The Year in Movies – 2018

2018 was not an excellent year for this blog. Though I still saw many movies, and many brilliant movies, personal matters kept me from writing and posting reviews (which always takes longer than watching the movie itself). I underwent a handful of wondrous experiences, which I shared here, and a few more that I regret I was not able to share. I feel that I developed and learned more about the work of making movies and of discussing them, as well as about myself and how I view and appreciate them. I hope the chances will come for me to go further in detail in the coming year. A particular development for me personally was an increase in the number of television series I watched. I’ve hardly written anything about television at all, and before 2018 I generally found that work made for television did not meet my expectations of audiovisual artistic creation and revelation; however, my broadened horizons brought me to such wonders as Spike Lee’s miniseries remake of She’s Gotta Have It and Joe Swanberg’s miniseries Easy, which both expanded the form immensely in artistic consciousness and pure, joyous beauty. I look forward eagerly to finding more works like these and perhaps sharing them here with readers, together with the best cinematic works of each year.

Nobody reading this needs to be told that a selection of top movies is wholly subjective; a movie is good when you decide that it’s good, and the choice of the best movies out of any group is based entirely on your unique personal perceptions of each movie. Similarly, a movie becomes important not when it simply gets seen by many people, earns a lot of revenue, or is codified by a prestigious association, but when it makes a connection with the people who see it. The disappointment of the exclusion of Inxeba from the Academy Award nominations for Best Foreign Language Film was quickly eclipsed by viewers’ strong appreciation of the work, and even the controversy surrounding it did not match the enthusiasm of the movie’s supporters.

The Excessive Beauty of “Phantom Thread”

Among Paul Thomas Anderson’s previous films, I have only seen There Will Be Blood, which I found turgid and tendentious. It’s the kind of arthouse epic that the word “grandiloquent” is reserved for. Phantom Thread comprises such a vast leap in artistic creation that I struggle to recall the earlier work; it’s totally eclipsed.

Those interested in arthouse releases or the Oscars will already know the context of the story, and the cultural reverberations of Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance at its centre. He plays a fictitious renowned couturier, named Reynolds Woodcock, in London in the 1950s. His milieu is the highest society of Europe: his fashion is wrought for the aristocracy and royalty who admire the beauty of his work, or, rather, the great light in which it casts them. He is obsessive and controlling by nature, which brings about the exquisite creations of his art, a demanding work environment for those employed by House of Woodcock, and fraught tensions in any personal relationships. The work environment is efficiently run (and his personal relationships coldly smoothed over) by his sister, Cyril (Lesley Manville), who is unmarried and who systematically manages Reynolds’s fashion house and his life.