10. The Breadwinner
(dir. Nora Twomey)
Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon’s two previous films
(one of which, the delightful Song of the
Sea, made it onto my top 10 list a couple of years back) are deeply rooted
in Irish history and mythology. For
their third offering (albeit one with heavy backing from both Canada and
Luxembourg), they’ve gone off on a completely different tack, adapting a
children’s novel set in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan just before the 2001
war. It focuses on a family whose father,
Nurullah, is unjustly arrested, leaving the mother, two daughters and infant
son trapped inside because the women can’t venture outside without a male
chaperone. Parvana, the younger
daughter, starts cross-dressing in order to earn money hawking in the market
and buy food while they try to figure out how to bring about Nurullah’s
release, if he’s even still alive.
Not the most
obvious subject for an animated film, but its gorgeous craftsmanship helps to
make the bleaker parts of the story more bearable and, more importantly, it
never truly loses hope. Wryly and
wittily commenting on Afghanistan’s lot (a prologue points out how the
country’s location has meant it always seems to be fought over by someone or
other while actual Afghans just try to make do while dodging the bullets), it
also provides breaks via the folklore story Parvana tells her baby brother in
instalments, a story of a young boy tasked with placating a terrible elephant
king terrorising a village. Animated in
a distinctive cut-out style, these sequences provide a bit of visual and
thematic variation while gradually becoming more entwined with the main movie.
It’s an elegant,
dignified film that never trivialises its subject but never loses its
optimistic humanity either. It’ll be
interesting to see what Cartoon Saloon does next.
9. Avengers: Infinity War (dirs. Anthony and Joe Russo)
I’ve mentioned Marvel Cinematic Universe films several times
in these yearly round-ups, but they’ve never quite made it into the top
10. That’s because an MCU film will
always be thoroughly entertaining, but also somewhat homogenised, and rarely feeling
like a film in its own right instead of an episode of the world’s most lavish
TV series. Well, weirdly enough, when
they smush nearly every character from every film into one extravaganza, a
coherent and excellent film pops out the other end.
Infinity War may not make the most sense
if you’ve not been keeping up, but happily I have. (If you haven’t, don’t worry – you only
really need to have seen Avengers: Age of
Ultron, Thor: Ragnorok, Captain America: Civil War, both Guardians of the Galaxy films, maybe Black Panther and arguably Spider-Man: Homecoming and Doctor Strange to follow
everything. Easy! In fairness, I think they do a fair job of
recapping but honestly I know this pointless nerd stuff well enough that I
can’t tell any more.) Anyway, it tells
the tale of big purple alien fellow Thanos, who is understandably concerned
with overpopulation. As a thoroughly
logical eco-warrior, he’s decided the thing to do is to gather the six Infinity
Stones, which when combined can do anything you can think of. So he’s going to use them to kill half the
population of the universe. Simple! (No-one tell him how quickly rabbits breed or
he’ll start doing this every year.)
Anyway, since two of these Infinity Stones are currently on Earth (in
Benedict Cumberbatch’s necklace and Paul Bettany’s forehead, specifically),
that’s where the big lilac lug is off to next on his intergalactic jolly. Sounds like an excellent excuse for a
punch-up.
The smart thing that Infinity War does is make Thanos the protagonist. It’s his quest that we’re following, and it
makes a clear throughline for a movie that has *counts* nineteen starring
actors listed on the poster. It’s also
actually helpful that this is the *counts* nineteenth MCU movie as it means
that whenever we cut to a new scene it’ll be starring people you should in
theory know plenty about. It’s an
excellent deployment of that most classic of comic book tropes, the big ol’
team-up. By splitting the goodies into
teams of three, we get the delights of Iron Man trying to follow the leaps of
logic deployed by Drax and Mantis, or Thor and Rocket Raccoon unexpectedly
becoming best friends. For a film about
galaxy-spanning genocide, it’s really
funny. And in ending on a genuinely
shocking cliffhanger, it proves the MCU is a neat counterpoint to the “too many
cooks” adage.
8. The Children Act
(dir. Richard Eyre)
A film based on an Ian McEwan novel starring Emma Thompson
is unlikely to ever be a waste of time, and so it proves here. McEwan himself provided the screenplay from
his 2014 work focusing on the veteran judge Fiona Maye, a specialist in family
law, who hears the case of Adam, a 17-year-old with leukaemia. He requires a blood transfusion but he and
his parents are refusing as they’re Jehovah’s Witnesses. As he’s so close to his 18th
birthday Adam is still legally a child, but the question’s there as to whether
in this case his parents are overruling his best interests on religious
grounds. As Maye, Thompson is
predictably excellent, and upcoming actor Fionn Whitehead does a good job as
Adam, a part that could quite easily go wrong.
The film’s restrained style insulates against the occasionally
melodramatic plotting, and the top-notch cast provide a meaty drama without
easy answers.
7. The Happy Prince
(dir. Rupert Everett)
A film about the last days of Oscar Wilde is so utterly
perfect a fit for Rupert Everett it’s no surprise to learn this has been a
passion project he’s been trying to get made for over a decade. Happily, the wait was worth it – this is an
excellent film, and a great directorial debut for Everett while he’s at
it. As with The Children Act, it’s a little bit of a case of “point talented
actor at perfectly cast role and job’s a good ‘un”, but Everett skilfully
navigates the script’s relatively complex chronologies (there are multiple
flashbacks to different moments of Wilde’s life while the main narrative
advances towards his death) and, importantly, never makes it into a vanity
vehicle. The result is an affecting,
intelligent portrait of a complicated man and a great case of good things
coming to those who wait.
6. The Death of Stalin
(dir. Armando Iannucci)
Another film about the death of a very famous man, but one
that’s a bit different to The Happy
Prince. First off, Stalin croaks it
at the beginning. Second off, it’s very,
very funny. And dark. But funny.
Iannucci takes the chaos that was caused in the USSR by Stalin’s death
and plays it as the blackest of satires – basically like The Thick of It, except with people getting shot for no reason. The brilliant ensemble cast take the
rapid-fire, helter-skelter politics and run with it to its utmost, resulting in
a film that’s as hilarious as it is horrifying.
Simon Russell Beale and Michael Palin just about turn in the standout
performances, but everyone’s bringing their A game here.
5. Thoroughbreds
(dir. Cory Finley)
Last year when discussing the excellent The Limehouse Golem, I predicted great things from Olivia
Cooke. I was not wrong. First she cheerfully walks off with Spielberg’s
good-but-not-great Ready Player One,
turning a pretty flat love-interest character into the best thing in the film,
then she delivers a delicious Becky Sharp in ITV’s adaptation of Vanity Fair. And in between those two, this little gem
snuck under the radar.
Here Cooke’s Amanda,
an American teen with a still-under-diagnosis condition that means she doesn’t
really have emotions. She reconnects
with an old childhood friend, Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) as her tutor, but the pair
eventually start re-bonding and quickly become each other’s enablers. Which is a problem as Lily loathes her
stepfather and starts to wonder if she can enlist Amanda’s help to bump him
off.
Taylor-Joy’s
another up-and-coming star who always puts in the best of performances, and
teaming her and Cooke up is an icy delight.
The script from first-time director Finley’s also great – interestingly,
it was initially intended for a stage play.
While you can see its theatrical roots in its small cast and few
locations, it’s certainly filmic, with some fantastic tracking shots wandering
round Lily’s house. And it has what
might be the best sequence in cinema this year, which consists solely of a slow
zoom in on a sleeping character with some sound effects in the background.
(I was going to
make a “too many Cookes” joke here but then I realised I’ve already done it.)
4. Lady Bird (dir.
Greta Gerwig)
Another excellent film about teenage life from a first-time
director, but this one has a much warmer heart.
Gerwig, long established as an excellent actor and writer, proves she’s
no slouch behind the lens here (seriously, what is it with 2018 and brilliant
first-time directors?) with this utterly charming tale of a thoroughly ordinary
life.
Gerwig’s said
something along the lines of “none of this happened, but it’s all true”, and it’s
a very neat summation. Focusing on a
year in the life of one Christine McPherson, who insists on being called Lady
Bird with all the misplaced determination of adolescence, it feels very real
indeed. Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan, who
must have the best agent ever because I have literally never seen her in a film
that wasn’t excellent) is coming close to graduation and desperately wants to attend
a fancy university at a “city of culture”.
She navigates boyfriends, friends and a very fraught relationship with
her mother (the always-brilliant Laurie Metcalfe, excelling even more than
usual here) with a level of self-absorption that should be offputting but
instead comes off as very honest. Given
that Gerwig lived in Sacramento (the city the film’s set in) growing up,
graduated in 2002 (the year the film’s set) and went off to study in New York
(guess how the film ends), it’s hard not to see this as a disguised
autobiopic. And that means it does,
indeed, feel very true.
3. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (dir. Martin McDonagh)
Another film with a protagonist that you occasionally want
to throttle, but one with a darker, sadder story. Mildred Hayes is a woman whose daughter was
raped and murdered; as the time drags on with no sign of a culprit, she hires
out three billboards near her house castigating the police chief over the lack
of progress in the case. The move keeps
public interest in the case alive, but makes her many enemies in the town.
Mildred is a woman
made flinty by her experiences – you understand her anger but you don’t always
condone it. She’s played by Frances
McDormand because of course she is; McDormand’s astonishing because of course
she is. The surrounding cast wisely don’t
try to upstage her, and the resulting honesty of the film’s central performance
keeps you hooked through the occasionally unlikely plot points. Add in a dash of McDonagh’s trademark jet-black
humour and you’ve got another great film in a year filled with superbly
well-rounded protagonists.
2. They Shall Not Grow Old (dir. Peter Jackson)
It feels kind of crass to put a film like this in a top 10
countdown but I am nothing if not crass.
So here’s Jackson’s astonishing documentary/filmic archaeology project. Jackson’s long been a proponent of the
cutting edge of film tech, even when no-one else cares (hi, The Hobbit’s high frame rates!) and he’s
here yoked his technical and artistic eye for a special work to mark the 100th
anniversary of World War I’s end.
The film consists
entirely of photography and film captured in and around the front lines of the
war – the original black-and-white footage has been given as thorough a
clean-up as is possible. First of all,
the flaws in the prints have been corrected.
Plus, it’s been colourised – but the real trick is to do with, yes,
frame rates. The original footage ran at
13 frames per second, resulting in the jerky footage we all associate with very
old film clips. Here’s where Jackson’s
technical obsessions come in, as he and his crew have painstakingly created and
inserted additional frames, pushing the frame rate up to the standard of 24 per
second. The result, when added to
judiciously placed sound effects, makes the footage feel, well, real. And all the more astonishing and devastating for
it.
And, happily,
Jackson’s artistic side has come out too.
He’s made the wise decision to avoid a narrator or indeed impose any
narrative lines to artificially order things – what we get is audio clips,
captured by the BBC and the Imperial War Museum, from interviews with
soldiers. The one genius addition is to
hire lip readers to work out what the soldiers were saying as they were being
filmed, then have some actors lip-sync to the footage. That’s it.
And that’s all that’s needed, just the remarkably curated footage and
the voices of those who were there. It’s
an incredible, moving piece of work.
That’s right, I’m so crass that They Shall Not Grow Old loses its top spot to a film that wasn’t
even out in 2018. Sorry, but I didn’t
see this in cinemas in 2017 and my local arts centre showed it in February (on
Valentine’s Day, for whatever hidden meanings you can discern there) so it
counts for my 2018 list.
I don’t really rate
the original Blade Runner, which I
know is heresy for a film nerd and a nerd nerd, but there we are. It’s, you know, fine. But this belated sequel I unexpectedly adore.
Thirty years on
from Rutger Hauer talking about the weather, we meet K, a replicant (robot, for
those of you not following at the back) blade runner (someone who tracks down
renegade robots, keep up) who stumbles across something that should be
impossible – the skeleton of a replicant that seems to have given birth. He’s quickly sent off to track down this unfeasible
issue, in a quest that will almost certainly see him bump into Harrison Ford on
the latter’s latest round of reviving his classic ‘80s roles.
This is not a film
that should work – a twenty-five-years-later sequel to a film that didn’t
especially ask for a sequel in an era where seemingly every film must be part
of a lengthy sequence or based on something else or a remake of something else
or just BE SOMETHING THAT PEOPLE KNOW BECAUSE PEOPLE DON’T LIKE NEW THINGS
DAMMIT, it probably should have crashed and burned. Instead, it’s a gripping, thoughtful,
beautiful piece of work. Quite apart
from finally getting Roger Deakins
his Best Cinematography Oscar, it succeeds in the two key aims of science
fiction cinema – it’s thrilling, with great action sequences, and it’s
thought-provoking, with K (who, as a taciturn creation of few words but deep
feeling, is inevitably but excellently played by Ryan Gosling) considering his lot
in robo-life as a tool with a personality (neatly paralleled by the fact he has
a virtual girlfriend, a hologram, who as an artificial life-form’s artificial companion
has even more questions about her own existence if it can be called that). The one weak link is Jared Leto’s weird,
ineffectual villain – a blind Steve Jobs with a Jesus complex – but that doesn’t
stop this film being so good it’s the best film in a year it didn’t come out
in.
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