The Class of 2018: My Favorite Movies

Kuroneko

I’ve watched movies every which way during these past twelve months, giving more time to them than I had in any previous year. There were the usual methods — discs bought, rented, and borrowed; digital versions streamed and purchased — as well as, for the first time in my life, weekly trips to the theater. The latter happened thanks to a MoviePass subscription that I officially started last October. As I continually read every prediction of doom concerning the company’s teetering business model, I’m making the most of the opportunity it offers — to see new movies, and to see them in the proper environment (more or less). True, I’ve exposed myself to a lot of forgettable fare this way, but I was also able to see every Best Picture nominee for the first time (and all the nominated documentary shorts, just for fun). As for home viewing, I cancelled both of my streaming subscriptions (FilmStruck and MUBI) at the end of last year. Now I’m mostly limiting myself to the movies I already own, as well as the occasional library visit. Such savings!

The Ascent

Besides my January retrospective (focused this time on the films of 1987), my viewing schedule has been pretty scattershot. I’ve spent some time acquainting myself with more directors: Samuel Fuller, Catherine Breillat, Errol Morris, Edward Yang, Kenneth Lonergan, Volker Schlöndorff, Julie Taymor, Béla Tarr, Michael Haneke, Olivier Assayas and Aki Kaurismäki. I watched the first four Dirty Harry movies and the first four Death Wish movies. I completed my “Both Versions” blog series with its last five entries (on Blade Runner, Amadeus, The New World, The Grandmaster and Goodbye to Language). I continued to chip away at the noteworthy films of the current decade.

There are two outstanding facts about the movies I saw this past year. First is that I — still a relatively inexperienced cinephile with major gaps in expertise — had a series of what I’ll call “breakthrough” moments with some pantheon directors. In other words, there were certain directors with whom I’d had at least a passing familiarity for years, without ever unabashedly loving a film of theirs — until now. These greats include Carl Theodor Dreyer, Yazujirô Ozu, Sergei Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky, Harold Lloyd (an actor, but we can call him an auteur) and Krzysztof Kieślowski. The fact that I hold mealy-mouthed opinions about these men’s consensus masterpieces, only to turn around and give my approval to less significant works, is neither here nor there. I still lack the confidence to take a truly contrarian stand. My default position is that I’m probably wrong.

Sátántangó

The second piece of trivia I want to point out is the simple fact that I saw some very long movies this year, and I mostly loved them. A total of four exceed Gone with the Wind in length: A Brighter Summer Day, Mysteries of Lisbon, Sátántangó and Shoah. That last one is longer than the first two combined. With Shoah, we’re getting up into the rafters as far as what constitutes a feature film. In terms of extreme duration, the only remaining frontiers for me to plant my flag in are Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 and Christian Marclay’s The Clock. Additionally, I saw a few serials and multi-part projects. The distinction between movies and TV may be mostly useless at this point, but I think I still need to draw a line between self-contained works and stories told in installments. (“What about Marvel?” Eh, shut up.) There was the eight-part Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), the ten-part Les Vampires (1915-1916), the ten-part Dekalog (1988-1989) and, my favorite of a glorious bunch, the eighteen-part Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). That last one got a mention from me on another blog as my favorite “movie” of 2017. So you can see me over there, eating my cake, at the same time that I’m over here, having it. My main list of favorite movies is restricted to “feature films” — those movies that are designed to be viewed in one sitting, lasting somewhere between 40 and (at least until I see the Rivette and the Marclay) 566 minutes.

Ida

Here are my favorites among all the movies I saw in the last twelve months: the class of 2018. There are a whopping seventy-eight of them, blowing away last year’s personal record of sixty-four. I’m just loving things willy-nilly now.

Title	Director	Year
Amour	Michael Haneke	2012
Ariel	Aki Kaurismäki	1988
The Ascent	Larisa Shepitko	1977
Baby Driver	Edgar Wright	2017
The Beguiled	Sofia Coppola	2017
The Big Sick	Michael Showalter	2017
Brazil	Terry Gilliam	1985
A Brief History of Time	Errol Morris	1991
A Brighter Summer Day	Edward Yang	1991
Caravaggio	Derek Jarman	1986
Charulata	Satyajit Ray	1964
Chicago	Frank Urson	1927
Cosmopolis	David Cronenberg	2012
Day of Wrath	Carl Theodor Dreyer	1943
The Devil and Daniel Webster	William Dieterle	1941
Drug War	Johnnie To	2012
Dunkirk	Christopher Nolan	2017
Faces Places	Agnès Varda & JR	2017
The Fisher King	Terry Gilliam	1991
The Florida Project	Sean Baker	2017
A Ghost Story	David Lowery	2017
Glengarry Glen Ross	James Foley	1992
Goodbye to Language	Jean-Luc Godard	2014
The Hidden	Jack Sholder	1987
Hope and Glory	John Boorman	1987
I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore	Macon Blair	2017
I Was Born, But…	Yasujirô Ozu	1932
Ida	Paweł Pawlikowski	2013
Irma Vep	Olivier Assayas	1996
Ivan the Terrible, Part II	Sergei Eisenstein	1958
Journey to the West	Tsai Ming-liang	2014
The Kid Brother	Ted Wilde	1927
Kuroneko	Kaneto Shindo	1968
Landline	Gillian Robespierre	2017
The Last Detail	Hal Ashby	1973
Lessons of Darkness	Werner Herzog	1992
Little Dieter Needs to Fly	Werner Herzog	1997
The Look of Silence	Joshua Oppenheimer & Anonymous	2014
Manchester by the Sea	Kenneth Lonergan	2016
Margaret	Kenneth Lonergan	2011
The Match Factory Girl	Aki Kaurismäki	1990
Mother!	Darren Aronofsky	2017
Mudbound	Dee Rees	2017
Mysteries of Lisbon	Raúl Ruiz	2010
The Naked Spur	Anthony Mann	1953
One Day Pina Asked…	Chantal Akerman	1983
Paddington 2	Paul King	2017
Pariah	Dee Rees	2011
Paris Is Burning	Jennie Livingston	1990
Pickup on South Street	Samuel Fuller	1953
Poetry	Lee Chang-dong	2010
A Quiet Passion	Terence Davies	2016
RoboCop	Paul Verhoeven	1987
The Sacrifice	Andrei Tarkovsky	1986
The Salesman	Asghar Farhadi	2016
Sátántangó	Béla Tarr	1994
Shoah	Claude Lanzmann	1985
A Short Film About Killing	Krzysztof Kieślowski	1988
A Short Film About Love	Krzysztof Kieślowski	1988
Sign “☮” the Times	Prince	1987
Song to Song	Terrence Malick	2017
Speedy	Ted Wilde	1928
The Steel Helmet	Samuel Fuller	1951
Stolen Kisses	François Truffaut	1968
A Story of Floating Weeds	Yasujirô Ozu	1934
Stray Dog	Akira Kurosawa	1949
Summer Hours	Olivier Assayas	2008
Taxi	Jafar Panahi	2015
The Thin Blue Line	Errol Morris	1988
Timbuktu	Abderrahmane Sissako	2014
Training Day	Antoine Fuqua	2001
The Turin Horse	Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky	2011
The Wedding Banquet	Ang Lee	1993
Werckmeister Harmonies	Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky	2000
Where the Wild Things Are	Spike Jonze	2009
The White Ribbon	Michael Haneke	2009
The Work	Jairus McLeary & Gethin Aldous	2017
Yi Yi	Edward Yang	2000

And as a reward (?) if you’ve stuck with me this long, here’s a further culling of the above list into a ranked top ten.

10. Manchester by the Sea

9. Amour

8. Pickup on South Street

7. The Florida Project

6. The Work

5. The Look of Silence

4. Baby Driver

3. Werckmeister Harmonies

2. Sátántangó

1. Margaret