Eight critics. Three hundred and forty-two movies analyzed, explored, pondered and scored (not including festival titles). But what were the reviews you were most interested in reading in 2018?
1: Death of a Nation
Seriously, Austin? Dinesh D’Souza’s latest a-HEM revisionist take on American history is your most-read review of the year? Oh, well, at least we can honestly say that we watched it so you didn’t have to! Yes, the movie that Josh Kupecki called “great stuff if you’re drinking the Kool-Aid, but to a sane person, it seems like a fantasy” (read the full 1/2 star review
here).
2: You Were Never Really Here
OK, now this is more like it. Joaquin Phoenix has consistently been one of the decade’s great actors, and his performance in Lynne Ramsay’s grimy, broken revenge drama may be his greatest yet. As we wrote in our four star review, “God’s not home, so it’s Joe and a hammer. In this irredeemable world, maybe that’s enough” (read the full review
here).
3: Mandy
Has Nicolas Cage ever been more Nicolas Cage? Few directors have ever worked out what to really do with his royal wildness, but Panos Cosmatos went into a cosmic acid-fueled race to produce one of the year’s craziest films – only to find star Andrea Riseborough had already beaten them to the finish line (read our full four star review
here).
4: Isle of Dogs
Wes Anderson’s glorious and patiently stop-motion-animated story of a lost boy and even more lost hounds was a fluffy dogpile of joy. As we said in our four star review at its release after its SXSW world premiere, “In short, they’re all good dogs, Wes” (read our full four star review
here).
5: Avengers: Infinity War
We may all know that Thanos’ *snap* will be mostly undone in the upcoming
Avengers: Endgame, but there were a lot of you wanting to know if the Marvel Cinematic Universe could really set up the swan song to the current phase of superhero antics (read our full review
here).
6: Bohemian Rhapsody
This messy biopic by (checks notes with lawyers) director Bryan Singer sacrificed any sense of historical accuracy in favor of a sloppy, paint-by-numbers
Behind the Music narrative: Both the real Freddie Mercury and star Rami Malek deserved better. Another one bites the dust in a film we called “a clumsily compiled greatest hits” (read our less-than-glowing two-and-a-half star review
here).
7: Hereditary
Oh, god, that clacking sound. A devastating mixture of the supernatural and the suburban, a story we said “stands with and above the best contemporary horror domestic dramas, like
Kill List and
A Dark Song, and alongside true classics, like
The Haunting and
The Innocents (read our four star review of this family nightmare
here).”
8: Sorry to Bother You
Boots Riley’s directorial debut was this year’s
Idiocracy; a social commentary stuffed to the gills with ideas, creativity, and insight. As Josh Kupecki wrote, “(it’s) a welcome hand grenade of subversive power” (read our four and a half star review
here).
9: Three Identical Strangers
Truth being stranger than fiction is a platitude at this point, but this charming story of triplets separated at birth talks a wild and sickening left turn into a terrifying world of illicit experimentation, wrecked lives, corruption, suicide, and unforgivable sins against babies. As Steve Davis wrote, “
Three Identical Strangers may not achieve the kind of redemptive catharsis we wish for here, but it achieves something almost as miraculous, making an otherwise unbelievable story seem believably real” (read his four star review
here).
10: Phantom Thread
Is this tale of high fashion in post-war London really to be Daniel Day Lewis’ last onscreen appearance? If so, then Paul Thomas Anderson’s exquisitely cut creation, which Kimberley Jones called “a Gothic romance with intentional shades of du Maurier’s
Rebecca,” is a hell of a way to top a career (read our full four-and-a-half star review
here).
This article appears in December 28 • 2018.
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