by Nathaniel R
I've been gleefully reading top ten lists for as long as I've loved movies. The first I waited for impatiently was in the Detroit Free Press in the 1980s and decades later I still love the impulse to live best movies, no matter how many people occassionally play contrarian to dismiss them as irrelevant and reductive. Top ten lists are definitely the latter but they're hardly the former, since what people value tells us so much about them and the idiosyncracies of individual top ten lists as well as occassional consensus across them are are especially beautiful if you love the magic that happens between any artform and its audience.
That said they'll make you crazy as often as they delight you. After the jump three early top ten lists worth discussing...
JOHN WATERS
The infamous film director's annual top ten for Artforum magazine is one of the most eccentric highlights of December each year. It's the only list that I can safely guarantee each and every time will have at least two movies I've never heard of on it. As you may have guess that's hard to do given how movie-centric my life is. His write-ups are always a joy so I've excerpted two of the ten below but you can read the whole thing here.
American Animals
10. Permanent Green Light (Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley)
9. Let it Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992 (John Ridley)
8. Sollers Point (Matthew Porterfield)
7. Custody (Xavier LeGrand)
Divorce, jealousy, misogyny, and physical abuse, topped off with psychological damage to children: This feel-bad movie of the year is so beautifully acted that it made me feel happy, happy, happy!
6. The Green Fog (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson)
5. Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada)
4. Mom & Dad (Brian Taylor)
3. Nico, 1988 (Susanna Nicchiarelli)
2. American Animals (Bart Layton)
1. Jeanette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (Bruno Dumont)
An insanely radical heavy-metal grade-school religious pageant that is sung in French from beginning to end. The actors themselves seem like they might burst out laughing, but this is no joke. It’s the best movie of the year. You’ll hate it.
STEPHANIE ZACHARECH
A wonderful wonderful critic who always has a way with words. But the actual message of those words sometimes has me shaking my head. I mean Bohemian Rhapsody in a list of 10 best? I feel ill even though her defense is relatably written. Two excerpts below and you can read the whole article here.
10. Paddington 2
09. Bohemian Rhapsody
It took forever for the thing to get made. Its director was fired during filming. (He had previously also been accused of sexual assault, which he denied.) Then the bad reviews poured in, focusing on the movie’s wooden dialogue and paint-by-numbers storytelling. But Bohemian Rhapsody, starring Rami Malek as Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury, has a luxuriant, potent energy that movies of “higher quality” rarely pull off. It may be a bit of a mess, but it’s a glorious one, a polychrome anthem about what it means to live for love and sex, rock ’n’ roll and beauty—the very opposite of sticking to an agenda.
08. If Beale Street Could Talk
07. A Star is Born
06. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
05. The Favourite
04. Eighth Grade
03. First Reformed
02. Won't You Be My Neighbor
01. Roma
This is a deeply personal film for Cuarón, but its embrace is universal: in telling his own story, he gets us thinking about the latticework of people who made each of us what we are. Roma is an ode to the power of memory, as intimate as a whisper and as vital as the roar of the sea.
DAVID ERLICH
He's a favorite primarily because he's totally idiosyncratic and also great at twitter. I rarely agree with his rankings (I think we'll only share two top ten entries) but whether or not you agree with a critic can be one of the least interesting things about following them. Plus he makes such wonderful videos that we are compelled to share them every year.
THE 25 BEST FILMS OF 2018: A VIDEO COUNTDOWN from david ehrlich on Vimeo.
The nuttiest juxtaposition in that delicious video ranking above is #8 and #7, If Beale Street Could Talk and Mission: Impossible - Fallout; the former couldn't be any more languorous in its pacing (its virtually art film parodic in this regard, which is one of the reasons I can't get into it) and the latter couldn't be any more try-hard aggressive about its kineticism (which is one of the reasons I don't love it quite as much as other critics since I think the comparatively effortless Ghost Protocol is more exciting).