What's missing from our list of 2018's best movies?
Image: Photo: Sorry To Bother YouPhoto: Incredibles 2Photo: Game NightPhoto: RevengePhoto: Mission: Impossible—FalloutGraphic: Natalie Peeples Film Features AVQ&A
Yesterday, The A.V. Club revealed its favorites movies of 2018. Today, we’re wondering: What’s missing from our list?
A.A. Dowd
I unabashedly love the Mission: Impossible movies. I love them for their glorious, nail-bitingly suspenseful action. I love them for their largely self-contained plots, a rarity in the age of the expanded universe. I love them as masochistic, narcissistic star vehicles for Tom Cruise, who pours every inch of himself into their death-defying practical stunt work, as though determined to actually sacrifice himself at the altar of our collective bloodlust. So while my rational critic brain laments the absence of Lucrecia Martel’s undervalued Zama (which I already got to write about on my personal ballot), there’s a pretty big part of me that really just wanted to see Mission: Impossible—Fallout, the breathlessly exciting sixth entry in Hollywood’s best blockbuster franchise, make the cut on our aggregate list. Is it too late for me to juke the stats and smuggle in Ethan Hunt’s epic battle against time, age, the odds, long falls, narrow ledges, rush-hour traffic, helicopter blades, and Henry Cavill’s biceps?
Allison Shoemaker
In the vein of Dowd’s critic brain saying Zama while his heart cries Fallout, I feel I ought to use this space to go to bat for Paul Dano’s Wildlife (and the remarkable Carey Mulligan performance therein). But the heart wants what it wants, and this heart wants the Spider-Verse. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman’s film would be a standout based on the animation alone—it’s gorgeously rendered, simultaneously capturing the feeling of reading a comic while adopting a style all its own. Yet the appeal of Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse goes far beyond its rich texture and visual language. Phil Lord’s endlessly clever screenplay swings from discovery to discovery with the assurance of a seasoned Spider-Person, but its heart is all Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), a young man still learning what he wants, who he is, and what he’d like his life to be. Throw in Spider-Ham, and you’ve got the makings for what’s arguably the year’s best superhero movie.
Jesse Hassenger
Maybe I’m still just basking in the afterglow of its delightful warmth, but I think The Old Man & The Gun is getting snubbed in some year-end conversations, including ours. Maybe it’s been perceived as too slight for serious recognition, or too much of a meta riff on Robert Redford’s career of handsome outlaws and charming golden-boy rogues, another movie about movies. But Redford’s possible acting swan song packs a lot of movie into its brisk 95-minute running time: the mechanics of lightly caper-y bank robberies perpetrated by a gang of old-timers including Redford, Tom Waits, and Danny Glover; the comedy of the gang’s oddball bantering and the low-key duel between Redford and puzzled lawman Casey Affleck; a lovely, bittersweet romance between Redford and fellow screen legend Sissy Spacek; and a better rumination on aging and regrets than the last decade-plus of Clint Eastwood movies. Between this and last year’s best-of fave A Ghost Story, writer-director David Lowery has fashioned one of the most affecting and eclectic one-two punches in recent American movies.
Mike D’Angelo
Some of the films on our list—Support the Girls, Buster Scruggs, The Favourite—have comedic elements, but we didn’t choose any flat-out, bust-a-gut comedies. (Even Isle of Dogs mostly leans on Wes Anderson’s signature dry melancholy.) Which is insane, since 2018 served up a superlative example in Game Night—one of precious few recent big-screen comedies that rivals first-rate sitcoms for choice zingers and deft character work while also functioning as, you know, a movie. I raved about the bullet-extraction bit in our roundup of the year’s best scenes, had initially suggested another scene entirely (Rachel McAdams in the bar, doing Pulp Fiction’s Yolanda and teaching criminals yoga and obliviously dancing to Third Eye Blind), and could easily have shortlisted half a dozen more. Game Night embeds all this tomfoolery into a bona fide plot involving a murder-mystery party supplanted by the real thing, featuring so many preposterous twists and turns that the whole thing eventually goes meta (including a magnificent end-credits sequence detailing how it was all engineered). Twenty years from now people will be looking back and wondering how an obvious classic wound up largely ignored.
William Hughes
Like its laconic protagonist, Sorry To Bother You spent a lot of its time in theaters this year trying to pass itself off as something that it’s not, which might help explain why it flew under so many people’s radar. The film’s initial premise—which sees Lakeith Stanfield’s down-on-his-luck call center operator fake a “white voice” (dubbed in the nasally-on-point tones of comedian David Cross) in order to get sales—is the sort of basic sketch comedy idea that’s hard to imagine sustaining a full feature-length film. And it doesn’t; first-time director Boots Riley runs a con on his audience, sticking his film’s most accessible element up front before revealing that he’s made one of the most demented, inventive, and socially conscious science fiction films in recent memory. Sorry To Bother You’s biggest twist is so good, so insane, and so deeply satisfying in its commitment to going there that I’d feel bad spoiling it here, months after the movie left theaters. But suffice it to say that Riley (who also wrote the film, inspired by ideas he’s been kicking around with his rap group The Coup for quite a while now) has way more ideas about capitalism, the co-opting of non-white bodies, and the ways the rich find to convince us to oppress ourselves on their behalf than that basic logline might initially make it seem. It doesn’t hurt that the movie’s funny as hell, too.
Katie Rife
A great thing about best-of lists is they give you an opportunity to look back on the films you watched over the course of the year in a new, broader context. Sometimes, a favorite from March doesn’t hold up compared to the flurry of November and December awards contenders; other times, hindsight only boosts my esteem for a certain film. That’s what happened with Revenge, which I gave a good but not great “B” in my initial review but made it onto my 2018 ballot over films I initially gave higher grades. Coralie Fargeat’s provocative directorial debut looks better with every “women in horror” think piece that comes in its wake, a cooly ultraviolent and combatively stylized rejoinder to the idea that expanding the genre’s fandom beyond a insular group of white guys in black T-shirts would somehow dull its edge. Like another sharp, feminist debut that seemed to come out of nowhere this year—Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei’s Cam—Revenge reclaims the hypersexuality so frequently imposed on women in genre movies on its own powerful yet unapologetically feminine terms. Unlike that film, it’s got not just self-actualization on its mind, but also, well, revenge, in the form of a blood-soaked climax that savors turning predator into prey, seer into seen, and powerful into powerless. If you had asked me in the beginning of the year if the most cathartic post-#MeToo movie would be a rape-revenge film, I would have been skeptical. Hindsight disagrees.
Charles Bramesco
There are many reasons for a person to not like The House That Jack Built: the stomach-turning, imaginative gore, the apparent misogyny, not wanting to encourage Lars von Trier. In all honesty, I’m not even sure I like it. But it’s been seven months and I cannot get this film out of my bones and the time has come for game to recognize game. 2018 will go down as the year that America officially lost its patience for art about morally deficient men consumed by self-loathing, but that’s only because it’s been done so poorly by so many people. Von Trier’s pain feels real, as does the addictive need to assuage that pain by any means necessary (in Nymphomaniac, through sex; here, through violence). The confession from Matt Dillon’s Jack that he only feels at ease when killing, and that even then his inner peace is short-lived, couches in metaphor the depressive tendency to do self-destructive things as long as they bring temporary pleasure. Yes, that much makes both Jack and von Trier himself decidedly bad people—and that the film refuses to give either of them a pass is its principal strength—but who among us, etc.
Clayton Purdom
When the dust settles on popular culture’s grand and seemingly never-ending superhero phase, there will be three titans of the form to study: Christopher Nolan’s first two Batman movies, Sam Raimi’s first two Spider-Man movies, and Brad Bird’s first two Incredibles movies. Maybe Bird will do a third, and maybe it’ll buck tradition—who knows—but no other filmmaker has better tapped into the sheer propulsive thrill enabled by the concept. Every action scene in Incredibles 2 pops with chaotic superpower, with walls of ice soaring through portals and sight gags crashing into white-knuckled force-fields. Youngest Incredible Jack-Jack transforms in this movie into… well, a lot of stuff, but also a sort of constant action scene, popping into triplets and quadruplets and raging pitbulls and inter-dimensional ghosts at the drop of a hat. And no one has pushed Pixar’s famously dynamic and efficient storyboarding harder than Elastigirl and Dash, stretching and screaming into action with just a few explosively full frames. The stakes can feel low in these movies—both appear to take place across the span of one extremely busy week—but that only lets Bird throw even more weight and drama where it counts.
Alex McLevy
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, the writer-director-producers of Resolution and Spring, have built a career on using supernatural and horror tropes to explore the ways the world can ever-so-slowly shift us off our planned courses and leave us wholly shocked by where our lives have ended up. But with their latest film, The Endless, the multi-hyphenated duo also turned their attention to the thorny question of family, and the ways we can let outside forces poison our connections to others. By having a pair of emotionally damaged brothers return to the UFO cult from which they escaped as kids, the movie asks difficult questions about the past and how we choose to remember it; this particular past just so happens to supposedly involve doomsday fanatics, strange happenings in a commune, and all manner of oddball characters that get under the skin. Benson and Moorhead have turned a Twilight Zone-ish premise into an affecting study of relationships and memory. Being adroit masters of throwing crazy shit into the mix, they’ve also made it fun as hell.
Noel Murray
I can make about a half-dozen arguments in favor of Paddington 2: from the stellar cast of British acting greats (including Hugh Grant doing some of the best work of his formidable career as a vainglorious villain) to the way it so cheerily promotes the virtues of graciousness and cooperation. But honestly, it deserves inclusion on any list of the year’s best movies strictly for its filmmaking. Director Paul King’s long takes and bustling frames rival Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma for their elaborate Tati-esque choreography and sense of surprise. Is it pretentious to compare a kid-friendly franchise to one of the geniuses of French cinema? Maybe! But… even more than the sweetly silly content, the visual splendor in Paddington 2 (and its predecessor, for that matter) is the key to its high rewatch value.
Sam Barsanti
It’s the only movie I’ve ever reviewed for the site, so maybe I’m biased, but Teen Titans Go! To The Movies is too much fun to be forgotten. It’s a loving tribute to the superhero genre, based around the team from Cartoon Network’s Teen Titans Go! trying to justify the existence of a Teen Titans movie. Also, they’re trying to fight a villain that wants to take over the world by controlling everyone’s minds with—get this—a superhero movie. That’s all a great setup for some self-aware gags about the movie industry and its obsession with superheroes, culminating in one brilliant sequence where the Titans try to prove that they deserve a movie by undoing and then redoing a bunch of classic superhero origins (which naturally means blowing up Krypton and leading Thomas and Martha Wayne to their doom in Crime Alley). It probably won’t restore anyone’s faith in superheroes if they’re already sick of capes, but it’s proof that you can still do new things with comic book movies.
Caroline Siede
I liked A Quiet Place well enough when I saw it back in April, but it’s a film that’s stuck with me far more than I expected it to—not because of its scares, but because of its heart. Writer-director-star John Krasinski crafted an unexpectedly warm family survival drama set in a brutal post-apocalyptic world, which is the same combo that drew me to the first couple of seasons of The Walking Dead. (I know that’s not exactly how most people watch that show, but what can I say?) A Quiet Place is a film about parents bravely, stoically, and, most importantly, silently shouldering burdens so that their kids don’t have to. And it’s equally a film about a prickly teenage girl learning to empathize with her parents’ flaws while owning her own strengths. The monsters are cool, as is the masterful sense of tension Krasinski creates throughout the film. But the moments I find myself thinking about the most are the ones about the lengths families will go to in order to protect each other. Throw in a great beard for Krasinski, a breakout turn from Millicent Simmonds, and Emily Blunt doing career-best work, and A Quiet Place is a 2018 film I’m happy to loudly champion.
Vikram Murthi
Ethan Hawke has been racking up well-deserved acting nominations for his stellar work in Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, but it’s a shame that it has largely overshadowed his fourth directorial effort, Blaze, an unconventional biopic of country musician and beautiful loser Blaze Foley. Hawke neatly circumvents the Walk Hard template not just by choosing a relatively obscure musician as a subject, but also by imposing a fractured structure onto Foley’s life. Blaze moves between snapshots of Foley’s career across three different timelines, capturing the beauty of sharing art with the world while wrestling with the pain of internal demons. Blaze purposefully takes the scenic route to its inevitable tragic conclusion because Hawke’s interests lie with mundane creative brainstorming or romantic bliss, i.e. the moments in between the ones that everyone recounts. On top of all that, the film also sports one of the great ensemble casts of the year (Alia Shawkat, Josh Hamilton, Charlie Sexton, Wyatt Russell), which is led by newcomer Ben Dickey, who’d be in awards contention alongside his director, if there was any justice in this world.
Lawrence Garcia
Though it eventually spirals into an irritating round of “Never Have I Ever,” the Blumhouse horror production Unfriended is a far more formally adventurous experiment than it had any right to be. Even more impressive is its standalone sequel, Unfriended: Dark Web, which similarly keeps its “action” confined entirely to a desktop. Though the film starts out as a regular Skype-mediated game night between a group of twentysomethings, it soon trawls the depths of the “dark web,” bringing into play an underground market of snuff films and a shadowy, seemingly all-powerful group of hackers. The plot is undeniably preposterous and sadistic, but it also manages to capture the distinct, free-floating sense of horror regarding what is incontrovertibly out there in the digital void. I’ve only seen one of Dark Web’s two Clue-style alternate endings, but a film that manages to turn a round of Cards Against Humanity into a genuinely (and rightly) horrible experience is well worth recommending.
178 Comments
More of the films I enjoyed ended up on this list, I think (granted not all of your Best films have made it here yet). Revenge, Climax and You Were Never Really Here make up a brutal triple bill near the top of my list (albeit with little on screen violence in thw latter), and the three cartoons here are better than any of their big screen equivalents.
I think Searching starring John Cho is a much better Unfriended than both Unfriended movies.It’s insane for Andy Garcia to think that an Unfriended film deserves to be in any best film list despite movies like Searching existing. Sure, they’re the best films with the concept before Searching, but that’s about it.And with the regards of “the characters in Unfriended are meant to be Unlikable!” defence: Well, rewatching Gone Girl a few times recently have given me big standards for unlikeable protagonists, and the characters in Unfriended are no Amy & Nick Dunne in terms of writing. Wake me up when Gillian Flynn writes an Unfriended sequel.
Polite disagree. I watched Searching and Dark Web one night after the other and it is the latter that stayed with me. I thought it was a nasty little movie in a good sense whilst Searching was the better performed but less interesting. I’m not one of those “Wicked smaht i got it right” people but I saw where it was going pretty early on and it didnt make any shift from that road. And whilst that was well executed, it was the final 5-10 minutes that kind of lost it for me. I didnt hate it or anything, I liked it still but of the two, Dark Web is the one that accomplished what it was going for more than Searching.
I love thrillers, and that’s why I was so excited to see Searching. But damn was that a big ol’ disappointment. The sappy mom passing away element and the dad drifting a part from the daughter was cringey. And the twist didn’t feel earned at all. It made sense, but it was so damn lame. And his daughter staying alive was the lamest part. I’m going to check out Unfriended Dark Web now that it made the list. Loved the first one, but I’m not too sure about the sequel.
It made sense only because the villain over explains everything at the end. Oof.
Yeah. That shit was lame as hell. Show not tell. It seriously was such a coincidence. And while coincidences are important for thrillers, these ones felt so damn arbitrary and lame.
Searching is TERRIBLE. It’s overly sentimental bullshit with a cheesy score (why is there even a score?) and a very poorly executed ending. Both Unfriended movies run circles around Searching.
Don’t know what this says about me, but this list is much better than the AVC’s actual Top 25.
Not just you.
Top 25 are better movies from a critic’s perspective, but these ones are more entertaining.
It does kind of smack a little of “right, we’ve got the ones that make us feel clever out of the way; now for ones people might actually have seen.”
What a dumbass take this is. Do you think that “Best Of” lists exist to validate the taste of mass audiences?
No, I’m just hoping to provoke a pointless, overly heated and unnecessarily hostile argument about lists of movies on the internet. So thank you, friend.
Depends on what you’re trying to do with the list. 25 “Best” or 25 most entertaining? The two will overlap somewhat but not entirely.
No, they exist to validate the ego of the critics.
I don’t know that I’d impart a snotty meaning to it, but I do separate films into “the best” and “my favorite” and the lists don’t always overlap much. It’s just like saying would you rather rewatch Citizen Kane or Touch of Evil? CK one TE fun
I often feel like they exist to validate the tastes of critics…”i’m one of you, see, i liked that boring movie”. Not saying that is the case for all choices, but as I say in another comment, I feel like they often talk themselves out of really well crafted genre movies because they feel like it’s a bad look as a critic to unabashedly say “this action movie is one of the years best”.
Gracious, the filthy commoners think they understand cinema! How uncouth! Don’t they know that mark of a great film is that no more than five people ever see it?
Of course not, but it does make one wonder if you make a movie, but no one can be arsed to see it, does it deserve awards?Er, in a forest, or something.
it does a bit. And I can’t be certain, but I think a lot of their top 25 where movies that seemed to come and go without much fuss – didn’t Buster Scruggs and Support the Girls get lukewarm reviews on this site?(and don’t feed the troll)
Likewise
Yeah, I feel the need to feel like a serious “critic” outweighed the desire to talk about movies they actually liked. Genre movies get the short end of the stick in these lists, so they end up talking themselves out of picking something like MI6 or the Spider-Man.
Or maybe they just picked the fucking movies they liked the best. The whole idea of people only picking art films to seem cool or cultured or whatever is just as stupid as art film fans saying people are too dumb to like art films.
I mean…if you read what they say here they are basically dancing around just that…so calm down asshole.
I actually like that most top 25 lists don’t have a lot of genre films because I’ve already seen all of those and know how I feel about them. This list is much closer to mine (Sorry To Bother You was robbed) but reading the top 25 list I found at least 3 movies I really want to watch now, which in my opinion validates the list
Jesse Plemons elevated Game Night, but I *had* to watch it for Sharon Horgan and Lamorne Morris.
Agreed and seeing Coach as kind of a prick was great. Game night was one of those movies where I originally watched it online and enjoyed it so much that I ended up purchasing the Blu-ray.
I had skipped it in the theaters but eventually caught it on streaming and holy hell, was I surprised at how good it was in every way. And yeah, seeing Winston Bishop up to some more classic messaround was great.
Am I the only one who thought Sorry to Bother You’s twist came out of nowhere and completely derailed what had previously been a wonderful film? It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but my wife and I’s disappointment with the 3rd act was palapable when we left the theater.
I could see it not landing with someone (I’m glad, for example, that I didn’t watch it with my wife, who probably would have loudly rolled her eyes). I thought it was great though. It was shocking and funny and bizarre. Probably my favorite film of the year.
I love the idea of someone loudly rolling her eyes but I don’t think I want to know what it sounds like. Squishy? Or a long pffffff?
It didn’t entirely land with me, but the rest of the film is so good, and I appreciated the audaciousness of the twist so much, that I was willing to play along.
Nope, very much the same thing with me.
It was already a wacky movie, so weird stuff coming out of nowhere works better than it would otherwise.
I think it was necessary — where else could the movie have gone, other than what is actually a fairly logical conclusion of a meditation on how capitalism exploits bodies? I had the opposite reaction of yours, in that it felt more like a standard sci-fi trope of literally enacting a metaphor, in this case the tendency to treat menial workers as subhuman animals.
And just when I was starting to feel like Veronica Cartwright after meeting Donald Sutherland in the park.Seriously, it’s like something out of a “South Park” episode and not one of the good ones!
If anything, I thought it was a little too on-the-nose. It felt like something, where if you read it in a novel or short story, it would be a little more powerful for letting your mind fill in the gaps, but the actual execution and effects used in the movie were grotesque and off-putting.
Of course not. It was a really bold choice and it’s inevitable that some people aren’t going to be on board with the decision. However the whole movie already existed in a world satirical enough to border on magical realism, so I would argue the twist was earned. The… transformation… is an extreme stand in for the various compromises that companies expect their workers to accept. If it was extreme, it is only because a more grounded compromise would not seem shocking, even though we should be appealed in the directors eyes. That’s the nature of metaphors, though there will always be people who don’t feel the comparison is apt, and I can’t tell you that you’re wrong to feel that way. But-we’re far enough into this comment for me to give away spoilers, so I’m going to discuss the actual twist now – the movie is not *about* horse transmogrification. It’s about the value of unions. The horse transmogrification is simply an extreme example of the point they were trying to make. It’s science fiction.
(Spoilers) I saw an interview with Riley where he said the initial turn for Cassius’a character came with the n-word scene, but decided the movie was already too surreal for that to be the turning point.
Yeah, I get all that. But it doesn’t make it less dumb.
I wouldn’t say it came out of nowhere. It was in line with the themes of the first hour. But it completely broke the tone, which had been walking a tightrope pretty flawlessly up to that point. It felt less like a twist and more like getting grabbed by the shoulders, shook, and having “DO YOU GET IT?” screamed in your face.
Yeah dude you are the only one. That twist ruled.
Didn’t really work for me either. Partially because it just felt like…too much somehow for me, but also because the CGI was shitty and it took me out of the movie.
Yeah, I’m totally with you.
I appreciated that it gave the protagonist something to believe in. Up to that point, he was just going along with a baldly unfair system in order to succeed at the cost of everything that really mattered. Wanting to not turn people into horses with attentively-designed genitalia and not being turned into a horse oneself was a lot more motivation than he had before.
It’s one of my favorite twists ever. It’s up there with the ending to Sleepaway Camp, the first flash forward in Lost and more recently the Bent Neck Lady reveal from Hill House
The twist makes perfect sense if you pay attention to the news footage in the background of certain scenes. They detail bits of the corporation’s escalating malevolence in ways the main characters don’t notice or talk about.
I’m going to stump for BLINDSPOTTING. It’s a pretty great film, with a final, climactic scene that is utterly devastating in its power and surprise and has to be one of the best scenes of the year for me.I’ve got like 10 more films to try and get in before the end of the year to make my list, but overall I’m pretty cool with their list. I’ll definitely have Spiderverse, Widows, Mandy, Annihilation, and Gemini on my personal list.
Blindspotting had the disadvantage of coming out around the same time as that other Oakland set comedy/social commentary Sorry to Bother You. I liked both, but the absurdism of the latter worked much better for me.
You’re probably not wrong about them cannibalizing each other, but I feel like they’re different enough they shouldn’t be. I vastly prefered BLINDSPOTTING myself. I wanted to love S2BY, but it just never congealed into anything but a smattering of neat ideas executed to varying degrees. Also I’m sick of Arnie Hammer.
Wow I started the comment for thoughts on S2BY but unstarred when I got to the last sentence. I love Armie Hammer
I vacillate wildly on him, but he was kinda exhausting in S2BY for me. I, however, love LaKeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson so it killed me to not love the movie.
I really only liked him in Sorry To Bother You he should play evil pricks more often.
It might have something to do with my preferences for comedy/drama mixes. I watch more dramas as a whole, but if they’re going to be significantly mixed I prefer it to lean more heavily into comedy. So I also preferred Barry to the comparable assassin series Killing Eve. But then on the other hand, I really like the Coen brothers’ Fargo while having a much lower opinion of the tv adaptation than most here.
I enjoy comedy/drama mixes as well, but it seems I’m opposite you at least in respect to the two examples you gave. Barry didn’t do much for me, but I thought Killing Eve was a masterwork. I like the movie Fargo a lot (though it’s been years), but I also think the TV show is pretty genius. Which is a long way of saying maybe you’re right in your diagnosis.
We should keep in touch so each knows to avoid/watch what the other likes/dislikes.
I’m always down to talk movies/TV!
Annihilation, obviously.
I liked that movie the more I kept thinking about it. It really does a great job at being beautiful and terrifying towards the end. I’m hoping for a sequel or something
Bizarre it didn’t make the shortlist for best visual effects, after Garland’s last feature actually won.
I’m hoping for a sequel or something I haven’t seen Annihilation yet, but I read the book. Which is the first part of a trilogy, so.. maybe there’ll be a sequel? (I don’t know how well it did at the box office or if there are any plans. But the story’s there.
Well the studio thought it would be such a financial failure that they sold the rights to Netflix and it got a very short release in American theaters. SooooAlso the movie is wildly wildly different from the first book.
I saw the movie without reading the books, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards so I picked up and read Annihilation in one sitting the next day. There are some parallels with ideas about change and evolution, but I can’t think of a single scene in the movie that’s actually from the book. There are, in fact, lots and lots of things that contradict things expressly stated in the books.Paramount bought the movie rights to the trilogy before all three books were released. Apparently Garland read Annihilation once, then waited a couple weeks, and then wrote his screenplay based on his memories of what he’d read. He also didn’t read any of the follow up books, which was his excuse for not casting an Asian women for the role of Lena. Based on where the movie went and how it ended, they could make a sequel, but I really doubt it would have anything to do with the plots of Authority or Acceptance.
Came here to say this; glad someone else did. Alex Garland is too good for the modern movie landscape…which is why, I suppose, he’s making the jump to TV.
Really? What’s he doing in TV?
He’s developing a show called Devs for FX:https://www.indiewire.com/2018/02/alex-garlands-fx-television-series-devs-1201930749/
Uhhh I wanted to love this movie as I loved Ex Machina. But I was ultimately left disappointed. It had exactly one amazing scene – the bear. And even that was completely ruined by CHARACTERS EXPLAINING IN DETAIL WHAT THAT WAS ABOUT
IN THE VERY NEXT SCENE. Jesus Christ, I was so pissed about that. You
had something great, and completely ruined it by treating the viewers like
morons.
Don’t forget the simulacrum in the lighthouse. Lord knows that wasn’t overexplained.
Well, the characters were supposed to be scientists. If you’ve hung around scientists (which maybe you have, dunno) but that’s kind of what they do; I’d argue that most are even more pedantic. What I didn’t buy was Natalie Portman also being a marine. But yeah. I actually thought Ex Machina was less mysterious, and more insulting to the audience (at least at the end) than Annihilation.
Yeah, but they didn’t need to tell us that. I mean come on, here is the dialogue from that scene:
“Sheppard’s voice in the mouth of that creature last night. I think as she was dying, part of her mind became… part of the creature that was killing her. Imagine dying frightened and in pain, and having that as the only part of you which survives. I wouldn’t like that at all.”Seriously, that was something that the audience can easily figure out on their own. It’s needless exposition that damages the story. Similar thing happens earlier in the movie – one of the scientists describes her colleagues literally lists all of their flaws. It’s as if Garland suddenly forgot how to write a script.
I agree, that’s not good. I don’t remember that sticking out as badly in the film as when I read it. I still think the expository nature of the dialogue fits the characters; although I’m not going to bat with how well those characters are defined (they’re not, and probably by design). I thought the whole film was goofy and surreal, and the characters were little more than ciphers, which I guess fits the themes. Honestly, I’ve never thought Garland was a good writer (which is funny that he started out as one only).But sure, I can see your point.
Yeah but I would think, after experiencing something that insane, you’d definitely want to talk about it and attempt to rationalize what happened. And, who’s to say that the interpretation in that line of dialogue is actually what happened to Sheppard? As a viewer, I guess we can take that as the be-all, end-all explanation as to what the Shimmer was doing to the characters, but who knows. I still think the movie’s mystery held up throughout, and there were a lot of things left unanswered.
Yeah, given what their dealing with in terms of constant evolution within the Shimmer, there could be other explanations (e.g. the thing can just mimic what it’s heard, Predator-style).Freakier to me was the girl who just gave up and allowed herself to become a topiary.
Another thing that stuck out to me was the house they were in during the scream-bear scene. It was almost identical to Lena’s home at the very beginning. And, when Kane returned from being away he stopped at the base of the stairway in Lena’s home and looked at a picture on the wall briefly before going up to see her. Later, in the Shimmer, Lena does the exact same thing when they enter that house. I dunno, little stuff like that I really, really enjoyed about the film. Mostly, I am thrilled that a big budget movie like this was made in 2018.
That’s true, even if I don’t like the movie as a whole, the little details were amazing. That is good filmmaking right there, it just needed a more polished script.
Here’s what I thought while watching the bear scene:
But seriously though, you guys make a few good points. I still think that the overexplaining ruined the scene for me, but the movie itself was not exactly bad – I just hoped it would be… well, better. There was stuff in it that I liked, but as a whole it kind of fell flat for me. Well, to each his own.
Even if the characters logically would break the situation down like that in real life (which I don’t really think is true, but we’ll say it is for the sake of argument), that doesn’t mean it works in a film. It’s one of the oldest maxims in writing that real life very often doesn’t seem credible when translated to a fictional story.
Right, I understand that. I was more or less saying I didn’t find the exposition to be that obnoxious. Of course, I won’t speak for everyone.
Fair enough. Sorry if my comment came across as condescending.
It didn’t! I appreciated your input!
The dialogue was really on the nose throughout and a lot of the tone the actors just weren’t selling it to me. Every idea in the movie was pretty good but the way people spoke was just too jarring.
Annihilation is in no way a movie that overexplains itself
The last ten minutes were phenomenal and explained literally nothing?
I didn’t really care for Ex Machina, because I thought it was a bit obvious. The text wasn’t all that surprising, and the subtext wasn’t all that deep. Asking “What makes us human?” in the context of a story about artificial intelligence is no longer a novel or profound concept.But Annihilation was a completely different animal. While everyone is arguing over whether the movie is overexplained or “dumbed down” by explaining or recapping things that are/were on screen, no one has mentioned the movie’s subtext and metaphors which were not overexplained or dumbed down.
My reading of the film is that the Shimmer is a metaphor for depression. People go through it and come out looking the same on the outside but are fundamentally changed on the inside.Oscar Isaac’s character suffers from PTSD. Natalie Portman’s character is grieving the “loss” of her spouse and the guilt of an extramarital sexual relationship. Gina Rodriguez’s character suffers from addiction, Tuva Novotny’s character has lost a child to leukemia, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character is dying from cancer, and Tessa Thompson’s character is a cutter and/or has attempted suicide multiple times. Each character expresses different aspects of depression, from situational to chemical imbalance.Eventually, every member of Natalie Portman’s team except her metaphorically gives in to depression and either dies or disappears. In the scene after the bear attack, Tessa Thompson’s character says she doesn’t want to fight or face “it,” and her arms are noticeably bare (possibly for the first time…?) uncovering her scars without inhibition. As she’s sitting there discussing the events of the previous night, the scars on her arms start to visibly change, and as she walks away flowers replace the scars until she disappears and, presumably, becomes one of the “flower people.”Tessa Thompson’s character is passively suicidal, wanting to die without taking any action to either kill herself or be killed by someone else. Her desire to fade into nothingness and never have to worry about her feelings again is granted as she fades into nature and completes the cycle of life and death without suffering.Natalie Portman’s character eventually reaches the lighthouse where she literally wrestles with a mirrored version of herself, externalizing the inner conflict of depression. She finds that her husband had killed himself in the lighthouse and we’re left to deduce that the form of her husband back at the hospital is somehow both her husband and not her husband.As the film ends, they are both “in isolation,” or, in metaphorical terms, cut off from feeling anything (a common feeling after a nervous breakdown). She asks him, “Are you Kane?” He replies, “I don’t think so. Are you Lena?” She doesn’t answer. They embrace. Their eyes glow with the iridescence of the Shimmer. The film ends. Neither of them will ever be the same, but they will presumably continue living as the new versions of themselves who were forever altered by their experiences with depression.
The problem was that all of the great ideas that you mentioned were tied together but a very weak, poorly written script. For example, all of the painful secrets of each character were explained in one big exposition dump, instead of some subtle hints – e.g. it would be enough to just show us the damn scars! This and the aftermath of the bear attack drives me nuts, because there is some great subtext in this movie otherwise.
The bear is called an Alzabo and is ripped off from Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun.
Yeah, it felt really rote. There were some cool imagery and moments (as you said, the Bear) but it just felt listless and there. Once she saw the last video with the husband I was immediately able to predict everything that was gonna happen and what the final scene would be (and yeah things don’t have to be surprising to be good, it’s more of a “oh right, these are the numbers it’s going to go by” kind of thing) It wasn’t bad but I’m a bit surprised at how many people loved it (and as with you, loved Ex Machina)
I appreciated Annihilation for its ambition and gorgeous imagery, but it was too much of a mess otherwise for me to really enjoy it.
Was the imagery really that gorgeous though? That was my biggest complaint. The bear was freaky, but otherwise, there wasn’t much to The Shimmer. Some merged flowers, brightly colored lichen, and a few trees that look like people is not enough for a fully realized, interesting world.
I thought Annihilation’s visuals were amazing, yes.
YES
Nope Nope Nope Nope Nope
I liked Annihilation I just wanted more. Felt too abbreviated to me, barely got to know any of the characters.
I came here to say precisely this
That’s a pretty good movie, but it’s probably not among the best that came out this year.It suffers from that contemporary middle-brow sci-fi thing where just sort of trailing off into a vaguely foreboding ending is supposed to serve its plot, somehow, which has become a sort of everything-looks-like-a-nail solution for that niche of fiction. And to be fair to “Annihilation”, a lot of the audience it ever had a chance of reaching will see that happen again, look around at each other to see if it’s time to nod and call the movie “Lovecraftian”, and then they’ll all start nodding and calling it that.
Annihilation took me a while to really appreciate. It was one of those movies that I liked as I watched it, but the more I thought about it, the more I *really* liked it.
I really enjoyed the book. The first time I saw the movie, I could acknowledge that it was good but l wasn’t really blown away. That changed after the second viewing.
No. The ending is terrible. If you have seen plenty of Sci-fi movies, you know it’s terrible.
Listen, friend. If you’re under the age of 40, I can say, unequivocally, that I have seen many more Sci-fi movies than you have. If you’re beyond the hill, then I dunno, but you’re still wrong!
Game Night was brilliant. So much fun. I still giggle at the memory of Rachel McAdams’ reaction to the mook getting sucked into the jet engine.
I thought I was going to die from the blood/dog scene.
So many great lines, including that one, but I think my favorite might be right around then, inside that plane, when Jason Bateman yelps “RIGHT IN MY BULLET HOLE!”
May have to check this one out…Jason Bateman is almost always worth it.
They spoiled the joke in the trailer, but her horrified/flattered reaction to the mook saying she had a great ass was some pretty great comedic work.One of the movie’s strengths is that it lets her be as funny and ridiculous as Jason Bateman instead of shoving her into the “serious wife” role you see in a lot of comedies.
Really enjoyed Teen Titans which I think is the best comic movie this year (Sorry, Spider-Verse. You were good, but you didn’t have an amazing Beastie Boys-esque foe conquering number) and i would say it succeeds at satirizing (for lack of a better term) the superhero movie in a way that for me, Deadpool and its sequel completely failed to.
Annihilation. Still thinking about it months after seeing it.
Annihilation is all over the comments. I loved Ex Machina so much, and I was excited for the Garland’s next project. But for me, Arrival, my favorite movie ever, just took too much wind out of Annihilation’s sail. It just looked similar enough for me to not be interested. Seeing all the acclaim in the comments though is making me want to check it out now.
Are guys gonna cover Voltron’s final season eventually?
And I’ll form the head?
More like the heart. And then it will be broken into a million pieces.
I don’t think the AV Club has covered any Voltron, so that seems unlikely?Also, not a film.
Holy crap, you are right. I somehow got them confused with io9.Well, I feel stupid now.
Nah, makes sense. With all the crossposting these sites are confusing as hell nowadays. They’re trying really hard to make the Kinja Cinematic Universe a thing.
So that would make Kinja the earth-shattering event that wiped out half of the commenters in an instant?
I see now what you did. You guys have a list that you can share with other film editors when you swap jobs with people at NYtimes or Chicago or Vulture. And then you have this, the real list. Your other list is thirsty for recognition and respect, similar to the people who prize access over good journalism, and clearly rubbed people the wrong way. People will respect you more if you are just honest. If there’s one thing we learned from Jonathon Gold, is that you have to forge your own path, and its not necessarily going to go through the “it” list you copy from more prestigious publications.
Who is Jonathon Gold?
a writer from LA that died this year. His articles are worth a read and not what you’d expect.
I know nothing about this person, so I don’t really have any expectations to upend.
Look at this dude thinking he just figured it all out.
Look at this dude pretending he already had figured it all out.
Nice strawman. Want to try again?
Yes, that’s right – no one could possibly have different tastes than you.
It’s not about taste, the critics admit here that they liked these movies, the other list was culled from lists of top movies at cannes. Its just the reason for the existence of the other list is to make sure the highbrow stuff comes up first to any peers, future employers and other necessarily people who can raise their stature in the business.
the critics admit here that they liked these movies, the other list was culled from lists of top movies at cannes.They did no such thing. They liked those movies more and these movies less, but thought they were worth mentioning still. But keep on making up conspiracy bullshit, Alex Jones.
Way to defend their obvious bullshit. No one is falling for it.
On the contrary. You’re the only one who sees through these insidious deep state lies. Pat yourself on the back, you galaxy-brained genius. You’ve unraveled the conspiracy like a modern day Jim Garrison. No one in the world likes movies that don’t involve explosions. We’ve been faking this whole time and you’ve uncovered our lies. We’ll probably have to kill you now.
Widows.
No dice.
This ain’t ovah.
I haven’t gone through all the movies I’ve seen this year and ranked them, so I don’t know if ‘Widows’ would be number one, but it’d have to be in the top five.
Sorry Purdom, but one cool train sequence does not make a best of the year superhero movie, incredibles 2 is nowhere near the level of artistry and brilliance that spider-verse has, even Teen Titans Go to the movies was a better movie.
I’ve talked about Mandy in two other articles, so let’s talk about films that are still unloved that aren’t Mandy:Thunder Road – In a right and just world, Jim Cummings would be winning every Best Actor accolade for this wonderful, funny, difficult film.Border – Oh my. The less you know the better. Because you don’t know where it’s going. And THAT scene is just the best.Twisted Pair – I realized I accidentally lied when I said Hereditary was the best theater experience I had this year. It was easily the insane reaction Twisted Pair got. The latest piece of Breenius from Neil Breen is simultaneously his most competent and least comprehensible film. I think I still prefer Fateful Findings and Double Down, but this blew my expectations away.The Death of Stalin – I blame release timing on this one. By far the best out and out comedy I saw this year (Thunder Road is hilarious but definitely more like a dramady). Ianucci’s still got it.Wildlife – Just for Carey Mulligan’s amazing performance
Enthusiastic agreement on Death of Stalin.
Waiting for Border to appear somewhere on amazon prime.
Twisted Pair was absolutely the best theater experience I had this year. There was a standing ovation during the credits and Neil Breen wasn’t even there.
Same here in central Ohio.
‘Wildlife’ got a very tepid review here, which had me worried when I went to see it, but I thought the whole thing was wonderful. I like all the performances, but definitely Mulligan’s is the highlight. The fact that you can still sympathise with a person who is acting so destructively is a testament to her abilities as an actor.
“The French Connection.” I know it’s from 1971, but I watched it again this year, and it’s better than anything else I saw! So there’s my vote.
Nicholson was so good in the early 70s.
Yes, he was. People who only focused on him after he was allowed to go overboard in “The Shining” – that would be many millions of people – have no idea the subtlety he could bring to a role.
Indeed—it might less The Shining in-and-of-itself, though, and maybe the 80s three-punch of The Shining, Witches of Eastwick, and Batman that solidified Muggy Jack. After that the best he could do was to occasionally do something interesting through the persona rather than outside it. But to star in Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge, Drive He Said, King of Marvin Gardens, The Last Detail, and Chinatown within four years? That’s astounding…
You left out Cuckoo’s Nest! And I agree. I think he was THE actor of the 70s, and that includes De Niro and Pacino.
Hey there. Cool list. Just throwing out The Kindergarten Teacher – would make a hell of a double feature with 8th Grade.
I would like to nominate The Night is Short, Walk on Girl. One of the most beautiful bizarre movies I’ve seen in years and I really wish I could’ve seen it in theaters. Fantastic movie
Anyone on board with Clovehitch Killer? Was pleasantly surprised with that one
Here I pipe up again for The Rider.Sometimes you need a good Malick movie from someone other than Terence Malick.
yeah people have ragged on its miserabilism and pace, but it was really just gorgeous. I saw it at lincoln center with a Q/A and some new york lady was like to the main actor: “you sound so educated!” and we all fucking barfed 😀
Totally agree on MI: Fallout, Incredibles 2, and Spider-Verse. All three were fantastic! I’d also add Creed 2. It found real depth in what on paper looked like kind of a silly idea. It also provided a pitch perfect end for the Rocky character should he not appear in future movies. Perhaps most impressive of all, it actually made me care about the Dragos and offered a surprising end to the big fight.
Sorry to Bother You and Mandy would both be on my list. I guess I like kinda weird movies.
Again, struggle to see why you’re sleeping on Searching for.
None of these movies belong on any “best of” lists.Except Teen Titans.
Okay, kid
Charles Bramesco you should honestly be embarrassed to put Von Trier’s “The House that Jack Built” on any list but a list of worst films of the year. Knowing what this was about I went to the one night unrated showing of this film, thinking that I’d give this guy one more chance to prove he can make a good film. THTJB is a pretentious bore in which Von Trier seems to constantly be fighting against himself and just showing brutal violence just for the sake of showing something shocking. I’m all for violence in film for the sake of art, but this film is just violence because Von Trier wants to see if he can make people look away. It’s time to call out this hack for what he really is. A filmmaker who’s sole purpose now is to see if he can get people to walk out of his movies at film festivals to try and gain some type of buzz for films that otherwise no one would ever bother watching. I’ve been rooked a couple of times, but never again.
You had me at pretentious bore. I’ve said it before: I am either stunned by LvT films, or hate them. And this one just bored me silly.
Your weird insistence that people should feel shame because they have different tastes in movies suggests you feel a great deal of insecurity about your own
I’m insisting that someone should feel shame? Everything here is opinion, which we are all entitled to. Your comments are interesting where you seem to think your opinion is more valid than anyone else’s in here. Spoiler alert: It isn’t.
It simply looks like a disaster.
Still no love for Upgrade? Sad.
I feel just on the sheer scale, and the ten years of work it took to get there, Infinity War really deserves some credentials here. For the movie to have been as good as it was, and with all of the different moving parts and story arcs it had to juggle, it made cinematic history and was a pretty magnificent triumph. And that ending…just wow.
It is very, very far from being one of the best movies of 2018
That’s your opinion, and your opinion doesn’t matter.
House That Jack Built is in my top 10 of all time.
This list loses credibility with Incredibles 2.
It doesn’t “lose… credibility” because you, a nobody, disagree with one entry on it
LOL Triggered over a cartoon. And I appreciate the comment from a fellow “nobody.”
A two-for-one:
I think The Hate U Give should have been on the list. The story and acting in that movie blew me away.
The story felt a little unwieldy to me (I felt like I could tell that it was adapted from a novel with a lot of subplots) but the acting was TERRIFIC. Russell Hornsby, especially, knocked me out.