Review by Lydia Creech
I’m sure Mandy will find its niche and hit the cult status it’s aiming for (it’s well on its way), but I’m fine with being left behind.
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Shannon Purser and Noah Centineo star in director Ian Samuels’s Sierra Burgess is a Loser
Sierra Burgess is a Loser (2018) by Ian Samuels
Review / Personal Essay by Courtney Anderson
I’m always waiting for the movie where there’s a fat girl that actually does have a love interest, or at least isn’t spending the entire movie commiserating her weight. Which is what I thought Sierra Burgess Is A Loser would be. And it wasn’t. At all.
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Jeff Bridges stars in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream
Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) by Francis Ford Coppola
Retro Review by Nadine Smith
Tucker is not about the real Tucker or even the product he made, but about the image he made and sold of himself, his car, and a certain post-war way of life. That’s what any car dealer or filmmaker sells us: aspirations, ideals, and the possibility of independence. In Tucker, the image that Coppola sells us of himself is identical to Preston Tucker, and I'd argue that Coppola used that image in order to build a case for himself.
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The Night is Short, Walk on Girl (2018) by Masaaki Yuasa
Review by Jordan Collier
Something this mercurial and wonderful begs to be seen rather than described. It defies traditional categorization. It is an experience packed with so much color, heart, originality, and unbridled positivity that it makes impossible to stop smiling. Night is Short is a whirlwind of epic proportions, and it is one worth getting swept up in.
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Haley Lu Richardson and Regina Hall star in director Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls
Support the Girls (2018) by Andrew Bujalski
Review by Nadine Smith
Support the Girls spoke truth to me personally as a child of strip malls and subdivisions, but it speaks to a much larger truth in its depiction of how the working class exists today.
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Takashi Shimura in Ikiru
Ikiru (1952) by Akira Kurosawa
Review by Zach Dennis
In a vast counter to Kurosawa’s Rashomon, which was released two years before, Ikiru posses an exuberant amount of empathy for a two and a half hour film. This empathy seems fixated in a sort of lexicon — more of an indictment on ourselves than on the characters.
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Mark Wahlberg in Mile 22
Mile 22 (2018) by Peter Berg
Review by Reid Ramsey
Mile 22 is just a bad story filled with bad characters and knowing that fictional characters were purposefully written and directed this way makes it all the worse.
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Topher Grace stars as David Duke in BlacKkKlansman, the latest Spike Lee joint
BlacKkKlansman (2018) by Spike Lee
Review by Andrew Swafford and Lydia Creech
In this (“fo’ real, fo’ real sh*t!”) story of Ron Stallworth, Lee does a hilarious job poking fun at the kind of people that join the Klan, but, importantly, he also shows how insidious and pervasive racist ideologies can be.
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15-year-old actress Elsie Fisher plays Kayla in director Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade
Eighth Grade (2018) by Bo Burnham
Review by Andrew Swafford
As a teacher, I’ve had countless conversations with colleagues fretting about how much tougher adolescence must be in the age of social media, and I’ve always found myself nodding in agreement. However, Eighth Grade reframes the conversation, asking us to empathetically consider why kids love being plugged in.
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Billy Redden in Deliverance (1972)
hillbilly (2018) by Ashley York and Sally Rubin
Review by Reid Ramsey
hillbilly examines our media representations of hillbillies and southerners while co-director Ashley York returns from L.A. to her original home in Eastern Kentucky.
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The Mamma Mia! Maniac
Personal Essay / Review by Paige Taylor
This dumb musical was so infectiously joyful that I’ve been addicted to its euphoria since I’ve watched it. I have listened to ABBA every single day since. I have run to my car to get to work and blasted "Chiquitita" with the eagerness of someone who’s just discovered a love for crack. I am deep in this blissed out state of 70’s Swedish pop band delirium and honestly? I do not care to escape.
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Tom Cruise reprises his role as Ethan Hunt in director Christopher McQuarrie's Mission: Impossible - Fallout
Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) by Christopher McQuarrie
Review by Lydia Creech
Maybe I misunderstand what other critics are responding so strongly to, or my tolerance for silly spy shit is just exceedingly low, but these “best action movie since X” reviews are really just damning with faint praise.
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Evangeline Lilly and Paul Rudd as Wasp and Ant-Man in Ant-Man and the Wasp.
ALTERNATE TAKE: Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) by Peyton Reed
Review by Zach Dennis
Ant-Man and the Wasp isn’t a vindictive or evil movie, but there’s something very half-cooked in its bones.
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Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) by Peyton Reed
Review by Courtney Anderson
Ant-Man and the Wasp is very straightforward, light-hearted film. Even though I find it odd that it was released so soon after Infinity War, it’s probably a good thing that it was: it’s a nice pick-me-up for Marvel fans who were shell-shocked.
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Lakeith Stanfield stars in director Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You
Sorry to Bother You (2018) by Boots Riley
Review by Michael O’Malley
Sorry to Bother You finds the exact wounds inflicted on American bodies by their own megacorporations and paints clown faces on the scabs. And it stings.
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The 2018 Shmight & Shmound Poll
By Nadine Smith
Two years ago I began a list of my own, a modest effort that at the time I referred to as the “Film Twitter Mock Sight & Sound Poll.” This was an attempt to replicate the best of the best with the friends and acquaintances I have encountered throughout my time in that nebulous social sphere known as “Film Twitter,” a loose assemblage of critics, filmmakers, cinephiles on Twitter. I solicited ballots made up of what people considered the ten greatest films ever made and aggregated the results, creating what I believed might be a more varied, more diverse, and ultimately more interesting alternative to the big lists. The first list was modest, but I enjoyed doing it and people seemed to respond to it well, so I decided to do it again in 2017.
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Tampopo (1985) by Juzo Itami
Retro Review by Jessica Carr
Whether you view it simply as a necessity needed to live or as something to truly be treasured, we are all connected by food. That’s why it was a work of genius in 1985 for Juzo Itami to create a Japanese film that uses food as a way to meditate on human behavior.
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American Animals (2018) by Bart Layton
Review by Reid Ramsey
American Animals treats truth as relative and unimportant, movies as fodder to be replicated, and youth as fleeting and worthwhile. Yet within these themes, whether noble or not, the movie is too often obsessed with its own gratification and has about as much cinematic consciousness of the college students at its core.
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Incredibles 2 (2018) by Brad Bird
Review by Courtney Anderson
Incredibles 2 feels like the filmmakers didn’t want to make this simply for movie or because they had no other ideas, but because they genuinely love the story they wanted to tell. I enjoyed it. I think most people will.
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Milly Shapiro stars in director Ari Aster’s Hereditary
Hereditary (2018) by Ari Aster
Review by Jessy Alva
Hereditary seems to be having its own identity crisis. Is this a psychological thriller about a family wrought with unshakeable trauma unraveling at the seams? Is it a supernatural horror movie about a conjuring gone awry? Is this a occult movie about worshiping the devil (et al.)? I think all three of those premises are great…separately. But piecing it all together left so much rich storytelling mostly unexplored.
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