It’s only a few months into 2018, but there’ve already been a handful of films worthy of great praise — and breaking box-office history. Here are the best movies Vulture has reviewed, according to our movie critics David Edelstein and Emily Yoshida.
(A quick note about our methodology: We’ve restricted this list only to films that have had an official release in the first four months of 2018, though we will continue to update it throughout the year.)
Annihilation
To dismiss Garland’s trippy expedition as woo-woo nonsense would be missing out on so much emotional work that he and Natalie Portman are doing. In his hands, the annihilation of the film’s title is first and foremost psychological, and it casts a bone-deep dread over the film, even when the Hollywood narrative trappings let it down. The film departs significantly from VanderMeer’s great book, but it, too, is about something that can’t be uttered. Accordingly, Garland goes silent for the film’s stunning finale, which is something at the intersection of 2001: A Space Odyssey and modern dance, and left me breathless.
Black Panther
A momentous event in pop culture: A comic-book superhero epic directed by a black man, Ryan Coogler, with a nearly all-black cast that set box-office records. Though the fictional African nation of Wakanda looks to the world like one of Trump’s “shitholes,” its hidden capital is a work of genius, with roots in ancient folklore, pop sci-fi, and an Afro-futurism that’s all its own. And its mightiest warriors are women. The conflict is both fantastic and real, between a king (Chadwick Boseman) trying gently to end his country’s isolationism and a separatist (Michael B. Jordan) who wants a full-scale race war. He’s crazy. But as a street kid with a chip on his shoulder, he’s compelling in ways that leave other comic-book antagonists in the dust.
Blockers
Pitch Perfect writer Kay Cannon’s directorial debut is a pushy teen sex comedy with a freewheeling, improvisatory spirit that works like gangbusters. The protagonists are also the antagonists: three parents (played by Leslie Mann, John Cena, and Ike Barinholtz) on a hysterical odyssey to keep their high-school daughters from fulfilling a pact to lose their virginity on prom night. The movie has the quality of an ancient, bacchanalian comedy in which humans are reckless fools, but the forgiving spirit of comedy itself leaves the characters in one piece — and the audience exhausted from laughing.
Chappaquiddick
Chappaquiddick is the kind of movie that could never be made while its subject was alive, which of course is the only reason it was worth making. But rather than simply point out that the famous man did a bad thing, Jason Clarke’s fascinating portrayal of Ted Kennedy is something more elemental, a snapshot of the failure of all the things masculinity was and to some degree is still billed as.
Double Lover
Like a steamy alternate-universe Frasier fanfic, Francois Ozon’s story of a woman caught between two psychologist brothers is a pulpy, uproarious stunt of a film. The twin-based body-horror premise (based on a Joyce Carol Oates novel!) is Freudian to the point of being purposefully reductive, but its sense of eroticism is far more adventurous. Parasitic twins, pegging, Jérémie Renier making out with himself — somehow it all coheres pretty seamlessly, even at its most ridiculous.
Foxtrot
Samuel Maoz’s acclaimed and reviled Israeli triptych centers on the death, rebirth, and death of a soldier and his parent’s attempt to make sense of the senseless. It’s thick with grief, confusion, and metaphor, the latter extending to the title, the name of an isolated desert checkpoint on a road trafficked by Palestinians and a dance step in which you end up where you start. This is life, Maoz says, in a traumatized, blindly militaristic state. Its surprise failure to win an Oscar nomination is a testament to how corrosive it is and, as such, a badge of honor.
Have a Nice Day
A bag of money and a botched plastic surgery create havoc in a rainy, anonymous postindustrial Chinese town in this electrifying animated crime yarn. American filmmakers looking for new depths for the neo-noir in 2018 would do well to check out director Liu Jian’s brand of brilliantly funny, utterly disaffected cynicism, and his portrayal of a world where literally everyone is just trying to make — or scam or steal — a yuan. The bone-dry humor of Jian’s Coen-esque caper is often as jarring as its minimalist animation style, but the sum of its tangled cast of characters and crisscrossing murder plots — which somehow comes in at a brisk 75 minutes — is satisfying in the extreme.
Isle of Dogs
Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animated film is a gorgeous hodgepodge, its disparate elements magically unified by the director’s trademark off-symmetrical compositions, pop-out colors, and dry wit. The story of canine refugees on a garbage dump off the coast of a Japanese city is an allegorical painterly kabuki comedy that’s also a howl of rage against authoritarianism in all its forms. Voicing the main canine, a stray who says we’re all in some sense astray, Bryan Cranston gives a sharp but indelibly soulful performance. (The cries of “cultural appropriation” shouldn’t be fully discounted — only partially. Anderson’s borrowings are loving.)
Love After Love
It’s swimming with hate, much of it self-hate. Russell Harbaugh’s extended-family psychodrama charts the impact of a father’s death on a verbally abusive child-man (Chris O’Dowd), his arguably too close mother (Andie MacDowell), and another son (James Adomian) who is staggeringly drunk at an engagement party and pees on the guests’ coats. Watching them flaying one another (and bystanders) is a masochistic experience, but not an emptily masochistic one. And if you think MacDowell can’t act, well, you’re mostly right, but here she’s superb, her placidity a form of passive-aggression.
Loveless
The title of Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s wintry, symbolic drama of a 12-year-old boy’s disappearance denotes a state of mind, a lament, and an indictment of crimes against the human spirit that seem to emanate from the country’s current president. Here and in his last film, Leviathan, Zvyagintsev anatomizes a spiritual disease for which a partial cure will be more movies like his.
Paddington 2
Children — and adults — deserve more movies as generous and lovingly made as Paddington 2.The sequel follows the template of the original almost to the minute, but manages to inject even more fun, freewheeling energy into each beat. In this installation, the Peruvian bear voiced by Ben Whishaw tries to find a job and winds up … enacting prison reform instead? Director Paul King still has loads of visual tricks up his sleeve that never feel too imposing on the story, and Hugh Grant gives one of the best unqualified performances of the year as a washed-up actor Paddington runs afoul of. The whole thing is a delight from start to teary-eyed finish.
TheDeath of Stalin
Armando Iannucci’s acid satire charts the days in 1953 when the Soviet Union lost its paranoid-psychotic leader of three decades and members of his inner circle argued, plotted, and killed a lot of people while selecting a successor. The joke is that the characters (played by the likes of Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor, and Simon Russell Beale) order torture and mass murder in the prissy, peevish accents of Cockney or American bureaucrats, creating a colossal disconnect between small-minded egotistical clowns and the large amount of horror they have the power to inflict. If there’s a single theme, it’s the disfiguring effects of terror on the simplest human interactions. It’s farce transformed into collective tragedy.
The Final Year
Greg Barker’s quietly devastating behind-the-scenes documentary tracks the Obama administration from late 2015 to the early morning of January 20, 2017, with special attention to U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, and Secretary of State John Kerry. It’s their last chance to cement a foreign-policy legacy as the clock ticks down — although as we watch, we know what they don’t, that the next president will be insanely bent on undoing everything they’re trying furiously to accomplish. The film has been unjustly criticized as Obama propaganda, but it’s haunted by a tragic failure: Power’s inability to prevail on the president to intervene forcefully in the humanitarian crisis in Syria.
The Rider
What’s so subtly special about Chloé Zhao’s intimate, lyrical filmisthe way it takes what easily could have been reportage and turns it into modern American myth. Injured cowboy Brady and his rodeo riding friends live in a milieu both quintessentially American and completely obscure to most 21st-century Americans. And yet, their story will feel immediately relatable to any person — or country, for that matter — that has ever had to accept a fundamental change or loss or blow to their sense of self.
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