghost Stories - Speaking of solid B-movies, here's Ghost Stories. It's a British anthology of three horror tales and with a fairly interesting frame story around it. You want something decently scary, here's something decently scary.

33. Bad Times at the El Royale - This crime movie has a lot of ambition to be this epic period piece full of over-the-top characters. It doesn't quite live up to that, but it is still a very good thing.

32. Avengers: Infinity War - Easily the biggest movie of the year, perhaps ever. I give it a DNF/10, as in, "Did Not Finish out of Ten". This is only half a movie. It isn't a bad half of a movie. I'm impressed by how well Marvel is able to make these ridiculously huge crossover things. But again, I can't rate something I've only seen half of.

31. Roma - Roma is the best movie to ever bore the fuck out of me.

30. Halloween - I wish this movie had been called "Halloween H40". It's about the same thing as Halloween H20, just done better. I've seen much worse reboots of slashers films and Halloween (2018) is a good reminder of why that genre ruled the Eighties. Also it's always great to see Jamie Lee Curtis again.

29. Christopher Robin - I just really like Winnie the Pooh.

28. A Quiet Place - Maybe in retrospect we've all decided that we're too smart for A Quiet Place. "Oh why didn't they just blah blah blah?" is what the CinemaSins crowds online has been saying for the last six months. But admit it, when you saw the movie, you were too scared to chew your popcorn or cough.

27. Deadpool 2 - It's Deadpool. Again. Actually this is pretty solid all-around movie. Even if it is less memorable than the original, I actually think the sequel might be the better film. The opening is gut-wrenching and sad, the whole sequence with X-Force is hilariously dark, and I loved seeing the Juggernaut in all his comic book nonsense glory. I guess with the Disney-Fox merger we won't get a Deadpool 3, but we didn't really need one. We're good with two.

26. Apostle - Wait, Netflix made a completely good movie in 2018? Jesus Howard Christ, what a surprise. Apostle is another really solid B-movie. Take The Wicker Man and set it in the world of Bloodborne and have Dan Stevens star and you'd get Apostle.

25. Let the Corpses Tan - I went to see this movie because it was called "Let the Corpses Tan". A name like that is something I can't resist. If you're in the mood for a very dark and very violent acid western, Let the Corpses Tan is your movie. There are indeed many corpses though I don't think enough time passed for them to properly tan. This is actually the better version of Bad Times at the El Royale.

24. Isle of Dogs - I really like Wes Anderson movies. I really like even the worst of Wes Anderson movies which Isle of Dogs kinda is. This isn't as good as his previous stop-motion film, Fantastic Mr. Fox. I don't understand why this movie needed to be set in Japan other than how it appealed to Anderson's twee sense of imagery. But this movie has newborn puppy puppets and that's adorable.

23. Assassination Nation - Few movies are so intentionally "2018" as Assassination Nation. It is a dark comedy about doxxing, toxic masculinity, transphobia, etc. etc. There's a trans actress playing one of the leads, Hari Nef, who is awesome in this and probably awesome in real life. But the ending to Assassination Nation comes so abruptly the entire movie suffers. Personally I think of this as a stealth Purge prequel, and probably a better one than The First Purge (which I haven't seen). Assassination Nation is Leftist Twitter 2018: The Movie.

22. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs - If this Western anthology movie had just been the first three stories, this would be in my Top 15, easily. The first tale of the six, "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" is possibly the best thing the Coen Brothers have ever done. It is a hilarious Looney Tunes cartoon with Tim Blake Nelson killing and singing his way across the Old West. Sadly the other tales can't quite live up to that high. And the last three are way too slow. By the final tale I was actively bored of the movie. But don't let those lows undercut the highs here. (And a hearty howdy to you, Netflix, you have finally redeemed yourself for Mute.)

21. Vox Lux - I actually considered for a second whether Vox Lux was better than A Star is Born, the other pop star movie of this year. Vox Lux is definitely the darker of the two, and the one that feels more real about where pop stardom is in 2018. A Star is Born is a lovely fantasy, Vox Lux is the sick and twisted reality of how decades of fame can break a person, and how 2018's 2018-ness drives us all into insanity. But Vox Lux also legitimately loves pop music. It thinks the entire fame and fortune cycle is toxic and evil, but when the show is going, Vox Lux is ready to jam.

20. Widows - Steve McQueen's crime thriller is helped a lot by his collaboration with Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl. This movie seems like a simple B-movie tale of the surviving wives of a murdered gang of thieves teaming up to take down corrupt Chicago politicians and gangsters. Instead it's a very solid story about the role of women, women's interactions, and relationships with men, all done without slamming you over the head with "#GURRRLPOWER". Plus it is still a B-movie heist flick and a fun one. Widows feels subtle, somber, and real. PS: We all need to pay more attention to Elizabeth Debicki, because in a movie with Colin Farrell, Robert Duvall, Viola Davis, and Liam Neeson, she comes away as the superstar.

19. Mission Impossible: Fallout - Five or six Mission Impossible movies later I still have no idea why this franchise exists. Up until recently these movies had no real cohesion in terms of cast or style. The first one is an intense spy thriller, the second one is a crazy John Woo action film, and most recently with Fallout, it's The Dark Knight. This movie is a series of huge practical action set pieces. Fallout in a lot of ways out-Christopher Nolan's Christopher Nolan. The parachute scene, the helicopter chase, the rooftop chase, it is all gritty exciting stuff that Tom Cruise really did cause Tom Cruise is out of his damn mind and living his Best Self. This is one of the best action movies of the year. And Henry Cavill's mustache is awesome in this.

18. My Hero Academia: Two Heroes - The My Hero Academia movie ranks so high not because it is a particularly great movie. It is a shonen anime film: it's a lot of cameos, it's a lot of fanservice, and ultimately none of it matters because it can't affect the overall plot. However, it is also a really good one of those. But the real reason this ranks high is because it was the best theater-going experience I had in 2018. It was packed to the brim with My Hero Academia superfans, and I've never seen an audience like this. There were cheers every minute for every character. Even the grape kid that nobody likes - he got cheers. Twenty years ago I saw Pokemon: The First Movie in theaters with an audience of eight-year-olds, and even Pokemon kids at the height of Poke-mania were less hyped for a movie than the My Hero Academia crowd were hyped last year. I left this movie with a huge smile. I was cheering too.

17. Upgrade - 2018 all-around was not a very good year for cyberpunk films. There's a reason Tau, Ready Player One, and Mute are some of the worst movies I saw this year. They're just uninteresting retreads of things we've seen before. Upgrade doesn't come with any new ideas either. Our automated future sucks and we've known that for while. But what it does have is super cool action scenes, sharp humor, and a great leading man in Logan Marshall-Green. The general concept is pure B-movie cheese: a dude loses his wife and his ability to move, but goes on a roaring rampage of revenge with his AI buddy that controls his limbs. Like Widows, the execution takes a trashy concept to real heights of humanity and emotion. Upgrade is the best B-movie of 2018. It really hurts me that it couldn't quite make the Top 15.

16. Black Panther - Black Panther is another film that barely got cut from the Top 15, and it hurt to lose it. A lot of Marvel films are very competent, but they aren't very interesting. Ant-Man 2 was fine, but who cares beyond it being fine? They actively avoid pressing their characters, and if they say anything about the world it is entirely by accident. Ryan Coogler took Black Panther and made something very different. The film's vision of African SciFi (may I call it "Africa Punk"?) with War Rhinos and weird costumes is something I've never seen before. But also this is a film more about African Americans than African-Africans. It creates a mythology and heroes for people whose mythology and heroes were stolen from them. I can't imagine the pain of having your family's story have to start with slavery and everything before that being lost forever. Black Panther is using fantasy in a way I think is very positive: it's trying to write history's wrongs. Wakanda doesn't exist, never will exist, but I think some dreams are worth dreaming.

Also Killmonger is a thousand times the villain that Thanos could ever be. Why am I alone in thinking that Thanos sucks?

So without further ado, the actual Best of the Best:

15. If Beale Street Could Talk 

In 1974 James Baldwin wrote the novel the 2018 film is based upon. Baldwin wrote a story that nobody was listening to in the Seventies, the story of crooked justice in black neighborhoods in America. The novel and film are set in Harlem, where is no Beale Street. Beale Street is actually in Memphis, but that's not important. The same story could have happened in Memphis or New York or Oakland. Also the novel and film are set in the early Seventies, but this story could still happen today. In 1974 Baldwin asked his readers to listen to black neighborhoods. History has shown that nobody did. Hopefully today in 2019 after the failure of mass policing, and with Season 3 of the Serial podcast, we are finally listening to how broken the system really is.

If Beale Street Could Talk sounds should be a depressing movie. It still is very heavy. Most of my audience had to sit for a minute during the end credits just to let the weight of it all wash over them. But it also is hopeful and graceful. The characters know they won't be able to get Fonnie (Stephan James) out of jail to be with his pregnant girlfriend, Tish (KiKi Layne), but they still fight every step of the way to do all they can. Director Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) sets most of the movie in the honeymoon phase of Fonnie and Tish's relationship. They are two young people deeply in love in New York City, and while it isn't going to work out for them, Beale Street wants to tell the good parts of the story, not just the injustice. They are complete human beings, not victims. They had a life before the system screwed them, and they'll have a life afterwards.

So solid directing, solid acting, beautiful cinematography - that's why Black Panther didn't make it on the list. And actually I don't regret it now. Beale Street might even have gone up higher on the list if I hadn't just seen it literally last night.

14. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

Yes, I'm putting Mamma Mia! 2 on my Top 15. Who is going to stop me? You? You?? Ha. You have no power here.

I don't have to justify anything to any of you people. I really liked Mamma Mia 2. Exactly why was Mamma Mia! 1 so hated anyway? Because it's a movie your mom can watch with a glass of wine? So what? I like wine, I like moms, I like ABBA, I like most of the cast here. I even like Pierce Brosnan's attempt at singing. (007 can beat a space laser fired by a North Korean turned Ginger supervillain but his feeble voice is utterly defeated by the background music to S.O.S.)

So this sequel to the saga of English colonists in Greece turns into The Godfather 2. We see the continuing story of Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) as she tries to continue the business set up by her mother, the inexplicably killed-off Donna (Meryl Streep). Meanwhile we cut to Young Donna (Lily James) as she sluts herself up across Europe in tight jeans. So totally Godfather 2 in every detail. The plots to both the present and past storylines are thin and ultimately pointless. Everything can be solved with some rich daddy money and the song Dancing Queen or ruined with a single picture in a wallet. There are plotholes, there are story threads that are outright forgotten, Amanda Seyfried is actually a worse singer than James Bond. So what?

Mamma Mia! 2 is just a fun movie. If you're against this movie you're against fun. You see this to see Lily James, the good singer in the cast, sing Waterloo in a French restaurant with her latest lover. Maybe half the reason I like this movie is because of Lily James' star power. Doesn't matter, still counts. Mamma Mia! 2 is on the list.

13. Mirai

As long as I'm writing these Best Of lists, at least one anime film will always make it on my Top 15. That's a rule.

Mirai is the latest film from Mamoru Hosoda director of previous honorees, Wolf Children, one of the best movie of the entire decade, and The Boy and the Beast, which was not. Mirai at times is like a greatest hits compilation of Hosoda's entire work. A girl leaps through time, children turn into dogs, there's furry animal princes, and there's an incredibly touching family story that only grows more profound at the film goes on.

Mirai is the story of a toddler, Kun, learning to share his life with his newborn sister, Mirai. That seems like small reason to make a movie, but Mirai treats Kun's emotions with the real importance they have. Maybe they're temper tantrums to adults but they're the entire universe to Kun. The film is broken up into a series of episodes as various figures in the family come to life to help Kun along. A teenaged Mirai comes to visit from the future, the family dog takes human shape, and a late ancestor visits from beyond the grave. It all seems slight and cute until the showstopping climax that takes Mirai to a whole other level of beauty and meaning. And also takes it to Number 13 on my list.

12. A Star is Born

If I really work on it, I could probably poke a million holes in A Star is Born. The second half of this movie is far weaker than the first. It turns into Bradly Cooper's movie instead of Lady Gaga's. For some reason our newly born star goes from a folk singer to a Z100 pop whore in the span of a weekend. Why dos Gaga's character want to sing this? And if she does, why is, why is Bradly Cooper's character being a dickhead about it? (Though, that sellout song is so bad that I considered becoming a self-destructive alcoholic myself.) But why does a movie starring Lady Gaga hate Lady Gaga-ish music so much anyway? Why can't it just let itself bop to the music like Vox Lux?

But forget all of that. I don't care because A Star is Born's power is built on just one scene. That's the scene in the trailers. Where Cooper's Jackson Maine drags Gaga's Ally onto stage to sing their duet of Shallow. They wrote it while they were drunk, they never rehearsed, the whole thing is nonsense, could never happen, but whatever. I love it still. The movie is a perfect build-up of meet-cute romance up until that powerful moment where Ally takes the stage. She's adorably embarrassed, but eventually caught up in the moment, and shows her talent to the entire world. And I'm in that moment, so was everybody who saw this movie. Sing it, Ally.

11. The Death of Stalin

Don't think because people are silly that they are not dangerous. My entire life I've seen horrible things done by complete morons in power. Hell, that's what is happening today, right now, this minute you read this sentence. Buffoons are dangerous. Don't forget it.

The Death of Stalin is 90% a mad-cap comedy as the clueless henchmen of Joseph Stalin try to pick up the reigns after he suddenly falls gravely ill in 1953. It's also historically accurate (if sped up somewhat), the Soviet ministers really were paralyzed by Stalin's illness and really did let the old man die. But as The Death of Stalin goes on, you start to see the difference between actual stupidity and the more malicious kind these men are trafficking in. They knew what they were doing when they let Stalin die, and they know the next steps they need to take. The battle for power starts as just some malapropisms and clever word play. The other 10% of this movie is death, fear, and beaten men begging for their lives.

The Death of Stalin opens with a USSR radio station playing a classical concert on the radio but then are suddenly told by the dictator that he wants a recording of the concert. No recording was taken so the radiomen desperately gather everybody in the crowd up and force them to sit as the concert is played again in full. The whole film is a series of awkward farces and petty little fights. It's ridiculous and very funny, but also there's always that hidden message of danger. You fail to get the General Secretary's concert recorded and you die. The Death of Stalin is black historical humor. But if you're laughing along with the joke, on some level you're also in on the scheme.

10. Suspiria

Horror films in 2018 were so good that even the horror remakes were great. It helps a lot that I'm not a fan of the original 1977 movie. Italian horror has always been just a bit too weird and nonsensical to me. So of course I would love the remake, which is ten times as weird.

One of the most important characters in the new Suspiria is a Dr. Josef Klemperer, who is played by Tilda Swinton under a mountain of old age make-up. Why? I don't know. It was a constantly distracting decision that properly hurt the movie. But also it might be a deeply meaningful metaphor for something. The whole movie is full strange choices like that. I can't say I really get the new Suspiria at all. There's subplots involving Cold War terrorists, the main character's mother, several witches or goddesses, and I don't know if any those go anywhere. I can't really say if the protagonist even is Dakota Johnson's Susie Bannon. The movie is at least as much about Tilda Swinton's character(s) or Mia Goth's Sara. But don't confused Suspiria for a mess. I don't get the story but I get the emotion here.

Suspiria is a dense, bizarre movie. It is half a spiritual nightmare of witches in a Berlin dance studio and half a morose tale of guilt during the Cold War. Imagine a more literary take on David Lynch, only with grotesque death scenes. There's some amazingly fucked-up stuff in this new Suspiria, such as a scene where a dancer's body tears itself apart against her wishes. Or the climax which has blood literally everywhere. We can debate for years what the new Suspiria was trying to say. However give me a movie with madness imagery, lesbian undertones, and some really fucking out-there dancing, I'm always down. There's something here, even if I can't quite grab it.

9. Sorry to Bother You

You ever notice that capitalism kinda sucks sometimes? Sorry to Bother You noticed too. Boots Riley peppered his socialist treatise with all sorts of wonderful details that might mean something, might not. Tessa Thompson has huge earrings that spout strange catch phrases, Lakeith Stanfield's car is so beat up and broken they have to operate the wipers manually, there's RoboCop-esque satire TV shows, and also the ultra-rich are sucking the world dry. That last one might not actually be a joke and probably isn't fictional. Yet Sorry to Bother You is cool and fun enough that it gets its point across. Maybe it needs a big swinging horse cock growing out of a tortured mutant to do it, but it gets there. I don't think Marx thought to use a horse cock as a metaphor for class exploitation, and maybe that's where he went wrong.

Class and race and labor unionization aside, Sorry to Bother You is just one of the coolest movies of the year. Maybe I'm not even cool enough to be reviewing it right now. I did put Mamma Mia! 2 on my Top 15, clearly I'm part of the problem here in America. But also, I've worked terrible jobs like the characters here in this movie. I've sat all day on the phone with people who hated me. And I wasn't even working for a corporation that enslaved people (at least I don't think I was). Sorry to Bother You is a perfect fantasy for us who have sat in the the trenches of a sad office working a sad job. You don't have to be your job, you can still be super cool.

8. Revenge

Suspiria is not the only classic late Seventies horror movie I actually don't like. I Spit on Your Grave is another one. It is a "rape-revenge" flick made entirely for the male gaze. The rape is to titillate you, the revenge is to titillate you, the victim even has sex with one of her rapists while getting revenge. It's an awful, awful movie that does not deserve its place in horror history. I've mostly avoided that rape-revenge exploitation genre since then.

So when critics went around saying that in 2018 somebody had made a "feminist" rape-revenge movie, I was interested. I'm not sure there's anything that explicitly feminist about this movie, other than reminding us of the reality that some men really suck and some women can be badass if needed. Do we still need to be told that a woman can be sexual and that doesn't mean she's allowed to be victimized? Some people do need the lesson still, sadly. The rape is filmed off-camera, and it is awful. The revenge however, is right on screen and is a really great time. Revenge's star Jen (Matilda Lutz) is betrayed by her boyfriend and left for dead in the desert. With the help of peyote and a lot of firepower, she kills her way to even the scales.

Revenge is a gore fest that gets outright slapstick with the blood. Who says that feminists don't like gore? There's some horrible things that happen to a fellow's feet that I'd rather not think about again. At one point a gentleman has to hold his torso together with a roll of kitchen cellophane. It's amazing how much blood you can get out of a movie with only four humans in it.

7. Won't You Be My Neighbor?

A lot of political documentaries have come out in the Trump era and I skipped almost all of them. Michael Moore had a sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11, there's An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, and I'm sure Dinesh D'Souza is still making his particular brand of vile shit. I don't think any of those are as important as Won't You Be My Neighbor? in addressing what the problem is today. This hagiography of Mister Rogers is a glowing reminder of his importance to television and children's entertainment. But it also is a good tale teaching us that we all need to be better.

I saw some people in an audience tearing up over the trailer to this movie. So there was a good chance it was going to make my Top 15. Fred Rogers is one of the best Americans of the 20th century. He came out of a very conservative white Protestant background and used it live a Christ-like life. He was born in 1928 and stood against racism, learned to accept his gay coworkers, and did everything he could to make the world a better and more loving place. There are some people who were born in 1991 who still haven't learned those lessons.

There's so much pressure right now to see the world as a zero sum game. You have to get yours. You have to stick with your tribe. We're being taught to hate. I've seen it with my own eyes over my lifetime. It took hard work from very awful people to get us to where we are today. Won't You Be My Neighbor? is about a man who tried to teach America to love. He worked hard too.

6. Hereditary

I like to think of myself as an old-hand of horror movies. I've seen it all and I'm more likely to laugh than scream at most death scenes. Heck, in this top 60 alone there's a good number of murders and some were very awful. I still got a good chuckle most of the time. But Hereditary features a scene so shocking that I was left completely unable to process it. I sat there for two minutes in my chair, my mouth a wide O. "Just what." I had to turn to my sister in the theater and ask "did that just fucking happen?" It did. Hereditary went there.

Hereditary is the story of a family coming to pieces after the death of a grandmother that nobody seemed to actually like. It has that The VVitch or The Shining quality of being a depressing family drama that just so happens to also be haunted. Annie (Toni Collette) is carrying a ton of emotional baggage. She's cold to her weird-looking children, her husband has all but checked-out years ago, and her daughter might be the target for Satanists. Hereditary sets you up thinking this movie is going one way with a creepy little girl and odd messages. Then... that scene happens, and suddenly every horror trope you thought was anchoring this story goes out the window. Literally out the back passenger-side window, in fact. Satan is pretty scary but Hereditary shows you some random freak accidents can be that much scarier.

Eventually Hereditary gets you to your decapitation Satan good scary fun. But it's a slow disturbing ride there. And you won't be chuckling at the end.

5. The Favourite

Yorgos Lanthimos is a really weird guy and makes really weird movies. Read the Wikipedia page summary for Dogtooth sometime, I dare you. I haven't liked any of his movies up until now because they're so strange and awkward. They're not bad, but you need to accept a level of Lanthimos language and Lanthimos behavior, normal people in real life don't act like this. It's like Wes Anderson, either you're down for the style or you're not. If you're into children talking way too frankly to total strangers about their puberty, his last movie, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is for you. It wasn't for me.

So The Favourite completely shocked me when it was a totally lucid period piece. Ten minutes in I realized this was about Queen Anne and Duchess Marlborough during The War of Spanish Succession. Sure the movie has quirks, there's duck races and anachronistic flashy club dancing. But otherwise if you're ready for a movie about court intrigue and a lesbian love triangle, here you go. The Favourite is about three key personalities battling for control. Rachel Weisz's Duchess Marlborough is the Queen of England in all but name thanks to her influence over her frail ill lover, Queen Anne (Olivia Coleman). But Emma Stone's Abigail comes into the picture as a rival courtier, leading to much in the way of acid-laced language and subtle backstabbing. The film is also really funny. This was a very normal comedy from a director I didn't think could do normal.

It is definitely to The Favourite's benefit that this is a very handsomely--made movie with great performances all around. Beyond the war, the politics, the racing ducks, and the lesbianism, Anne is a lonely and broken character. She just wants love, but she can't tell the difference between real affection and the ruthless opportunists in her midst. That's where the tragedy comes from.

4. Blindspotting 

I can't say enough good things about Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs with Blindspotting. This duo made an incredible movie with their very first effort. These two are great actors, great writers, and damn fiery rappers. Their movie is also dealing with a lot of "some fo real, fo real shit" far more successfully than BlacKKKlansman could. (I do hate that movie enough for me to bring it up again just to shit on it. Sorry, Spike Lee.) For Daveed Diggs' Collin, the police are not some heroic blackspoitation hero. They're a guillotine hanging over his head. Young black men like him just coming out of prison are easy targets. Any day could be the day they find you. They don't need a reason.

A running theme in my Top 15 is whether a movie can tackle brutal realities well. Beale Street is all grace in the face of the same impending doom as Blindspotting. Sorry to Bother You is wacky comedy. Blindspotting is also a very funny movie though much more grounded. It's a movie actively trying to avoid its subject matter. Collin just wants to get back to a normal life. He wants to ignore the bodies around him. The man has his own problems, his best friend Miles (Casal) is not taking his identity crisis well. Being the one white native in a gentrifying Oakland is not easy. We all got our lives to live, we all got our own issues. But more and more the threat around Colin can't be ignored, it has to be faced. Blindspotting creates a confrontation in the finale that could never happen, but fantasy is what films are for. That fantasy is another important one.

3. Mandy

Panos Cosmatos is another director that I didn't think could ever do normal. And he can't. Mandy is totally Daffy Duck bonkers. Do not try to watch this movie back-to-back with Suspiria, your brain would probably explode by the end of it.

Mandy is something that you need to see to really understand. My own explanation here going to be far inferior to the task. Imagine a dark heavy metal album come to life slowly devouring reality until nothing but alien landscapes and cenobites are left. This is a dark brutal movie where a cult breaks into the lives of Red (Nicholas Cage) and his wife, Mandy (Andrea Riseborough). Awful things happen to them. Red is left with nothing but his rage. And yet, it's also movie where my audience was laughing the entire time. The one gag in the entire film is a bizarre commercial for Cheddar Goblin mac'n'cheese which plays during the climax of Red's despair on TV. After that my audience was howling in giggles during every scene of Crazy Nic Cage. And trust me, Mandy is a great showcase for Crazy Nic Cage.

The best I can do with a movie like Mandy is just describe some of things shit that go on here. I can't really supply a greater meaning or purpose to any of it. There's a chainsaw fight, featuring a chainsaw that is about four feet longer than any chainsaw has the right to be. There's a crazy drug dealer with a tiger in a cage who speaks only in riddles. (And I'm about half-sure I hallucinated that whole scene.) There's a gang of drug-addicted bikers who might actually be demons from Hell. And the main bad guy is a failed folk rock star from the Sixties with a tiny penis. Mandy needs to be experienced more than it needs to be described.

2. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

There are so many movies that come out in a year that I believe it is wasteful to see a movie twice. Why waste your limited time on this Earth watching the same thing again when there's some weird Eighties death metal movie out to see? So it really is the highest compliment I can give to a film when I go to see it twice in theaters. I haven't seen a movie twice in theaters since The Dark Knight Rises. And two movies in 2018 got that honor. One was my number 1, and you probably already know what it is if you know me even slightly, and the other was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

I can't believe nobody has thought of this before. With all the art styles and all the concepts we've put into superhero films, how come nobody thought to make a movie look like a superhero comic? Heck, we made a Lego Batman Movie before we made a comic book-ass comic book movie. There's a lot of crosshatching and print errors, like lines will sometimes double slightly. Spider-Verse uses Ben-Day dots and Halftones to get that printed color effect. (Look at the black Spider-Man on the right in the image above for the clearest example of this technique.) Plus the colors are carefully chosen to get the right pop in every scene. I couldn't even name all the motion effects and camera moves Sony Animation was using. It all creates fluid action scenes that are next-level shit. You really feel the full swing of Spider-Man action here. Spider-Verse is a Marvel of an art style coming to the screen.

But beyond the looks, this is basically the last word anybody ever needs to say about Spider-Man. Sony Animation here has created the ultimate Spider-Man movie... starring Ultimate Spider-Man. Miles Morales teams up with his various other odd Spider-Mammals and saves the world. Along the way he learns his place in the world and jams as his own unique hero. This movie doesn't just tell Peter Parker's story again, it defines what Spider-Man can mean to everybody. It is a universalist Spider-Man movie.

So Warner Bros, you have no excuse if you show me Martha Wayne's pearls clattering to the floor of Crime Alley again. We've seen it and you can do something else. Get me black Brooklyn Batman instead.

1. Annihilation

I said in February that Annihilation was Movie of the Year. That did not change. There was not going to be a movie that would threaten Annihilation's place at the top. The only thing that did change is that I read the entire Southern Reach trilogy the film was based on. And after reading those, I think I love Annihilation: The Movie even more. Jeff VanderMeer wrote a clinical almost Borges-esque take on H.P. Lovecraft. Annihilation takes that concept firjter to create a fantastic journey to the heart of its characters and their history. It is about life itself and all it beauty and all its horrors.

What else is there to say about Annihilation that I haven't said already? I feel like I've exhausted all the praise I can give for this movie. It is one of the best SciFi films of the decade, it is an incredibly unnerving horror film, and the ending is... I'm out of words now. There's 8,000 words in this post already, maybe a few of those other ones can help describe Annihilation. It's as weird and surreal as Mandy, as moving and personal as Beale Street, and as scary and disturbing as Hereditary. I just want to gush about this movie incoherently. Remember the bear attack? Remember that dude who melted into the swimming pool? Remember what happens to Tessa Thompson? I can't even say more without just spoiling the whole movie again.

I love Annihilation to the point of my own embarrassment. It has reached a level in my heart beyond intelligent discourse. It could very well end up being Movie of the Decade. So check in next January to find out if that's the case. Still have to go through all of 2019 to see if something will dethrone it.

Speaking of next year, Escape Room is out and that doesn't look too bad. I'll have to go see that tomorrow night. Got to start working on the 2019 Best Of list.