You know the drill: a lot of movies came out this year and I saw a very small percentage of them. Below is my Top 10, along with several other awards – a format that I started last year and enjoyed writing very, very much.

I want to apologize in advance to the following films I missed, but believe could have very easily made their way into this article, and of which I’ll likely catch up with in 2019: Early Man, A Wrinkle in Time, Blockers, Tully, Hotel Artemis, Uncle Drew, Teen Titans Go! To The Movies, A Star Is Born, Bad Times at the El Royale, First Man, Eighth Grade, The Rider, The Hate U Give, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Suspiria, Private Life, Hold the Dark, Burning, Widows, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Anna and the Apocalypse, and Aquaman.

And off we go!

Most Expensive Magic Trick: Avengers: Infinity War

A $300 million budget. 40 characters across 18 Marvel films. A main villain that is 100% motion-capture. I can’t even imagine the amount of planning it took to get so many expensive, well-known actors into one location, given secret scripts which unravel upon being read, with the sets, locations, and coordination that goes into making this even remotely work.

And yet, it works. It really, really works. Thanos, thanks to Josh Brolin and an army of CGI artists, feels like a living, breathing, power-hungry villain. Yes, his plan is pretty dumb. But it feels beside the point. What matters is how powerful he becomes and how powerless Marvel’s characters feel by the film’s closing moments. This film lost major points with me for killing off the characters we all knew had movies coming (this is where reading about movies as much as I do is not so beneficial), and yet: I’m not sure how they could have avoided a collision with the Disney/Marvel movie machine, which will rumble on for many years to come, among roads paved with dollars, coins, and sheer gold.

Even more: it made me curious just how they’re going to wrap this whole ongoing storyline up. Maybe there will actually be stakes. Maybe main characters will actually die or remain dead. Maybe these movies will stick with us beyond the walk to our car.

These are all high hopes. But nobody can take away Infinity War and the massively expensive, exhaustingly-coordinated magic trick it turned out to be.

Best Summer Palate Cleanser: Ant Man and the Wasp

The first Ant-Man movie came out in the summer of 2015, a couple months after Avengers: Age of Ultron, which was a 2 hours-plus, $300 million-plus sequel with a CGI villain played in motion-capture by a fifty-something actor (James Spader). Everyone pretty much said, “Wow, that Ant-Man sure is a great Marvel palate cleanser after the excess of that Avengers sequel!”

Three years later, Ant-Man and the Wasp comes out a couple months after Avengers: Infinity War, which was a 2 hours-plus-plus, $300 million-plus sequel with a CGI villain played in motion-capture by a fifty-something actor (Josh Brolin). Everyone pretty much said, “Wow, that Ant-Man and the Wasp sure is a great Marvel palate cleanser after the excess of that Avengers sequel!”

Best Wedding Sequence: Crazy Rich Asians

The film itself is quite fun and an interesting foray into a world unbeknownst to most of America. And yes, Henry Golding is very, very charming and a great onscreen match for Constance Wu. But the movie operates along the lines of “fun, escapist summer movie” all the way until its showstopper of a wedding sequence.

Like a wedding in Washington, D.C. or even with the Royal Family in England, this is a wedding in which the surroundings and participants are more attention-demanding than the bride and groom themselves. Rachel (Wu) has struggled to untangle the webs of Singapore wealth threatening to keep her and Nick (Golding) from being together. Her unease is apparent as the key figures in the various conflicts approach and seat themselves amidst tall grass, with an aisle that later fills with a shallow sheen of water as the bridge glides to the alter.

It’s a gorgeous setting, and clear how such a royal wedding such as this could cost $40 million. Everyone is dealing with their own personal issues, whether with themselves, their family, or their spousal relationships. And yet, by the time Kina Grannis’ sings her immaculate, deeply emotional cover of ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ and the camera cuts between Nick and Rachel, back and forth, each time their frustrations disappearing and their smiles surfacing, we can see just how deeply in love these two are and how special it is that moment when they recognize everything is worth it. That they will give it their all to make it work.

Best Twist: Sorry to Bother You

Anything I read about Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You suggested to go into the film as cold as possible. To not spoil one bit. And so I listened. I bookmarked anything I wanted to read and read absolutely nothing ahead of time. I was ready to roll.

But that late-in-the-game twist? Holy shit.

It is so ballsy, so off-the-wall, so unexpected. And it recontextualizes everything that came before, like the best twists do.

This is a movie with great music, great acting, a true point-of-view, and the best twist of 2018.

Best/Worst 2 Hour Tease of a Movie I Might Actually Prefer to See: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Jurassic World seemed to think people wanted two things from their Jurassic Park movie: great dinosaur action and human, relatable characters. They delivered (mostly) on the dino action, but they gave us some of the most annoying, maddening human characters. So then they overcompensated with Fallen Kingdom by dialing the human characters down a bit and trying to make them more likable. And then they gave their new bad guy the broadest possible personality strokes – so broad even Jafar and Scar would sit up and spit out their drink – and their new child character, meant to be somewhat relatable, the craziest, ickiest twist of science fiction.

Guess what, guys? It really doesn’t matter.

I don’t care about any of these people.

I just wanna see some jaw-dropping dino action that I haven’t seen before. That’s all I ask.

And I just might get it. I’ll just have to wait until Summer 2020 when the last of this dumb trilogy comes out. You see, the final moments of Fallen Kingdom (SPOILERS) show what we actually saw in the first trailers: shots of a T-Rex roaring at a Lion, of a Mesosaurus in rapid danger of chomping the life out of some tiny surfers cruising a gnarly wave.

In other words, we saw a world in which we didn’t have to come up with another dumb dumb dumb reason to get these barely human characters BACK to the island AGAIN and instead got to see the totally cool juxtaposition of real dinosaurs in AMERICA with ANIMALS that we are very, very familiar with. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll get to see these dinosaurs ruin the country even faster than the current administration has! Maybe we’ll even get some ‘good’ dinosaurs to help take out the ‘bad’ ones and it will be like every time I played with my good and bad dinosaur toys as a kid! Maybe!

I just had to suffer through 120 minutes of an excuse to see 4 minutes of what I actually wanted to see. So if you have the time and energy for that kind of bargain, might as well fire this movie up.

Best Video Game on Film: Ready Player One

I haven’t read the Ernest Cline novel which this is based upon, so I can only base my reactions on the film itself (which is how every film adaptation of a book should be judged, honestly). This is a seriously confused movie thematically, as it keeps building towards a moment of being profound that ends up being somewhat lacking in self-awareness. It wants to tell us to prize human interaction and go outside more often when the entire thing is stuck is in a video game. It wants to convince us that an entire virtual reality empire was built on not being kissed on a date, which just makes all the adults look like 14-year-olds in a state of arrested development. And then it wants to say NONE OF THIS MATTERS LETS HAVE FUN while demanding we create more meaning of what we just saw.

My issues with those story choices aside, this is a movie that’s better to view through the lens of Spielberg having loads of fun with fancy technology.

(BTW: director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future trilogy, Forrest Gump) – who went down a serious motion-capture animation rabbit hole with Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol – paved the way for Spielberg to take the marriage of actors and animation and run with it. Spielberg dabbled in the field with alarming success in his first feature attempt with 2011’s Adventures of Tintin. Zemeckis just made a movie called Welcome to Marwen – about a man going through a difficult time and who finds escape and meaning in creating an alternative reality that is fully CGI’d…much like Wade Watts in Ready Player One escaping into a fully CGI’d alternate reality. If these similar frameworks for films were dresses and we were playing ’Who Wore It Best?’ I’m gonna say Spielberg wins this round. Just sayin’.)

It should say a lot that Sony actively pursued an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Film for this crazy ride of a film. There’s just that much CGI and that little of actual humans moving on screen. Either way, Spielberg is clearly having a blast going nuts with the technology and being freed from the constraints of a physical film set. Like Avatar, your eyes will become accustomed to the new CGI reality and it will all blend seamlessly together. I never thought I’d get so much enjoyment out of seeing my beloved Iron Giant on the screen again, kicking ass and taking names, but this is the kind of film that takes your nostalgia for everything (and not just the 80’s) and weaponizes it in the name of hope and, uh…whatever else the film is fighting for. Just don’t think about it too hard.

Best Exercise in Gratitude: Hereditary

I left this movie grateful for a few things, in no particular order:

1. My head (as in, a healthy one attached to my neck and above my shoulders)

2. A lack of peanut allergy.

3. A bedroom ceiling devoid of Toni Collette’s presence.

The “It’s Not You, It’s Me” Award: Mandy

Just about every conversation I’ve had with a fan of this movie has admitted it’s style over substance. And they just really, really like the style. I remain baffled at what makes this movie so beyond great other than some impressive cinematography, original title cards, a unique way of showing how cults brainwash you (maybe the whole movie is a giant cult trying to brainwash me into loving something I do not fully understand?), and some brave, oddball decisions.

I felt like the dude on the other side of the looking glass the last few months as everyone raved about this film. But there’s nothing wrong with saying it’s just not your thing. Mandy, it’s not you. It’s me. And that’s okay.

Best and Most Expensive Dad Joke: Rampage

I will admit I am very vulnerable to the charms of not only CGI monkeys, but CGI monkeys using sign language. There’s just something about it I cannot resist.

Another thing I cannot resist: dad jokes. I love them wholeheartedly.

So when (in an otherwise very forgettable movie) Dwayne Johnson reminds this white ape of what his name is and he signs the ASL sign for “rock”, you bet your monkey-signing-loving dollar that I laughed out loud and told everyone about it.

Hats off to Dwayne Johnson, director Rawson Thurber Marshall, and New Line Cinema’s pockets for nailing the most expensive Dad Joke in cinema history.

Best Reminder There is Good in the World: Paddington 2

I love this movie franchise, and yet even I have to admit there is very little to these series than 1) very charming British actors, 2) an adorable CGI bear voiced by a charming British actor, and 3) the lesson that kindness and community will never go out of style.

This sequel recycles points #1-3, but does so with the addition of perhaps the most charming British actor of the last 30 years in Hugh Grant, who is delightfully game for some very, very amusing disguises throughout the film.

And, of course, like the first Paddington did, this movie is very likely to make you cry in its final moments.

Reminder That Getting Things Out of Your System Should Be Good, Not Unhealthy: Venom

Maybe Tom Hardy just wanted to be in a superhero movie and have his own superhero franchise. Maybe Tom Hardy thought the character looked cool. Maybe he liked the possible acting challenge of Venom vs. Eddie Brock and playing both characters. Maybe he wanted to act a scene in which he jumped in a lobster tank and bit a couple lobster heads off. Maybe he did this movie because his kids love the character and he wanted to bond a little more. Maybe he needed the money. Maybe Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed, and Jenny Slate all needed the money (and if they did, God Bless them all, because they are wonderful actors that I cannot bare to say a bad thing about). Maybe everyone thought they were supposed to act like an alien in this movie.

Maybe all these things are true.

But there is still always a choice. And it looks like everyone kinda made the wrong one.

Best Netflix Movie to Compete for Your Attention: Set It Up

There’s an awful lot on Netflix that can be considered background noise; either because it’s so familiar you can hear or notice the familiar beats and slide right in, or because it’s so predictable that you can catch an original moment with a glance.

I found my pursuit of Level 89 of Toon Blast more interesting than this movie early on, but I kept glancing. And glancing. And glancing.

There’s some good lines (I guffawed at least thrice). There’s weirdly a lot of dick jokes. There’s further evidence that Pete Davidson cannot act (sorry, Pete!).

But above all, there’s undeniable proof that two very likable actors with great chemistry goes a loooooong way towards helping your movie almost single-handedly revive the presumed-dead romantic comedy genre. It subverts and calls out romantic comedy tropes just enough to keep it fresh while also hitting those familiar notes that upgrade a movie to ‘memorable’. They set it up, and they nailed it.

Best Reminder That Sequels Can Be Bigger, Better, and Sexier: Deadpool 2

I loved the first Deadpool, but after multiple delays and the original director departing, I worried where the Merc with the Mouth would be going. Turns out Ryan Reynolds and his collaborators were just fiercely taking their time to tell a worthwhile story.

I doubt I had a more thoroughly enjoyable moviegoing experience as seeing this one in theaters. The jokes come fast and furious, and they land far more often than not. The series gets some delightful new blood with Josh Brolin’s Cable, Zazie Beetz’s Domino, and Julian Dennison’s Firefist. New director David Leitch (John Wick, Atomic Blonde) brings ample amounts of action crunch to Rhett Reeese and Paul Wernick’s hilarious script that somehow, for a Deadpool movie, packs a pretty decent emotional wallop.

Of course, the post-credits scene upped the awesomeness of this movie up an additional 37%. Highly recommended.

And now, the actual Top 10:

10. BlacKKKlansman

Spike Lee lays out the true story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), the first African-American detective to serve in the Colorado Springs Police Department. Stallworth, wanting to make a difference, finds a way to infiltrate the KKK by impersonating a white man and using a partner, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) to take them down.

This film reminds me so much of Lee’s Chi-Raq, in which he used well-known, great actors and an entertaining, muscular style to bring some attention to a real, pressing issue. Washington, Driver, and every other actor in this movie clearly bring their A-game to tell this story as powerfully and honestly as possible. Lee even manages to wring some real laughs out of the film while losing none of its power.

And the final shots are a strong, bold reminder from Lee of just how little we have progressed as a racist country in the 40-plus years since.

9. Roma

Alfonso Cuarón has long been one of my favorite directors. I love him for his insane skill at filmmaking – his masterful long takes and his seamless uses of cutting edge technology – and I especially love him for his empathy. All of his characters feel deeply felt and realized. They’re raging against their reality; they’re trying to find meaning in things that often feel meaningless.

Roma has an unlikely protagonist in Cleo, the housekeeper of a middle class family in early 1970’s Mexico City. She barely says anything throughout the film, her facial expressions almost impenetrable. In fact, one of my favorite scenes is early in the film when a naked man performs his martial arts in front of a smiling Cleo – a scene that with any other director could be played for laughs, but here? Cuarón holds no judgment and instead embraces the naked display of expression from his characters.

Around Cleo, Cuarón paints his black-and-white tapestry with astounding images: planes flying across the reflections in puddles, dust blowing through an outdoor martial arts class, the stark juxtaposition of people blown out of cannonballs while the rest of the world walks through mud and poverty. I kept waiting, however, for something to break through. Something to show us that Cuarón had something up his sleeve.

You’ll know it when you see it, but a devastating event for Cleo seems to go without response or expression until Cuarón masterfully films a scene in which Cleo, unable to swim, must desperately fight through waves to get to children who are drowning. On the surface, it’s a technically impressive long take. But on a storytelling level, it’s one of the most visceral, emotional scenes I’ve seen all year. We know what it feels like when those waves we’re walking or swimming against just keep hitting and hitting, a percussive reminder of just how close we are to failing.

What follows after this scene is the outburst of emotion we’ve been waiting nearly the whole movie for. And the response of the characters around Cleo is just about the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in the movies all year. Cuarón has done it again: impressed us with this deft hand at filmmaking just as he’s reminded us of how powerful empathy and community can be.

8. Shirkers

I happened upon this documentary rather late in the game, and I’m so grateful such a happy accident. Director Sandi Tan wrote, starred in, and shot a movie, Shirkers, back in 1992 with the help of an American mentor twice her age. But just as they finished filming, the footage disappeared with the mentor, never to be seen or shared until 20 years later, when a series of events placed 70 canisters of the film back in her hands.

This film gave me so much to digest and think over. It made me angry and sad for the opportunity that Tan and her collaborators lost. They could have had their place in Singapore (and even American) film history with an actual film, and not just a ghost of a film that everyone continued to whisper and talk about. When Tan points out the American movies that followed hers and the similarities that came about, it only highlights further a simple question: just how many influential, powerful movies have we lost in the narrative of film history? How many stories have been taken away, especially from women?

Tan shows incredible skill with her filmmaking in the way she’s able to seamlessly weave in actual footage from her 1992 unfinished film with the footage of her work to interview her collaborators, her critics, and her friends, and to get to the bottom of what exactly happened to his passion project that was taken away from her. It’s a beautiful way to take back control of a narrative she long had no control over. It’s empowering and heartbreaking all at once, and something I will not forget about for a very long time.

7. Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Watching the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scroggs reminded me of the time I recommended one their films and nearly scarred a dear friend forever.

It was 2009, and I was drunk on their 2008 twofer of Burn After Reading and their deeply personal, highly underrated follow-up, A Serious Man. Giddy from describing what a lovable twit Brad Pitt makes against the fiery, blustery anger of John Malkovich (there are still few things funnier to me than an angry, petulant Malkovich), I recommended Burn After Reading to a friend, promising a deeply entertaining reel of non-stop laughs and giggles.

The next time I saw her, I asked how the movie was. I expected something close to the same giddy energy I had when I first described the movie to her. That’s not quite what I got.

“Ugh” she said, “So depressing. I felt like I needed a shower after that movie.”

This is not an easily depressed friend. This is someone I joked many, many times with, from the mundane to the slightly macabre. I thought this would be an easy win. Instead, it seemed to burrow some kind of dark energy into her that didn’t easily wash off. She seemed almost bothered by what she had seen.

I couldn’t reconcile the difference in my expectations and the reality until I convinced my own mother to watch A Serious Man. I insisted to her how deeply thoughtful and yet hilarious it was, and figured the stark Jewishness of it might somehow appease the strong Catholic she stood as (clearly I did not understand religion enough at the time). While I giggled throughout the entire movie at all the colorful characters and their note-perfect, deeply infectious dialogue, my mother watched in confused silence.

By the end, when the finals moments reveal peak Coen Brothers’ nihilism, the screen cut to black and my mother beat me with a pillow as she screamed “damn you damn you damn you”. She was slightly joking, but she also was a bit serious. She didn’t see what was so enjoyable about it – she just saw the bleak, unrelenting pessimism that’s easy to feel yet harder to intellectualize.

From there, the Brothers’ just stacked their tribute to Memento Mori even higher, as if each movie was a giant coin made life-size and unmovable.

I could only think about those experiences as I watched this new Netflix joint because what held true then holds even more true now: among their six stories, there are incredible charms to be had – and yet each piece is punctuated by deep, horrific reality and an arrow-to-the-chest reminder that life is fleeting. That you could go at any moment and any unsavory way; a shot you can’t move from once you’re hit. You can only sit and attempt to admire the view (which is quite easy in this handsome production).

All the while, I could only hear the Brothers cackling behind me. You can hear the glee in their dialogue and in just how jet-black their story decisions sometimes are. And while some will point to this as evidence that these brothers are some seriously tortured, fucked-up souls, I prefer the more likely reading: that they know their jig will be up one day, so they might as well find the small joys in all the smile-worthy characters and quirky physical comedy they can.

6. The Favourite

Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster was my #1 movie of 2016. That his new movie would be working with some of my favorite actresses in Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz, and Olivia Colman only primed me further to love this 18th century display of madness.

There is so much charm and quirk and hilariously sinister in this movie. The story sets its pieces on its twisted chessboard before winding around tighter and tighter with the performances of Colman, Weisz, and Stone and their corresponding characters’ actions, right up until the final, unforgettable shot, an extremely deft touch by Lanthimos’ that punctuates his message like an arrow from the past to the present.

5. Black Panther

Few films this year made me think as much or as deeply. This is not JUST a Marvel movie. This is so, so much more. From the impressive cast to the colorful, smart art direction to the bruising action scenes and philosophical discussions: it’s got a little bit of everything and it does a little bit of everything very, very well.

Ryan Cogler knocked me cold with his last film, 2015’s Creed, and he further proves his worth as a heartfelt heavyweight with his Marvel debut. I’m so glad he fought for the creative control he seeked (and received) with this film, and that he did it all inservice of a story both global and painfully personal at once.

4. Mission Impossible: Fallout

I’m not gonna lie: I was about to say this film had my two favorite live-action action scenes of the year – the bathroom brawl and the batshit crazy helicopter chase – and then I realized just how many other killer action sequences there are and then I thought, “Holy Cruise, this thing is just long incredible action scene, right?”

To say that’s true would actually be doing a disservice to the filmmakers. I found it simply incredible that a film this intricate and nuanced could begin shooting with barely a 30-page script and rough outline to its name. I’ve seen successful movies made more or less on the fly before. But never as assured, confident, and textured as this. Writer/director Christopher McQuarrie clearly has a special relationship with his star, Tom Cruise, and the madness those two fuel each other towards – while still managing to tell a complete, engaging story – is truly something else.

I have no fathomable idea where they will take the story from here. They truly threw all their best cards on the table and won all the chips. But I would wager if the money and motivation became enough and they still had a sliver of a script, they’d answer all questions with the great dialogue through-line the film uses: “I’m working on it”.

3. A Quiet Place

I was probably one of two people in my entire college to watch John Krasinski’s directing debut, an adaption of David Foster Wallace’s short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, way back in 2009. The cast was undeniable, but the story too complex and scattered to really register.

I knew John Krasinski had to be a smart, capable dude. I mean, he did convince Emily Blunt to marry him, after all. But I had no idea he had this in him.

What I will remember the most about this film and still hold close to my chest is the restraint. Every time the film feels like it’s about to blow the premise open, it takes a breath and sits still. It lets us learn about the family and how they communicate with their Deaf member. It shows us all the different ways they maintain their survival. It lets us live their lives with them just before we see them broken again.

There’s an ache that sits deep in this film from the first sequence, where we’re exposed to a tragedy the family never quite recovers from. They grieve in their own ways. They don’t always say the things they need to say to each other. And they live each moment knowing just how easily it can all come undone.

This film holds a handful of beautiful moments I still remember: Krasinski and Blunt’s sweet headphones dance to “Harvest Moon”, Millicent Simmonds’ struggle to relieve herself of blame, Blunt’s moment of levity with her son as she talks about how she’ll need him to take care of her when she’s old and missing teeth. It’s a beautifully etched, impressively-thought through film that ends on the absolute perfect moment.

I cringe at the idea of an unnecessary sequel, but with Krasinksi back in the saddle, he’s got my trust.

2. Annihilation

Reading, Annihilation, the first book in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, is still one of my favorite reading experiences ever. I curled into the couch, moving only for bathroom, water, and the occasional shifting into a new position. I devoured and savored the book all at once, a masterfully-sketched tone of paranoia and dread from start to finish.

Knowing this experience would be adapted by one of my favorite writer/directors in the business certainly had my interest. But what Alex Garland does with this adaptation is something wholly inspired. The beginning and the middle of the story will feel familiar to readers. Even parts of the end. But the rest? There are still bits of dialogue, flashes of horrifying and beautiful imagery, and whole sequences embedded in my brain.

Maybe this movie is about cancer. Maybe it’s about depression and mental illness. Maybe it’s about self-destruction and how we can’t just get out of our own way. The beauty of this film is that it can be all of the things. Time will treat this movie well. Seek it out.

1. Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse

Spiderman has never been a hero I’ve been particularly drawn to beyond two things: a badass costume and just how cool it is to swing around a city. That’s about it. Peter Parker didn’t feel especially relatable to me, no matter how many times the movies or the comics tried to make it so. I never rooted for or against Mary Jane. I never understood just why Uncle Ben was so deeply important to Peter beyond, again, the movies and comics reminding me over and over it must be so. And, of course, it didn’t help that Sony couldn’t seem to get out of its own way and figure out just how to continue a successful Spiderman movie franchise.

I tuned out after the Sam Raimi-Tobey Maguire breakup and never saw the Marc Webb-Andrew Garfield films. I rooted for Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone far more in real life than I ever had an interest to in the movies. The movies seemed to struggle to differentiate themselves from each other just as the audience increasingly struggled with how to care. More recently, I found Tom Holland’s version of Spiderman to be like all the Marvel movies: likable, enjoyable, but not particularly memorable.

All I needed to see in the teaser for Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse when it sprung out over a year ago (December 2017!) is the fact Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie, 22 Jump Street) had a producing hand. I didn’t care how involved they were. Simply having them nearby had to be something good. I mean, these are two of the busiest guys in the business; it has to be something worthwhile to grab their interest, especially when working with one of the most visible superheroes.

The charm of the animation style (you can read about how they achieved it here) only had me further smitten. Casting Jack Johnson to voice a Nick Miller-ish Peter Parker/Spiderman? I needed to see it and luxuriate in it. Then the rest of the cast rolled in: Nic Cage, John Mulaney, Halie Stanfield, Mahershala Ali, Shameik Moore, Liev Schreiber, Kathryn Hahn, and Brian Tyree Henry.

Now, animation voice casts are typically stacked. They have big names. But this? This felt awfully specific. The kind of specific that only occurs when people REALLY know the kind of story they’re trying to tell.

And man, do they tell it.

I am still blown away by what this team of filmmakers pulled off. It’s not only the most second-to-second entertaining movie I’ve seen this year (even more so than Mission Impossible: Fallout), but it’s quite deep, emotionally resonant (I definitely got choked up a few times), and got me to finally understand the appeal of Spiderman: that anyone can wear the mask.

Hopefully this is the kind of film that opens the creative floodgates for many eager to tell stories. The animation style is such a captivating mix of voices that I’d be shocked if it’s not only studied heavily in art and animation schools in the future, but just as often cited by future artists as a key inspiration. Last year’s Moana, Wonder Woman, and Coco showed us just how powerful representation is for the upcoming generation. It’s not enough to tell them they can be someone. They have to see themselves on the screen.

And if you can convince me that Nick Miller can be Spiderman, screw it all up, and STILL have a chance to make it right? You’ve got a believer in me.

I cannot wait to see this movie again.

That’s all, folks. Looking forward to 2019!

Nick Offerman is damn near inseparable from Ron Swanson.

Like Nick, Ron does not benefit from a lack of facial hair. In fact, an increase in facial hair is directly proportional to an increase in overall badassness.

The unfortunate thing about being the actor behind such unmistakable characters is that you’ll never be mistaken for anything else. Including yourself. Including the new character you’re trying to play in a completely different movie set in a completely different world. What gave you a career can just as soon drain it away.

It takes a couple minutes and a glorious salt-and-pepper beard, but there’s enough in Frank Fisher (Offerman) to differentiate him from Ron Swanson. He’s softer. He’s at ease. He’s not so anti-government. Whereas Swanson had a love affair with breakfast foods, wood, and the great outdoors, Fisher finds refuge in the intersection of music and sweet, sweet vinyl. His record shop has the appearance of someone who only cares about the music. Not the colors. Not the graphic design in labels. Not the need for profit to keep the place afloat.

In fact, director Brett Haley and his co-writer Marc Basch do an excellent job of setting up Nick in his first scene, when he argues with a young millennial about records and whether or not he’s allowed to smoke in his own store.

But something connects Frank Fisher and Ron Swanson beyond the their homes on streaming platforms: they’re loathe to change.

For 6 glorious, pun-soaked, big-hearted seasons, Swanson’s antagonists ranged from his own office-mate, Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler), who represented everything he hated (namely government and publicly celebrating birthdays), to Ron Dunn (Sam Elliot), who TRULY represented everything he hated (hippies, veganism, etc).

But from the very beginning, Swanson’s biggest antagonist was change. He did not want to bend to anything. He wanted everything to bend to him. Or better yet, simply pass him by. After 2 failed marriages to two different Tammy’s, it took a woman like Diane and her two darling daughters to break him out of his ways. It was a long journey, but eventually Ron got to a point where he realized he could still uphold his values and make a few tweaks to make room for others.

Heart Beats Loud lays it’s premise out quickly: that Frank, recognizing he can no longer afford his precious record store, will not renew the lease with his landlord. Additionally, he’s only got a summer left with his daughter, Sam (Kiersey Clemons), before she heads off to UCLA.

A fortuitous jam session with Sam leads to a song that catches fire on Spotify, and you can slowly see Frank start to recognize that maybe he CAN have it all: maybe he can date his landlord, who will help him keep his shop open, and maybe even the song will convince his daughter to stay in Jersey so they can develop their band and do the music thing. He can have all the things he wants and is danger of losing: a successful store, a viable partner, a band, and a creatively and emotionally fruitful relationship with his talented daughter.

But to have all those things would require others to give up what they want. To make sacrifices that may benefit Frank in the short-term. But that in the long term? Everyone loses. And Frank knows this.

Offerman’s always had an incredible expressive face – 6 seasons of Ron Swanson taught me just how many emotions he can elicit with only his eyes and eyebrows, the rest of his face dominated by a glorious mustache – but his eyes become even redder and wearier and sadder as he realizes everything is shrinking away from him.

Everyone is moving on and changing but him. His daughter has the future ahead of her across the country in Los Angeles. His landlord is dating someone else. His best friend, Dave (Ted Danson), is enjoying his foray into the world of marijuana. Everyone’s chasing their happiness. And yet his seems more unattainable than ever.

Part of the beauty of well-told stories is how they guide their story into a corner seemingly impossible to get out from, and they somehow pull the damn escape off. Haley and Basch find a way to deftly wrap up their story with the bright shine of future potential and yet remain emotionally true to their characters. It is satisfying and rich, like the kind of record Frank would appreciate: a rare and unexpected find in a low-key, but lovingly-owned store.

It’s hard to believe now, but there did exist a time on this planet when Deadpool – as a movie character – felt like a gigantic risk. No one knew if it would work. No one knew if a story could be hammered out and an adequate budget paired along with it. The public’s first filmic taste of the character, which came in X:Men Origins: Wolverine, was so poorly received that it probably set back any development for, well, 13 years. It took some persistence from Ryan Reynolds and writers Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick to get this baby into shape. And then it took a mistakenly-or-perhaps-totally-intentionally leaked proof-of-concept short film to finally kick down the doors.

The point is: this is a movie that had a lot going for it, and yet: no one knew if it would be successful.

$781 million dollars at the worldwide box office will certainly help with that question.

The best thing Deadpool did, beyond make a lot of people a ton of money (and show that superheroes could be exceedingly silly and violent and still be an awful lot of fun), is show the character had been accepted. Now, the creative team didn’t have to worry so much about financing or funding or pushing a rock up a treadmill of a craggy hill. It could focus on telling a good story, coming up with some crackling humor, and having some goddamn fun.

This enabled them to take their time. To let the original director go over creative differences. To get a great actor like Josh Brolin aboard. To add a little more cheddar to the budget and raise that freak flag even higher than before. There’s beauty in confidence that comes from acceptance. And the Deadpool 2 team took it and ran with it as far as they could, before the public ever noticed they were about to run out of breath.

When Marvel got a taste of success with their first Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America movies, they started lining up the next installations in their ongoing story. But it didn’t matter how much money these movies made or how well they seemed to be accepted; I simply could not understand the appeal of a movie or character called Ant-Man. It seemed so desperately uncool. So uncinematic. What could possibly be the fun in this endeavor?

Edgar Wright’s involvement with Ant-Man gave me some indication the character had more potential that I realized. But his departure in 2012, a particularly sad piece of business, only increased my doubts. Surely, Marvel would realize they had something so uncool on their hands they couldn’t possibly heat it back up. But they moved on, hiring Adam McKay and eventual star Paul Rudd to finish up the script. They hired director Peyton Reed (Bring It On, Down with Love, The Break-Up) to take over. And they sped ahead, making this seemingly uncool thing into something worthy.

The original Ant-Man, like the original Deadpool, is a great example of what happens when fresh air is pumped into popcorn-stained theaters. I’ll never forget being positively delighted by the final showdown with the villain, an epic train fight that took place on a child’s Thomas the Train set and eventually the inside of a suitcase. After the excess of Avengers: Age of Ultron, it cleansed the palate so well my sense of taste and appetite for movies returned. Instead of feeling numbed by status quo, I felt enlivened by all the possibilities.

But the biggest thing the success of Ant-Man (and his appearance in Captain America: Civil War) taught its filmmakers is that the audience can definitely accept Paul Rudd – a delightful actor far more known for comedies such as Anchorman – as an action star. Just because Brian Fontana had a panther cologne didn’t mean he needed it to be credible; he could believably exist alongside the Black Panther himself, T’Challa, as well as Peter Parker, Tony Stark, and Steve Rogers, and no one would wonder if he had stumbled onto the wrong film set.

Deadpool 2 and Ant-Man and the Wasp came out only a month apart, but they taught us the same thing: confidence through acceptance leads to an emboldened, risk-taking attitude. Deadpool 2 amps up the humor and brutal action, but it also takes some chances with more dramatic storytelling and spends a good chunk of its runtime building up a team for Deadpool that gets entirely killed off minutes into its first mission. Ant Man and the Wasp sees Reed and his collaborators having even more fun with all the shrinking and expanding, as well as deepening relationships, characters, and the presence of the Quantum Realm. Both films have an undeniable glee to their energy. They want to entertain you. They want you to get your money’s worth. But they also are clearly having so much goddamn fun. It’s a form of contagious that can’t help but make you giggle along.

The next steps for Deadpool and Ant-Man are less sure. Deadpool might be joining an X-Force movie before any further adventures. Worst case scenario: Disney’s purchase of Fox means we may have seen our last R-rated Deadpool flick. Deadpool can do without a swear word or two, but theres a level of chaos and inappropriateness inherent in the character that cannot be and should not be washed out. Ant-Man more than likely has to help bail out some of the Avengers in next year’s Infinity War: End Game before any further solo adventures with the Wasp.  I don’t know what will happen with these two emboldened, far-less-risky characters, but they can take satisfaction in knowing when the time came, they shot their shot.

 

Some movies are so heavily reported on they feel devoid of any surprise. By the time Warner Brothers released Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and it’s unwieldy title into the wild, they had loaded a pre-emptive strike bullet into their PR gun: already, across the pond, film was rolling on its follow-up, Justice League. No one knew details on the story. No one knew if it was going to be any good. In many ways, it didn’t matter: they just needed the public to believe they had something already cooking.

Here’s a core relationship that you need to understand as a moviegoer: Marvel and DC are the two biggest comic book companies, and have been rivals since the 1960’s. DC has historically always been associated with Warner Brothers. You’ve seen their work in both animated and live-action form. Until 2006, Marvel was rather polygamous, selling its properties out to Fox (X-Men, Fantastic Four, Deadpool), Sony (Spider-Man), and Universal (The Incredible Hulk) because it desperately needed the cash to stay afloat. But from the time Iron Man hit in 2008 and Marvel’s 20-movie plan culminated in last May’s Infinity War, Warner Brothers-DC has been looking through the window, drooling at their rival’s unprecedented success.

It knew it wanted some of that Marvel movie money. It just didn’t know how to get there.

So after Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy ended, DC did a little bit of everything. It made itself darker. That didn’t really work. It decided to do a soft opening of a team-up in Batman v. Superman before going hard with Justice League. But they barely crawled through to that, a leaden zeppelin scraping the tops of buildings in its reach for flight. Then they ultimately decided to disband the whole shared universe concept to focus on different stories while pulling their Justice League around to surround the one undeniable success so far: 2016’s Wonder Woman.

It looks like Warner Brothers is still guessing. You can’t look like you know what you’re doing if you’re trying to make 3 different Joker movies at the same time.

So here’s the very specific criteria it took for me to finally watch a $300 million dollar movie that came out 8 months ago: I had a 3.5 hour flight, limited movie options on-board, and needed it to be something that had closed captions and probably did not rely on a totally bitchin’ soundtrack.

Warner Brothers: there’s your audience.

So I decided to do a little bit for a running diary. Here’s the thing: it’s easy to make fun of a $300 million dollar movie like this, but it’s important to remember that a lot of very talented people worked on this with the best of intentions. Some movie births are relatively painless. Others are like 36 hours in labor without an epidural in sight. You never know.

Immediately after the credits: Much has been made about the space above Henry Cavill’s lip. It’s responsible for my favorite movie business story, maybe ever. And yes, it looks just as bad as expected. Who knew that Hollywood could be so adept at removing limbs, deaging famous stars by 30 years, and creating new worlds, but a single goddamn mustache would completely trip it up? I love it. The point is clear: facial hair is something that will continue to equally vex and fascinate humankind for the rest of time.

 

14 min – I don’t have any problem believing that Jason Mamoa talks to fishes. I mean, have you seen the guy? If you told me he could do Monty Python coconut-claps to draw an entire herd of horses to his feet, I would believe you 100%. It doesn’t even bother me that his hair is very NOT aerodynamic, or that he’s choosing to live in very cold waters when he could be easily lounging about closer to the equator – dude clearly likes to be shirtless, ya know?

 

But here’s what does bother me: any good swimmer enters the water with a dive. Doesn’t matter if it’s face down or face up – it’s common knowledge that lining your hands together above your head as  you dive is the slickest, most efficient way to enter the water. So of course, because this is a backasswards movie, Arthur Curry aka Aquaman aka King of the Seas enters the water in what can only be described as a trust fall with the beginnings of a backflip that somehow miraculously becomes a streamlined fish form. When you control the seas, you can apparently get away with some pretty uncool shit.

22 min – For 3 summers in college, I worked as an extra help grunt for the local school district’s maintenance department. I learned a lot that had nothing to do with maintenance (like how to legally play a forbidden game of volleyball by calling it ‘hand soccer’), but one thing I definitely learned is that the custodians hold the keys to the kingdom. They don’t just have a massive ring full of keys that threaten to pull their paints down. They have access to every room in the building AND your ability to get in these rooms is entirely contingent upon their presence and if they like you or not. It’s a display of power that’s weirdly disproportionate to how the general public tends to value a custodian. This just made me love custodians even more. But for all the access that these many keys may provide, I have never known a custodian to have such free after-hours access to an alien ship. A little bit of an oversight there.

27 min – I don’t know if this was something added late in the game (again, these are very talented people at work), but the entire attack on Themiscyra may as well have happened in a video game. Tons of weightless CGI with a weightless CGI villain and weightless CGI fights. What was once an enchanting, empowering place in 2016’s Wonder Woman has been rendered an afterthought by 2017. Here’s hoping Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984 restores a little bit of that Themiscyra shine to the island.

40 min – Seeing this crazy Frankenstein of a movie so late meant that I saw Justice League and Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp within a week of each other. An interesting bit of product placement tidbit that I can’t get over: all of Justice League’s cars, including the souped-up concept cars, are made by Mercedes-Benz, and all of Ant Man and the Wasp’s cars, including the souped-up concept cars, are made by Hyundai. There’s a lot of ways to look at this, but this is my favorite: many people who drive Mercedes-Benz take themselves a little too seriously and think the name alone will draw people to it, whereas Hyundai knows it has to be a little more fun to stand out above the crowd and is a hard-working, reliable brand that gets the job done. Now, was I talking about the car brands or the movies? You can’t separate the two, right?

71 min – In case you were wondering, Clark Kent/Superman does not get buried with a Superman tie. This is highly disappointing and a clear missed opportunity in branding.

75 min – After Superman wakes up and is clearly not himself, the Justice League needs to band together to stop him. Barry Allen aka The Flash tries to run around him, and the look of recognition on both The Flash and Superman’s faces (they have time to recognize each other because being super fast means the movie slows way down for them) that they’re both looking at someone with hyperspeed abilities is pretty hilarious. In The Flash, we see fear. In Superman, we see pure annoyance. This is the moment where the movie seems to realize Superman CAN be a little funny!

ALSO: If you ever wondered how Wonder Woman and Superman would fight each other, this movie answers in a way I never expected: head-butts. Lots of head-butts. And supercharged ones at that.

77 min – Superman lifts Batman up by the chin, because he knows that’s how they’ll be measured: not by the content of their character, but by the strength of their chins.

*There is a 35 min gap between observations. This is no accident. Nothing particularly notable.*

101 min – Superman and the Flash, in the middle of a massive CGI battle against CGI monsters, participate in a dick-measuring contest. Barry saves a family in a truck from certain death. Superman, however, carries a whole apartment complex over his head. No team is above pettiness!

There’s not much that’s memorable in this movie (at least for the right reasons). Everything you heard seems to ring true: Ben Affleck looks bored and a little sad in his role; Wonder Woman is clearly the best character, even if she’s underwritten here; The Flash has some serious potential if they can finally get a movie made; Aquaman could be fun if it’s not drowned by CGI water.

The next year and a half is going to be a very interesting one for Warner Brothers, with Aquaman (Dec 2018), Shazam (April 2019), Joker (Oct 2019), and Wonder Woman 1984 (Nov 2019). Those four films offer quite the potentialmix of adventure, color, humor, camp, and darkness. Warner Brothers should know much better but the end of this cycle what works for them and what doesn’t.

Let’s just hope another mustache doesn’t trip them up.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout is a 148 minute mission to stop a plutonium nuclear bomb from detonating. The bomb’s attached to a countdown, of which must be stopped first before the wires can be cut to avoid a disaster killing over a billion people worldwide. I guess it isn’t a spoiler to say (this is a franchise, after all) the countdown is stopped. As this happens, the weapon of mass destruction disengages, pulls itself apart, and two plutonium balls drop out into the hands of nearby characters.

I describe this whole situation because by the end of this movie, it became clear to me those plutonium balls are something else: us, the audience. The tension, of which is miraculously sustained the entire film, is finally released, and into the palm of the hands of the movie itself. We can finally breathe, knowing Tom Cruise did not die a death faked by the studio. We know they’ll make enough money from this installment to send Cruise to space and/or pay for a team of researchers to figure out just what he could possibly do to top himself.

For the previous sequel, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Cruise trained to hold his breath for nearly 6 minutes underwater. The problem with this feat is that the necessity of how they filmed and edited the scene made it difficult to tell if it was for real or not. Some digital trickery had to be employed to ensure safety, which only dampened the illusion. Contrast this with the high-speed motorcycle chase around the winding roads of Morocco – which clearly had Cruise doing it for real – and you can see where writer/director Christopher McQuarrie’s own mission became clear: make an entertaining movie that makes it clear Tom is doing this batshit crazy stuff for real, creating high stakes for both the actor and the character alike.

As a result of all this, everything that Tom does in this film looks legimitately dangerous. A soon-to-be legendary bathroom fight – which has supplanted Eastern Promises’ bathhouse fight as cinema’s greatest fight amongst the toilets and sinks – looks beyond brutal and destructive. You might as well wrap the scene up in an office, give it a name, and consider it a new demolition business.  A motorcycle chase through Paris has Tom doing his usual dangerous thing right up until he’s hit by a car and a slightly CGI Tom has to take his place to ensure he lives beyond the movie. And finally, the helicopter chase through the mountains of Kashmir: we will be talking about this one – what’s on the screen and what it took to accomplish it – for a long, long time.

Even more impressive to me is how McQuarrie and Co. managed to include its franchise star’s greatest collection of stunts in the same movie as his character’s most personal story yet. McQuarrie made it clear in interviews that Ethan Hunt had often functioned as a cipher in the Mission: Impossible movies, doing whatever the plot calls for but with no clear motivation of his own beyond the mission at hand. He’s been held at a distance while his team stands in awe of their greatest living weapon. A dream sequence that starts Fallout lets us know this is a new game: it’s going to be Hunt’s most personal yet and suggest costs he’s never had to reckon with.

McQuarrie challenged Cruise as an actor, Cruise challenged the crew as the wealthiest, most-famous stuntmen around, and absolutely everyone rose to the occasion. Special things happen with this kind of harmony. It’s enough synergy to disarm a nuclear weapon.