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The Best Films of 2018…So Far

These films are united not only by their greatness but, with one exception, by their relative obscurity in the pop-art landscape.

The Best Films of 2018 So Far
Photo: Sundance Selects

Cinema embodies an increasingly strange mixture of the personal and private elements of our lives. It was born as a public spectacle, so that people may gather together to watch simple actions, but film-going is an essentially lonely act of contemplation. Which is to say that there’s a certain poetic justice in how mainstream cinema, overrun by Disney’s corporate product, has forced most of the medium’s true art out of popular consideration into the shadows of streaming sites and imperiled small-run theaters. Perhaps cinema’s destiny of privacy is being fulfilled, which renders the equally imperiled critic’s job all the more important. These films, the best of 2018 so far, are united not only by their greatness but, with one exception, by their relative obscurity in the pop-art landscape. One must now work to discover great films. We can’t rely on publicity and marketing to do that work for us, but the reward sanctifies the efforts, as evinced below. Chuck Bowen


The Best Films of 2018 So Far

24 Frames

The basis for 24 Frames, specified in an opening title card, is Abbas Kiarostami’s photography work. Looking over his stills archive, the filmmaker was apparently overcome with a desire to witness more than what his images could offer, and thus set about resurrecting, with some mixture of memory and projection, the “scenes” leading up to and succeeding the click of the shutter—an undertaking that deflates Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous idea of “the decisive moment.” If one “decides” on immortalizing a single instant with photography, Kiarostami seems to posit, then one has robbed a moment of its life and complexity, qualities that can only be revived through cinema. It’s no accident that whenever a death occurs in 24 Frames, the vignette comes to an end; movement and progress are the organizing principles here. Carson Lund


The Best Films of 2018 So Far

Bitter Money

“To follow” could be said to be Wang Bing’s ethos. Ta’ang, from 2016, was literally structured around following refugees fleeing war, and the Chinese filmmaker’s output, at least since 2012’s Three Sisters, has largely been propelled by his camera’s adherence to his subjects’ movements and spaces. In Bitter Money, Wang gets close to his subjects—so close that he’s in their work and inside their crowded dormitories—but maintains and highlights his limited perspective on their world by often spending time with an individual, only to let them walk into the distance, leaving undisclosed whatever happens next. Techniques like these balance the filmmaker’s proximity to the community with a sense of his outsider status, preventing any illusion of objectivity or detached spectatorship, while still bolstering the film’s unsparing realism. Peter Goldberg


The Best Films of 2018 So Far

The Day After

Hong Sang-soo’s The Day After homes in on the similarities between job interviews and dates, mining them for a comedy of romantic alienation and autobiographical rumination. In the tradition of many of Hong’s protagonists, Bong-wan (Kwon Hae-hyo) is an acclaimed creative at a crossroads with the women in his life, implicitly feeling that his professional success grants him a right to his self-absorption. Bong-wan, a married book publisher, has three attractive women circling him throughout the film, which is a dream that becomes a castrating nightmare. Over the course of coffee and soju-drenched meals, these women demand that Bong-wan account for himself, as the film is a study of his increasingly inadequate deflections. As with most Hong films, The Day After engages in intellectual gamesmanship while courting emotional pathos, representing its hero’s own attempt to rationalize behavioral chaos with tidy structures and neat justifications. Hong uses a distinctive formality that’s designed to highlight its own inadequacy—a daring, self-interrogating hat trick that he’s managed to pull off with stunning consistency over the years, forging a cumulative tapestry of the frailties of the creative male ego. Bowen


The Best Films of 2018 So Far

Did You Know Who Fired the Gun?

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? begins with a baritone voice intoning the following credo over pin-drop silence: “Trust me when I tell you this isn’t another white savior story. This is a white nightmare story.” In directly requesting the audience’s trust, director Travis Wilkerson initiates a not-particularly-inviting proposition for the viewer, and specifically the white American viewer: Follow my lead, the voice seems to say, and my conclusions will make you uncomfortable. The film’s equivalent of a chorus, repeated four times throughout, is something of a call-and-response bit, setting bold textual callouts to recent black victims of white aggression—Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, and so on—against Janelle Monáe and Wondaland Records’s “Hell You Talmbout,” a thundering backbeat that re-enters the soundtrack at sudden, unannounced junctures. The declamatory nature of these interludes extends into Wilkerson’s style of narration, which similarly reiterates certain phrases and names. Didacticism becomes a critical means to an end here, since the underlying implication of the film is that American history’s unnerving cyclicality can only begin to crack through a self-conscious reckoning with the past and its hard evidence—that unsavory truths must be recalled as vigorously as they’ve been covered up. Lund

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The Best Films of 2018 So Far

First Reformed

There’s an irony to Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver fame, as the film bears Scorsese’s taste for highly florid formalism, which is at odds with Schrader’s own methods as an artist. Throughout his career as a director, Schrader has set about reconstructing the basic Taxi Driver scenario—of a miserable loner with the potential for radicalism—and casting it in the more intellectualized light of the work he first described in Transcendental Style in Film. These ambitions reach a pinnacle in First Reformed, in which Father Toller (Ethan Hawke) wrestles with Earth’s potential for environmental catastrophe while contemplating a violent response to a church that’s in bed with corrupt corporations. Drawn inexorably toward the pregnant, recently widowed Mary (Amanda Seyfried), Father Toller embarks on a Schrader-esque struggle to discern heaven in a place that increasingly resembles hell. Operating at the peak of his formal powers, Schrader transforms his fury with the modern world into arrestingly lucid icons of grief, hopelessness, and exaltation. Bowen


The Best Films of 2018 So Far

Gemini

With Gemini, Aaron Katz does his cover of the Los Angeles-set murder mystery, homing in on the genre’s evocative loneliness. In a city known for reinvention, anyone can be anything, which implies that everyone is also no one. Katz opens the film on a haunting image of upside-down palm trees, suggesting a rarefied dream world that’s out of tilt—an impression that’s intensified by Keegan DeWitt’s score, which bridges the jazzy sound of 1940s noirs with the synth-laden melancholia of so many ’80s-era neo-noirs. The film abounds in such topsy-turvy re-appropriations of familiar tropes, but Katz doesn’t bracket Gemini in quotation marks, understanding that L.A. murder mysteries live on for their simultaneous senses of damnation and possibility. Most people who dream of being filmmakers and movie stars aren’t successful in their aims, but there’s always the haunting promise of the few who are. Bowen


The Best Films of 2018 So Far

Golden Exits

Golden Exits has an autumnal, lived-in quality that’s somewhat of a departure from the flamboyant hostility of Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip and Queen of Earth. The film is an explosion of earthy colors that communicate a sense of enchanted vagueness and lost-ness, and it doesn’t quite seem to be playing out in real time. This melancholic, nostalgic aesthetic is heightened by Keegan DeWitt’s spare score, and by Robert Greene’s diaphanous editing, which blends arguments, flirtations, and recriminations together, underscoring their similarities and affirming both the constrictions and comforts of repetition—of the sameness from which Adam Horovitz’s character, Nick, claims to derive freedom. An aging man’s existential difficulties and sexual hunger aren’t exactly unplumbed territories for American art. But Perry understands that sex is only one element of a midlife crisis, which reflects growing old enough to realize that you have not only a date of expiration, but a date of irrelevancy. As Nick says himself, he’s a kind of grim reaper, rooting through people’s pasts so as to lend their lives an illusion of structure, functioning as the historian as artist. Nick isn’t a fraud, as his sensitivity is authentic and memorably embodied by Horvitz’s tentative gestures. Bowen


The Best Films of 2018 So Far

Good Luck

Ben Russell’s aesthetic trademark in Good Luck is the extended tracking shot, his camera gently floating behind and in front of his subjects as they go about the incessant, exhausting business of drilling and burrowing, digging and prospecting. The spellbinding mood is set early on as the filmmaker follows, in what looks like real time, a band of Serbian miners descending in an elevator from the sunlit surface to the murky depths of the copper reserve. Any sense of normal temporality vanishes. Every image feels like it could go on forever, though Russell’s decision to shoot on 16mm does give the proceedings a subconscious sense of a clock ticking. Compared to the prolonged possibilities of digital photography, celluloid offers a very strict recording window. Indeed, one of the most powerful moments in Good Luck results from the camera running out of film, the shadow-laden images of the underground mine suddenly vanishing in a shock of white light. Is this a dream, a nightmare, or a bit of both? Keith Uhlich

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The Best Films of 2018 So Far

Let the Sunshine In

Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In is concerned with the fragility, and perseverance, of the heart. Its modesty and intimacy runs the risk of being erroneously labelled slight. It’s a 95-minute reconciliation with love, which has always been something of an unmitigable poison for Denis’s characters. The self-destructive nature of searching for meaning, for a partner, has long fascinated the filmmaker, and here she strips bare that hopeless pursuit. In those diurnal moments, the mundane, unexceptional motions that make up a relationship, Denis disinters the pleasures (however brief) and pain of love. The film is inspired by Roland Barthes’s 1977 exegesis The Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, a clinical examination of love that’s composed of quotes and musings from a medley of canonical and esoteric writers. Turning an unadaptable work of postmodern literature into an incandescent cinematic reverie on love’s follies as a quick side project could have been a masturbatory exercise in intellectualism, but Denis finds the inexorable beauty (and sadness) in that most corrosive and fugacious of feelings. Greg Cwik


The Best Films of 2018 So Far

Love After Love

For a film about the breakdown of a bourgeoisie family’s comfortable suburban existence following the death of its patriarch, Russell Harbaugh’s Love After Love is a remarkably cool-headed, composed piece of work. Like John Magary’s The Mend, which Harbaugh helped conceive, this melancholic drama is marked by an acute focus on the quarrelsome collision of various family members’ ideas of themselves and each other, and it benefits from its nuanced, fully inhabited performances. But unlike The Mend, which is as abundant in frantic leaps in style as it is in mood swings, Love After Love displays a commitment to balance, consistency, and a persistent formal idea: In every scene, a steady camera observes Harbaugh’s characters from a careful distance on a zoom lens, and the cutting is dictated less by the tempo of their banter than by the turbulent pace of their inner lives. Lund


The Best Films of 2018 So Far

Loveless

Emotional reckonings certainly power Loveless, which could also serve as the title for any of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s other films. Newscasts establish the film as being set in 2012, referencing the American presidential election with Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, which seems poignantly quaint in light of current events that include Russia’s potential meddling in our elections. The chaos in Ukraine is most pointedly namedropped, however, suggesting that Boris (Aleksey Rosin) and Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) have inherited from their country an inability to discern a greater humanist picture beyond the curtain of their own bitterness. In the midst of political gamesmanship and warmongering, the proletariat is lost, like the couple’s 12-year-old son, Alexey (Matvey Novikov), who exits Loveless when no one’s looking. And the only monument to Alexey’s existence, his room, is as casually and callously destroyed as the protagonist’s home in Leviathan. Such destruction particularly enlivens Zvyagintsev’s formalism, which is rife with contradictions. The filmmaker rues chic and functional buildings while mourning empty, dilapidated structures as dignified totems of an awful past. Bowen


The Best Films of 2018 So Far

Milla

Valérie Massadian’s Milla begins with a stylistic bait-and-switch that neatly summarizes the film’s overall sense of formal balance. The delicate first shot, of two entwined lovers lying in the woods, is filtered through a gossamer-like haze and brings to mind a romantic painting for how it emanates a vastness around the carefully lit and positioned characters. The subsequent shot reveals that the silky glow of the previous composition originated from the fogged rear window of an old, cheap car. In effect, artifice is reined in by the quotidian. The rest of the film is an exploration of the space between these aesthetic poles of painterly formalism and direct realism, tracking the relationship of two teen lovers, Milla (Severine Jonckeere) and Leo (Luc Chessel), through the emotional mechanisms that make them human and allow them to deal with each other and their crippling poverty. Jake Cole

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The Best Films of 2018 So Far

November

In André Breton’s writings on surrealism, he envisions, and prescribes, a mode of fairy tale for adults rooted in juxtapositions so poetic and strange that they seem only possible in dreams. Or in the work of Rainer Sarnet, who crafts the uncanniest of fables in November. Based on a novel by Andrus Kivirähk, this gorgeously shot film is an intrepid portrait of an Estonian village inhabited by greedy old men, wise toothless hags, ghostly lovers, and anthropomorphic creatures made out of human hair and metal coils. November respects the logic and temporality of the unconscious. As such, it’s difficult to tell if the story takes place in medieval times or some dystopian future. Its impenetrable storylines take shape like most of its dialogue, bearing the enigmatic sparseness of poetic stanzas or ancient spells. There’s more to be enjoyed if one gets lost in the bewildering rhythm between eerie sounds and the black-and-white imagery, instead of trying to detangle the various strands of the surreal narrative. Diego Semerene


The Best Films of 2018 So Far

Paddington 2

It turns out that Paddington was merely a prelude to the gloriously daffy absurdism of Paddington 2, a wilder, weirder, funnier, more heartfelt and eye-popping, and, above all, more fully realized representation of Paul King’s eccentric sensibility. Fusing the pastry-shop aesthetic of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel with Chaplinesque slapstick and a whimsical, fable-like approach to narrative, King plops us into a world out of time—one full of carnivals, pop-up books, junk shops, steam engines, and calypso bands that magically appear out of nowhere to sing songs about window washing. In our current era of relentless vulgarity and endemic mistrust, Paddington 2 stands out for its atmosphere of homey cheer and profound belief in the harmonizing power of warmth, politeness, and the absurd. The magic of King’s film is that it doesn’t merely espouse these virtues, but embodies them in every lovingly crafted frame. Keith Watson


The Best Films of 2018 So Far

Revenge

Revenge’s lurid absurdity shames the faux-seriousness of many films with similar narratives. Coralie Fargeat co-opts and amuses herself with sexist pop-cultural archetypes: Jen (Matilda Lutz) turns into something like the Clint Eastwood character from High Plains Drifter, evolving into a killer phantom who’s somehow better with her boyfriend’s weapons than he is. And in case we miss the point, Jen cauterizes a wound with a heated beer can, tattooing a phoenix onto her belly. Rape actualizes Jen, flipping her from one male sexual fantasy (kept young mistress) to another (scantily clad badass). Such blatant sacrilege is intensified by Fargeat’s gift for frenzied imagery; the film’s desert scuffles evoke the overheated, camera-shuttling insanity of Oliver Stone’s U Turn. Bowen


The Best Films of 2018 So Far

Sollers Point

Matthew Porterfield’s Sollers Point is a moving and elusive blend of naturalism and melodrama, less a character study than an analysis of a community. Keith (McCaul Lombardi), an ex-con and former drug dealer, wanders his neighborhood in vignettes that illustrate the webbed connections existing between gangs of various ethnic backgrounds, junkies, retirees, educational administrators, and law enforcers. Most of the film’s great moments belong in Porterfield’s traditional observational wheelhouse. We learn that Keith’s house arrest is over via a long sequence in which he jogs through his neighborhood, as fluid compositions attest to his newfound and highly tenuous and qualified freedom. Sollers Point achieves a remarkable double awareness of how Keith sees life and how it actually is, capturing the alien-ness of being an addict or an ex-con. Porterfield’s compositions are beautiful, affirming, yet also distant, and to the point of occasionally reminding one of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films. Keith is understood to be a potentially unreachable architect of his own destruction, as he’s yearning for structure and drive—for love—that’s in front of him. Bowen

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The Best Films of 2018 So Far

Summer 1993

In the opening scene of Carla Simón’s autobiographical Summer 1993, the camera hangs behind the head of six-year-old Frida (Laia Artigas) as she watches fireworks exploding above. Frida’s upward gaze is appropriate given the film’s focus on events whose significance go over the girl’s head, foremost among them her move from Barcelona to a small Catalan village following the sudden death of her parents. The film prioritizes Frida’s inexpressible sense of displacement and anger throughout scenes between the girl and her aunt, Marga (Bruna Cusí), that function as tender expressions of empathy. It’s these moments shared between a young girl and her new guardian that will become the basis for Frida’s emerging identity in relation to her past. Summer 1993’s unwavering devotion to thoroughly realizing Frida’s childhood confusion isn’t a prelude to violence or grist for a twist ending. The small miracle of this film is how its engine runs on its maker’s desire to inhabit the rhythms of being a child who’s reckoning with traumatic emotions that are only beginning to emerge at the forefront of her consciousness. Clayton Dillard


The Best Films of 2018 So Far

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Early in Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, director Morgan Neville shows a clip from the 1968 premiere episode of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood in which the leader of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, a puppet named King Friday XIII, announces his plans to build a wall around his kingdom because of his fear of change. His pronouncement carries an obvious irony in light of president Donald Trump’s repeated calls for a wall at the Mexican border, and is certain to elicit knowing chuckles or heavy sighs from the film’s audience. But it’s the tension generated by the clashing notions that Fred Rogers was both an iconoclast in children’s entertainment and that his pleas for kindness, understanding, and basic human decency never quite took hold in American society that subtly colors the remainder of Neville’s documentary. If Neville tugs on the heartstrings a bit too often, it’s a small price to pay in providing a living, breathing example of love, tolerance, and openness to a world dead set on building walls rather than tearing them down. Derek Smith


The Best Films of 2018 So Far

Zama

How strange and apt that the year’s most sensorially and ideologically dense film is also a comedy of microaggressions, built on the minor workplace humiliations of a pencil-pusher in the 1790s. Just like the great 1956 Antonio di Benedetto novel it’s based upon, Zama is both sympathetic to and teasing of Don Diego de Zama’s (Daniel Giménez Cacho) impotence. His personality is as confused as his identity; he straddles multiple nations without quite belonging to any of them. Though Zama is both an embodiment and a deadpan critique of colonialism and its attendant violence, slavery, and racism—themes that reverberate through Lucrecia Martel’s more modern works about domesticity and class unrest, like La Ciénaga and The Headless Woman—he’s also a sap who’s drawn a poor lot. Christopher Gray

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