The best films of the year explore the hollowness of contemporary Korean culture, faith in an era of climate change, the last frantic day in the life of a Hollywood director and more.
This year’s best movies were, broadly speaking, freaks and geeks, weird signals from the outskirts. A black-and-white Mexican mood piece about a domestic worker may win the best picture Oscar, if critical hype retains its momentum—another sign, if we needed one, of movies’ loosening grip on the public mind and heart. (To most non-Americans, American movies appear to consist of expensive quasi-genres—“blockbusters,” “action films,” “reboots”—that didn’t really exist for the medium’s first 80 years.) Like our political system and our policy institutions, movies haven’t quite caught up to where we are, spinning their wheels in old formulas and forms, while technology and its attendant cultural distortions bullet us into the future.
So, we’re talking here about movies that traffic in the margins and target adults like any respectable art form should. It speaks volumes that two of my top 10 films of 2018 are detritus left behind by dead people. But my No. 1, and easily the year’s least-fucks-given journey into painful, serious-issue territory, is Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. In addition to writing the screenplays for many of Martin Scorsese’s best films, Schrader has been making his own movies since the 1970s that probe into ethical, social and spiritual issues (from Hardcore and American Gigolo to Mishima, Patty Hearst and Affliction). First Reformed is his best and most dismaying movie, a character study of a guilt-wracked pastor in a small, upstate New York parish confronting his own lack of faith, his failure as a man and his tortured, evolving response to a parishioner who clearly sees the Armageddon of climate change.
