Best of 2018, I: Movies in English.

I watched a grand total of 25 movies in English this year. 

From this, we choose a top five… not in order. These aren’t necessarily the absolute best five movies I watched this year; they are the five that made the most impression on me and that I find to be all fine movies in themselves. I don’t really think one is superior to the other (besides they are very different in terms of story, themes, style…). With one exception, these are all from the current century. So, in alphabetical order: 

1. A ghost story (2017). A tour-de-force journey through time and space presented via a deceptively simple image: A bedsheet ghost! The result is neither an horror movie nor a parody of the genre (even though it actually is both of those things sometimes), but a poetic exploration of the human soul. Genuinely haunting, as the best ghost stories are. 

2. Do the right thing (1989). The up and downs of a tightly-knit, diverse urban community during a cruel heat wave. Possibly the quintessential Spike Lee movie, as polarizing as the deep-rooted conflicts it portrays, with unforgettable sequences that range from the touching to the humorous to the disturbing. 

3. Dream Boat (2017). A documentary of a week-long gay cruise which becomes a snapshot of the international gay community of the current era. Mixing interviews with party chronicles, it achieves an almost symbolic quality (case in point, a nighttime party is almost dreamlike, as befits the title). 

4. I, Tonya (2017). Less a biography or a reconstruction of a real-life event than an exercise in film that highlights the unreality of what we think of as “fact”. A movie that is by turns hilarious, spectacular and very thought-provoking, anchored by terrific performances and a delightfully sardonic script. 

5. Kinky Boots (2005). A comedy loosely based on a real-life anecdote (it’s interesting how fiction is nourished by reality, without needing to be an exact copy of it). But what makes this movie shine is the use of a simple detail (shoe-making) to illustrate the changing attitude of entire societies around complex issues (blue-collar workers grappling with novel concepts of gender and sexuality, which often challenge their own assumptions). And it manages to tackle these subjects without needing to be overtly dramatic nor heavy-handed. 

***

Thoughts and commentaries are welcome.