2018 was quite the cinematic year. Now that the New Year is upon us, WEMU's David Fair and Michigan and State Theater executive director Russ Collins look back at the best films that graced the big screen in 2018 in this week's "Cinema Chat."
FILMS RUSS SAW AT GREAT INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVALS
Sundance Film Festival –
- The Death of Stalin
- Won’t You Be My Neighbor
- Eighth Grade
- The Guilty
- You Were Never Really Here
- Beast
- Juliet, Naked
Berlin Film Festival –
Leipzig – German Art House Conference (gave keynote speech) –
Seville European Film Festival –
- NON-FICTION- Olivier Assayas – France Very talky, but smart film about an executive trying to understand changes to media business in the digital age. Parisian urban neurosis with sex (its French)!
- DONBASS - Sergei Loznitza – (Ukrainian director) Portrait of the war that shook Donbass, Ukraine, in 2014. Director won AAFF award in 2016. This film also won Best Director Un Certain Regard, Cannes.
- RAY & LIZ - Richard Billingham – United Kingdom Photographer Richard Billingham’s evocation of his childhood home run by his dysfunctional parents Ray and Liz.
- RUBEN BRANDT, COLLECTOR - Milorad Krstic – Hungary The psychoanalyst has terrible nightmares featuring famous paintings. Completely silly smart A fun work of animation with a strong female leads.
- JOY - Sudabeh Mortezai – Austria Joy Anwulika Alphonsus play as Nigerian woman who was human trafficked to Austria as a sex worker. A compelling and well put together film.
Cinetopia
- Woman Walks Ahead – Michael Greyeyes
- Love, Gilda
- Blindspotting
- A Boy. A Girl. A Dream.
- The Big House
- Eighth Grade & The Guilty (from Sundance)
- Hearts Beat Loud
- The Russian 5
FILMS FROM 2017 THAT PEOPLE IN ANN ARBOR SAW IN 2018
- The Post – Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Washington Post, Watergate, journalism
- Call Me By Your Name – Dir. James Ivory, Timothee Chalamet, Armie Hammer,
- I, Tonya – Margot Robbie, Alison Janney, Tonya Harding
- Phantom Thread – Daniel Day Lewis
SPECIAL SCREENINGS
- The Leisure Seeker – based on original story by Michigander Michael Zadoorian
- Hereditary – Local producer and local laser artist (Mike Gould)
- The Yellow Ticket – Silent film with live musical accompaniment
- The Death of Stalin – Direct from Sundance, Directed by Armando Iannucci, with Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev
- White Christmas - Sing Along – Sold out
- The Greatest Showman – Sing Along – Fun! And coming back in January
- The Other Side of the Wind– Lost Orson Welles Film
- Roma– Alfonso Cuaron
A DOZEN FILMS RUSS ENJOYED AND APPRECIATED - 2018
- Foxtrot(Israeli film)
- Black Panther – Directed by Ryan Coogler, w/ Michael B. Jordan
- Won’t You Be My Neighbor? – Fred Rogers
- RBG – Ruth Bader Ginsberg
- BlacKkKlansman – Spike Lee
- Blindspotting – Daveed Diggs, Rafael Casal
- Eighth Grade – Directed by Beau Burnham, staring Elsie Fisher
- The Old Man and the Gun – Robert Redford, Sissy Spacek
- Beautiful Boy – Steve Carell, Timothee Chalemet
- Can You Ever Forgive Me?– Melissa McCarthy
- Sorry to Bother You – Directed by Boots Riley
- The Favourite – 18th century British royalty fighting for top position with Queen Anne
Haven’t seen:
KENNETH TURAN'S BEST OF 2018: "BLACK PANTHER" AND "LEAVE NO TRACE" TOP A BANNER YEAR
In movie business parlance, a four-quadrant film is one that appeals to each of a potential audience’s four demographic groups:
- men
- women,
- those over
- those under 25 years of age.
A film that succeeds with all four quadrants — think “Star Wars,” “Toy Story,” “Lord of the Rings” — is doing very well indeed.
Critics don’t look at films in a four-quadrant way but you could say that there is an equivalent, that a year’s worth of movies can also be divided into four groups:
- big studio blockbusters,
- independent films,
- foreign-language efforts
- documentaries.
The best way to understand why 2018 was an exceptional movie year, and it was, is to realize that each of these four categories boasted better than average films, films not only worthy of a 10-best list but also suitable for an all-time classics registry as well.
In recognition of this, I’m splitting my No. 1 pick between two memorable films that each represents a pinnacle of its particular group:
- Ryan Coogler’s dazzling, massively successful blockbuster “Black Panther” and
- Debra Granik’s emotionally resonant, piercingly insightful independent gem “Leave No Trace.”
As in years past, I am going to order the rest of my list alphabetically, but, in recognition of how strong individual films were in 2018, I will also do a few things differently. That starts with not including more than one film in each choice (as has been my habit in the past) but letting each of these films stand alone. Here goes:
- “Cold War.” Poland’s Pawel Pawlikowski has made a star-crossed love story, haunting, atmospheric, passionate and tempestuous.
- “Free Solo.” Both intimate and expansive, this eye-widening documentary about a climber who disdains ropes has an unexpected human dimension.
- “Incredibles 2.” If all sequels were as good as this 14-years-later follow-up, what a fine movie world this would be.
- “Roma.” Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón’s impeccably realized memory piece allows us to feel we haven’t merely witnessed a life, we’ve been fully immersed in one.
- “Shoplifters.” The latest from Japan’s Hirokazu Koreeda, a master of unforced intimacy, this wise and insightful film is delicate, poignant and unexpectedly powerful.
- “A Star Is Born.” This is the fifth version of a venerable Hollywood tale, but you wouldn’t know it from Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s fearlessly emotional performances.
Sundance documentaries. It’s a truism that the Park City festival is the U.S.’ premiere doc showcase, but in 2018 something like 20 top docs debuted there on the way to theatrical release. Just listing my favorite 15 in alphabetical order takes my breath away:
- “Bisbee ’17”
- "Crime + Punishment”
- “Dark Money”
- “Hal”
- “Hale County This Morning, This Evening”
- “Jane Fonda In Five Acts”
- “King In the Wilderness”
- “The Last Race”
- "On Her Shoulders”
- “The Oslo Diaries”
- “RBG”
- “The Sentence”
- “Shirkers”
- “Three Identical Strangers”
- “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”
- “Vice.” “The Big Short” showed that Adam McKay was a writer-director to reckon with, and this wicked smart Christian Bale-starring satirical biography of Vice President Dick Cheney proves that in spades.
- “At Eternity’s Gate.”Willem Dafoe’s deep dive into playing Vincent van Gogh elevates everything it touches.
- “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.”The Coen brothers’ take on the traditional western is hard to resist.
- “BlacKkKlansman.” Spike Lee reaffirms that he’s as skilled as a filmmaker as he is as a committed polemicist.
- “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” Melissa McCarthy gives a nuanced dramatic performance as a woman you hate to care about.
- “The Front Runner.”Jason Reitman’s fine, unjustly neglected film about politician Gary Hart and his relevance to today.
- “The Mule.” At age 88, Clint Eastwood continues to do things his own way, and we’re all richer for it.
- “A Private War.” Rosamund Pike brilliantly brings to life foreign correspondent Marie Colvin’s magnificent obsession with the truth.
- “They Shall Not Grow Old.” Peter Jackson’s groundbreaking documentary uses the most modern technology to bring ancient World War I footage magnificently alive.
- “22 July.” Paul Greengrass’ ambitious, somber and significant re-creation of a horrific terrorist attack.
- “Wildlife.”An impeccably made, beautifully restrained emotional drama that is also an impressive directing debut for actor Paul Dano.
Lastly, I want to put in a good word for the wonderful films that didn’t all last long at theaters but still linger in my mind. Let’s hear it for, in no particular order: “Puzzle”
- “Early Man”
- “Juliet, Naked”
- “Beirut”
- “The Guilty”
- “The Land of Steady Habits”
- “Big Fish and Begonia”
- “Mirai”
- “The Death of Stalin”
- “The Guardians”
- “American Animals”
- “Hearts Beat Loud”
- “Custody”
- “The Cakemaker”
- “I Am Not A Witch”
They enriched my year and, given the chance, they will yours as well.
OWEN GLEIBERMAN'S 10 BEST FILMS OF 2018
1. “A Star Is Born”
The beauty of Bradley Cooper’s romantic drama is that it finds a way to re-imagine old-school Hollywood classicism as something contemporary yet timeless. The soap-opera beats are all in place, and they pay off with all the grandeur you hope for, but as directed by Cooper with a slow-burn voyeuristic spaciousness, “A Star Is Born” is like something from the ’70s — not just a melodramatic weeper but a journey. Lady Gaga, in her captivating movie-star debut, plays the beguiling songstress Ally — innocent, spirited, calculating, loving — as someone who echoes Gaga herself while remaining her own mystery creation. (Does Ally hold onto herself as an artist or become part of the machine? The answer is both.) And Cooper, in a performance of broken-down shaggy power, creates the most lived-in hellbent movie rock star in a generation. Their acting meshes so intimately that the entire movie feels like a dance.
2. “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”
How could a portrait of Mister Rogers, the homespun children’s-TV maestro of gentle smiles and sock puppets, turn out to be the most glorious documentary of the year? By keying adults to the depth of Fred Rogers’ message: that the day we stop loving our neighbors, we’re lost. The story of how this angelic ’60s mensch in a cardigan came to play a formative role in the lives of several generations of American kids now looks richer and stranger than it ever did. And that’s because Rogers’ deceptively simple message doesn’t just come off as sublime medicine for an age of bombast and rage. It now looks more clearly like what it always was: radical.
3. “The Rider”
Telling the story of a South Dakota rodeo star who suffers a serious head injury and has to give up riding (forever), director Chloé Zhao creates a radiant and moving Western drama that turns into nothing less than an odyssey of the soul. The actors are real-life rodeo figures playing variations on themselves, and though that gives the film its rough-grained authentic surface, the miracle of Zhao’s filmmaking is that we experience them as fully fledged creations of the imagination. What happens when you can’t do the one thing you feel like you were put on earth to do? “The Rider” pushes that simple, aching question to a place of luminous redemption.
4. “Green Book”
Yes, it’s a cozy Hollywood message movie about a black guy and a white guy who have nothing in common but come to have each other’s backs. Yet that doesn’t mean that Peter Farrelly’s 1962 road movie is anything less than a work of incandescent emotion. Mahershala Ali, as the crisply aristocratic jazz pianist Dr. Don Shirley (a man so wittily refined he turns manners into armor), and Viggo Mortensen, as the bigoted Italian meathead who’s hired to be his chauffeur and bodyguard on a tour of the Deep South, find the notes of truth in humanely flawed characters. And though the nature of a movie like this one is that it’s built like a clock, part of the pleasure of “Green Book” is remembering that when a drama this minutely structured is executed this perfectly, it can touch something elemental.
It dramatizes — rivetingly — what happened in the drunken car-crash scandal that torpedoed the moral image of Edward M. Kennedy. Yet the power of John Curran’s docudrama is that it’s not just a movie about a 50-year-old piece of tabloid political history. It’s about how the integrity of postwar liberalism sold itself out in a way that America is still reeling from. As the film lays bare the squirmy horror of what happened at Chappaquiddick and how it was covered up, Jason Clarke, in a pitch-perfect performance, creates a full-on study of Ted Kennedy as a man of political passion who, at his moment of truth, revealed himself to be a weasel. The film dramatizes how he did all he could to hold himself above the law, setting a standard for Democratic Party double standards that, to this day, keeps knocking liberal culture off its high ground.
As a thriller, it’s as tricky and well-crafted as “Bridge of Spies” — the kind of neo-Cold War, neo-Le Carré drama that treats Russia not as a cartoon villain but as a force of serious malignancy on the world stage. But director Francis Lawrence, adapting Jason Matthews’ novel, has also made an intensely personal espionage movie, one that carries a subversive and explosive jolt of sexual-political currency. Jennifer Lawrence, all ripe sensory intelligence, gives a star performance as Dominika, a Moscow ballerina-turned-spy who confronts and undermines a world of toxic masculine power. You wish the Russian accents were more consistent (Lawrence’s is fine; Jeremy Irons’, for some reason, is barely there), yet apart from that quibble the acting is superb, especially Matthias Shoenaerts as an SVR higher-up who’s like Vladimir Putin’s cutthroat son and Lawrence as the victim/avenger who’s a step ahead of everyone, including the audience.
7. “If Beale Street Could Talk”
“Moonlight” was a movie of linked but hermetic chapters: life slices that we had to assemble in our heads. But in his first film since that Oscar-winning drama two years ago, writer-director Barry Jenkins transforms James Baldwin’s 1974 novel into a tale that’s powerfully experiential. It’s about a primal injustice (an innocent man is railroaded, sent to prison for a rape he had nothing to do with), but the movie wants us to revel in every lingering glance, every stirring heartbeat of the place he’s falling from. Jenkins, lighting his filmmaking from within, lets us bask in a romantic dream — in the hopes for a good and solid life — that get squashed overnight by a racist society. Acted with powerful purity by KiKi Layne and Stephan James, “If Beale Street Could Talk” is a movie that doesn’t just talk — it whispers and, finally, sings to us about that place where injustice becomes tragedy, and tragedy becomes resilience. It’s a poetic vision of finding light in the darkness.
8. “First Man”
The hero of Damien Chazelle’s outer-space docudrama is Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling), the taciturn astronaut who became the first man to walk on the moon. In a sense, though, the real protagonist of Chazelle’s revelatory movie is the American space program itself. Chazelle brushes aside virtually every image we have of men gliding in rocket ships on their way to lunar transcendence to create a tumultuous vision of space travel as a shaky, dread-ridden mechanical-industrial purgatory, with death hanging in the air — which makes sense, since it’s all about tearing holes in the fabric of what’s possible. Gosling’s Armstrong isn’t “repressed” so much as he is restrained and reactive, a good soldier who knows he’s in over his head. “First Man” was dismissed as “cold,” but the film’s emotion is there in the fiber of its danger, which becomes, at every turn, the measure of Armstrong’s heroic humanity.
A lot of people gorged on this six-hour Netflix documentary (which is receiving an Oscar-qualifying run, despite its episodic nature) about the Rajneesh commune, a cult devoted to sex and smiling and red-orange clothing, as if it were the ultimate non-fiction page-turner. And maybe it is. The directors, Maclain and Chapman Way, make good on the promise of long-form documentary that worked so brilliantly in “O.J.: Made in America,” building their movie around a singular showdown. In the early ’80s, the followers of the Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh showed up in Antelope, Oregon, and took the town over — a culture clash made in movie heaven. The documentary, based on 300 hours of archival footage, teems with drama (sex, land grabs, food poisoning), yet the unsettling power of “Wild, Wild Country” ultimately comes from the prophetic timeliness of what it’s about: an America of starry-eyed believers who will follow their “enlightened” leader right off a cliff. You can’t make up characters like Bhagwan, a glittery-eyed, drug-addled New Age snake-oil salesman who parades around like the Maharishi crossed with Don Corleone, or his spokeswoman and enforcer, Ma Anand Sheela, a fiercely charismatic backstabbing megalomaniac who will stop at nothing to blaze the true path.
10. “Eighth Grade”
The best movie about the terror and excitement of middle school since “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” Bo Burnham’s drama is about Kayla (Elsie Fisher), a perfectly eager and friendly — and therefore desperate and ostracized — 13-year-old girl trying to make it through the tunnel of eighth grade. Though the film nails an experience that’s universal, it’s also bracingly specific to this era. Burnham has made the first drama to capture, in its bones, the experience of growing up in the digital world, where everything is shared, nothing is sacred, and what we used to call peer pressure is the only dynamic left. Elsie Fisher gives a performance of plucky spirit and exquisite delicacy, attuning you to what her Kayla is thinking but can’t say: that for young people today, simply “being yourself” is the most daunting challenge that exists.
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— David Fair is the WEMU News Director and host of Morning Edition on WEMU. You can contact David at734.487.3363, on twitter @DavidFairWEMU, or email him at dfair@emich.edu
