So here we are again, another year done. I’m late with this blog post yet again. Frankly I did a terrible job keeping up with this blog at all last year (I blame laziness, business and general bad moodiness). But I was still going to the cinema, and it’s been a remarkable year all round – big screen favourites returned, blockbusters reached new levels of scale and excitement, American cinema embraced politics to an even greater degree.
As usual, there were heaps of great looking films I missed and hope to catch up with soon, so consider this list true as of 15th January 2019! Strangely, I’ve found a pattern has developed where every year is either filled with films which I grew to love on a deeply person level (2015, 2017) or films which I generally admired on a critical level (2016, 2018). I’m hoping this trend continues with 2019 being a standout year – there isn’t a great deal here I would consider amongst my recent personal favourites, despite how much I respect and appreciate them. All films featured had UK release dates in 2018.
20. Mission: Impossible – Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie; USA)
Having had pretty much no interest in the Mission Impossible films earlier, going to see 2015’s Rogue Nation had been a very welcome surprise. And thankfully, writer/director Christopher McQuarrie returns, keeping up the same frantic pacing, preposterous plotting and immense stakes as before. The stuntwork, camerawork and editing in this are all insanely sharp, with the film pushing itself to new heights, and each setpiece somehow expanding on the other to make some of the most audacious action scenes of all time. Perhaps the lack of surprise this time meant that personally I still preferred Rogue Nation, but no action film came close to this in terms of sheer ambition and achievement.
19. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Perischetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman; USA)
If any film was a welcome surprise this year, it’s surely this ridiculously titled animation, proving that you can never have too many Spidermen. With the trailer giving the impression of it being an overblown slapstick for kids, it was the overwhelming positive response to it that convinced me to give it a go. And what a treat it was. The rendering of the animation style, mixing 2D and 3D, and blending … is a marvel (geddit…) and frenetic postmodern humour that has become a trademark of producers Lord and Miller prove a welcome antidote to the usual origin story re-treads. It can’t entirely escape the clichés of the standard superhero plotting which means some scenes feel a little dull despite the kineticism of it all. But the film’s real strength is of the understanding of Spider-Man as a fully fleshed character, with each of the different universe versions enhancing the storytelling.
18. A Fantastic Woman (Sebastián Leilo; Chile/Germany/Spain/USA)
The deserving winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, A Fantastic Woman follows Marina (Daniela Vega), a transgender woman in a relationship with an older man (Francisco Reyes) who dies suddenly, leaving Marina alone and treated with suspicion by her boyfriend’s family. It
could have been a bleak and upsetting tragedy, but the film is far more subtle and intelligent than that. It’s a film about the grieving process, and the ways we cope with profound loss. But tied to this is a story of trans rights, of quiet dignity in overcoming ignorance and adversity, and embracing one’s self-worth as the key to longevity and happiness. Moments of magical realism push the film into something far more subjective and fascinating, but it’s Vega’s raw and layered performance that really makes the film stand out. She lays her emotions so bare in this, being at once tough but vulnerable.
17. BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee; USA)
I’ve been slowly catching up with Spike Lee’s earlier films from the 80s and 90s, and with the reputation he has in some parts these days and with the reception to some of his most recent films, I’ve been surprised how playful, how daring and how radical some of those films are. A lot of those qualities feature in this film – a fascinating thriller which derives much of its power in relating this seemingly unusual true story from the past to the state of race relations and politics in modern America. Tense and funny in equal measure, with many standout scenes edited with cross-cutting to marvellous effect, and a devastating ending that brings everything back to the present. Though heavy handed in its politics, it’s a film which hopes to inspire change.
16. Black Panther (Ryan Coogler; USA)
As someone who has fallen a little behind with the Marvel franchise, I have to say Black Panther was a pleasure to watch. Sure, it ends in the usual CGI splurge at which point I tend to zone out. But having gotten genuinely bored with the more recent Marvel films, which are so overstuffed with characters and overplotting, it was surprisingly enjoyable to a brand new, beautifully designed and realised world in Wakanda. Added to that a story less about world domination and invading aliens, and more a tragic family drama about responsibility, honour, expectations and the sins of the parents. Throw in plenty of charismatic performances and some finely crafted setpieces and you’ve got a fine blockbuster and one of Marvel’s best films.
15. Loveless (Andrey Zvyagintsev; Russia/France/Belgium/Germany)
The latest from serial miserablist Andrey Zvyagintsev is a bleak modern tragedy about neglect and the consequences of a young boy running away from home as his parents go through a bitter divorce. Set amidst the sparsest of wintry Russian backdrops, we follow the efforts of the relatively unengaged police, a dedicated team of volunteer searchers, and the parents themselves as they slowly struggle to articulate how their own self-absorption and selfishness led to this – indeed, about as much as they learn about themselves in this is the depth of their hatred for each other, and the void of empathy within themselves. The strength of the film is how it avoids heavy-handedness, and swerves from obviously linking this story to the wider issues of an uncaring state.
14. 120 Beats Per Minute (Robin Campillo; France)
Drawing from director Robin Campillo’s own experiences, the film is a vast portrait of Paris in the early 1990s and the group ACT UP, a campaign group battling for better recognition and care for those afflicted with HIV/AIDS. A blend of the personal and political, large portions of the film are given to long meetings and debates within the group, as they discuss tactics for getting their message across to the government and its ineffective policies. Amongst this, we get the deeply personal story of Nathan (Arnaud Valois) and his new relationship with HIV-positive Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) as the illness begins to take hold. Never shying away from the graphic details of the disease, but never letting it overshadow the human story, it’s a humane and life-affirming film about love and support in times of crisis.
13. Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig; USA)
Breathing new life into what one could safely assume is already a well-tread and saturated genre, Greta Gerwig’s wonderful teen drama follows the self-titled “Lady Bird” (Saoirse Ronan) as she navigates the final year of school, having boyfriends, struggling to fulfil her dream of getting into a New York college, and coming to terms with her mother (Laurie Metcalf). What makes this film really stand out is the vitality of the writing and the authenticity of the performances that makes this such an endearing and relatable experience no matter your background. Finding focus in its simplicity and warmth, probably the greatest asset of the film is the central relationships Lady Bird has with her parents, particularly the tempestuous but loving relationship with her mother. Plus it’s just a sweet-natured and appealing film, with a real sense of care given to recreating the 2002 setting through fashion, dialogue, context and music.
12. American Animals (Bart Layton; UK/USA)
I have to say I was won over by the ambition and imagination of this fascinating and thrilling film, which blends documentary interviews with dramatized recreations. While this experiment is not entirely successful formally, I still found it an immensely compelling and gripping film – it’s obvious this film is told by an effective documentarian. Depicting a true story in which a gang of middle class college students attempt to cure their general malaise and lack of ambition by stealing and selling rare books from their university library, the film is a playful study on the native of memory and perspective, visually altering the story as the real life participants’ recollections differ. It’s also a searing critique of the selfishness of these men, and it’s fascinating to see them look back on their exploits of older and (hopefully) wiser men.
11. You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay; UK/USA/France)
It’s good to have Lynne Ramsay back after so long. One of cinema’s most inventive visual storytellers, her take on the pulpy crime thriller is beguiling and brutal. We follow war veteran Joe (played by a hulking mass of Joaquin Phoenix) who gets paid to break a teenage girl out of a brothel where she is being held. It’s a fantastically sparse film – short of length but also refreshingly light on dialogue. Everything is stripped back, using only visual cues to expose Joe’s paranoia, the viciousness of the violence and the corruption at play in the sidelines. The score gives it an offbeat, almost animalistic frenzy which builds an unusual contract to the stillness of the framing. This stillness means this is a film that keeps you at a critical distance – this isn’t a thriller that revels in the satisfaction of revenge, but exposes the harshness of its reality.
10. Lean On Pete (Andrew Haigh; UK)
On the surface, this seems to be a sparse, workmanlike depiction of poverty and hard times in Middle America. But Lean On Pete is far more poetic and thoughtful than that. We follow fifteen year old Charley (Charlie Plummer), moving to yet another new town with his single parent dad (Travis Fimmel), a well-meaning but irresponsible man who struggles to hold down jobs. At a loose end, Charley gets himself work at a local stable and becomes attached to the titular horse Pete. When Lean On Pete’s future is thrown into doubt by his trainer (Steve Buscemi), Charley attempts to free the horse to safety, embarking on an odyssey across the American desert. Depicting an America rarely shown onscreen, the film is a quiet but unsentimental story, depicting trauma and struggle but never tipping over into mawkishness or outright misery porn. Writer/director Andrew Haigh’s balance of tone is just right – you desperately wish to reach out and help Charley, but we can only watch as this fragile-looking young man grows and survives. Beautifully shot with an almost fairy tale-like sense of the uncanny sublime, and Plummer’s performance is remarkable, conveying so much through his expressions alone.
9. Hereditary (Ari Aster; USA)
One of the most talked about and debated films of 2018, all the more remarkable considering it is a feature debut by director Ari Aster. Depicting the breakdown of a family following the death and possible haunting of the domineering grandmother, Hereditary truly succeeds in building an atmosphere of dread and almost sickening tension, and delights in pulling the rug from under viewers. It’s quite a brutal film, one which seems to relish dwelling on the suffering of its characters. The production design and cinematography crafts a remarkably rich world and the performances are excellent. I preferred it as an extreme family drama, as the sheer weight of ambition and the shift to more generic horror/supernatural focus at points felt clumsy (and provoked some guffaws at the screening I saw it in).
8. Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda; Japan)
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and the latest by director Hirokazu Kore-eda, one of the greatest humanist filmmakers working today. A story of the families that we make, and the lives of those who live on the margins of society, Shoplifters depict a family who get by on odd jobs, petty theft and the pension of an elderly matriarch. One day they take in a little girl who is left alone outside her home, and she becomes a part of the makeshift family. Thoough what could on the one hand be a kidnapping thriller is instead a delicate and empathetic portrait of lost souls, gratefully free from judgement and sentimentality. The sheer charm of the oddballs, and the total immersion in their lives and culture make this relatively plot-free film wonderfully engrossing. No one person is all good or all bad – instead Kore-eda shows the complexity of how one can at once be a good person and break the laws as set by wider society.
7. Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley; USA)
Another breathtaking film by a debut director. It’s remarkable to think a film like this was released by a major studio – something so radical, surreal, and angry. It depicts an alternate near-future in which poorer people are increasingly having to live in WorryFree centres, where members sign lifetime contracts to get a bed and menial labour in prison-style buildings. Our protagonist Cash (Lakeith Stanfield) gets a call centre job, but after discovering he can use his ‘white voice’, begins a rapid ascent to the highest reaches of the sales world, and to increasingly murky and sinister territory. The sheer ambition of this film is dizzying – at once a searing critique of capitalism and the current state of race relations in the US, but also a call to arms to us the audience that people power can cause change. Sadly still a rare major film to come from an African American perspective, it’s also a wonderfully funny, downright silly comedy that fills the screen with too many jokes to even keep up with on just one viewing, and Michel Gondry-esque quirky visual design.
6. Faces Places (Agnès Varda, JR; France)
One part road trip documentary, another part love letter to cinema, visual arts and, most importantly, to the spirit and people of the small rural towns and villages which rarely are seen or considering in the wider culture. Living legend Agnes Varda team up with photographer JR to travel round rural France with his magical van which prints gigantic photographs of the people they meet on their travels, and together they create wonderful and imaginative displays of these photos around these towns. The film is charming as hell, led primarily between the chemistry of our two guides, an ultimate odd couple of sorts. It’s also a touching tribute to the power of art to bring people together, spark debates, pay tribute to our heroes and celebrate the wonderful everyday. Its unassuming simplicity is a welcome antidote to more generic mainstream films that occupy the multiplexes.
5. The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Desiree Akhavan; USA/UK)
I’m a big fan of writer/director Desiree Akhavan, one of the most distinct voices of modern cinema. But her best work yet is one where she stays behind the camera, to focus on teenager Cameron (Chloe Grace Moretz) who is sent to a conversion therapy camp after she is caught having sex with another girl. The real success of this film is that something so modest, so quiet and subtle can have such power to it. The film is movingly sympathetic, exploring the vulnerability we all can feel when coming to terms with ourselves, particularly if you are made to feel you don’t fit the norm. It deftly handles the damaging effects such therapy can have, and wisely shows that not all the counsellors who peddle these practices are just paper-thin textbook villains, but flawed humans making up for a lack within themselves. The performances are uniformly excellent, particularly Moretz who sensitively handles the depth of emotions Cameron is experiencing often with just the smallest of looks or gestures.
4. Annihilation (Alex Garland; UK/USA)
It’s a real shame that I didn’t get to see this on the big screen – I’ve been making a real effort to Netflix releases in cinemas but this one passed me by. Alex Garland’s remarkable follow-up to Ex Machina is a deep and disturbing return to serious science fiction – burrowing deep into the farthest reaches of concepts most modern sci-fi films wouldn’t even dare touch. It’s a film both visceral and cerebral. A scientific expedition explores a quarantined zone called The Shimmer, where an asteroid crash is causing the landscape to mutate, and where all previous expeditions have vanished without trace. On the one hand it’s an intense, sometimes horrifying thriller, with gorgeous production design and effects making this alien world feel true – like Tarvoksky’s Stalker to the extreme. It’s also a haunting meditation on grief and loss, and our propensity towards self-destruction. I found it a film that infected my consciousness, lingering long after it had ended.
3. Widows (Steve McQueen; UK/USA)
Well this is not something I expected director Steve McQueen to make next: a crime thriller, indeed a remake of a 1980s ITV miniseries which I was not familiar with. But what an almighty cinematic achievement this is – retaining the distant and critical eye of McQueen’s previous work to offer an unwavering study of a time and place, yet imbuing it with the thrills and pleasures of a meaty heist film. The performances are excellent across the board, and the fantastic decision of setting the script in Chicago allows the heist to be given a context and heft most other films wouldn’t even consider – the bias, corruption and nepotism of local politics, racial imbalance and segregation, the chasm between classes. Everybody has something to lose – it’s a film about desperate times for desperate people. The stakes feel real and the peril is all the more genuine for it.
2. Roma (Alfonso Cuarón; Mexico/USA)
The weight of expectation going into Roma following the overwhelming critical praise it has received meant I didn’t think it could possibly be as good as nearly everyone says it is. But, well, it nearly is. Remarkable in many ways, thoughtfully crafted, compelling in such a way to turn the personal and intimate into something far more epic – it’s imbued with a vitality that not many films I’ve seen in a long while possess.
I was lucky enough to get to see this in a cinema (Netflix funded and released the film) and truly get to appreciate the care that went into crafting the shots, and the detail that went into the sound design. I can’t think of a recent drama where the surround sound is given such prominence. Cuaron’s ambition with this film is to truly immerse you in the world of 1970s Mexico City – a neorealist visions of the houses and streets, the sounds of military marching bands and student riots outside. At once a landscape painting of the city, as well as a portrait of an upper-middle class family (drawn from Cuaron’s own childhood) it is undeniably idealised, often to the detriment of the supposed protagonist of the film, their maid Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio). Cleo is seen going about her daily chores with a quiet dignity which to an extent robs her of much interiority – we see little of her wants, hopes, desires. But Aparicio’s nuanced performance endears her as our guide to this very particular context, and it is great to see a native Mexican domestic worker as the main focus of any film. I’m sure a second viewing will clarify my feelings for this film. But this doesn’t take away from what is a poetic study of the beauties of the everyday – the hope, heartbreak and relationships that I found quite moving.
- Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson; USA)
There are some films that come along every so often where all the choices that went into making it are just right, and where the levels of skill, thought and craft are beyond any expectations that it pushes a film into the realm of the truly sublime. Going into Phantom Thread, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect – probably a Classical throwback chamber piece about an outsider in high society London in the 1950s.
What I got was an unexpectedly sharp and twisted, wickedly funny and downright strange picture, but one which in the end can still be called an achingly romantic drama. We follow Daniel Day Lewis’s estemmed dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock, whose pernickety and precise routine-driven life he shares with his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville), is thrown off balance with the discovery of a new muse and lover, waitress Alma (Vicky Krieps). At its heart this is a film about the obsessive artist and his process, and how he gains inspiration from his new muse. But Alma (one of the most remarkable characters I think I’ve seen in any film all year) expects more from Reynolds, and she is strong-willed enough to fight for it. Drawing from the contorted plotting of gothic literature a la Rebecca, the couple engages in a power struggle of sorts to get what they want. This almost sadistic power play, tied with the couple’s obvious affection for each other, turns the film into something far more compelling, sexier and perhaps even kinkier than the likes of Fifty Shades of Grey has to offer.
Jonny Greenwood’s swoon-worthy score gives the picture a grandiose romanticism (I was disappointed when he lost out on the Oscar to the cloying sentimental score for The Shape of Water), the costumes by Mark Bridges are incredible (as they should be!), and the cinematography gives the film a painterly feel, imbuing it with an almost timeless sense of grace and beauty. And the three central performance are all iconic in my eyes.
Musings from a Darkened Room 