Here is my list of films for 2018, and in this exact order.
1) Sicario: Day of the Soldado by Stefano Sollima
The future will see this masterpiece of early 21st century cinema as standing to Sicario (2015) exactly how Aliens stands to Alien. The latter does not better the former, but leads the original concepts into completely new directions. Indeed, it is interesting that the director of Sicario made the second part of Alien-director’s second Hollywood film, Blade Runner, but without the success of the director of Aliens. But Sicario: Day of the Soldado is how you make a movie when you got that studio money. That ending. That hellish blaring. The scorched landscape. The helicopters of empire. I saw nothing better this year than this massive movie.
2) Shoplifters by Hirokazu Kore-eda
Much of the film is spent in their crowded little house. Clothes and useless goods are heaped on the floor, the bathroom is dirty, the kitchen is too tiny. The family eats a lot of ramen. But this life of poverty has its pleasures. The table conversations are lively. The house has a small garden. There is a trip to the beach. The boy thief has a growing crush on the girl thief. The parents have steamy sex during a rainstorm.
3) Beauty and the Dogs by Kaouther Ben Hania
This is the first outstanding film I have seen in 2018. It’s set in Tunisia, has nine chapters (each composed of one take), happens over one night, and concerns the rape of a young woman, a university student named Mariam (Mariam Al Ferjani). Actually, the film is not so much about the rape as it is about Mariam’s dogged effort to report it and make it official. Everything is against her.
4) Sorry to Bother You by Boots Riley
This [review] will not be about that huge horse-like cock that appears in the excellent film Sorry to Bother You. I will indeed ignore it (for now) and turn your attention to that floating apartment in the middle of the movie. I will not explain the posh apartment’s function in the plot or how it ends up in the center of Oakland, which is now gentrified because San Francisco is the most expensive city in the US. But this post, which promises to be brief and not to refer to critical theory of any kind, will explain what it is that makes this apartment float.
5) Sweet Country by Warwick Thornton
Sweet Country does not fuck around. It gets right to it: the brutal colonization of Australia. Set in the 1920s in the outback of the Northern Territory, the film is about a black man, his black wife, and their black daughter, and the family’s religious instructor, a white man. It’s not paradise, but they manage to get along. One day, an alcoholic and rock-hard racist ex-soldier shows up and makes the black man work for nothing, rapes his wife, and considers raping their daughter. Eventually, the black man kills the white man. And this begins a time of trouble that ends with this question: How will Australia survive this madness?
