In just over one week, I'm going to be publishing my list of my favourite movies of last year. But I think this year I'll also do something different and give special attention to various films which, despite not getting my highest recommendations, deserve extra mention. Too often, interesting movies are looked over for being imperfect, and I think that's unfair. Opinion is subjective, and limiting the film conversation only to the most beloved of movies does them a disservice. So rather than rattling off an extensive list of movies I loved but cut from my top 10, here's a sort of third place trophy for the flawed movies that defined this year for me just as much as the great ones.
Annihilation
dir. and written by Alex Garland
In a year with a lot of stand-out horror movies (see also: Hereditary, A Quiet Place, and Suspiria, among others), none had quite the anxious power of Alex Garland's directorial follow-up, which combined otherworldly aesthetics with an unparalleled atmosphere of dread. It's a movie which operates on a tone of perpetual anxiety, and although it has its fair share of surreal body horror, nothing in it is more scary than the persistent question of what will happen next, of what grotesque twists are yet to come. Annihilation is a film which builds horror through innocuous imagery: a mutated flowering plant brings up the question of what else can mutate, which is more powerful in evoking the fear of the unknown than any lurking shadow. It's also frequently gorgeous in that imagery, and perhaps most impressively, both the beauty and the horror of the film comes from that same otherworldly style.
A Star is Born
dir. by Bradley Cooper
written by Eric Roth, Braldey Cooper, and Will Fetters
Sometimes, film titles make critics' jobs easier. More often than not, this pops up in negative reviews, but there's little more joyous than a title which promises much and then delivers not only within a film's content but also on a meta level. For the fourth version of A Star is Born to become such a phenomenon is remarkable in itself, and Cooper's somber take on this classic story is packed with great performances all around, but it's Lady Gaga's big screen debut which really stuns. Perhaps it makes sense: Gaga, who rose to fame on a larger-than-life pop star image, is no stranger to the nuances of performance, but although her acting benefits from strong hints of autobiography, her astonishing control of body language and subtle emotion is truly impressive for a first-timer. In a world where many celebrities fail to shift their careers, Gaga's graceful transition is heartening. Let's all hope she gets many more roles in the future.
Deadpool 2
dir. by David Leitch
written by Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and Ryan Reynolds
Some of the issues inherent to the first Deadpool film carry over to its sequel: it's still often juvenile, it's still laden with pop culture references, and it's still tremendously noisy. It also contains one of the best action sequences of the year, and the combination of a greater budget and the directorial talents of David Leitch allow the titular character's excesses to gain the over-the-top treatment they deserve, complete with an escalation in irreverent absurdity. Admittedly, much of this is to be attributed to the introduction of charismatic new characters to offset Deadpool's at times grating shtick, but stripped of its leaden origin story, this sequel is gleefully plotless, careening from exquisite action beat to exquisite action beat, with its own limp emotional scenes providing only momentary diversions from the glorious chaos. At this point, a further refinement of the dialogue to eliminate juvenile and dated elements is all this series needs to be truly great.
First Man
dir. by Damien Chazelle
written by Josh Singer
Strange as it is to say, this Oscar-baiting biopic secretly doubles as one of the scariest movies of the year. Whereas Hereditary found the horror in the mundane, and Annihilation found the horror in anticipation, First Man just presents an incredibly intense experience in profoundly unsettling detail. Lengthy stretches of the film are set in claustrophobic, rattling spacecraft, with the spectre of death looming over every minor malfunction, every jitter of the handheld camera. Astronauts regularly die both onscreen and off, and Gosling's distant gaze is never more compelling than when he's struggling to regain control of a spaceship which is spinning wildly out of it. And yet, the film also has moments of great beauty, conveying the otherworldly experience of seeing Earth from afar in majestic detail, and its climactic scenes on the moon are handled with the patience that they deserve.
Hereditary
dir. and written by Ari Aster
Speaking of which: film distributor A24 seems to delight in unleashing unconventional, challenging horror films upon an unsuspecting mainstream audience, and this year's example is as slow-paced as the best of them. The thing is, Hereditary is most exciting at its most mundane, utilizing the visual language of horror to express the traumatic emotions of its family drama. Accidents are presented in a similar light to murders, and simple dysfunction is draped in gloomy shadows and accompanied by a droning soundtrack. It's a horror film which, at least for its first hour, seems almost completely divorced from the usual narrative hooks of the genre, and that makes it all the more disturbing. Thankfully, when it does betray its premise, it at least does so with a strong level of craft: the supernatural imagery may be no replacement for the cyclic trauma of the first half, but it remains shocking, and the dread-infused atmosphere gives way to immediate danger far more gracefully than is to be expected. If Hereditary is merely a blueprint for an even better film, then it's a very impressive one.
Mandy
dir. by Panos Cosmatos
written by Panos Cosmatos and Aaron Stewart-Ahn
If there's a sweet spot between pretension and camp, then Mandy slides perfectly into it, crafting an impressively precise aesthetic and a slow, contemplative pace which is regularly disrupted by moments of hilarious absurdity. On one hand, this is a movie which takes an hour to set itself up, which is genuinely beautiful to look at, and which apes its aesthetic cues from some of the best classic horror films. On the other, it's a film containing a chainsaw duel. It's deeply silly, probably more so than it realizes, and yet there's nothing here serious enough that to be disrupted by that silliness. The slow pace and gorgeous neon fog provide the B-movie shenanigans with a strong atmosphere, whereas nonsense like Nicolas Cage's hammy performance and the endless procession of ridiculous moments provides much-needed levity to the film's droning style. The result is a midnight movie for the arthouse crowd, something which targets a very specific niche with deadly precision and is all the more awesome for it.
Searching
dir. by Aneesh Chaganty
written by Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian
Portraying computers and the internet on film is one of the most prominent and notorious challenges in the medium, and most movies and TV shows attempt to strain it through traditional cinematic language. In almost every case, computers are presented as physical objects, situated in the context of human beings rather than the other way around. Searching, like the Unfriended films before it, flips that dynamic, instead taking place entirely on computer screens. It's filled with conventional editing and retains focus on the lead actor, and yet by the very nature of its form, it reinforces themes about modern media and gaps in knowledge in a way that a different film couldn't, and it also frequently achieves novelty by offsetting John Cho's compelling performance with revelations of new information elsewhere on the screen. It's a gimmick which is perfectly suited for a mystery, and that it's so successful in mining the emotional and thematic implications of that gimmick is even more commendable.
You Were Never Really Here
dir. by Lynne Ramsay
written by Lynne Ramsay and Jonathan Ames
As thrilling as cleanly shot, kinetic action can be, there's something really special about a film which successfully fragments itself for rhythmic purposes. You Were Never Really Here is the kind of exquisitely disorienting fare which so rarely comes about, a movie of severe brutality which offsets a committed lead performance with an unpredictably shuffled timeline and unusual editing, which cuts hard between long silences and key emotional beats without ever compromising its own exhilarating rhythm. For all the acclaim this film has received as a drama, it's most successful as an extremely stylish thrill ride: the storyline is relatively simple, something about a vengeful, traumatized mercenary, but the greatest surprises come in stylistic fluorishes and formal contortions. It's incredibly strange and abstract, and yet it remains propulsive and thrilling.
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Annihilation
dir. and written by Alex Garland
In a year with a lot of stand-out horror movies (see also: Hereditary, A Quiet Place, and Suspiria, among others), none had quite the anxious power of Alex Garland's directorial follow-up, which combined otherworldly aesthetics with an unparalleled atmosphere of dread. It's a movie which operates on a tone of perpetual anxiety, and although it has its fair share of surreal body horror, nothing in it is more scary than the persistent question of what will happen next, of what grotesque twists are yet to come. Annihilation is a film which builds horror through innocuous imagery: a mutated flowering plant brings up the question of what else can mutate, which is more powerful in evoking the fear of the unknown than any lurking shadow. It's also frequently gorgeous in that imagery, and perhaps most impressively, both the beauty and the horror of the film comes from that same otherworldly style.
A Star is Born
dir. by Bradley Cooper
written by Eric Roth, Braldey Cooper, and Will Fetters
Sometimes, film titles make critics' jobs easier. More often than not, this pops up in negative reviews, but there's little more joyous than a title which promises much and then delivers not only within a film's content but also on a meta level. For the fourth version of A Star is Born to become such a phenomenon is remarkable in itself, and Cooper's somber take on this classic story is packed with great performances all around, but it's Lady Gaga's big screen debut which really stuns. Perhaps it makes sense: Gaga, who rose to fame on a larger-than-life pop star image, is no stranger to the nuances of performance, but although her acting benefits from strong hints of autobiography, her astonishing control of body language and subtle emotion is truly impressive for a first-timer. In a world where many celebrities fail to shift their careers, Gaga's graceful transition is heartening. Let's all hope she gets many more roles in the future.
dir. by David Leitch
written by Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and Ryan Reynolds
Some of the issues inherent to the first Deadpool film carry over to its sequel: it's still often juvenile, it's still laden with pop culture references, and it's still tremendously noisy. It also contains one of the best action sequences of the year, and the combination of a greater budget and the directorial talents of David Leitch allow the titular character's excesses to gain the over-the-top treatment they deserve, complete with an escalation in irreverent absurdity. Admittedly, much of this is to be attributed to the introduction of charismatic new characters to offset Deadpool's at times grating shtick, but stripped of its leaden origin story, this sequel is gleefully plotless, careening from exquisite action beat to exquisite action beat, with its own limp emotional scenes providing only momentary diversions from the glorious chaos. At this point, a further refinement of the dialogue to eliminate juvenile and dated elements is all this series needs to be truly great.
First Man
dir. by Damien Chazelle
written by Josh Singer
Strange as it is to say, this Oscar-baiting biopic secretly doubles as one of the scariest movies of the year. Whereas Hereditary found the horror in the mundane, and Annihilation found the horror in anticipation, First Man just presents an incredibly intense experience in profoundly unsettling detail. Lengthy stretches of the film are set in claustrophobic, rattling spacecraft, with the spectre of death looming over every minor malfunction, every jitter of the handheld camera. Astronauts regularly die both onscreen and off, and Gosling's distant gaze is never more compelling than when he's struggling to regain control of a spaceship which is spinning wildly out of it. And yet, the film also has moments of great beauty, conveying the otherworldly experience of seeing Earth from afar in majestic detail, and its climactic scenes on the moon are handled with the patience that they deserve.
dir. and written by Ari Aster
Speaking of which: film distributor A24 seems to delight in unleashing unconventional, challenging horror films upon an unsuspecting mainstream audience, and this year's example is as slow-paced as the best of them. The thing is, Hereditary is most exciting at its most mundane, utilizing the visual language of horror to express the traumatic emotions of its family drama. Accidents are presented in a similar light to murders, and simple dysfunction is draped in gloomy shadows and accompanied by a droning soundtrack. It's a horror film which, at least for its first hour, seems almost completely divorced from the usual narrative hooks of the genre, and that makes it all the more disturbing. Thankfully, when it does betray its premise, it at least does so with a strong level of craft: the supernatural imagery may be no replacement for the cyclic trauma of the first half, but it remains shocking, and the dread-infused atmosphere gives way to immediate danger far more gracefully than is to be expected. If Hereditary is merely a blueprint for an even better film, then it's a very impressive one.
Mandy
dir. by Panos Cosmatos
written by Panos Cosmatos and Aaron Stewart-Ahn
If there's a sweet spot between pretension and camp, then Mandy slides perfectly into it, crafting an impressively precise aesthetic and a slow, contemplative pace which is regularly disrupted by moments of hilarious absurdity. On one hand, this is a movie which takes an hour to set itself up, which is genuinely beautiful to look at, and which apes its aesthetic cues from some of the best classic horror films. On the other, it's a film containing a chainsaw duel. It's deeply silly, probably more so than it realizes, and yet there's nothing here serious enough that to be disrupted by that silliness. The slow pace and gorgeous neon fog provide the B-movie shenanigans with a strong atmosphere, whereas nonsense like Nicolas Cage's hammy performance and the endless procession of ridiculous moments provides much-needed levity to the film's droning style. The result is a midnight movie for the arthouse crowd, something which targets a very specific niche with deadly precision and is all the more awesome for it.
Searching
dir. by Aneesh Chaganty
written by Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian
Portraying computers and the internet on film is one of the most prominent and notorious challenges in the medium, and most movies and TV shows attempt to strain it through traditional cinematic language. In almost every case, computers are presented as physical objects, situated in the context of human beings rather than the other way around. Searching, like the Unfriended films before it, flips that dynamic, instead taking place entirely on computer screens. It's filled with conventional editing and retains focus on the lead actor, and yet by the very nature of its form, it reinforces themes about modern media and gaps in knowledge in a way that a different film couldn't, and it also frequently achieves novelty by offsetting John Cho's compelling performance with revelations of new information elsewhere on the screen. It's a gimmick which is perfectly suited for a mystery, and that it's so successful in mining the emotional and thematic implications of that gimmick is even more commendable.
You Were Never Really Here
dir. by Lynne Ramsay
written by Lynne Ramsay and Jonathan Ames
As thrilling as cleanly shot, kinetic action can be, there's something really special about a film which successfully fragments itself for rhythmic purposes. You Were Never Really Here is the kind of exquisitely disorienting fare which so rarely comes about, a movie of severe brutality which offsets a committed lead performance with an unpredictably shuffled timeline and unusual editing, which cuts hard between long silences and key emotional beats without ever compromising its own exhilarating rhythm. For all the acclaim this film has received as a drama, it's most successful as an extremely stylish thrill ride: the storyline is relatively simple, something about a vengeful, traumatized mercenary, but the greatest surprises come in stylistic fluorishes and formal contortions. It's incredibly strange and abstract, and yet it remains propulsive and thrilling.
Support me on Patreon!
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