Best Films of 2018

Figured I'd produce my list of the top 3 films of 2018. Not 10, 6, 24? No ma'am, not this year. Just haven't seen as many 2018 premieres as I'd wished to. My festival-going is presently on cold ice, and I'd rather 'do business' when I'm there and see market screenings than engage in what is, for the most part, the rat-race of avoiding people and listening to snap-misjudgments and lies.

The three best films I saw this year, counting down:


3. 22nd Ji.hlava IDFF (Promotional Spot)
by Jean-Luc Godard
2018
1 minute

2. Le livre d'image: Image et Parole [The Image Book: Image and Word]
by Jean-Luc Godard
2018
1 hour 32 minutes

1. The Other Side of the Wind
by Orson Welles
1976/2018
2 hours 2 minutes

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Other 2018-premiered movies I thought were truly excellent:

Aphex Twin: "T69 collapse"
by WEIRDCORE

The Tree of Life {Extended Version}
by Terrence Malick

Support the Girls
by Andrew Bujalski

Jobe'z World
by Michael M. Bilandic

Incorrectional
by Christopher James Bell

Wobble Palace
by Eugene Kotlyarenko

Better Call Saul: Season 4
by Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan

Easy: Season 2
by Joe Swanberg

Random Acts of Flyness: Season 1
by Terence Nance

Lazzaro Felice
[Happy Lazzaro]
by Alice Rohrwacher

Ayka
by Sergei Dvortsevoy

A Star Is Born
by Bradley Cooper
Here are the films that premiered this year that I really want to see but haven't yet, and I will be catching up with in the couple-months ahead. (If I'm missing any that I happen to think of after posting this, I'll just slip them in here without alert. BTW, there are a lot of movies that don't appear here, that I've seen mentioned as great exclusively by writers I either hate or whose taste/judgment I don't trust, or who haven't made any good argument in the picture's favor, so those titles are hereby excised... if I see them I see them.) Anyway, movies I'm itching for —

Monrovia, Indiana
by Frederick Wiseman

If Beale Street Could Talk
by Barry Jenkins

Four Sisters
by Claude Lanzmann

Film Catastrophe
by Paul Grivas

A Bread Factory
by Patrick Wang

Hotel by the River
by Hong Sang-soo

Grass
by Hong Sang-soo

Black Mother
by Khalik Allah

Gens du lac
by Jean-Marie Straub

Two Plains & a Fancy
by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn

Madeline's Madeline
by Josephine Decker

Ash Is Purest White
by Jia Zhang-ke

Mandy
by Panos Cosmatos

Her Smell
by Alex Ross Perry

La flor
by Mariano Llinás

Dead Souls
by Wang Bing

Bisbee '17
by Robert Greene

Sollers Point
by Matthew Porterfield

3 Faces
by Jafar Panahi

Hale County This Morning, This Evening
by RaMell Ross

Doubles vies / Non-Fiction
by Olivier Assayas

High Life
by Claire Denis

Cold War
by Paweł Pawlikowski

Mission: Impossible: Fallout
by Christopher McQuarrie

Long Day's Journey into Night
by Bi Gan

Clara's Ghost
by Bridey Elliott

Minding the Gap
by Bing Liu

Three Identical Strangers
by Tim Wardle

Lean on Pete
by Andrew Haigh

They'll Love Me When I'm Dead
by Morgan Neville

Border
by Ali Abbasi

The Great Pretender
by Nathan Silver

Tyrel
by Sebastián Silva

Diamantino
by Daniel Schmidt and Gabriel Abrantes

Classical Period
by Ted Fendt

Roi Soleil
by Albert Serra

Your Face
by Tsai Ming-liang

The Mule
by Clint Eastwood

American Animals
by Bart Layton

We Are the Animals
by Jeremiah Zagar

Coincoin et les Z'inhumains
by Bruno Dumont

Blue
by Apichatpong Weerasethakul



The most overrated film of the year was Alfonso Cuarón's Roma which I wrote about here and which no-one has proved in writing it's a masterpiece, and the worst film I saw all year was Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You, which I'm not alone in thinking was a complete mess, especially in the last and inane third, at least among friends who haven't gone on the record to express their thoughts on it.

Lots to look forward to in 2019...

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