Whenever it comes to forming a list of my favorite films of the year, I always think long and hard about the stories that affected me the most. What moved me? What shook me? What scared me? What made me laugh uncontrollably? What did I connect with the most, personally, and what films entered my life at a time when I really needed it the most?
When this year’s list began to materialize, I noticed a lot of the films had something in common: they were about coming of age, and they were about family. Whether it was a superhero movie about alternate dimensions or a horror movie about gnarly monsters triggered by sound, so many of the films you see below were really about trusting the ones you love and chasing the things you care about most. We currently live in a painfully divided world, and so it’s no surprise that my favorite films of the year were the ones that spoke in their own unique ways about how important it is that we come together and support one other.
These are my ten favorite films of 2018.
10. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
It may be an unexpected film about family because you spend most of the time watching in awe of Tom Cruise and lengths he will go to deliver a moviegoing experience unlike any you’ve ever encountered. However, one of the year’s fiercest action films is certainly about family – perhaps moreso than any of the previous installments. Fallout dazzles with death-defying stunts and fight scenes you feel in your bones, but always at its core is the teamwork between this makeshift family of super-spies. They bicker and they collaborate, and they often come a little too close to screwing it all up, but the day is not saved unless they all work together as a team and as a family.
9. Crazy Rich Asians
It’s tough to find an old-school romantic comedy that works in the modern age. People are cynical when it comes to love these days, and it’s the darker, more devious R-rated stories that win out over the less cynical fare that wears its heart on its sleeve. Crazy Rich Asians provides a terrific – and all-too-rare—stage for an all-Asian cast in a big-budget Hollywood production, but it’s also hopelessly romantic and that’s what’s refreshing about it.
The power of this film is that it’s funny and sexy and quoteable for the first two-thirds, and then it gets to that wedding scene. As “Can't Help Falling in Love” softly plays in the background and our two lovers lock eyes, you realize just how invested you are – not just in them, but in love and romance and happily ever after. The tear that drops down Rachel's (Constance Wu) face as she mouths the words, "I love you," is all of us wanting to feel that kind of moment. All around her is beauty, magic and spectacle, and yet she can't turn away from the man she adores. It's a movie moment for the ages, and it’s a moment that absolutely destroyed me. That scene is what took this film from being a good one to a great one.
8. Blockers
I truly feel that this comedy, about a group of high school girls who make a pact to lose their virginity at prom and the parents who band together to stop them at all costs, is one of the best teen sex comedies we’ve seen in quite a long time. Similar to the Hopelessly Romantic Comedy, like Crazy Rich Asians, the Teen Sex Comedy is rare these days, especially ones as funny and heartfelt as Blockers.
When John Cena attempted the butt chug, I just about lost it. And when Leslie Mann was stuck under that hotel bed as her daughter and her boyfriend were getting ready to do the deed, it was funny, nerve-wracking, humiliating and then so incredibly warm and wonderful. Blockers is an exceptional film about friends, family, growing up, figuring out who you want to be and, most of all, letting go of the past and embracing the future.... no matter how hard that is, DAD!
7. A Quiet Place
I don’t think anyone expected John Krasinski to direct the horror film of the year, but that’s the great thing about A Quiet Place – everything about it is unexpected. It’s a terrific set-up – aliens have invaded, and they attack when there’s sound. Making it small-scale, about how one family is not just coping with the death of their child, but also attempting to bring a new one into this alien-riddled world, is what makes it personal. Its brilliant use of sound feeds off the performances given by Krasinski, his real-life wife Emily Blunt and most especially Millicent Simmonds, and the outcome is super intense and uncomfortable - just how you want it to be.
6. Roma
Leave it to Alfonso Cuarón to go from creating an out-of-this-world epic set in space with Gravity, and then following it up with perhaps the most grounded movie of the year with Roma. Cuarón's stunning portrait of a marriage in turmoil and the nanny tasked with keeping things together for the family is both visually astounding and heartbreakingly emotional.
Every single frame feels meticulously crafted and bursting with life, while a cast made up of predominantly local non-actors lends an energetic authenticity that slowly builds throughout the film, eventually annihilating your tear ducts.
5. Black Panther
If you were to look for a film that truly defined 2018, it’d have to be Black Panther.
A ferociously action-packed superhero movie that embraced culture, family and diversity in a way that no other superhero film to date has been able to accomplish. Yes, it’s the first superhero film with an all-black cast, but Black Panther is so much more than its cast (who are spectacular, no doubt). It's vibrant and colorful, but also driven and purposeful. It’s entertaining and heroic, but also inspiring and full of hope. It brought people together; it broke records; it shattered expectations - and it proved that comic book stories could not only conquer the box office, but they can help change the world, too.
4. Eighth Grade
For his first feature, director Bo Burnham delivered one of the best coming-of-age movies in years. Burnham’s experience on YouTube as a rising social media star helped him bring a special kind of raw honesty to this story about a girl (newcomer Elsie Fisher) deliriously trapped in this moment between the innocence of her childhood and everything that comes next.
It’s funny, sweet, heartfelt, immensely relatable and extremely uncomfortable at times. The fact that Fisher was the same age as her character helps amplify the believability factor, and the way Burnham carefully and creatively weaves social media throughout the film is outstanding and is the best use of social media we’ve seen in a film to date.
3. If Beale Street Could Talk
For his follow-up to the Best Picture-winning Moonlight, Barry Jenkins adapted James Baldwin’s piercing novel about love, family and injustice, and in doing so supplied audiences with the year’s most soulful film. With its moody jazz-inspired score and an ensemble cast that roars with relatability and vulnerability, If Beale Street Could Talk is angry when it needs to be, and tender and romantic when it wants to be. Its two masterful lead performances from up-and-comers Stephan James and Kiki Layne drive forward a plot that’s not afraid to be lovely in one moment and disgusting in the next.
In the film’s most hopeful scene, Layne and James, as Tish and Fonny, swirl around one another outside a space they’ve chosen as their first home together. They’re experiencing pure joy, and as the score swells and their screams of happiness echo into the streets of New York City, you are completely swept up in the strength of their love. To me, it’s among the most powerful moments in a film this year, and it proves that Barry Jenkins has truly emerged as one of the greatest and most necessary storytellers of our time.
2. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
BROOKLYN!
Phil Lord and Chris Miller are masters when it comes to taking an existing property and reinventing it in a way that makes it feel fresh, alive and unlike anything you’ve seen before. They did it before with The Lego Movie and with 21 Jump Street, and now they’ve done it with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
Hands down the most comic book-y comic book movie of all time, Spider-Verse is a gorgeous, groundbreaking love letter to comics and the different iterations of a character you’ll see grace their pages over the years. At its core, this is a story about a boy learning to be a hero from a man who forgot how to be one, playing as both an origin story for Miles Morales and an aging Spider-Man story. It’s the most cleverly inventive superhero team-up movie yet, and while we may need a bit more distance from its release, I have a feeling this will ultimately go down as the best Spider-Man movie ever.
1. Won’t You Be My Neighbor
I don’t know if there’s a more important film this year than Won't You Be My Neighbor. There’s no way you sit through the entirety of this film and not want to try to be a better person –in general, sure, but to your friends, to your family, to your neighbors. It’s like the movie equivalent of a warm cup of tea, and that was Mr. Rogers in a nutshell, at least for me.
I grew up watching Mr. Rogers pretty much on the regular. He was a major constant in my life; a warm, comfortable cup of tea that soothed my soul and taught me some of the more fundamental life lessons, even if I didn’t exactly realize it at the time. I watched Mr. Rogers because there was something wonderfully engaging about him, and once I began watching him, I didn’t want to stop. I couldn’t stop.
This documentary captures that marvelously, and in a sense, it was the most personal coming-of-age film I watched this year because I don’t think I truly got what Mr. Rogers was actually attempting until I watched Won’t You Be My Neighbor. He is a man who had a profound effect on my entire sense of being when I was a child, but it wasn’t until I watched his story – his losses, his triumphs, his loves, his passions, his incredible commitment to carving out a better future for all of us by teaching our children to be kind to one another – that I realized this man was teaching me how to grow up in a world that was scary, troubling, angry, dangerous and divided.
In a way, he taught me how to be me.
There’s never been another Mr. Rogers, and I’m not sure there will ever be someone so pure and good-natured that everyone accepts and embraces them without cynicism. But if placing this film in the top spot on my list can encourage just a couple of people to go watch it and feel it, and then go back out into the world with a greater commitment to understanding and being kind to one another, then I’ve done my part and helped spread the message delivered to me by Mr. Rogers all those years ago.
Mr. Rogers saw the best in all of us, and I think we owe it to him to do everything we can to discover the best in each other.
