Beyond the superheroes

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This article was published 31/12/2018 (2778 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The year 2018 was a lucrative one for movies. Domestic estimates tally nearly US$12 billion at the box office by year’s end, with 25 per cent of the receipts going to the nine superhero movies released this past year, according to Comscore, an American media analytics company.

With one notable exception, superheroes didn’t register much with Free Press critics Alison Gillmor, Randall King and Jill Wilson. Their cumulative picks for the top 10 of the year were culled from a wide array of cinema, from studio franchises to indie documentaries and everything in between. Here are their choices:

Randall King:

Paddington 2

This story of an emigré bear who gets embroiled in a heist is an absolute delight. Writer-director Paul King has a solid plot for this sequel, but he steeps every scene in the spirit of English comedy at its most eccentric. He also employs an astonishing array of English talent, particularly Hugh Grant, whose turn as the vain, dastardly villain, demonstrating a versatility we never knew he had. If the first Paddington was a timely immigrant story, the second film is a celebration of simple kindness.

Hereditary

Written and directed by first-time feature director Ari Aster, this offbeat horror thriller is about a family that starts to come unmoored after the death of grandma, leaving troubled artist Annie (Toni Collette) to support her needy kids against a series of escalating supernatural disasters. Aster deployed sophisticated sound editing, proving again the most reliable pathway for a filmmaker to induce terror is through the ears.

Widows

Based on an ahead-of-the-curve Brit miniseries from 1983, this drama/heist movie from director Steve McQueen is about a trio of women — the wives of recently deceased criminals — obliged to pull off the gang ringleader’s last meticulously planned job, or face the wrath of the hoodlum victims of the gang’s last score. It’s a surprisingly potent combination of drama and action, which relies on a strong cast. It’s a real pleasure to see Michelle Rodriguez finally get a role worthy of her, but it is largely Viola Davis’s show, and she is up for the heavy lifting of a heroine who deftly juggles grief, anger and survival.

Loveless

The premise offers up pathos on a Little Match Girl scale. A lonely, isolated 12-year-old boy comes to a horrifying realization that, in the demise of his Muscovite parents’ marriage, neither parent wants him. He disappears, and as the parents begin their search, we are sucked into a bleak yet weirdly captivating drama by Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan). He frames a human story as an indictment of national Russian malaise, particularly widespread narcissism, suggesting this dehumanizing condition has led to the wider abuses of Vladimir Putin’s ruthless regime. Suffice to say: the premise very much lends itself to an American remake.

Black Panther

Director Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther acts as a corrective to the Marvel Universe by adding much-needed gravitas to the realm, along the way creating one of the most interesting and elaborate of alternate realities. Marvel’s world-building energy is actually focused in exciting and provocative ways, reflecting African culture and experience in the film’s amazing production design. In the title role, Chadwick Boseman plays it restrained, leaving the thespian fireworks to Michael B. Jordan as Killmonger, one of the more interesting Marvel villains. It’s fantasy, yes. But it’s a culturally constructive one that may ultimately tune you in, not out.

Alison Gillmor:

Eighth Grade

This low-fi, low-budget drama from debut writer-director Bo Burnham — comedian, musician, poet and YouTube star — is an insightful, empathetic and non-judgmental look at adolescence in the age of social media. Elsie Fisher plays a young American girl struggling through her last weeks of middle school, and the film’s agonizing poignance rests in her brave performance. I know calling a performance “brave” is a cliché, but there’s simply no other word to describe her heart-rendingly open naturalism.

Roma

A tender, powerful and deeply personal project from Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity, Children of Men, Y Tu Mama Tambien), this semi-autobiographical drama centres on an upper-middle-class household in 1970s Mexico City, conveyed primarily through the experience of the family’s maid (Yalitza Aparicio). With beautiful black-and-white cinematography and a scale that encompasses big social shifts and the smallest details of domestic life, Roma is both profoundly emotional and unsentimental.

First Reformed

Bleak, wintry and rigorously controlled — until it’s not, and then, wow — this Book-of-Job-like drama from American filmmaker Paul Schrader looks at the challenges of faith in a broken world. As he wrestles with despair, the spiritual fate of the Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke, doing career-best work) remains in doubt. It is certain, however, that First Reformed marks a cinematic rebirth for Schrader. Serious, complex and moving, this is not a perfect film, but even its flaws are powerful.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

A tender tribute to beloved children’s TV host Fred Rogers and his lifelong commitment to kindness, gentleness and simple goodness, this documentary kept bringing me to tears, and not from nostalgia for some lost age of innocence. As Oscar-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville (Twenty Feet from Stardom) reveals the almost avant-garde oddness of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, he suggests that the radical decency of that influential show has survived into an even more fraught and uncertain time.

Jill Wilson:

Brimstone & Glory

German filmmaker Viktor Jakovleski visits Tultepec, Mexico, for its annual National Pyrotechnics Festival in this gorgeous, impressionistic documentary. He captures the matter-of-fact business of daily work in a deadly trade — done by people who have little choice in the matter — as well as the passionate devotion to the craft of pyrotechnics and its thrilling, awe-inspiring results. The film culminates in the quema de toros, the burning of the bulls, in which special cameras give us hypnotic, slow-motion views of incendiary devices exploding as townspeople dance with religious fervour in a shower of sparks. It’s beautiful, terrifying and unforgettable.