At the end of every year, when compiling our respective filmography lists, Hunter and I would tally our final number of that year’s films we saw. Always in awe of Steven Soderbergh’s Extension 765 “Seen, Read” list, we mutually agreed that in 2018 we’d try to hit the ever-elusive century of contemporary theatrical releases: 100 in a calendar year.

As of this summer, we were both on pace to climb that mountain, and so in honor of Hunter, I decided to follow through on our pact and commemorate that finishing the list he started. By the end of 2018, I saw a total of 119 releases from the universal calendar we always used at Dark Horizons. What I’ve realized is that once you’ve hit the 100 mark, quantity reveals quality. It turns out you can compare apples and oranges.

I’ve always been a fan of Hunter’s writing, bringing the high and the low, the popcorn and the art house, and the good and the just plain bad together under one big mutual love of film. I know I’ll never be able to write with his same wit or depth of knowledge, but I want to keep his Filmography format alive, so please accept this post as a tribute and a continuation of his view of cinema (and thanks to Ariel and Rod for helping me set this up).

Below are entirely my opinions, though some of these picks he told me would definitely be making his list (and not the shoo-in ones you’d even expect). He definitely wouldn’t agree with all of this, but he sure would enjoy you getting excited or upset about some of the below inclusions.

Agree, disagree, chew me out, or write your own list entirely. What Hunter would want is for the discussion to continue. Please enjoy.

– Drew Shields

THE UNHERALDED:

The films that never found their audience, could just use some more exposure, or deserve another look.

A rock movie content to stay small and intimate, built not for arena-sized set pieces but coffee shop playlists and bedroom pop productions.

An unlikely duo of actors stretched outside of their usual typecasting to rally across the American Southwest.

This duel of political correctness and oafishness takes aim at every point on the political spectrum, resulting in some of the best one-liners in any film this year.

A childlike concoction of an action film, where the rules are made up, weapons and vehicles appear out of thin air, and every character takes a turn to tackle one of the bad guys like action figures smashing together.

The ultimate mid-life crisis, this eulogy-turned-redemption song wears equal parts humor and heart on its sleeve.

FAVORITE MOVIEGOING EXPERIENCE OF 2018:

Oh, Oh I Know That!: The Movie is a weird slapdash of the adolescent, 80s style-storytelling (which Spielberg perfected a few decades ago) with a 100-page listicle of proper nouns meant to appeal to today’s IP-obsessed Internet. Notable juxtaposition at my screening: when the Gundam robot appeared, the 40 year-old Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons sitting in front of me squealed. A few minutes later, when Reluctant Chosen One Boy saved the day and Manic Pixie Rebel Girl rewarded him with a kiss, the two teenage girls on a date next to me groaned. In that moment I realized Spielberg failed making a movie for today’s youth, with characters and a world that matched the crowd a PG-13 adventure film should appeal to. But, Spielberg playing his greatest hits at least gave him the opportunity to make The Post. In the end, we won.

I WAS THERE WHEN IT HAPPENED:

Geographically and chronologically confusing, tonally schizophrenic, and featuring brilliant flashes of melodrama, this timeless tale works best when you don’t think about it too much. It’s a myth, it’s a meme, it’s a now-legendary karaoke staple. Ladies and gentlemen, this is worthy popcorn zeitgeist.

HOT MESS OF THE YEAR:

By giving equal weight to narrative and documentary styles in this true-story heist film, Layton has unknowingly made The Thin Blue Line for the Barstool Sports crowd. Neither style is cautionary nor critical enough of its subjects to leave the audience with any coherent message besides the penal leniency white privilege buys. As an experiment, it’s worthy, but as a swing that misses so hard, it’s unsettling to see this film so polished into a facsimile of something important.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Because making a ranked list is hard, these shortlist candidates are ordered alphabetically.

Adapted, streamlined, and still somehow as disquieting as a purposely gender-flipped Stalker could be on paper, Garland’s latest science fiction expedition forces you to confront how you feel when the good guys neither win nor lose… But simply change the limits of their stories entirely.

Haruki Murakami’s magical realism usually leaves you mystified and unfulfilled. But with Lee’s deft direction, it takes on a cyclical, poetic, and unsettling slant, forcing you to question the difference between seeing and knowing.

An exhumation of old selves and old traditions which reproves the adage that you can never truly go home again. Dull and grey, Lelio’s vision proves a worthy successor to Stephen Frears’ view of an outsider London.

Cringeworthy, cautionary, but ultimately compassionate, this may be the first, judgement-free, totemic text for living in the social media age.

A great study in misdirection, the real horror here sets in when you’re already way too deep into the story see the forest for the terrifying trees.

With the story and characters’ internal monologues provided by James Baldwin’s unfettered text, Jenkins is free to use his floating camera to lead the scenes. A brush of the arm, a whisp of a cigarette, these are the moments in which love is born.

Featuring a stunning debut by Madeline Howard, who plays the ultimate nesting doll of unreliable narrators, this is a film that teaches you how to watch it as you’re watching it.

In a filmic landscape where every popcorn movie is so loud, this succeeds because it strives to be the quiet outlier. It’s a challenge in breath control buoyed by a believable and warm family dynamic.

The chemistry between Zooey Deutsch and Glen Powell is unmatched in any film remotely resembling a rom-com in the past year. Their shared late-night pizza is the pie that launched a thousand Tumblr posts.

A funk Alice in Wonderland odyssey through downtown Oakland and up the corporate ladder. It’s Repo Man for 2018, a fun and rebellious middle finger to late-stage capitalism.

GREAT PERFORMANCES:

The actors who defined their films, made bad material great, and occasionally made you crawl the end credits just to see who that was, listed alphabetically.

TOP 10:

Frozen, temperately and emotionally in an upstate New York winter, ennui and toxic masculinity take hold. Through the most privileged and yet repressed blunt object, Hawke’s Father Toller, the film plays out as the most desperate fight for our supposed collective soul.

A quiet meditation on the family we choose, the plain way in which Koreeda portrays the unorthodox lifestyle at the film’s center calls to mind the non-judgmental eye of Yasujirō Ozu, who loved to focus on marginal people sticking together amidst indifferent societies rapidly moving past them.

A tightrope walk of anachronisms ranging from dance to trash talk, this cat-and-mouse game is responsible for some of the biggest laughs of the year, if you hate cats and love mice.

A pressure cooker between a man and his friend, his family, his city, and the society that put him in his precarious position. Any semblance of freedom lies at the end of this grueling countdown.

A love letter to a John le Carré novel never written, Yun raises the temperature of this cold war espionage thriller to something more human, personal, and melancholic, erasing borders and demarcating morality.

A paper-thin pulp plot (gold bullion, a pack of thieves, two cops, some collateral bystanders, and a shootout) propelled by visual flourishes and metaphors more at home on the walls of an art gallery. It takes every opportunity to make everyday objects visceral and everyday acts transcendent.

Cuarón has been derided for prioritizing technical craft over storytelling, but here, the immaculately choreographed world of Roma is the story. In this dollhouse aesthetic, the background is the focus from an omnipotent perspective that’s simultaneously intimate and passive.

A breath of fresh air. If every children’s film could be this original, boldly cosmopolitan, inclusive, and steadfastly optimistic, we wouldn’t need family films which pen separate jokes for the kids and for the parents. At its moral core, King posits a world in which no one is irredeemable and overcoming greed can be accomplished not through imagination nor self-confidence, but with the radical notion of kindness.

Dark and disturbing, less for the black magic at play than its politics, which thematically traces the turmoil of post-WWII Germany, when its monsters were forced underground. At its core, the Bechdel-smashing cast hides an authoritarian matriarchy responsible for brutal reprisals of political rivals and dissidents.

If all this film is remembered for is headlines, think pieces, and onscreen representation epochs, it would be a travesty. As a mainstream release of a dormant genre film, the rom-com, it had to check many boxes and thread many needles. Exclusive and yet inclusive, content to not explain every mahjong tile while also providing the ABCs of ABCs to a largely non-Asian audience, that this film also found space to be so damn subversive is what makes it truly great.

In lesser hands, this film could have simply been a visual laundry list of high-end product placement. Instead, Chu clears the lane to rewrite the tropes of Old Hollywood. Here is a world in which the soundtrack is buttressed upon 60s classic chic and a wardrobe montage bops along to a Cantonese rewiring of Madonna’s “Material Girl.” It doesn’t shy away from making sly proclamations of the end of the American Century, or cementing its tongue firmly in cheek to pull off a post-colonial flip of Apocalypse Now, in which a group of Asian men fly helicopters into International Waters to the tune of “Flight of the Valkyries” and then wrap white Miss Universe contestants around their arms like trophies. It’s this bombast that has the ability to supplant in people’s minds the old, racist refrain of “Charlie don’t surf.”

And while a rom-com is sold on the leading couple at hand, it should be shouted from every rooftop in Singapore: this is Michelle Yeoh’s film. If you don’t accept her as the protagonist (even though we do meet her first in the film, flippantly conquering old-school British racism), then she is the film’s antagonist—but never the villain. Her influence forced Chu to retool her character’s arc, temporarily removing her character’s husband from the equation, and putting the cross-continental, cross-generational conflict with Constance Wu’s character squarely on her shoulders. No longer the matriarchal obstructionist, Yeoh’s character’s arc is transformed into an ongoing argument with a younger version of herself. What initially appears to be a zero-sum-game detentes into a mutual understanding delivered with a simple glance. With all the weight in the Hollywood world on its shoulders, this film never flees, but fights to make itself unequivocally heard.

EVERYTHING ELSE I SAW IN 2018:

The Commuter / Proud Mary / Paddington 2 / The Cloverfield Paradox / Black Panther / Annihilation / Game Night / Mute / Gringo / Thoroughbreds / A Wrinkle In Time / Isle of Dogs / The Death of Stalin / Unsane / Pacific Rim: Uprising / Ready Player One / You Were Never Really Here / Blockers / A Quiet Place / The Endless / Love, Simon / Avengers: Infinity War / Tully / Breaking In / On Chesil Beach / Book Club / Deadpool 2 / Solo: A Star Wars Story / First Reformed / Disobedience / Won’t You Be My Neighbor? / Action Point / Ocean’s Eight / Hereditary / American Animals / Incredibles 2 / Set It Up / Red Sparrow / Uncle Drew / Sorry To Bother You / Ant-Man and the Wasp / Eighth Grade / Sicario: Day of the Soldado / The Equalizer 2 / Crazy Rich Asians / Mission: Impossible – Fallout / BlacKkKlansman / Juliet, Naked / To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before / Blindspotting / The Wife / The Ritual / Let the Corpses Tan / Kin / Searching / The Spy Gone North / The Meg / The Predator / Assassination Nation / Beirut / The Long Dumb Road / Gemini / Hot Summer Nights / The Old Man & the Gun / First Man / Lean on Pete / Hold the Dark / A Star is Born / The Sisters Brothers / Destination Wedding / Venom / The Oath / Bad Times at the El Royale / Tag / Halloween / Hearts Beat Loud / Upgrade / Overboard / Apostle / Can You Ever Forgive Me? / Mid90s / Slice / Wildlife / Suspiria / Hotel Artemis / Adrift / I Feel Pretty / Green Book / Nico, 1988 / Teen Titans Go! To The Movies / Burning / The Spy Who Dumped Me / Skyscraper / Shoplifters / The Front Runner / The Ballad of Buster Scruggs / Widows / The Favourite / Revenge / Roma / Leave No Trace / The Night Comes for Us / Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom / The Hurricane Heist / Outlaw King / Madeline’s Madeline / If Beale Street Could Talk / Support the Girls / Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse / Destroyer / Ralph Breaks The Internet / A Simple Favor / Mandy / Thunder Road / Mary Poppins Returns / Bird Box / Christopher Robin / Aquaman