I never really know how to get this list rolling. As usual, comparing movies which are so different is an impossible task and any ranking is largely whimsical on the part of the ranker. Basically, this year, I went with: to what extent would I suggest them to myself if I hadn’t seen them? It’s a blur of gray – the “best” movies, my favorite, emotional impact, creativity, rewatchability, etc. This year, I feel more than most, that I could darn near reshuffle half a dozen films into the top ten and feel just as good about my list. So, right or wrong (it’s opinion–there is no right or wrong) these are the films I want to highlight.
First, some honorable mentions in alphabetical order:
Crazy Rich Asians – This one just so vastly exceeded my expectations that I couldn’t forget it after seeing it. I thought the trailer looked horrible. The title is ridiculous (and somehow offensive, right?). I only saw it because its 91% on rottentomatoes couldn’t be ignored. At the end of the day, it’s just a REALLY well executed romantic comedy that manages to avoid the classic genre stereotypes. Even when it does do something fairly predictable, it does so in an unpredictable way. We get a fish-out-of-water story when an Asian American woman goes to Singapore with her boyfriend. She’s seen as an outsider because, to much of her boyfriend’s family, she’s not Asian, she’s American. Full of fun and memorable characters with an opulence that impressed me despite myself on screen.
Eighth Grade – This one was the hardest to remove from my top ten and even now I’m second-guessing myself. So we can call it my solid #11. The film does an excruciatingly good job and making us feel the social awkwardness of being an eighth grade girl. It’s funny and heartfelt and real. I’ve also long been a fan of the film’s director Bo Burnham. He started out making clever, often math related, songs on YouTube when he was just in high school. He was talented enough that this set him up for a career as a comedian. His 2016 Netflix special “Make Happy” is really impressive. It’s a musical comedy show with the lights dancing around like it’s a rock concert. In the final number, he breaks the fourth wall to discuss performance anxiety and mental health while seamlessly blending it with the performance and jokes. He recently beat out Bradley Cooper at the Directors Guild Awards for best debut film by a director. Keep an eye on Bo in the future.
First Man – When I saw this in the theaters, it was supposed to be a possible best picture contender. In that context I found it rather underwhelming, though well-made. Now that it’s receiving little to no love, I feel the need to advocate for it. It does a great job humanizing the man who would become the first person to set foot on the moon. It reveals that he was the perfect man for the job because he was calm, cool, and collected. In fact, it also shows how he was all of those things to a fault. Ryan Gosling plays Neil Armstrong as a man who plays his cards very close to his chest, even with his wife. But we, the audience, also see his hidden emotional depth. Good show.
Green Book – Okay, so almost the opposite of First Man. If Green Book wasn’t getting more love, I’d probably feel more inclined to include it in my top ten. As it is, I’m starting to feel that it’s overrated and primed to play spoiler to better movies on Oscar night. Based on the true story of a walking Italian stereotype escorting a black musician while he tours the south, I’ve been calling it a real well-made Lifetime movie. It’s very enjoyable and hard not to like (which is why it might win best picture), but neither does it tread particularly new ground or offer us something we haven’t seen before. I liked it. You should watch it. But I’m already starting to forget it.
The Hate U Give – Very well executed story of a teenager who sees her childhood friend shot and killed by a police officer who wrongly thought he had a weapon. All too unfortunately a movie of our time and world today. It would be very easy for this film to become one-sided or feel preachy, but it succeeds in giving us a world full of more nuance than that. It shows the angels and demons of all of us, black or white, cop or civilian. I’m really surprised this didn’t get more attention this awards season.
Juliet, Naked – Just a fun and clever romantic comedy that many of you may not even have heard of. It’s based on a Nick Hornby novel (he also wrote the novels that became High Fidelity, Fever Pitch, and About a Boy). A woman is in an unfulfilling relationship with a man who is obsessed with a reclusive, one-hit-wonder rock star from the 90s. As they’re splitting up, she starts a correspondence with said rock star played by Ethan Hawke. It’s fun and clever and played very real.
One more film worth noting–I’m pretty upset that I wasn’t able to see Cold War before finishing this list. It was on my radar already and became a must-watch the moment its director received an Oscar nomination. It just won’t be available in time. But, that’s how it often goes. Anyway, on to the top ten.
10. Can You Ever Forgive Me? – I always have a soft spot for movies about writers and this one tells a crazy, true story that I was not familiar with. Melissa McCarthy plays a struggling writer who stumbles upon a scheme of forging private letters from famous authors. There’s a high-end collectors’ market where these are items are extremely valuable. She knows it’s wrong and doesn’t plan to do it forever. She knows she’s rolling the dice with each new letter. Everything is going fine until the FBI shows up asking questions. The film has earned three Oscar nominations: adapted screenplay, McCarthy for lead actress, and her co-star Richard E. Grant for his supporting role as an also-struggling, flamboyant acquaintance who helps her sell the letters. The screenplay was actually based on the book by the actual author who committed these scams in the early 90s.
9. Shoplifters – This was a last-minute addition to my list and the last film I watched with this awards season in mind. It’s a Japanese film unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. The main characters are, yes, a family of shoplifters, but this is a gross oversimplification. First, they’re not exactly a family. It’s five people of all ages who are crammed together in a small home – a grandmother, a middle-aged couple, a college girl, and a 12-year-old boy. They are all dishonest in their own way, but have good hearts at their cores. The main plot begins when they find a young girl huddled in the cold, locked out of her own house. The “family” basically adopts/kidnaps her as she is abused and unwanted by her biological parents. The whole thing is an eye-opening look at morality. It’s a captivating, light-hearted drama.
8. The Favourite – I actually discussed this film on my podcast, History in Film. The film’s director, Yorgos Lanthimos, is one whom critics have been far more enamored with than I have been. I first saw his 2009 film Dogtooth and hated it. It’s about kids, now becoming young adults, who have never left their home due to overprotective parents. As such, they have a warped understanding of the world in general. It was just painfully awkward and unpleasant to watch. I was a little more on board with The Lobster, though that same unpleasantness was there. It’s an alternate reality of sorts where people who can’t find a partner are turned into animals. You have to choose beforehand, hence the title The Lobster as that’s the animal chosen by our protagonist. Finally, with The Favourite, Lanthimos’s unique sentiment was put to brilliant use. He toned it down just enough and was able to turn what might have otherwise been a dry, period drama into a dark comedy. Two cousins battle to be the favorite of Queen Anne of England. Ultimately, neither of them are redeemable enough to root for, nor is the queen herself, but Lanthimos’s unpleasantness is overshadowed by unforgettableness.
7. The Rider – I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard of a movie like this. The film’s director found an actual rodeo cowboy named Brady and crafted a semi-fictional movie around his life. He’s not an actor, but it’s not a documentary. What we get is one of the most real and most raw movies I’ve ever seen. His real-life dad and sister, play his dad and sister in the movie. In fact, this is how I knew something must be up. I didn’t know any of this when I sat down to watch the movie. His sister is obviously on the autism spectrum and you could just tell there was NO WAY any actor would ever play a character she the she was acting. It was just too real and would have actually been somehow offense for an actor to pretend to act that way. The same went for an injured friend of Brady’s who’s basically a quadriplegic. It just didn’t look like an actor. Sure enough, it was Brady’s actual quadriplegic friend playing himself in the film. The film is slow paced and puts you in Brady’s skin. I have zero interest in rodeo and cowboys, etc., but this film brought me to tears and the performance Brady gives is absolutely stunning, especially for a non-professional actor.
6. A Star is Born – An early favorite for the Oscar for best picture, its star seems to have been falling as we get closer and closer to Oscar night. This is the fourth major iteration of A Star is Born and the third to be nominated for best picture, so it’s a story audiences tend to love. It works very well as an underdog story with strong acting performances across the board. The music is great and the moment when Bradley Cooper’s character convinces Lady Gaga’s character to take the stage and sing with him is devastatingly joyous. The problem is that the movie can never top that moment and gets dangerously close to melodrama in the second half. I wasn’t emotionally invested in the film’s climax even though they had me early on. And, while I thought Cooper was good, it would be easy to argue that he’s overacting. So, why is this film even in my top ten? Well… the first third was THAT good.
5. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs – When I first watched this, I just kinda assumed I couldn’t let it count on a top ten list for the year as it’s really just six short films that don’t have overlapping characters or anything. But, it was released as a stand-alone film on Netflix, and it’s nominated for three Oscars. At the end of the day, it was just one of my favorite movies of the year, and perhaps the most memorable by far. From the Coen brothers (No Country for Old Men, Raising Arizona), we’re given six stories set in the old west, each dealing with death and each, overall, getting darker and darker in tone as the movie progresses. As is standard for the Coen brothers, it’s filled with bold and distinct characters and dialogue that feels classic and iconic even when you’re hearing it for the first time. We don’t get near enough of Buster Scruggs himself, but to me he’s hands down the most original character of the year–an overly polite, ruthless gunslinger who speaks like he’s memorized a thesaurus. It’s definitely not for everyone, but Coen brothers fans can’t miss it.
4. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse – So, funny story–as I was slowly piecing together my top ten, there were four movies that I really wanted to make sure were included, regardless of position. When I saw this version of Spider-Man, I instantly decided it was going on my list, but I thought probably around the 9th or 10th spot. It then occurred to me–if your #9 “has” to be on your list, but you could live without your #6, then you have the order wrong. So these top four were the only four I felt just HAD to be included in my top ten which, by default, means they’re my top four. I have nothing bad to say about Black Panther, it’s a good film. I enjoyed it. But the groundbreaking superhero movie this year with a minority protagonist was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I was grinning with enjoyment the entire time. This movie is just so fun and so clever and very heartfelt. Spider-Man dies at the beginning, but a dimensional rift is opened up and we end up with half a dozen different versions of Spider-Man from various dimensions. Our protagonist is Miles Morales, introduced as a new Spider-Man in the comics in 2011. He’s trying to learn to use his new powers and may not yet be up to the task of saving the day, especially with the more experienced other versions of Spider-Man who have been forced into our world and are ready to help.
3. Leave No Trace – This is a film that gets the viewer to ask a lot of questions and is pretty stingy with the answers, but I think they’re there. We meet a father and his teenage daughter living in the woods–only the woods are Forest Park in Portland, Oregon (a park so large it really is a forest). They get busted when a jogger sees the daughter and are brought in by social services. The daughter insists they aren’t homeless–they live in the woods; that’s their home. She proves she’s ahead of grade level from a school standpoint so they don’t separate her from her dad. They are set up in a small house, but the dad just can’t handle being in society. What it boils down to is this: he’s a former marine with PTSD and, though they never explicitly say it, the only thing keeping him from killing himself is living in the woods away from the world. So the major conflict in the movie becomes the daughter who loves her dad (mom died when she was a baby) but wants to live a normal life, socializing, etc. The thought I couldn’t help having was the extent to which the dad is a victim. We send soldiers into action and don’t get them the help they need when they get back. We, as a society, did this to him and those like him. It’s a slow-paced, heartfelt story with great performances by the two leads. Ben Foster (3:10 to Yuma, Hell or High Water) plays the dad.
2. Roma – So, I get that this movie is not for everyone. It’s not really even something that I’d typically be excited about. It’s slow to the point that many people have told me just how boring they find it. Even I got frustrated with the degree to which is took its time. It ends on a powerful emotional note and by the time it was over I just kinda nodded and thought it was pretty solid. But I couldn’t shake it. Instead of fading from memory, Roma actually made more of an impression as the days passed. So, I say this fully acknowledging it comes from a place of film snobbery: Roma is one of greatest works of film art ever created. It will be studied and revered a hundred years from now along with Citizen Kane, The Seventh Seal, Metropolis, etc. So, if you fell asleep during it, I get it, but also know that this is what those voting for it to win all these awards are recognizing. It is a stunning and instantly timeless work of art.
Set in the Roma district of Mexico City, it is loosely based on the childhood of director Alfonso Cuaron. The main character is Cleo, a servant to a middle-class family. We enter their world in a way that feels invasive–seeing private moments that families don’t share with the world, but the camera never judges and keeps us at a distance. As Cleo is forced to deal with an unplanned pregnancy, the family she works for may be in the midst of splitting up. The whole thing is simple, powerful, and I wanted to recognize that even if it’s not my personal favorite movie of the year.
1. BlacKkKlansman – Perhaps the most mind-blowing bit of trivia to emerge from this year’s awards season is that Spike Lee had never before been nominated for best director at the Oscars or had a film of his nominated for best picture. His only nominations were a best original screenplay nomination for Do the Right Thing in 1989 and for the documentary 4 Little Girls in 1997 (though he did win an honorary Oscar a few years ago). BlacKkKlansman is the perfect storm of the racial issues which Lee often puts a spotlight to and a story that feels depressingly relevant today despite being set more than 40 years ago. I didn’t realize until after the day after I watched it that the lead actor, John David Washington, is, in fact, Denzel Washington’s son. He plays Ron Stallworth, the first African-American on the police force in Colorado Springs. On a whim he calls the local chapter of the KKK on the phone, pretending to be a white man. This leads to a plan to infiltrate the Klan to prevent any terrorist activities they may have planned. Obviously Ron can’t show up in person, so his partner Flip, played by Adam Driver, fills in. From there the film becomes a tense, dramatic thriller infused with plenty of humor, dark as it may be. David Duke even comes to town (played by Topher Grace). After bonding with Ron on the phone, he wants to personally be there for his induction ceremony.
The film is almost Shakespearean in how intricately all the interpersonal connections between the characters are woven together. Ron becomes romantically involved with a political activist who he doesn’t want to find out that he’s a cop. She also becomes a target of the Klan’s wrath. Meanwhile, Flip, who is Jewish, has to keep his cool while posing as a white supremacist around men who are skeptical of newcomers. All throughout Lee parallels the story to our contemporary political zeitgeist, even invoking the death of Heather Heyer at Charlottesville in 2017 at the end.
Ultimately, I can’t properly summarize it, but it perfectly threads the needle through the criteria I mentioned at the beginning – the best, my favorite, strong emotional impact, creative, and rewatchable. At the end of the day, there was just no other movie this year that I could rank of ahead this one.