*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.
- The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier)
- Climax (Gaspar Noé)
- The Image Book (Jean-Luc Godard)
- Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Bi Gan)
- Burning (Lee Chang-dong)
- L. COHEN (James Benning)
- High Life (Claire Denis)
- Our Time (Carlos Reygadas)
- Quantification Trilogy (Jeremy Shaw)
- 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.)
- The House That Jack Built (2018, Lars von Trier)
- Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (2017, Bruno Dumont)
- Mrs. Hyde (2017, Serge Bozon)
- Burning (2018, Lee Chang-dong)
- The Dreamed Path (2016, Angela Schanelec)
- Streetscapes [Dialogue] (2017, Heinz Emigholz)
- 24 Frames (2017, Abbas Kiarostami)
- Caniba (2017, Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel)
- Ready Player One (2018, Steven Spielberg)
- First Reformed (2017, Paul Schrader)
My Top 10 Discoveries During 2018 (for first-time viewings of films made before 2000)
- A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea (1991, Stan Brakhage)
- Daisy Kenyon (1947, Otto Preminger)
- The Text of Light (1974, Stan Brakhage)
- Hatari! (1962, Howard Hawks)
- Tortured Dust (1984, Stan Brakhage)
- Flesh for Frankenstein (1973, Paul Morrissey)
- The Heartbreak Kid (1972, Elaine May)
- Treasure of the Four Crowns (1983, Ferdinando Baldi)
- Anticipation of the Night (1958, Stan Brakhage)
- 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
- Free Solo (Jimmy Chin & Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi) – 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