The Big Picture - The Top 10 Films of the Year | Discussion (Ep. 105)

Episode Date: December 7, 2018

We break down which movies made the final cut for our top 10 lists this year — including everything from ‘Black Panther’ and ‘A Star Is Born’ to ‘Burning,’ ‘Support the Girls,’ ‘Minding the Gap,’ and more. Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Chris Ryan and Adam Nayman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, we've got a really great show coming up with Chris Ryan and Adam Naiman talking about our favorite movies of 2018. But before you dig into that, I just want to make you aware of a couple of other year-end pieces that we have going at TheRinger.com. First and foremost, Adam and I whittled down our big list to 10 movies that you should check out in case you're confused or are not aware of some of the movies we're going through in this podcast. I also wrote a year-end essay that you'll want to look at, which is about Black Panther and A Star is Born and a number of the most successful movies of the year and why they're all made by men. And there's a ton of other great year-end content on TheRinger.com. Miles Suri wrote about the best superhero movies. Tom Bryan wrote about the best action movies.

We've got the best TV episodes of the year, the best TV shows of the year, the best songs of the year, the best albums of the year. It's all on TheRinger.com. Please check that out right now. I'm Sean Fennessey, editor-in-chief of The Ringer, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about the best damn movies of 2018. I am joined by two wonderful guests. The first, of course, is Chris Ryan, editorial director of The Ringer, co-host of The Watch. Chris, hello.

What's up? The second is Adam Naiman, regular contributor to The Ringer and one of our favorite film writers. Adam, thank you for doing this. Thanks, guys. We're doing top tens. It's the end of the year. If you look on TheRinger.com, you will see all manner of top ten lists, albums, songs, performances. Adam and I collaborated on a top 10 films list. And,

you know, it was a little bit of a hack. And I think we'll be open about that, about the way that we sort of manage the year-end list. And so in an effort to expand our purview, talk about more movies, have a little bit more insight, let Chris rave about certain drug cartel dramas. We are here to talk about our own personal top 10s. My reputation precedes me. That's right. Chris, I'd like for you to start. And if there's, I don't know, if you guys have any reflections about kind of the year that was, feel free to interweave them as we go through this conversation. You know, I felt like movies were kind of a refuge for me this year just

because I watched so much television in the course of doing The Watch. So I, you know, hundreds of hours of TV, probably. And it was, I think it changed a little bit how I felt about the movies in that I was looking for the movies to be this transportive kind of escapism, at least for the first nine months of the year. And then I think that in the last few months, I've really like sort of returned to like the true power of movies and what they can tell us about what it means to be a human being. Or robots in some case, but you know, mostly human beings. What did they tell us?

It's tough out here to be a human being. It's kind of rough. Yeah, Adam, would you concur that that is the message of the films? Yeah, I mean, it's hard to be a human being. And it's also hard to see as many movies. In my younger days, before I became a dad, I was going to festivals, seeing a lot more stuff. I felt like my purview was a bit narrower this year. And so I was really grateful for stuff I saw that I actually really loved. And maybe also grateful that I didn't have to see as much stuff that's just kind of noise.

But then you also lose out on the possibility of sort of, you know, interesting discovery or unexpected favorites. I mean, I look at my list and a lot of the titles on it are things that, you know, if I'd just been told who made them, I probably would have guessed they would have been of interest. So I don't know if that means I just know my taste really well at this point or if I'm kind of narrow and redundant. Yeah, for me personally, I've always tried to make

these lists in ways that would surprise even myself. I've done personal lists for 10, 15 years, only publishing them more recently in this life. And it's an interesting thing because I found that this year is probably the least interesting list that I've ever made for myself. I didn't, maybe it's because I feel like I'm publishing it that I'm afraid to take a kind of hacky studio comedy and actually ride for it in the way that I have in the past or a smaller film that not as many people have seen and is also not necessarily at the height of the critical discourse. And I'm questioning myself about that because I'm trying to think about what I actually want from these movies. Chris, that's something that you and I talk about all the time. How did you go about – how did you decide this will be my number 10 movie? This is torture.

I couldn't decide. For some reason this year, in years past, I feel like I've had this real, like, very smooth thought process about, like, these are the movies that are who I am. And I love these 10,

and there's probably 20 more that I would add on there. And this year, I felt like a real divide between the movies that I knew were achievements in film versus the actual good times I had at the movies. And so I tried to make a list that was reflective of both, but it was not an easy list to make. So what's your number 10? A Star Baby, it's time to let the old ways die Go in, go.

This was the idea, you know, I think comic book movies have sort of taken over the popular culture, but this was the movie that represented the ability for film to govern the monoculture and to make something that, for a brief moment in time, every single person cared about deeply, even if ironically. And the first hour of this movie

is absolutely breathtaking. And it has moments after that, but I think that in terms of an achievement of kind of old school Hollywood filmmaking and myth-making and star-making, quite literally, I just was really kind of, I really was in awe of this movie. Adam, I'm going to go down a limb here and say that it's not on your list. It's not, although the first hour might be.

And it certainly has individual scenes and moments and line readings, particularly from Bradley Cooper and Sam Elliott, that are pretty memorable. I completely respect Star is Born being on a 10 best list, and it lives better in memory than some of the other big ticket stuff I saw at TIFF this year. So yeah, I mean, you know, and it's going to be a big player for the next three months. We're all just going to be hearing about it from every angle between now and the Oscars. So, you know, here's as good a place to start as any. It's not on my list either, and I completely agree with everything you said, Chris. I think that first hour is amazing. The performances are really fun. It's kind of an impressive achievement. It starts to kind of get a little saggy on the backside, but there's so much that is fun to talk about. But sometimes it's only in part. And when you're making a list like this, how do you navigate? Well, I probably had more fun through that first hour than I did through almost every film that I have on this list. But do you hold against it its own flaws? That's like a tricky part of list making.

Yeah, I mean, it's also like in this day and age, do you count the 10 weeks we spent anticipating it and then talking about it and making memes out of it? And it was like this never ending fountain of content in some ways. And I know that that sounds like I'm living in Blade Runner or something, but it really was this text that you could approach from a lot of different ways. And I know that that sounds like I'm living in Blade Runner or something, but it really was this text that you could approach from a lot of different ways. And for that, I appreciate it. And I thought it should go on the list. Yeah, it's a new shade of appreciation. And, you know, on this show, we love that movie. And as Adam said, we'll be talking about it certainly through at least February 24th, 2019, when the Oscars happen. I still think that's going to win best picture. Adam, why don't you tell us your number 10 movie? Well, I limited myself to one film that I didn't think most listeners would have seen.

And that's not an assumption about listenership or taste, just that it got a very small release. But it qualifies, and it's exactly a movie that's kind of fun to talk about on The Ringer, because it's kind of a sports comedy, but a very unusual one, which is called Infinite Football. We're going to play a game with slightly different rules. but a very unusual one, which is called Infinite Football. By Cornelio Poramboyu, who is a Romanian director who's very sort of famous in film festival circles for these very sort of austere, oblique, deadpan comedies like Police Adjective and 1208 East of Bucharest, which are all sort of

about the country's transition politically in the late 80s. This one is like a Nathan For You episode where he found a guy, I believe it's his cousin, who was injured playing football in his youth and is now endeavoring to change the rules of football. So I mean, soccer, European football, soccer. And he just thinks that by changing the rules, he can kind of go back and fix this injury that happened to him in his youth. And he ends up creating these insane, bizarre rules, illustrating them with a kind of chalkboard or a kind of clipboard on how soccer could change and ends up completely destroying and complicating the game.

There's an interesting political metaphor in there, but it's also just very funny to see these two Romanians talking about how soccer needs to either be simpler or more complicated. And I think, laugh for laugh, it was the funniest thing I saw this year. Sounds like an episode of Ringer FC, Chris. Have you seen this movie? I haven't, no. I haven't either. I think it's the only movie we're going to

talk about here today, and Adam, I knew you were going to talk about it, that I haven't seen, which is quite a challenge for me, because I think I'm nearing the 300 mark on the year. Uh, that's a great recommendation. I really liked that one. Um, as we go through these and if we have any crossover with ours, we'll kind of use that as the opportunity to talk about them and going through 10 is obviously quite a lengthy endeavor. My number 10 is the movie Annihilation, uh, which is still sticking with me. And I find it's both an interesting text and a thing to talk about as a movie

and also an interesting thing to talk about in terms of kind of the business and maybe not the memeing like you were talking about, Chris, but the way a movie gets out in the world. There's always one kind of early spring studio movie that happens and people are surprised by how good it is. There were actually two this year. I think A Quiet Place also kind of qualified for that.

Of course, Get Out last year was that version. Annihilation is Alex Garland's adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's science fiction ecological horror novel. It's quite a bit different from that book, though. Chris and I know we're both big fans, Adam. I don't know if you've read that. It's an interesting portrait of not so much annihilation, but desolation, I think, and kind of feeling alone in the world and figuring out how to make a connection with a person or perhaps an alien spirit or yourself. And it's just, it's kind of beautifully made. It's a little bit of a supersized version of Ex Machina, which was Garland's 2015 movie, which was pretty successful

and earned him a new reputation after being the author of 28 Days Later and The Beach and a series of books. I think Garland is pretty gutsy as studio filmmakers go. And it's interesting that he has now moved on to an FX TV series as his next project. He's the kind of person who I really wish would just keep making movies because I feel like the more movies he makes, the more he's going to get to the bottom of the thing that's inside of his head. But it's also an interesting thing to talk about because this movie was oddly bought by Netflix to be distributed internationally from Paramount. Paramount had a changeover in its administration during the production of this movie. And so it didn't quite get the love that it, I think it deserved, or maybe that a movie like this needs in 2018,

in part because it has neither the, you know, big top effect of a Marvel movie, nor even like kind of the grandeur of something like A Star is Born. So it's hard to tell a story about annihilation other than five women go inside of a shimmering digital image and they come out the other side fighting mutants. It's a really interesting movie though. I don't know, Chris, what do you think about it upon reflection? Yeah, you know, I was actually thrown off by the movie. I mean, Alex Garland sort of infamously adapted this film from the book after only reading the book once. And it was sort of almost a riff on the themes of the book or his impression of the book rather than a faithful adaptation.

And I think for anybody who really goes into it hoping that it follows the text will be a little bit disappointed. And I think I was slightly thrown off by that on my first viewing. But after watching it again, you just admire the bravery of it. You admire the give no shits attitude of whether or not you quote the viewer is going to get it and also pushing this genre stuff into the realm of art film. At the end of it is truly something to behold and to try and unpack for multiple viewings and I think will be done over the course of multiple years. Yeah, and I think it's related to the Star is Born quality

that you're talking about too, which is there are parts of the movie that don't really work that well. And there are performances that I'm not really that crazy about. But that kind of cosmic final 25 minutes or so, I was just kind of impressed by the ballsiness of it. I was like, I guess you're just going for this kind of Star Child meets the Nutcracker Suite kind of thing. And I really enjoyed it.

Chris, what's your number nine? Black Panther. My son, it is your time. Show me my respect and bow down. You get to decide what kind of king you are going to be. Let's go. Not dissimilar from a star's board, I find that my list has got a lot of pairs

and then the ranking of them is not necessarily arbitrary, but it's interesting that I was grouping a lot of these movies together. But Black Panther was another seminal, monocultural event. It was something that people had been anticipating since the summer of 2017, if not before when it was actually announced, but the trailer came out in the summer of 2017.

It is, I think, the best Marvel movie pretty easily. It's the most socially and emotionally complex Marvel film. And for as much as people probably read into Marvel movies a lot, because we spend so much time talking and thinking about these movies, we start to give them a certain weight that maybe they don't actually have. Black Panther did have that. Black Panther did grapple

with some really interesting questions about revolution and about justice and about heritage. And yeah, it had some really stupid VFX, like rhino fights at places that were for kids but I thought that the Killmonger T'Challa relationship was probably the most

interesting binary in superhero movies since Dark Knight and I thought actually on multiple viewings that Michael Jordan's performance made a lot of sense I talked about this a lot on Shay's villains podcast with Karen Shay. And yeah, I just,

I'm still thinking about it now. And I think in achievement in superhero movies is something that we have to sort of recognize in superhero movies are the corn of the land. Adam, did this end up making your top 10? It did not. I think that it's pretty good. It didn't like it as a,

as a, as a film, as much as I liked Creed, which I thought really got inside a kind of a genre and its beats and its tropes and kind of exploded them. I thought that this one sort of stopped short of exploding those things. You know, Chris mentions bad VFX, Rhino fight. I just thought the whole third act in general felt very trapped and constrained by the Marvel structure, which isn't a flaw necessarily. I mean, it's a Marvel movie, but didn't really seem like it pushed outside of that. But I think Coogler is a really strong director. You only have to watch Creed 2 to see how good a director he is because Creed 2 is lacking some of what he brought to the first one. And yeah, I mean, I think Michael B. Jordan's terrific.

I think a lot of the cast in Black Panther's pretty good, but I just couldn't quite find room for it in the top 10. Yeah, it's number five on my list. And the reason it keeps crawling higher and higher, even though I completely agree with everything that you just said, Adam, I thought the third act was kind of bound by this rulemaking about what a movie like that has to be. Every time when I wrote the blurb for this movie on our list, and it's fairly high on the list that we published, I kept having to go back to it to add one more small idea that the movie has inside of it.

And there's some obvious ideas about kind of isolationism versus empire building. There are ideas about brotherhood. There are ideas about fathers and sons. There are ideas about how to forge relationships. There are ideas about not and sons. There are ideas about how to forge relationships. There are ideas about not necessarily listening to the people in your life that are closest to you, especially women. There's all of this depth of thought that you just don't get. And even the best Marvel movies, Thor Ragnarok was a really fun time. That movie is not really about anything. And you could do a deep text reading of any number of Marvel movies. But

in Black Panther, it's one of the rare cases where intentionality is actually really meaningful to me. And I took a lot away from what Coogler was trying to say with the movie. And in some ways, I don't want to hold against him the fact that he took an opportunity to make something that has all this, you know, kind of rule bound stuff that has to happen in a movie because he used it. You know, it's not quite a Trojan horse, but it's close. When the movie was released, I wrote about how it's one of the first movies of its kind that ever actually tried to tangle with things that are happening in the real world and

not just in the imagined Stanley Jack Kirby universe that all of that world exists in. And I really admire that. And I really think, I wish more filmmakers didn't just use the Marvel movies to make aesthetic choices, but that they use them to make emotional or intellectual choices. And so it's pretty high on my list. Ultimately, I just think that's an incredible accomplishment. I mean, maybe that's one of the reasons why we're I mean, aside from the fact that it's a it's very popular thing to talk about, I think one of the reasons why we're so fascinated with not only MCU, but also the Star Wars franchise is because of the collision between art and commerce and the compromise that you can see on screen between filmmakers who are

trying to be thoughtful, but know they're making a huge piece of mass entertainment and know that they're servicing a much larger storyline and a much larger business outside of just here's the movie I want to make. And to watch that kind of tension sometimes, yes, you wind up with rhino fights, but you also wind up with subversion and you wind up with, I'm going to sneak this in there while everybody's looking over here at this villain or at this explosion.

There's going to be these really interesting ideas and a lot of people are going to hear about those ideas. I agree. Adam, why don't you give us your number nine? My number nine is a film I suspect may be on a couple of your lists, so we can kind of talk about it now, which is Paul Schrader's First Reformed. These are frightening times.

We have to be patient. Well, somebody has to do something. Are you washed in the blood? Which is a really strong film with Ethan Hawke. It's been covered on the ringer a couple of times. I wrote the review, Sean, you had trader on the podcast,

right? I did. Yeah. Yeah. Which was a good interview. Delightfully grouchy, delightfully grouchy, you know,

a film that does not lack for sort of dissection and, and, and discourse this year. And, you know, I mean, I hesitate to describe movies as feeling of the moment or being about now, but certainly the environmental and sort of climate anxiety

in that movie, which isn't what it's being sold as or even what it starts with. But the idea that the catalyst for Ethan Hawke's character, this priest to sort of start questioning both spiritual authority and also the authority of the church and also maybe driving him to become this Travis Bickle style vigilante is this anxiety over the future, which is catalyzed by this environmental activist and his partner and this question of what it means to bring a child into the world. And I found all that stuff really frightening and really resonant and handled with a lot of grace by Schrader. And I would also say, maybe you guys will talk more about this, but the way that it's made is just really refreshing. This is a movie of very precise economical means.

Schrader's always been a bit of a minimalist. And here I thought that that minimalism and that quiet and that stillness were really quite powerfully used. I would have thought halfway through the year it would be higher on my list than number nine, but I still think it's really, really extraordinary. Yeah, it's number four on my list. It's still sticking with me. I keep trying to encourage my wife to watch it with me for like a fourth or fifth time. She's not as

excited by the prospect of doom that kind of permeates the entire movie. I completely agree that you can look at it from a very technical perspective, which is it's obviously this homage to, you know, Bergman and Bresson and Ozu. And it's very still. The camera does not move very much. It's this very almost like a cedic story. And then you can also look at it as this like ecstatic, beautiful film full of like incredible performances and these kind of leaps of metaphysical daring. And it's got maybe the best Ethan Hawke performance ever right at the center of it. Chris, did it end up making your top 10? It didn't, but I have a lot of respect for it,

especially since Ethan Hawke's one of my favorite actors and has been for a long time. And it's great to, it sounds like he's going to be in the mix. We'll get a lot of Hawke at award ceremonies. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. The one thing that it did, this is kind of a, this is frivolous, but it's true,

is I can't get the shape of the divot in the middle of Ethan Hawk's head out of my mind. And you can see, and when I talked to Schrader, he talked about how his face was just right

for this moment to cast him in the movie. And he said, you know, he loves Oscar Isaac and he thought Oscar Isaac would be good in this movie, but he needed like 10 or 15 more years. And Ethan Hawk has just reached this moment to cast him in the movie. And he said, you know, he loves Oscar Isaac and he thought Oscar Isaac would be good in this movie, but he needed like 10 or 15 more years. And Ethan Hawke has just reached this moment

playing this reverend who's lost his son and who is going through this crisis of faith and who is, you know, facing down this environmental crisis that as Adam said, essentially like a parishioner has brought to his attention. And he just looks like the world's pain is bending into his face

in slow time across the movie. Really incredible piece of work. I love it. I'm glad to be able to get some of my top five out of the way early.

My number nine is If Beale Street Could Talk. I'm yours and your mine and that's it. You and me all the time. Honey, there's something I gotta tell you. You know, I'm honestly not sure. I think this might rise in estimation if I see it again.

I saw it a few months ago. Adam, I know you did as well. And I know that in the piece that you wrote, the blurb for the film, you mentioned that it has really been sticking with you. This is, of course, Barry Jenkins' third film. And it's a very elegant and powerful adaptation of a James Baldwin novel set in Harlem in the early 1970s. Adam, what was it that really resonated with you about Beale Street?

Yeah, well, I should say, first of all, it is in my top five. I mean, whether it's number four or number five, it kind of flips, but it's right up there. Let's i mean whether it's number four or number five it kind of flips but it's right up there let's say right now it's number four um i think that jenkins is a very very expressionist kind of filmmaker he doesn't withhold pleasure he doesn't withhold visual pleasure he likes his images to sort of communicate beyond simply a level of of dialogue or or beyond their narrative function and i think that with each movie he's gotten better and better at justifying that kind of the word is an indulgence like he's just gotten better and better at just justifying that pleasure like the the number of times that this movie pauses you can just take in the faces and bodies

of people on screen um the incredible delight he takes in filming his cast, the way that he captures the romantic love between the two young leads, but also just various angles and vertices of love between family members and between friends. There's a shot of a Stefan James and Brian Tyree Henry walking towards each other from either side of this street in the middle of the day. And the brownstone buildings are high behind them, and everything is long shadows. And I just haven't been able to get it out of my mind since I saw it at TIFF.

And I also think that it's a film in terms of how things are dramatized. I think in some ways it's a step up from Moonlight. I think that the dialogue exchanges and interactions, some of them are really, really wonderful. Brian Tyree Henry, who might be my actor of the year, between his work here and in Widows and on Atlanta, he has this one monologue where his character who's just gotten out of jail talks about the experience of being there. And the film just kind of almost like

slows to nothing. It's completely mesmerizing. It doesn't serve the story. It doesn't drive the story forward, but it has the dramatic force of like a short story or a novel in and of itself. And I guess that's the thing about Beale Street is I just find myself meditating on these individual shots, individual details, individual monologues, and they just have not left my head since I saw it in September. Yeah, I agree. That might be the scene of the year. It's obviously a scene. I've talked to Barry and we'll air that episode next week and he was very keen on even discussing that scene I think he

knew that he was pushing convention just a little bit but also really really proud of it and it's just an it's just an amazing Chris you haven't

seen Beale Street yet right? I haven't had a chance to see it yet it's not out until December 14th I would highly encourage people to check it out

what's next? what's are we at eight? we're at number eight yeah burning Uh, what's next? What's, are we at eight? We're at number eight. Yeah, Burning. Talk about it. Burning is on me and Adam's list.

Yeah. Uh, you guys really like did my head in with this one. Cause like, I think you guys have both been talking about this for a while and I finally got a chance to see it recently and it's a testament to this movie that I'm still like grappling

with how to articulate how I felt about it. I don't even know if you're supposed to truly understand how you feel about it. That's how mysterious this movie is.

When I say mysterious, I mean there is a mystery at the heart of it. It's a love triangle. It's very much an homage to its literary roots, whether it's the Murakami story it's built on or it's based on and the Faulkner story that that Murakami story is based on, but also has elements of F. Scott Fitzgerald in it. But it's about class and longing in Korea right now and in the world right now.

And, you know, this was really a movie, this was a year I thought that two of my favorite films, Burning and another one I'm sure we'll all be talking about later in this podcast, were foreign films that made me feel in a way that no American film made me feel this year. That it spoke to me in a way and did something that movies, I think we rely on movies to really get into deeply into the heart of something. And, you know, we can talk about A Star is Born and have fun with that stuff. But Burning is the kind of movie that I think made me fall in love with movies in the first place,

which is just like, I feel like I'm really living another person's experience and learning about my own by watching it. Yeah, Adam, this is number three for me. I don't know how high it crept up for you. I've got it at three as well, which is probably the highest that any film on our two lists in that top 10 we did. I don't think we both have another film higher than that, right? We don't. And that's why we put Burning at number one for the year for us. And it's interesting, Chris, I think you kind of nailed all of the themes. And I think you particularly nailed the idea that there's no way to really know what the movie wants to say, which is an impressive quality. It's like, it's a particularly impressive quality

in the face of something like A Star Is Born, which is so, is like pretty expertly made and very entertaining and has a great legacy in Hollywood but also like could there be a more obvious story in the history of time than A Star is Born and Burning just defies that logic yeah um and I think particularly the uh Steven Yeun who you know many people know from The Walking Dead his character in the movie is one of the more mysterious sort of quasi protagonists yeah you can kind of compare him to Ripley, but like, you know what I mean? Like, if you were looking to throw out, like, comps, I would say, think about that. But it's not really like that. Yeah, Adam, what are your reflections on it? Also, when did you first see it? I saw it at TIFF, and I was really grateful

that you guys let me go, like, pretty long on it for Ringer, because that was a piece that I was really happy with, just because I think it's really fun movie to think about and write about. I mean, everything you guys have said about it's mystery and about it dealing with class. I completely agree with, I think Steven Yeun is,

is amazing. And I try not to think too much about the Oscars, but if there is justice within that process, if burning is indeed a best foreign language film can contender, it'd be really nice to see and get some support because it's really just a magnetic performance. I love the Ripley comparison, but it's kind of like Ripley turned inside out because with Patricia Highsmith's books, you always know Ripley's inner life. And here we're just guessing at Ben's inner life through the main character, through Jeong-sun. But I think also that it has a quality that, I don't think it's lost on people reviewing it, but it's something that doesn't get talked about so much in film criticism these days,

which is just this quality of writing. Just not to say that it's a literary movie or a prosaic movie or that the camera and the acting aren't terrific, they are, but it's just such a fantastic screenplay because all those layers of meaning about class about masculinity about hunger and yearning and rivalry um it's it's on the page you know i think that as a script it's the film of the year for sure it may be the film of the year in general but as a piece of writing it's just astonishing and i think you can go back to it i've still only seen it once i can't imagine how fun it'll be to watch it a second time when I find time yeah I'm eager to see that one again as well um as I said that's number three for me I believe it's out of most theaters in the world but I would highly encourage people to check out Burning Adam what's your number eight my number

eight is the is the is the one that I think at least one of you can't abide or shocked that I would put on a top 10 list that did right about for Ringer, which is Joseph Kahn's Bodied, which I won't say too much about because, again, my piece is there on the site, and I don't want to take up too much oxygen for this film. But I think I wrote something to the effect of whether or not it's the best movie of 2018, it's the most 2018 of any movie, and I would sort of stand by that. I think it's quite an annoying film and I think it's quite a meddlesome movie and I'm not even sure it's fully coherent

but the things that it's playing with and the guts it has to play with them and the exuberance it has to play with them are just things that I really admire and I think Khan is really one of the best pop filmmakers we've got. I'm kind of more interested to hear you guys either trash it or act shocked about my pick, but I'll leave it to you. I have to be honest. I still haven't seen it. Okay.

Act shocked is an operative phrase here because I think that that's what the movie wants you to do. And that is sort of my issue with it. I don't dislike it. I actually found it, one, certainly entertaining. Two, I'm fond of experiment movies that are trying to provoke and try to bust up some of the kind of mainframe of normative storytelling. I don't really, I certainly don't hate the movie. I just think that that ultimate lack of coherence that

you noted at the end there, Adam, kind of holds it back from being ultimately meaningful. And it's this like nice artisanal puzzle box, like funny or die design. Like it's kind of like a really, really smart version of an episode of while and out. And I, it has great performances. I think the writing is very good. It's not easy to write dis wraps and there are literally dozens,

maybe hundreds of diss raps in this movie and joseph khan is an incredible stylist and he has 25 years of experience making music videos to show his his incredible sense of of style and what he does with the camera is pretty impressive in this movie i i couldn't help but walk away ultimately feeling like this movie was the equivalent of um gosh how do I don't think there's like an elegant way to put it. It was like, don't control my free speech, like MAGA bullshit. And I don't know if that message ultimately makes sense to me because I think that there is some nuance in that disagreement. You know, I think I certainly don't also side with the notion

of controlling all free speech and creating this sort of politically correct world. But I ultimately couldn't figure out what they really wanted to say about the movie. And if it was that control of speech being like a pox on our society, I had some concerns about that too. Does that make sense? It does. And I think that there's been some really good insightful criticism of the film suggesting exactly what you've said and also suggesting its opposite which isn't to say that one side is more right but just that a certain spaciousness is built in amidst all the needling and the obnoxiousness i mean i think that as a movie produced by eminem that styles itself as a kind of weird quasi eminem origin myth

and doesn't do so heroically it's kind of like a superhero origin story or a super villain origin story, I think, given where the main character played by Callum Worthy ends up at the end. And, you know, I think that Khan on Twitter has sort of called himself a free speech absolutist. And I hope he's not listening to this because he's, you know, someone I admire and have written well about in the past. I think in some ways the movie may be even more coherent than he means it to be, or the movie's incoherence. The movie's incoherence may be more interesting than is even meant based on the Twitter persona. But no, I mean, everything you've said is fair enough. And I'm in the minority to rank it as high as I do. But both

times I've watched it, I have just felt here's a movie that is grappling with actual 2018 reality instead of quote unquote 2018 reality it's a perfect movie for a top 10 list that's what i'll say um right on this is uh my number eight it's hereditary i don't know if it made the list for any of you guys very close we've talked about it a lot this year i know that adam you had some issues with it though you thought it was impressive chris you are an avowed horror, though this seemed like it maybe pushed the boundaries a little bit too hard. No, I mean, I thought this movie was great. I was struggling with whether to put Hereditary or A Quiet Place on my top 10, and it just didn't have room. But

there are moments in Hereditary that are probably the visceral moment of movies this year. There are two sequences where you're just like, I'm in the hands of a complete master right now. Yeah, and in many ways, it's on the list in part because I am very desperate to kind of see where Ari Aster takes his career. He was on this show. We've talked about this movie quite a bit.

We saw it at Sundance. It's just, it is a truly interesting, and it's interesting that Nicholas Roeg just died because I think that he clearly is a huge influence on Aster. And the sort of desire to show the most unfortunate and painful and sort of like hair-twisting vision of bad humanity feels a little bit resonant to this moment. So just wanted to give Hereditary a quick shout out. Chris, why don't you give us your number seven? Widows.

You have no idea, do you? Or did you choose not to know? Your husband stole $2 million from me. This is about my life. This is about my life. And because it's about my life it now becomes about yours yeah this didn't make my list

but I do love it what did you like about it? I keep thinking about Widows in relationship to Ocean's Eleven which is kind of nice because I think that given some of the tonal stuff in it I think a lot of people

have talked about it in relationship to Michael Mann this is Stephen Queen's heist movie starring Viola Davis, obviously. Came out a couple weeks ago and it sadly kind of came and went. But I keep thinking about it in relationship to Ocean's Eleven because I think that these are two examples of what you can do with a basically Hollywood heist movie.

And Steven Soderbergh's version of it was to maximize pleasure in every single department from the clothes to the music to the performances to the deliriousness of the plot. And Steve McQueen's was to get as gritty as possible. I mean, there's some really obviously the Olivia the dog is cute and the apartments are nice and stuff like that. But he tried to show what it would take to put people in the mindset and in the headspace to actually commit a crime and what kind of levels of desperation you'd have to be in. And I talked about this on the watch, so I don't want to like kind of plagiarize myself. But to me, the movie was a lot about debt. And to me, the movie was a lot about what you owe different people in your

life and what those people might make you do to pay up. And I just thought it was at once incredibly entertaining and gripping and it, and, and also really thought provoking. And even when it misstepped, I thought the missteps were interesting. Yeah. Adam, I don't think either one of us has it on our list though.

I'm very admiring of the movie and really like what Steve McQueen does. And it's, it is, you know, I wrote about this in a piece that'll run on the site this week about sort of the year in movies and what, not the failure necessarily, but sort of the lack of heat

around a movie like Widows means for movies like Widows being made. And there's just candidly a part of me that really wants Hollywood studios to make new versions of old formats. And I really like the idea of a souped up, redefined heist movie.

Yeah, Viola Davison and John Frankenheimer movie. I'm like all good with that. Yeah, me too. Go ahead. Adam, what's your number seven? My number seven is The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

Things have a way of escalating out here in the West. My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. That man is a wonder. I'll just have to see you hell yeah by uh you know is that on your list it's not by by by a pair of filmmakers who i'm just not very familiar with uh joel and ethan co Ethan Cohen. You know, I did a podcast that was like literally 90 minutes on Ballad of Buster Scruggs the other day with Slate, which doesn't mean I don't

want to talk about it now, but, you know, again, you guys gave me the chance to write about it on Ringer and I went back to that piece after watching it a second time and you know, I think the main thing I stand by is the sense in which this is just very clearly a movie about death, very clearly a movie about mortality. It's not going to be their last film. It's not a valedictory film, but it definitely feels like a mature work in that sense. And the different variations that it rings on death from this very Bugs Bunny cartoon opening to this almost Edgar Allan Poe horror story at the end and all these spaces for death in between really kind of sticks to me. We've all done our Coen ranking recently. The three of us had that

podcast recently. I don't know where I rank it as a Coen film, but it's certainly one of the things I saw this year that I liked the most. It's an amazing movie. It's like I have it on my list of 15. What the hell does that mean? You know, I've already seen it more than I've seen all of these movies. I put it on all the time now. It's just incredibly deep and entertaining at the same time. And I cease to be amazed by what they do. Like, it's just incredible. They were recently, the Coen brothers were recently guests on Fresh Air. And I was listening to it and I had a big smile on my face.

I was on a plane and my wife turned to me and she was just like, what are you smiling about? And I was just like, I just fucking love these guys. So she was like, okay, I'd like to listen to this episode of the show and she listened to it

and she was like, they didn't say anything? And they really didn't and in fact, part of what's entertaining about that podcast is that Terry Gross has great questions for them

and her questions are observational and they're, you know, she clearly wants to have fun with them and she clearly loves their films. And she's getting a lot out of asking them questions that they have like nine word answers to. Sure.

And that is sort of a metaphor for their movies. You know, they put all of this on the screen for you and it's like, take away from it what you want to. I like the way that you describe this sort of mini formats that they're using to tell these stories, Adam. You know, the idea of an Edgar Allen Poe movie and a Bugs Bunny movie living side by side is like, there's nobody else that can do that. So it almost makes me feel like an idiot for being like, yeah, this is the 15th best movie of the year, which is, and it's clearly something that I'll love forever. Chris, did Scruggs make your list? I didn't, but the Tom Waits segment should have. Mr. Pocket should have made my list. This movie's

great and I thought you had a very astute observation a couple weeks back when you were talking about this movie actually being a check in the box for Netflix for the ability to instantly revisit it and to analyze it in a lot of different ways and since

it is a segmented film, I don't feel like it bastardizes the experience to kind of just rewatch the one you really like or try and investigate the one you didn't like as much the first time around. It's almost like an album where you kind of like re-listen to the six that you like. And then six months later, you're like, fuck, I really like track four. And I'm sure that's going to happen with me with Scruggs. I'm going to go back and really like the Liam Neeson carnival performer segment one day, even if it's not my favorite now. It's awesome.

It's the Coen brothers. I feel like they kind of make a movie every few years, and that movie goes in its own little part of the best of the year. Yeah. It also has that great thing that all of their movies have, which is it has 10 or 12 lines of dialogue that are just stuck on my brain now. I find myself muttering, like, hole to myself uh for whatever reason um my number seven is the favorite which is you know something that none of us wrote about yeah none of us talked

about I don't think either of you guys have it on your list my number four oh my gosh that's so good I'm glad to talk about it Adam it didn't make your list right right? It didn't. I liked the piece that was on Ringer by Manny Lasich about it and Lanthimos in general. I like Yorgos Lanthimos up to a point. I even liked this movie. And I'd love to talk about it. It just didn't make my 10. Yeah, it's an interesting thing. Lanthimos, of course, people will, well, I don't know about of course.

I wouldn't say he's the most well-known filmmaker in the world, though given his point of view, has become extraordinarily successful and worked with very famous people. He's probably best known for The Lobster. Two years ago, he made a movie called The Killing of a Sacred Deer starring Colin Farrell. He kind of came to people's attention with Dogtooth, which was nominated for Best Academy Award for Foreign Film. He's a Greek director, and he has a very um discomfiting approach

to humanity and this is the story essentially of Queen Anne and her court it's not a faithful adaptation of history

uh it's an absurdist movie it's very funny it stars Olivia Colman Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz Chris what

why did it get up to number four on your list we haven't even discussed this in person. It just made me laugh more than any other movie this year outside of Death of Stalin. It just cracked me up.

And I thought it had the best, not the best, but the troika of performances of Weiss and Stone and Coleman. And shout out to Nicholas Holt. Pretty good in this movie. Great stuff. I don't know.

I just love people behaving badly. And I just really, if you want to dial it up to good in this movie. Great stuff. I don't know. I just love people behaving badly. And I just really, if you want to dial it up to 13 like this movie does and the prison that they make this palace and the way it kind of feels like people playing dress up in a 2018 palace.

They snuck in after tourist hours and did this. But also just how dirty it is and the gout and the lie burns and everything that goes along with how awful it must have been to be alive. I don't know. I just, I thought about it a lot in relationship to succession, just about just how money and power destroys people's brains like syphilis. And I just, I adored this movie. I did too. I don't know what else there is to sayilis. And I just, I adored this movie. I did too.

I don't know what else there is to say about it. It's just, it's really well made. It's in theaters now. It's probably expanding over the next coming weeks. I think it's the one potentially noisy Oscar thing that hasn't really been identified yet. Yeah. It's really been a story about Roma,

A Star is Born, Black Panther, and to a lesser extent, maybe Mary Poppins Returns. This is the one movie that is going to be nominated. All of the performances will be nominated. And it'd be kind of funny if this Greek art house weirdo ended up somehow Trojan horsing his way into Oscar contention. Because I don't even know if Academy members

will understand what this movie is trying to tell us. Well, if I can say one thing about Favorite is that I really do appreciate that if we're going to get to the point where these really talented international filmmakers are all copying Kubrick, at least he's copying Barry Lyndon. Barry Lyndon, yeah, of course. Which is rare. And when you talk about that weirdo Greek thing, I mean, again, that piece on Ringer about his career trajectory is very interesting. I mean, he's a fascinating case study because as recently as four or five years ago, he's making truly rigorous, austere, not

obscure, but like very small little Greek art films. And it is not a sensibility back then when we were all starting watching his career with Dogtooth and Alps. I wouldn't have been like, this guy will work with Emma Stone in the next five years. Me too. I'm shocked. It's startling. And it speaks to his talent and the fact that there is something slightly mainstream and commercial about the kind of despair and deadpan and cruelty

that he has. It shocks me, but also I can kind of see why these movies reach an audience. But it's a big improvement on Sacred Deer. And I think it's awesome that Chris has it that high on his list. I'm glad that it's on this podcast. Me too. Chris, what's your number six? I'm really, this is the movie I'm most excited to talk about.

Thunder Road. I'll start with myself. My wife left me a year and a half ago. There, laughing up. I slept in my car. Three weeks. Jerry saw it. Isn't that right, Jerry?

Yeah, I brought you breakfast. Thank you so much for doing that, Jerry. Haven't been a lot back then. Oh, wow! Yeah. Great! Okay. So, this movie, obviously,

Sean wrote a piece about this film a couple of months back? Was it a month or two ago? I think it was early November. Early November. That's a lot about how Jim Cummings, who's the writer, director, and star of this movie, got this movie made,

and how it is basically an expansion of a short film, an award-winning short film he made that I think he showed at South By a couple years ago, but then I think the feature-length version of Thunder Road won the Audience Award, correct? The short originally was shown at Sundance in 2016, and it won the Sundance Short Film Award. And then the full-length was shown at South By, and it won the Sundance Short Film Award. And then the full length was shown at South By

and it won the prize at South By. So, and Sean wrote a fascinating piece about people basically still making movies out on the margins like this in an American independent film. And this movie gives me the feeling that I had in the mid-90s when I first sort of started encountering

Jim Jarmusch and Richard Linklater movies that, I don't know, I think that the opening scene of this movie is one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen. It's essentially an uncut eulogy that this guy gives for his mother and it is one of the true emotional roller coasters I've really seen in a long time. I cannot define this movie for the life of me. I feel like almost unequipped, but it's essentially hilarious, heartbreaking, maddening. It's about a cop who is basically having a nervous breakdown, but is trying to deal with the passing away of his mother and the deteriorating relationship with his ex-wife and his daughter. But it's also hilarious. It's got a remarkable sense of place.

And it really has a vibrancy and a liveliness. Like, these are real people. And it just does feel like kind of like this snapshot of a life that you never get to see on screen. Along with Support the Girls, I thought this was kind of like this really cool throwback to a time when I really fell in love with independent cinema. I love that. Jim Cummings is a fascinating person. He's a wonderful performer. He's like an incredible showman. He's got almost like a Spike Lee quality of fully embodying what his

movies are about. So he was a very fun person to talk to for that story that you mentioned. It's a good movie. And you can kind of see the seams in the same way that you could in a lot of those movies that you were describing, which I think has a measure of charm. It's also kind of secretly a great double feature with First Reformed, I think, because it's really about a guy kind of losing his shit in real time. I love that you put it on your list. That's great.

Adam, I know it's not on your list. I haven't seen it. I look forward to hearing what you think. It's a very smart, charming, impressive movie, especially when you know a little bit about the constraints of how it was made. But even without that,

it's really good. Everything that's been written about it is the constraints of how it was made, but even, even without that, it's, it's really good. Everything that's been written about it is really interesting. And it was part of that whole suite on independent films that were up on the ringer, like a couple of months ago. Right. So it definitely seems like an example of what it means when Indy is not a brand. Right.

Or when, when Indy is not a sort of, you know, loosely factual adjective applied to a movie, but like really a sign of how it's made. So I'm, I'm fascinated. Yeah. And I think that it's probably worth saying that I think that assignation is dead. Like I think the idea of like what's an indie movie doesn't mean anything anymore because we

don't... Or less. Yeah. It's just, it was kind of bunk to begin with, but it's interesting to think about Thunder Road in that context. Adam, what's your number six is another film that uh even more than in football i hope ringer listeners will check out and they have no excuse not to because it's on netflix right now which is alice roerwacher's happy as lazaro the italian title being lazaro felice which is a film that won the screenplay prize at Cannes, and I still think is underrated in terms of its reception at Cannes. It's this very sort of superficially gentle but searing political allegory about this little mountain village that exists seemingly out of time, and then the question of when the film is actually set is quite mysterious. I don't want to say too much because it's kind of a twist or it kind of spoils it but not only the question of

when the movie is set but why this mountain population kind of is like ruled by a by a baroness basically and just our slave labor for her and the slave labor then sort of doubles down in the character of lazaro who's's sort of the factotum. Like, he just runs around doing what everyone tells him. And then halfway through the film, the narrative reality completely changes, and it becomes a contemporary story about Italy. But Lazaro is still there and very similar to the way he was in the first half of the film. Like, a good movie to compare it to would be Being There, the Peter Sellers film. A bad movie to compare it to would be Forrest Gump, which is also a bad version of Being There.

But I think that Rohrwacher is a really, really interesting, humane, smart filmmaker. And it's just quite a magical movie. I take it neither of you guys have seen it yet? No. I haven't. This is the single biggest have not yet watched on my list. And you're right. It's shameful since it's literally live on Netflix right now I'm really excited to see this movie

oh yeah and I'm hopefully I'll get to write about it soon like it's just it's it's really good so I hope people who are listening are intrigued to check it out thanks Adam my number six is Mission Impossible Fallout there you go I don't think it has very much in common with Happy as Lazaro. I'll report back when I see that movie. There's a big fall in Happy as Lazaro. Someone falls from a great height. They do, for real. But it's not a halo jump, right?

No, it's not. Okay. Mission Impossible Fallout. Ethan, that's not who we are. Maybe we need to reconsider that. Best action movie I've seen in the last few years. A real testament to the power of big top action cinema made me excited to go to the movies.

In fact, I went to this movie three times. It's the only movie I saw twice in theaters this year. There you go. You know, I had the writer-director Chris McQuarrie on this show over the summer. It's just an adrenaline shot to the chest. You know, there's six or seven sequences. And it's one of those movies where I don't really care to unravel the plot. Like, it just doesn't mean anything to me.

These movies are all kind of a feint to get Tom Cruise doing wild shit. And frankly, it works. Like, it is just incredibly effective. I'm interested in him kind of running and moving around and saying dumb lines of dialogue. But as a series of constructed set pieces, it is really going for it in a way that I admire and that I find really fun.

Chris, I assume you have it here as well. I do not actually have it on my top 10. Oh, I'm shocked. Yeah, I mean, I really love this movie. There were my remaining five. I just couldn't really find the spot I wanted to put it in. It's kind of like Scruggs, so it wound up not being on there.

Testaments of the great year that we're having. Yeah, and I would say that I'm pretty regularly impressed with these movies, but Henry Cavill and Vess Kirby really gave it a nice shot of fresh blood

that I thought that the franchise itself needed. But yeah, I mean, as far as an action movie goes, there hasn't been a better one in years. Yeah, there's just

not much more to say. It's a really fun movie. People are aware of it. It's one of the biggest hits of the year. It kind of revived the franchise in some respects too,

which is, I feel like maybe it's always, every new Mission Impossible movie is reviving the franchise. That's kind of is I feel like maybe it's always every new Mission Impossible movie is reviving the franchise that's kind of like a news story that happens

every time but I'm okay with it. Chris what's your number five? Sicario Day of the Sold Out. Here we go! Yeah.

This is a doom metal song of a Hollywood blockbuster. I don't even know if you could really call it a blockbuster. I don't think it made that much money.

Hard to believe this terribly bleak drug drama failed. Well that's why I'm so interested in it. It is a like just grotesque boil of a movie. And that is something that I think the more you go to movies, the more maybe you don't have time for something like this. Although I just found it. I saw it in June when it came out. And it was one of those movies where I was looking around wondering if everybody else was seeing the movie that I was seeing. You know, the first 40 minutes of it are pretty much like NatSec porn. It's just, you know, Islamist terrorism and border paranoia and stuff like that.

And I think you can take it literally and think that that is, you know, the things that drive the filmmakers. But I do not think that that is the case. The real thing that I responded to in Soldado was when it turns into El Topo for an hour in the middle of it, and it becomes this sort of psychedelic Western about Benicio Del Toro, who's been shot in the face, kind of moving across this barren landscape.

It is easily one of the most antisocial Hollywood movies I've seen in a really long time. I kind of doubt that they'll make a third one, even though they very much set it up for that. But Sean and I talked to Stefano Salima, the director of the film, and I thought that he was right there with us when he was just saying,

I did not want an avatar the way that the first one did. I did not want to hold people's hands through the moral decisions being made in this movie. And I think he was quite clear that these are grotesque people and these are people who have been perverted by a war machine and that this whole entire region has been sort of raised by this war. And that's what this movie was. It's a war movie. I'm not sure that I necessarily ultimately agree with this ultimately being a good movie Chris, but I would say that I would definitely

line up for a post graduate course of you teaching people about this movie because this is maybe the third or fourth time we've talked about it and every time I think you have this incredible ability to clarify why you like it and why it's meaningful. And that's the best part about making lists like this.

It's different small things speak to you about movies. And I wasn't offended by the movie per se. I just wish it was just a little bit more entertaining, candidly. I'm not the kind of person who goes in with a modicum of moral outrage coming out of something. And Adam, I know for a fact that this is not on your list. No, but what I'm envisioning is, you know those award season screeners that open like a gatefold

and there's like a row of like 12 quotes from different outlets? It's just Chris. It's just each paragraph of what he just said and then at the bottom, in very small print, it just says Chris Ryan Ringer. So it looks like there's 12 people raving about it.

And then it says, what utter horseshit, every other critic in the world. No, what I'll say, I mean, it didn't there's 12 people raving about it. And then it says, what utter horseshit, every other critic in the world. No, what I'll say, I mean, it didn't occur to me when I wrote about it, because again, I think I wrote about it for us, for Ringer, and yeah, the El Topo comparison is a good one, and even though I don't like

the film, just to support Chris here, del Toro's really good. He's better than he has to be with that character. He's just a fine, professional actor. He's good in the first Sicario and he's good in this one, too. I'm all for Benicio. I'm all for Benicio,

too. What's your number five, Adam? My number five is Support the Girls. My name is Lisa. I'm the general manager and my girl just said you got a little disrespectful with her. A what? You might have thought you were just having a little fun, but I have a zero tolerance policy on disrespect, so you're going to have to go.

Blow me. Nice. Chris just mentioned it. Let's talk about it. By Andrew Budzowski. This is a film set at a kind of highway side restaurant that's a little bit like an Applebee's crossed with a Hooters, and it's this welter of contradictions where it's sleazy but family-friendly,

and it's also like an independent mom-and-pop store that can't compete, but it can't compete with peddling, sleazy, but also very retrograde sexual ideas. But then the staff are maybe a little less less put upon and beaten down than you'd expect in some ways they're quite cheerful and own aspects of these personas they take on while they're serving customers and their boss is played by regina hall character lisa and it's i think the performance of the year certainly the female lead performance of the year someone who's internalized all these aspects of her job like she's internalized the authority and the protectiveness but also that sense of frustration and futility and she kind of succeeds at her job at the expense of the other aspects of her life and the movie is just set in one

fairly eventful but in the grand scheme of things like compared to a movie like black panther a pretty banal afternoon and uh it's just enchanting i was reminded of any of everything from altman to to jean renoir while watching it just you know in terms of the the humanism of it and the sweetness of it i think it's terrific i like andrew bujowski generally i think it's his best movie by a mile that's fascinating um i don't know that i agree that it's his best movie i will definitely watch anything he makes and i think this is a very nice kind of evolution off of what results was. I found Computer Chess to be kind of like a fascinating grand statement for him in a weird way. But results seem to be a slight pivot in a new direction to a certain kind of filmmaking. And Support the Girls is a really

nice modernizing of that. Chris, you liked Support the Girls too? I did, man. I mean, he makes ordinary people fascinating. He makes these movies about people where you're just like, I passed this person on the street. I interacted this person in a transactional way and supported my life. And it's kind of brave to just kind of go ahead and say, you know what, I want to make the movie about the waitress.

I want to make the movie about the personal trainer. It's just great that these movies still get made. And the sight gag of the year, in this case, being a Steph Curry tattoo. Which has an end... I mean, that just killed me. I read somewhere the other day that it was a Steph Curry tattoo and not a LeBron tattoo because they just thought Steph Curry

was funnier. I don't quite know why that is or what that means, but it is the correct choice. Yeah, that's my kind of director right there who knows how to make that choice. My number five is Black Panther. We already talked about that. Chris, what's your number four? My number four, this was the favorite. Okay. Adam, what's your number four? Beale Street. So we're zipping through now. This is beautiful. My number four was First Reformed, which we have discussed.

Okay. What's your number three? Okay. So I would just say, for what it's worth, we talked a little bit about the mechanics of list making at the top of this pod. I think that this is where the tier starts. Okay. So I would say that there's a four through 18 is malleable. These are the three best movies that I've seen this year by far. And number three is Minding the Gap.

Life might be moving too fast. We have to fully grow up and it's going to suck. When you're a kid, you just do, you just act. And then somewhere along the line, everyone loses that. The most moving thing I saw this year, I am not a doc guy, you know, much to my personal shame, but it's just one of the things I've never actually become proficient in is watching documentaries. There were times I forgot this is a documentary.

They felt like characters whose lives were bending in a way that almost matched like a tragedy. Even though there are some nice moments in this movie, a lot of it is about the abandoned part of this country and the lives that kind of got left behind there and the few kind of moments that you can find of solace in that world and skateboarding being one of them, friendship being another. And, you know, for people who don't know, this is on Hulu, so it's relatively accessible. It's a documentary about a group of kids who found each other through skateboarding in Rockford, Illinois, which is sort of this dead factory town where a lot of people are just kind of scraping by to make ends meet. foot of capitalism right now in a long time, like Minding the Gap, in just really basic ways

of guys who are like, I have this job. I have to be on top of a roof all day or wash dishes all day, and I can barely make enough money to do anything outside of live. But these three guys at the center of the movie are just, you'll leave it thinking they're your friends, you know, and you'll care about them that much. So this is my number one. I'll tell a quick story about this movie. There was a Michael Moore movie that came out this year. It's called Fahrenheit 11-9. I actually think it's a little bit better than it's gotten credit for. I thought it was kind of an impressive piece of propaganda. But in the lead up to that movie, I rewatched all of Michael Moore's movies, which I have a complicated relationship with.

I thought that they were kind of impressively radicalizing for a kid from the suburbs, but I also sense a sort of narcissism in them that I'm a little dubious of. One of his least discussed movies is called The Big One. And it's basically a travelogue of his book tour in 1998 around Downsize This, which was a once upon a time very successful book in the mold of like an Al Franken book or a Rush Limbaugh book. We don't really have those anymore, but, you know, it was this rabble rousing thing. And Michael Moore's conceit was to go on a book tour to a number of American cities that were less visited. This was not the New York, Washington, D.C., Tony book tour.

He went to real places. And one of the places he goes to in the movie is Rockford, Illinois. And in Rockford, Illinois, there's a Borders bookstore that is attempting to unionize and they're having trouble getting the wages and the benefits that they want,

that they feel that they need to have to live in this small town. This movie was made and released in 1998. It's 20 years ago. And it kind of feels like the people that we see from Rockford in the big one are the people who grew up to be the parents of the kids in Minding the Gap. And it felt like there was a real world connection. And Minding the Gap has none of the kind of frivolity and smarminess of a Michael Moore movie,

as much as I like Michael Moore. It is a very sincere, grounded, and difficult kind of life that Bing Liu, the filmmaker, is showing. And I was completely blown away by it. And this is a fascinating year for documentaries. We've had four movies that have been more successful than any documentary have in many years. Chief among them, Won't You Be My Neighbor, the Mr. Rogers movie, which I think is a very well-made and good hagiography. And I like all of those movies that came out. I've written about all of them. I've talked to some of the filmmakers. Minding the Gap, I haven't spoken

to Bing Liu in part because I almost don't want to ruin my experience of Minding the Gap. And that's a rare thing for me because I'm usually trying to untangle why I'm connected to something. But he just really tapped into something for me. I really love this movie. I'm so glad that you drew it back, that you drew that conclusion from a 20-year kind of time span because one of the things that this movie does so well is show what happens when there's this deterioration of any kind of family. Forget

nuclear, forget the heteronormative idea of it, but there's a deterioration of family and what that does to kids. And what happens when kids make adult mistakes and are forced to be adults too early in their lives. And the violence that comes out of those families, the economic destitution that comes out of those families the pain that is never really you never really figure out how to talk about until it's too late and I don't know like I would recommend this movie to literally anyone

I would recommend this movie if you like skateboarding if you like The Wire if you care about teenage culture if you care about where we're going in this country I just I could not recommend a movie more highly adam what's your number three on that note oh i was gonna say i i wasn't listening to any of that because i didn't see minding the gap i was starting to watch it here in the booth so i could catch up no i i i i missed it i've heard from you guys from people here in toronto that it's

terrific so that is my shameful i don't know if we're all going to say the most shameful thing we didn't see sean mentioned happy as as lazaro this is my shameful one that i missed so i'm sorry about that i thought your shameful one would be game night but that's okay no i like game night i like game night um my number three was burning so that's been covered cool my number three is also burning of course so now we go to chris r number two. Wildlife. There comes a time when a man needs something more to hang his hat on. I got this homicide in my head. I need to do something about it. You understand?

Oh, good. So this was my ladybird this year. Which is basically my shorthand for saying that at the end of this movie, I needed to have a by-myself moment. Paul Dano's debut feature, adapted from a short Richard Ford novel, had my favorite performance of the year, which is Carey Mulligan, who plays a mom. She's married to Jake Gyllenhaal's character of the father, and they have a teenage son. And they're living out in Montana in the early 60s. And sort of, you know, America is sort of starting to change. It feels very much in a part with Minding the Gap to me in some ways.

And this movie was, to me, really a masterpiece of perspective because it tells a story about two adults who are drifting apart from one another and going through these crises. But it tells it with the mystery that comes along with it when you're a kid and you're watching adults go through adult things and you're just getting the emotional vocabulary to understand what they're going through, but you don't quite understand it. And in fact, the two adults in this film frequently confront the teenager with that reality. They're like, you're now in the arena with us. You're seeing me lose someone, try and find someone else. You're seeing your father go through this crisis where he's going to basically drive off into the middle of nowhere. And he'd rather be fighting a forest fire with hobos than staying here at home and providing for our family. And I thought it was just a perfect small movie. And it kind of got lost in the run of movies that came out in the last couple of months, but it was really a breathtaking experience. I love Wildlife. It's unfortunately number 11, which what does that

even mean? I felt similarly, had a very similar relationship to it. It's kind of the inverse of Annihilation in some respects because it is incredibly faithful to the novel until basically the very end that Richard Ford wrote. Just really impressive for a first-time filmmaker. And it's also just not a lot of people have seen it. So I would encourage people to check it out when it comes to iTunes or whatever streaming service. Very well-made, beautiful movie. Adam, what is your number two?

My number two is Let the Sunshine In by Claire Denis, a filmmaker who I know for a fact Sean's a fan of. I don't know how much of her work you've seen, Chris. Did you guys both or one of you see this film? I've seen it. I did not. I like it. It's a little difficult in the face of the movie that I saw that she has coming out

next year, which maybe we can talk about a little bit. Yeah, I mean, for me, Claire Denis is sort of the she's the best. She's a French filmmaker who's been working for the last 30 years and sometimes she works in genres like horror, like Trouble Every Day and this upcoming film High Life which is

a sci-fi film with Robert Pattinson and Andre 3000 from OutKast. This on the surface is a genre film in that it's meant as a kind of romantic comedy or a romantic dramatic comedy. Its subject is somewhat familiar which is sort of midlife dating or the sort of romantic tribulations of a protagonist played

by juliette binoche i think under the fairly accessible surface of this movie is an incredibly serious blunt terrifying unsentimental movie about loneliness and about companionship and about compromise. And I'm all in on Claire Denis. It doesn't mean that I think all her films are great or that I'll like anything she makes regardless of what it is. But I thought this was a really personal film for her and made quite perfectly in an unspectacular, unshowy sort of way. I think by the time High Life comes out next year, it may end up seeming a little bit small because High Life is so ambitious and so extreme

and goes so hard. I have an interview with her that'll be out in CinemaScope in a couple of weeks where we talk about this idea of going hard and that Denise sometimes, she just goes further than almost any filmmaker you can think of. Let the Sunshine In seems to be gentler

and seems to be softer. But what she said to me and i agree with her is that she thinks it's like one of the harshest movies she's ever made and um i've been i've been back to it now a couple of times and i'm just in awe of her uh of her honesty and and lack of sentiment yeah and we should say for people if you're going to check out minding the maybe watch let the sunshine in right afterwards it's also on Hulu at the moment. I saw both of these movies this year, and High Life, as you said, is such a

sensory halo jump in a way. I feel not strange saying it. It's a crazy movie, and it's fascinating. And so it does seem, Let the Sunshine in seems a little bit modest by comparison.

However, there is a kind of frankness in the portrait of a person's sexuality and discontent in the movie that is just really rare. And she's just an amazing director. And I would encourage people to watch all of her films. Where would you start if you were going to do a Claire Denis tutorial? Where would you start if you were going to do a Claire Denis tutorial? Where would I start? I mean, she made a film called Beau Travail,

which is by no means her earliest film, but it's kind of the first one of her movies that really got clocked internationally as like, this person is something special.

You can't start there though because you can't see Beau Travail. It's like really hard to find. Yeah, I know. Well, I mean, where I would start is with the number of her films have sort of been put on nice DVD labels, including

Criterion made her film White Material with Isabelle Huppert, which is also, I think, relatively accessible by her terms. What's fascinating to me is that a lot of people, because A24 is a good distributor in this sense, are going to start with High Life. And if people aren't familiar with Denis before they see High Life, they're going to ask, who is this filmmaker, right? So hopefully they'll then answer this question by going back and looking at the body of work. And I can't wait to see how A24 tries to market this thing, you know, because it's pretty out there and we'll see what they do. Yeah. I mean, Robert Pattinson, Andre 3000, and Julia Pinoche on the poster will probably get the

job done, but yeah, it'll be fun. There'll be a lot of where to start with Claire Denis in 2019. So this is a good kickoff to that conversation. Yeah, for sure. My number two is Roma. That's my number one. Great. Let's talk about Roma. It's funny that, Adam, I know that you responded to this movie with a little bit of distance, even though I think you admired it.

I did. I'll just get my little crack out of the way and then let you guys talk about it if you like it more, which is at the end of each scene, I felt I should have been holding up like an Olympic judge scorecard. Like, this is an eight. This is a nine. And the fact is there's a lot of tens in there,

but there is something, a fundamental contradiction in terms between neorealism and the kind of spectacle that Cuaron is good at. Didn't bother me in Children of Men, in Gravity, how can you be bothered by it? It's the point. In this film, I thought the means and the content were a bit at odds, but I do not hold it against people who find this to be an amazing technical piece of filmmaking because it is. So that's a great way to phrase it because that is what I like about it. It feels like the summation of the two ethics that he has pursued as a filmmaker. It feels like Children of Men and Gravity colliding headlong with The Little Princess and Y Tu Mamá Tambien. And not just

because it's set in Mexico or because it's an emotional story that has incredible camera work, but because it seemed like he was trying to find a movie to put both of these feelings together for years and he never quite found it. And even though Cuaron is understood to be a master, I think some people think he's kind of the master living filmmaker right now. I'm not sure I would really go that far, but it felt like he figured out a way to fuse the two things that make him special. And, you know, I've talked about it a little bit on the show already. I've written about the movie already. I'm really excited to hear what Chris thought about this because we haven't

discussed it at all, but it's just, uh, even if it is an Olympic judging scenario, like the Olympics are fucking great. Yeah. The best of the Olympics is incredible. It's one of the most incredible uniting experiences that we have.

And this movie does feel like, I wish I could just be like, just watch this movie to every single person that lives in a different way than Yeah, the best of the Olympics is incredible. It's one of the most incredible uniting experiences that we have. And this movie does feel like, I wish I could just be like, just watch this movie to every single person that lives in a different way than Minding the Gap. Minding the Gap is a way to understand humanity in real terms on the ground. Roma is like what the, to me, what the height of the art form can be. Chris, what did you think? I have like a really pretentious metaphor, or I think, or an analogy rather, which is basically like I felt like I was watching the Brooklyn Bridge get built. Because not only was it this majestical technical achievement, but I also felt like I walked across it. And then I like was, I like got closer to my fellow man because of it.

And it was really, you know, I hate doing this because it's not enough people are going to get a chance to see this in the movie theater. But I saw it in a packed, sold-out theater right up the street from my house, luckily enough. And you could just hear people crying. You know what I mean? Like, that's fucking amazing. That's not something that we get to do very often in our lives is to be connected with other people around us while we're experiencing art in that way. So that was a really, really moving experience. But beyond that, I thought it captured the way in which when you're young, especially, even though it's about this woman, Cleo, for the most part, who's a little bit older, but like for the kids in the movie, I was always watching them because I thought that the grandeur of it really captured the way when you're a kid,

your small slice of the world feels like the entire world. And, you know, sometimes I'll go back to my neighborhood in Philadelphia now and I'll walk down to places I used to ride my bike or whatever. And in my mind back then, they were so far away. It was such like an accomplishment to like get to this side of the park or something like that. And now you go down there and you're like, oh, it's like right there. But this movie captures what it must be like to turn a corner in Mexico City and see a movie theater. You know what I mean? And that feeling of just being like this entire world is opening up. And, you know, Mexico City is one of the true teeming metropolises that we have on the planet. And so that he's got this huge canvas to paint

with. But I don't know, man. I mean, there are obviously some gut punch moments in it, but I was just as fascinated with watching her prepare an egg for a kid, you know? And, and, uh, I think that is kind of his genius is the ability to, to, to take these small moments and make them, you know, gone with the wind, basically. Well said. said adam let's go to your number one my number one is the front runner by jason reitman uh really you know links gary hart to today no my uh my number one film uh is uh lucrezia martel's zama don diego de Zama. ¿A dónde esperas al trasladado? A la ciudad de Lerma.

¡Mirón! Which almost rhymes with Roma, which is an Argentinian film about a Spanish diplomat stationed in Patagonia in the 17th century, and he's bored out of his mind, and it's like the Hotel California, like he just cannot check out of there, and he's bored out of his mind and it's like the hotel california like he just cannot check out of there and he's mocked by the locals and he's sexually frustrated and his life is passing him by and it's like this slow motion comedy this perfect satire of government authority

and masculinity and futility and then in the second half it becomes almost like a heart of darkness adventure movie where in order to show that he deserves to be treated better, he's going to go out and catch this outlaw, which has really sort of hilariously violent consequences. And you know, I mentioned Kubrick earlier with The Favourite and Barry Lyndon, and there's

a bit of Barry Lyndon in this movie too. The difference being that even more than Yorgos Lanthimos, I think Lucrezia Martel has a way of seeing that is fully, completely, and heroically her own. I think she's more like Claire Denis in that sense, which is you wouldn't mistake a frame of her work for anyone else's. She makes you see the world through her eyes. She makes you experience time and stasis and boredom, but also desire and ecstasy and violence on her terms. And it's not for everyone. But I have not seen a film, not only this year, but I'd say in a couple of years,

that so forces you to meet it on its level as Zama does. And it's a level that I was really happy to be on. It's visually beautiful. It feels both longer than it is, but also feels like it's over in a flash. I've seen it three times now. It's very much my taste, and it may not be everyone's taste, but it's a film to discover. And for those of us who discovered Martel a few years ago and have watched her now through these four flawless movies she's made, Le Chienaga, which is on Criterion, The Holy Girl, The Headless

Woman, which is a great thriller, and this film Zama, she's just about the most amazing contemporary filmmaker working. I was glad to see the film get a release. I've been happy to see it show up on a few 10 best lists, and I can't recommend a film more highly. We've already talked about my number one. It's Minding the Gap. Adam, you mentioned time, boredom, ecstasy, and violence. I feel like that neatly summarizes the movies we discussed here today. Chris Ryan, Adam Naiman, thank you guys so much for doing this. Thanks, man. Thanks.