Starving artist and expat Charlie is in desperate need of 800 euros in writer-director Jordan Blady’s darkly comedic first feature. To the audience’s great amusement, Blady’s narcissistic protagonist is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to get ahead. The sonnet-length, 74-minute indie debuted at the LA Film Festival in 2018.
On a historic night, Parasite became the first foreign-language film to win Best Picture during the 92nd Academy Awards ceremony. The accolades for director Bong Joon-ho’s rousing social critique didn’t end there; as the film won the newly minted Best International Feature Film (formerly Best Foreign Language Film), Bong received the second-ever Best Director win for a foreign-language film after Alfonso Cuarón was honored for Roma 11-and-a-half months ago, and Parasite became the sixth foreign-language film to take home Best Original Screenplay.
Screenwriter and director Paul Schrader is best known for writing Taxi Driver and co-writing Raging Bull. With First Reformed, a movie written and directed by Schrader, the filmmaker can step out of Martin Scorsese’s long shadow and add an accomplishment all his own to the list of his most prominent credits.
Featuring a pastel-colored prison bakery, a bear riding a stray dog like Napoleon Crossing the Alps, and a pop-up book leading to long lost treasure, Paddington 2 is pure childhood bliss in a 104-minute package.
New York Stories and V/H/S are among the most notable anthology movies, but the best known of all is already 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the most recent film from Joel and Ethan Coen. In Buster Scruggs, the directors open and close each of the movie’s six short films by flipping through the fictional book of short stories that the tales emanate from. This is apt imagery from a collection of unconnected, darkly comedic Westerns that belongs on a list among the best short stories in any medium.
Twenty-nine years after Driving Miss Daisy unconscionably secured the Academy Award for Best Picture, Green Book, a movie informally dubbed the reverse Driving Miss Daisy, took home the same prize at the 2018 Academy Awards. Studios won’t halt production on the Green Books of the world until movies like it are no longer profitable and well received, but the Academy should stop rewarding them. Green Book is entertaining, innocuous (on its surface), and feel-good for the right viewer, but the context surrounding it and the subtext that can be garnered from it change the conversation.
Raw is the most apt word to describe mid90s, a 2018 coming-of-age skate film and the directorial debut for actor-turned-director Jonah Hill. Though thin on plot, mid90s finds redemption through its authentic characters and genuine story.
Set in Harlem in the early 1970s, If Beale Street Could Talk is a story of family, hope, and despair. Released in 2018 and based on a book of the same title by famed author James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk reveals what we already knew: writer-director Barry Jenkins is a master of the craft.
Damien Chazelle’s third feature film, First Man, salutes the ingenuity and sacrifice necessary to launch rickety spacecrafts into the great unknown. The film spends its 141-minute runtime as a cross between a Neil Armstrong biopic and a recounting of the Apollo space program. Despite Chazelle’s technical mastery and the intrinsic allure of the subject matter, the film is unable to replicate the feelings that inspired a generation of scientists.
Based on a true story and a memoir of the same name, Can You Ever Forgive Me? follows Lee Israel, a biographer turned forger and her exploits across the collector book scene, in ‘90s New York City. One of the best films of 2018, Can You Ever Forgive Me? operates somewhere between a buddy comedy and Catch Me If You Can.
amixedreview.com 