Top 10 movies of 2018
Some movies made us laugh, some made us cry and some taught us a little something about ourselves. These are the best flicks of 2018.
From the hundreds of movies released every year, only a few will really stand out — the ones that made us laugh, cry and cower in fear, or taught us something new about ourselves or the people around us.
The best movies don’t just entertain us, they reveal a little of their soul, and of the best and worst of humanity.
Here are our picks for the 10 best movies released in Australia in 2018 (in no particular order). If you haven’t seen them yet, do everything you can to seek them out.
Director Damien Chazelle’s biopic of Neil Armstrong, starring Ryan Gosling, is a stunning film where everything works in symphony. It’s much more a personal story than it is another space adventure and Gosling nails the closed-off character with an understated but affecting performance.
From the superlative performances to Chazelle’s ambitious vision and technical achievements, and the care and attention infused in every scene, First Man is an incredible accomplishment that can, at times, be emotionally crushing.
The semi-autobiographical story of Oscar-winning director Alfonso Cuaron’s childhood growing up in Mexico City, Roma is both intimate and grand. Set around the character of Cleo, a maid serving a middle-class family, the film is a tender tribute to Cuaron’s real-life nanny, whose memories of that time he used for the screenplay. He also deftly ties the changes and anxieties in Cleo’s life to the wider social upheaval of the era.
Cuaron shot it in crisp black-and-white and every frame is filled with incredible depth and detail — it’s a gorgeous-to-look-at film with a beautiful naturalism. Roma is a magnificent piece of cinema, a jawdropping, rewarding movie that emotionally connects on several levels.
Set in the interwar era in the Northern Territory outback, Sweet Country is the story of Sam Kelly (Hamilton Morris), a quiet and unassuming Aboriginal man who kills a white land owner in self defence, forcing him on the run from the law.
A subtle but breathtaking piece of work, Warwick Thornton’s film stabs right at the heart of Australian identity and the heartbreak that built this country, told through a wrenching tale of justice and injustice. At times transcendent and at times deeply uncomfortable, Sweet Country is Australian filmmaking at its best.
A smart, coming-of-age tale about an opinionated teen in her final year of high school, Lady Bird is easily one of the best movies of 2018 thanks to its sophisticated tone and rhythm, plus superlative performances from Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf. Greta Gerwig’s movie flows from one perfect beat to the next, putting a smile on your face.
It’s almost too hard to write about Lady Bird, precisely because it’s so wonderful that no words could possibly capture its spirit and convey why this film absolutely has to be seen, and loved. It demands it.
A brilliant showcase for three supremely talented actors — Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone — The Favourite is not like any costume drama you’ve seen before. Based on the real-life power tussle between Queen Anne and two of her courtiers, Lady Sarah Marlborough and Abigail Hill, The Favourite is exactly the kind of period piece you’d expect from Yorgos Lanthimos, the man behind eclectic hits The Lobster and The Killing Of A Sacred Deer.
The Favourite is biting and brimming with deliciously venomous passive-aggression — every insult, jab and line of dialogue will have you sniggering with guilt-laden joy. At the core of the film are these complex female characters, every bit as awful and nasty as any man, as they fight and scheme to come out on top.
It’s rare to come across a film that is both brilliant and brilliantly entertaining. Widows is that film — a compelling mix of action blockbuster and gravitas. The story is centred on a group of women whose criminal husbands die mid-job, leaving them to finish it — using the sexism of lowered expectations to their advantage.
Steve McQueen has proven himself a prodigious filmmaker and he has crafted an extraordinary film that is wildly entertaining with thrilling car chases, explosions and tense heist sequences. As always, Viola Davis’ performance is fierce, confident and vulnerable — when Davis is hurting or raging, you feel it, her emotions jump off the screen and reverberate.
In 1972, an African-American rookie cop in Colorado Springs infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan. Along with a Jewish detective, the two of them convince the local chapter that they’re a white guy named Ron Stallworth, with the same hideous attitudes towards race. It’s a bizarre story but it also happens to be true.
BlacKkKlansman is not a comedy but it is funny, it’s not a horror movie but it is horrifying, it’s a period movie but it is chillingly relevant to 2018. It’s tense, hair-raising and distressing, but above all, what you sense is director Spike Lee’s palpable, unmistakeable rage at where Americans find themselves in 2018.
If American Animals had just been a dramatisation of the true story of four middle-class college boys trying to pull off a daring library heist, it would’ve been perfectly satisfying — a gripping movie that simultaneously asks what it means to have a “significant life” while delivering electrifying thrills.
But director Bart Layton did one better — he created an innovative hybrid model of merging the narrative drama with documentary conventions by slicing in pieces-to-camera of the real-life subjects alongside the actors. It’s an experiment in authorship, the fallibility of memory and retrospection, one that the film pulls off sensationally.
A silly action flick like Mission: Impossible — Fallout isn’t a likely candidate for one of the best movies of the year, but this was the most entertaining two hours (and some change) spent in a cinema in 2018. Twenty-two years in, this franchise is still so successful at thrilling audiences with its mad daredevil stunts, heart-thumping action sequences and its promise of a bloody good time.
Because how do you argue with a movie that pummels you with insane helicopter chases, intense hand-to-hand combat, a riveting motorcycle chase across Paris and more Tom Cruise running than you’ve ever seen before? You can’t. You just can’t. All the more impressive because they were practical stunts in an age of ubiquitous green screens — it creates a real sense of jeopardy for the audience.
This low-key, quiet Japanese movie gets to the heart of what makes a family: The people you’re arbitrarily born to or the ones you choose? When a family, surviving on shoplifting and grandma’s pension, sees a little girl neglected by her parents, out in the cold, they take her in and informally adopt her.
Shoplifters is almost an anthropological look at outsiders in one of the world’s most modern cities — maybe that sounds heavy, but it’s not. It’s never cloying or trite, preferring a subtle emotionality that’s sparingly used. It takes great skill to make a movie with as many layers of significance to be as light on its feet as it is. A work of grace and empathy.
Honourable mentions: The Old Man & The Gun, A Star Is Born, Searching, Leave No Trace, Crazy Rich Asians, The Wife, Foxtrot, Hereditary, Isle Of Dogs, A Quiet Place, Annihilation, Game Night, Black Panther, The Shape Of Water and Loveless.
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