Listomania! My Favourite Films of 2018

Like fifty percent of the Universe at a snap of Thanos' fingers, 2018 will soon be dust...but wait! There's still plenty of time for the highlight of everyone's film calendar, the Unleashing of the Lists!

As long-term readers of my annual cinematic reverie know, I’m a stone-cold sucker for a well-placed musical interlude. After all, Action is Character. It’s not what you say, it’s what you do...

...in a rare moment of wild abandon from his life of thankless wage-drudgery, David Oyelowo drives to work belting out Will Smith’s Gettin’ Jiggy Wit’ It with gusto on an icy Chicago morning in Gringo...

...Juliette Binoche illuminates the dancefloor, letting the sunshine out, as she succumbs to the yearning, seductive charms of Etta James’ At Last in Un beau soleil intérieur...

...Agnès Varda accompanying Anita Ward’s Ring My Bell as she drives along a country road in the South of France in JR’s photobooth truck in Faces Places...

...Jason Statham sings plucky blue tang Dory’s reassuring refrain of Just Keep Swimming to himself as he does just that in the direction of a gleefully absurd showdown with The Meg...

Dread it, run from it, My Top Ten of 2018 arrives all the same. And now, it's here. We're in the endgame now:

Coco (Lee Unkrich)

Half an hour before I entered the cinema to watch Coco, I got a phone call telling me that a close family member had died. This is either the best way or the worst way to watch Coco - I haven’t decided yet. Either way, it will surprise no-one to know that I was weeping uncontrollably by the time the end credits rolled.

Faces Places (Visages villages) (Agnès Varda / JR)

The Green Fog (Guy Maddin / Galen Johnson / Evan Johnson)

Alfred Hitchock’s Vertigo recreated using only footage from movies and television shows shot in San Francisco. One minute, Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie is Rock Hudson circa McMillan & Wife...the next, he’s Chuck Norris brooding his way through An Eye for an Eye. The Michael Douglas of The Streets of San Francisco watches a screen and hoots admiringly at the bare ass of the Michael Douglas of Basic Instinct. An exhilarating and hugely entertaining experimental valentine to both the City by the Bay and Hitch’s psychosexual thriller.

Let the Corpses Tan (Laissez bronzer les cadavres) (Hélène Cattet / Bruno Forzani)

Mandy (Panos Cosmatos)

You’d be hard-pressed to find a bigger Nicolas Cage stan than me, but it’s Andrea Riseborough’s delicate, luminescent performance that really gives Mandy the heart and heft that makes it all work.

Mom and Dad (Brian Taylor)

One Cut of the Dead (Kamera o tomeru na!) (Shin'ichirô Ueda)

It’s all true. You will grudgingly admire the 37 minute non-stop single opening shot, but you won’t really understand what all the fuss is about. Hang in there. Your persistence will be rewarded. By the time you reach the end, you’ll get it, I promise. Pom!

Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson)

I had no idea what to expect going in to Phantom Thread, but it wasn’t what I got. I didn’t expect it to be so funny, and strange, and hypnotic. It was all of those things, and so much more.

The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro)

Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino)

I thought I’d be, at best, lukewarm on Suspiria. I haven’t really fallen for a Guadagnino picture since I Am Love almost a decade ago, and treading in the colour-saturated shadows cast by Dario Argento is as perilous as it is ambitious. But this isn’t a remake so much as it as a cover version, and is so much stronger for it. Perhaps Madame Blanc says it best: "When you dance the dance of another, you make yourself in the image of its creator."

Right under my Top Ten, I’ve got this dirty dozen and, honestly, any one of these could have been up there on another day, but personal taste is a capricious motherfucker.

Close But No Cigar

A Quiet Place (John Krasinski)
Avengers Infinity War (Anthony Russo / Joe Russo)
BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee)
Black Panther (Ryan Coogler)
The First Purge (Gerard McMurray)
Gholam (Mitra Tabrizian)
Isle of Dogs (Wes Anderson)
Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig)
Mission: Impossible - Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie)
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti / Peter Ramsey / Rodney Rothman)
Teen Titans Go! To The Movies (Aaron Horvath / Peter Rida Michail)
You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay)

UPDATED 19/12/18: The lines are closed, the votes have been counted and verified, and I can now reveal the results of the HeyUGuys Online Critics Best Films of 2018 Poll (to which I contributed a ballot). Eagle-eyed List Watchers will note that it doesn’t exactly match my Top Ten listed above. The HeyUGuys voting rules stipulate that all selections must have opened in the UK in 2018, so I’ve made a couple of substitutions for One Cut of the Dead (which has a UK theatrical release from 4th January 2019) and The Green Fog (which is never likely to get a commercial release of any kind due to rights issues relating to cobbling together pre-existing footage from around 200 sources). Anyway, go check it out. 

Within A Forest Dark - Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built

“Some people claim that the atrocities we commit in our fiction are those inner desires which we cannot commit in our controlled civilization, so they're expressed instead through our art. I don't agree. I believe Heaven and Hell are one and the same. The soul belongs to Heaven and the body to Hell." -- Jack (Matt Dillon)

"Jack has a weak point for fame also, and so do I. I’m not proud of it." -- Lars von Trier

“I Am Jack's Complete Lack of Surprise.” -- Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

Jack (Matt Dillon) is an architect. Or maybe Jack is an engineer. Jack definitely considers himself an artist. The medium for Jack’s art is the human body and the manifold horrors that can be inflicted upon it. Because Jack is a serial killer.

Utilising the same narrative device that he employed in Nymphomaniac, Lars von Trier presents The House That Jack Built as a series of episodic vignettes. A dark mirror to Charlotte Gainsbourg’s recollections of sexual experiences in Nymphomaniac, this is an unflinching catalogue of death. A grotesque picaresque. Part confessional, part testament, part reverie, Jack regales Verge (Bruno Ganz) with the details of five incidents that take place over a period of twelve years.

Jack may be an unreliable narrator. But then, so is Lars.

“I Am Jack's Smirking Revenge.”

Interspersed with repeated refrains of David Bowie's "Fame" and Glenn Gould seated at his piano, Jack’s revelations are by turns self-aggrandising and self-flagellating. Sometimes both at the same time. He gives himself the grandiose pseudonym Mr. Sophistication, and arranges his victims in hideous tableaux morte to capture moments with negative photography. Provocative and repellent, it occasionally feels like von Trier is whispering in my ear “why are you still watching this?” and laughing at his little incitements. (This is as good a time as any to note that the film isn’t actually funny, despite the intermittent bursts of laughter from the audience in the screening that I attended).

As the film progresses, the line between Jack and Lars becomes increasingly blurry. Jack (and Lars) suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. His art distracts him from his neuroses, and he exorcises his demons through his work. I don’t even know if I’m talking about Jack or Lars von Trier anymore..

“I Am Jack's Medulla Oblongata.”

The House That Jack Built also grows more contemplative as it goes on. We get a better sense of Jack’s narcissism and egotism. He is utterly self-absorbed, and we’re trapped in the stifling confines of his warped worldview. There are excuses and justifications. He flaunts his toxic masculinity and male entitlement and his ability to act with impunity. He indulges in discursive digressions on architecture and “the noble rot” of fermenting grapes, and self-importantly places himself in a continuum of human horror and atrocities.

It would be a stretch to say that I enjoyed watching The House That Jack Built, but I’ve certainly enjoyed turning it over in my head in the days since. It’s a confident and impressive piece of work. The early movements of the film are reminiscent of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Man Bites Dog, but it’s a very different beast as we descend further towards the baroque denouement. And it is ripe with allusions: early on, Jack sports a pair of large lens Jeffrey Dahmer glasses; occasionally, Jack faces the audience wielding cue cards à la Bob Dylan's “Subterranean Homesick Blues”; and then there’s the impressive and striking recreation of Eugène Delacroix's The Barque of Dante.

“I Am Jack's Inflamed Sense of Rejection.” 

It’s surely no coincidence that Jack is von Trier’s first male protagonist since 1991’s Europa. It certainly feels like The House That Jack Built could be Lars von Trier’s swansong. With Jack as his proxy, von Trier is looking back on his oeuvre - the House that Lars built. (Sometimes, it’s a little bit too on-the-nose, especially in a montage made up of footage from von Trier’s back catalogue. Subtle it ain’t.) But I hope this isn’t the last room on von Trier’s house. There’s life in the old provocateur yet.

The House That Jack Built is in cinemas and on demand in the UK from Friday 14th December 2018, with nationwide previews that include a pre-recorded Lars von Trier Q&A on Wednesday 12th December 2018