2018 favorites

It's July 7, 2019. I've had this in my drafts for half a year. Here it is! Unfinished and untouched; a capsule of how I felt on January 1, 2019 about the previous year's films.

My top 20 films of 2018

Dead Souls (Wang Bing)

The 15:17 to Paris (Clint Eastwood)

Altiplano (Malena Szlam)

Black Panther (Ryan Coogler)

Detective Dee and the Four Heavenly Kings (Tsui Hark)

Ready Player One (Steven Spielberg)

First Man (Damien Chazelle)

Angel of Death 3D (Nadine Smith)

Shadow (Zhang Yimou)

Been Busy (Jhon Hernandez)

Unsane (Steven Soderbergh)

Creed II (Steven Caple Jr.)

Transit (Christian Petzold)

The Commuter (Jaume Collet-Serra)

Vent d’ouest (anonymous, possibly Jean-Luc Godard)

Shoot the Moon Right Between the Eyes (Graham Carter)

BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee)

Que le diable nouse emporte (Jean-Claude Brisseau)

Game Night (John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein)

The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles & The Almighty Algorithm)

This was a great year for American studio productions. I also enjoyed A Star Is Born, Ant-Man and the Wasp, The Post, Tomb Raider, Death Wish, Mission Impossible: Fallout, A Simple Favor, and Venom.

And an interesting year for personal essay films and what Catherine Russel calls archiveologies, specifically personal archival practices. I didn't care for all of these films, but they are close to my heart and my own stalled experiments in filmmaking: From Its Mouth Came a River of High-End Residential Appliances, Optimism, Harry Smith at the Breslin Hotel, Spring Masks, and Disintegration 93-96.