Top 10 of 2018

*Click on the ‘Lists & Logs’ tab to see lists from previous years.

This list will be updated each time I see a film from 2018 (world premiere/imdb date) that is better than at least one of the films already on the list.

  1. The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier)
  2. Climax (Gaspar Noé)
  3. The Image Book (Jean-Luc Godard)
  4. Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Bi Gan)
  5. Burning (Lee Chang-dong)
  6. L. COHEN (James Benning)
  7. High Life (Claire Denis)
  8. Our Time (Carlos Reygadas)
  9. Quantification Trilogy (Jeremy Shaw)
  10. Dragged Across Concrete (S. Craig Zahler)

 

Polls Top 10 (Eligible titles appear here.) (Note: This year I started including MUBI’s [and other VOD services’] streaming-only releases on this list.)

  1. The House That Jack Built (2018, Lars von Trier)
  2. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (2017, Bruno Dumont)
  3. Mrs. Hyde (2017, Serge Bozon)
  4. Burning (2018, Lee Chang-dong)
  5. The Dreamed Path (2016, Angela Schanelec)
  6. Streetscapes [Dialogue] (2017, Heinz Emigholz)
  7. 24 Frames (2017, Abbas Kiarostami)
  8. Caniba (2017, Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel)
  9. Ready Player One (2018, Steven Spielberg)
  10. First Reformed (2017, Paul Schrader)

 

My Top 10 Discoveries During 2018 (for first-time viewings of films made before 2000)

  1. A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea (1991, Stan Brakhage)
  2. Daisy Kenyon (1947, Otto Preminger)
  3. The Text of Light (1974, Stan Brakhage)
  4. Hatari! (1962, Howard Hawks)
  5. Tortured Dust (1984, Stan Brakhage)
  6. Flesh for Frankenstein (1973, Paul Morrissey)
  7. The Heartbreak Kid (1972, Elaine May)
  8. Treasure of the Four Crowns (1983, Ferdinando Baldi)
  9. Anticipation of the Night (1958, Stan Brakhage)
  10. Amityville 3-D (1983, Richard Fleischer)

 

Other 2018 films I’ve seen

  • Black Mother (Khalik Allah) – 6.9
  • Donbass (Sergei Loznitsa) – 6.8
  • Ready Player One (Steven Spielberg) – 6.7
  • Sand (Tsai Ming-liang) – 6.6
  • Asako I & II (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi) – 6.6
  • The Grand Bizarre (Jodie Mack) – 6.6
  • Green Book (Peter Farrelly) – 6.6
  • I Can See Forever (Jeremy Shaw) – 6.5
  • Mission: Impossible—Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie) – 6.5
  • In My Room (Ulrich Köhler) – 6.5
  • In the Realm of Perfection (Julien Faraut) – 6.5
  • BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee) – 6.5
  • La Flor (Mariano Llinas) – 6.4
  • Segunda Vez (Dora García) – 6.4
  • Hotel by the River (Hong Sang-soo) – 6.4
  • Coincoin and the Extra-Humans (Bruno Dumont) – 6.3
  • An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo) – 6.3
  • Classical Period (Ted Fendt) – 6.3
  • Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham) – 6.3
  • Spice It Up (Lev and Yonah Lewis & Calvin Thomas) – 6.3
  • Transit (Christian Petzold) – 6.2
  • Ash is Purest White (Jia Zhang-ke) – 6.2
  • Non-Fiction (Olivier Assayas) – 6.2
  • Private Life (Tamara Jenkins) – 6.1
  • Welcome to Marwen (Robert Zemeckis) – 6.1
  • Monrovia, Indiana (Frederick Wiseman) – 6.0
  • Petra (Jaime Rosales) – 6.0
  • Support the Girls (Andrew Bujalski) – 5.9
  • Jinpa (Pema Tseden) – 5.9
  • M/M (Drew Lint) – 5.9
  • Winter’s Night (Jang Woo-jin) – 5.9
  • Peterloo (Mike Leigh) – 5.8
  • Notes on an Appearance (Ricky D’Ambrose) – 5.8
  • Communion Los Angeles (Peter Bo Rappmund & Adam R. Levine) – 5.8
  • Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Marielle Heller) – 5.8
  • Sedução da Carne (Júlio Bressane) – 5.8
  • Infinite Football (Corneliu Porumboiu) – 5.8
  • Girl (Lukas Dhont) – 5.8
  • Happy as Lazzaro (Alice Rohrwacher) – 5.7
  • Game Night (John Francis Daley & Jonathan M. Goldstein) – 5.7
  • The Wolf House (Joaquín Cociña & Cristóbal León) – 5.7
  • Widows (Steve McQueen) – 5.7
  • Unfriended: Dark Web (Stephen Susco) – 5.6
  • Ayka (Sergey Dvortsevoy) – 5.6
  • Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda) – 5.6
  • The Old Man & the Gun (David Lowery) – 5.6
  • A Star is Born (Bradley Cooper) – 5.6
  • Mid90s (Jonah Hill) – 5.6
  • Hale County This Morning, This Evening (RaMell Ross) – 5.6
  • Madeline’s Madeline (Josephine Decker) – 5.6
  • The Load (Ognjen Glavonic) – 5.6
  • Acid Forest (Rugile Barzdžiukaite) – 5.6
  • Treasure Island (Guillaume Brac) – 5.6
  • ROOM H.264: Brooklyn, NY, June 2016 (Jeff Reichert, Damon Smith, & Eric Hynes) – 5.6
  • Piercing (Nicolas Pesce) – 5.5
  • Grass (Hong Sang-soo) – 5.5
  • Upgrade (Leigh Whannell) – 5.5
  • Thunder Road (Jim Cummings) – 5.5
  • Greta (Neil Jordan) – 5.4
  • What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? (Roberto Minervini) – 5.4
  • Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley) – 5.4
  • The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos) – 5.4
  • Maya (Mia Hansen-Løve) – 5.4
  • At War (Stéphane Brizé) – 5.4
  • Memento Stella (Takashi Makino) – 5.3
  • Belmonte (Federico Veiroj) – 5.3
  • Minding the Gap (Bing Liu) – 5.3
  • N.O.N. (Zebulon Zang) – 5.3
  • Ten Years Thailand (Assarat, Sasanatieng, Sriphol, & Weerasethakul) – 5.3
  • Casanova Gene (Luise Donschen) – 5.3
  • The Dead and the Others (João Salaviza & Renée Nader Messora) – 5.3
  • ROMA (Alfonso Cuarón) – 5.2
  • RAY & LIZ (Richard Billingham) – 5.2
  • The Mule (Clint Eastwood) – 5.2
  • 3 Faces (Jafar Panahi) – 5.2
  • Everything Outside (David Findlay) – 5.2
  • The Last Race (Michael Dweck) – 5.2
  • To the Ends of the World (Guillaume Nicloux) – 5.1
  • The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles) – 5.1
  • A Faithful Man (Louis Garrel) – 5.1
  • If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins) – 5.1
  • The Pluto Moment (Ming Zhang) – 5.1
  • First Man (Damian Chazelle) – 5.0
  • The Wild Pear Tree (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) – 5.0
  • Roi Soleil (Albert Serra) – 5.0
  • Buy Me a Gun (Julio Hernández Cordón) – 5.0
  • Your Face (Tsai Ming-liang) – 4.9
  • In Fabric (Peter Strickland) – 4.9
  • Season of the Devil (Lav Diaz) – 4.9
  • They Shall Not Grow Old (Peter Jackson) – 4.9
  • Sauvage (Camille Vidal-Naquet) – 4.9
  • Unsane (Steven Soderbergh) – 4.9
  • Meeting Gorbachev (Werner Herzog & André Singer) – 4.9
  • Cold War (Pawel Pawlikowski) – 4.9
  • Isle of Dogs (Wes Anderson) – 4.9
  • A Land Imagined (Siew Hua Yeo) – 4.9
  • Touch Me Not (Adina Pintilie) – 4.9
  • Border (Ali Abbasi) – 4.9
  • Black Panther (Ryan Coogler) – 4.8
  • Destroyer (Karyn Kusama) – 4.8
  • Roads in February (Katherine Jerkovic) – 4.8
  • Introduzione All’Oscuro (Gastón Solnicki) – 4.8
  • Diamantino (Gabriel Abrantes & Daniel Schmidt) – 4.7
  • Her Smell (Alex Ross Perry) – 4.7
  • Annihilation (Alex Garland) – 4.7
  • Vox Lux (Brady Corbet) – 4.7
  • Bisbee ’17 (Robert Greene) – 4.7
  • Dogman (Matteo Garrone) – 4.7
  • The Tale (Jennifer Fox) – 4.7
  • Mangoshake (Terry Chiu) – 4.7
  • Sorry Angel (Christophe Honoré) – 4.6
  • Leave No Trace (Debra Granik) – 4.6
  • Too Late to Die Young (Dominga Sotomayor) – 4.6
  • The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel & Ethan Coen) – 4.6
  • The River (Emir Baigazin) – 4.6
  • When the Storm Fades (Sean Devlin) – 4.6
  • The New Romantic (Carly Stone) – 4.6
  • Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (Ol Parker) – 4.5
  • The Trial (Sergei Loznitsa) – 4.5
  • Capernaum (Nadine Labaki) – 4.5
  • Knife + Heart (Yann Gonzalez) – 4.4
  • Hereditary (Ari Aster) – 4.4
  • Dovlatov (Alexey German Jr.) – 4.4
  • Girls of the Sun (Eva Husson) – 4.4
  • Fausto (Andrea Bussmann) – 4.3
  • Mandy (Panos Cosmatos) – 4.3
  • Diane (Kent Jones) – 4.2
  • The 15:17 to Paris (Clint Eastwood) – 4.1
  • Crazy Rich Asians (Jon M. Chu) – 4.1
  • Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino) – 4.1
  • The Far Shore (David Uloth) – 4.1
  • Birds of Passage (Cristina Gallego & Ciro Guerra) – 4.1
  • The Mountain (Rick Alverson) – 4.0
  • The Museum of Forgotten Triumphs (Bojan Bodružić) – 4.0
  • Everybody Knows (Asghar Farhadi) – 4.0
  • The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Desiree Akhavan) – 4.0
  • Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings (Tsui Hark) – 3.9
  • A Family Tour (Ying Liang) – 3.9
  • Song of a Seer (Aïda Maigre-Touchet) – 3.9
  • Under the Silver Lake (David Robert Mitchell) – 3.9
  • The Land of Steady Habits (Nicole Holofcener) – 3.8
  • Freaks (Zach Lipovsky & Adam Stein) – 3.8
  • Sunset (László Nemes) – 3.7
  • Victory Day (Sergei Loznitsa) – 3.6
  • Summer (Kirill Serebrennikov) – 3.6
  • Firecrackers (Jasmin Mozaffari) – 3.5
  • Yomeddine (A.B. Shawky) – 3.5
  • The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (Xavier Dolan) – 3.4
  • Aniara (Pella Kågerman & Hugo Lilja) – 3.2
  • Wildlife (Paul Dano) – 3.0
  • Anthem of a Teenage Prophet (Robin Hays) – 2.9
  • Clara (Akash Sherman) – 2.8
  • The Grizzlies (Miranda de Pencier) – 2.3