Here Are All The Films You Should Have Already Watched This Year

In a week in which the main cinematic attraction is Skyscraper, it’s time to forget about the drudgery of the weekly popcorn blockbuster. Turning away from such soul-sapping darkness, let us turn backwards, and bask in the light, the glorious shine of the best of the best. In the spirit of the Top 30 Albums Of 2018 (So Far) countdown that already won your heart, here’s the countdown to end all countdowns, at least until December. It’s your old bean Film Carew’s Top 20 Films Of 2018 (So Far).

ÁGA

Ága starts off in ‘yurt movie’ territory: an elderly couple, in the middle of a snowy wilderness, tending to quotidian routines upon Arctic Ice. But Milko Lazarov’s film grows in grandeur as it goes, the imposing landscapes, classical score, and emotional tenor all cresting at an operatic climax.

ANCHOR & HOPE

Natalia Tena and Oona Chaplin play a same-sex couple living on a canal-boat in London, who rope their hirsute pal David Verdaguer into helping them conceive a kid. The actors are given glorious roles and room to shine in Carlos Marques-Marcet’s 10,000km follow-up, another thoughtful exploration of the messiness and complexity of human behaviour and relationships.

ANNIHILATION

For its first 90 minutes, Annihilation — Alex Garland’s Ex Machina follow-up — is an artful sci-fi actioner with horror-movie set-pieces and an evocative, if a little evasive, premise. Then, in its last half-hour, it heads to a psychedelic, mind-widening place of pure cinema: all throbbing soundtrack, eye-popping spectacle, and instant sci-fi-classic status.

BEAUTIFUL THINGS

Unquestionably the year’s #1 documentary-exploration-of-consumer-waste-turned-experimental-sound-art-musical.

THE CLEANERS

A look at the outsourced Filipino workers whose surreal McJobs are scanning through — and censoring — 25,000 Facebook images a day, this way-unsettling documentary naturally pulls back to the bigger picture, looking at how our internet overlords control not simply what we see, but the parameters of our democracies.

COLUMBUS

It was slow to arrive in Australia, but Kogonada’s masterfully-composed debut is a glorious shrine to both humanity and architecture; the clean lines of modernist buildings contrasting with the rough lives of the human figures who move through them. It’ll make you want to both visit its titular architectural mecca, and fervently follow Haley Lu Richardson’s forthcoming career.

CUSTODY

The year’s most bracing, brilliant, exhilarating debut, Custody may end up, at the year’s end, as 2018’s best film. Xavier Legrand’s film is a magnificently-photographed, meticulously-mounted portrait of two parents — and their two luckless children — engaged in a bitter custody battle. It begins with a court hearing, and no clear black-and-white answers, but slowly sinks into a thriller so taut it feels suffocating.

DOUBLE LOVER

18 films in, François Ozon is still full of mischief: his latest a wicked, psycho-sexual paranoia-thriller loaded with doubles, twins, parasitic twins, mirrors, and plentiful pussy symbolism, including a cast of creepy cats.

FOXTROT

The foxtrot is a dance with three steps, and Foxtrot is a film in three distinct acts: a portrait of an Israeli family — father, son, mother — lost in their nation’s grand cycles of war, trauma, repression, grief. Its unexpected animated interlude is one of the year’s most surprising, artful, emotionally-loaded cinematic flourishes.

HEREDITARY

Hail, Paimon!

HOLIDAY

A glittering exemplar of a beautiful film about horrible people, Isabella Eklöf’s stunning debut imprisons a trophy girlfriend, a noxious crime family, and Eurotrash nouveua-richedom in a host of brightly-coloured, symmetrically-framed tableaux.

ISLE OF DOGS

Not just the latest Wes Anderson movie, but the most Wes Anderson movie. A stop-motion-animated fable about dogs, it’s filled with a bittersweet melancholy; as sublime-yet-sad as the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band song that serves as its recurring musical heartbeat.

PHANTOM THREAD

One of the most memorable relationship-movies in aeons, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest masterwork is at once hilarious and harrowing, parading a host of glorious frocks and quotable lines.

A QUIET PLACE

The opening five minutes of A Quiet Place, in which a crowd is shamed into respectful silence by the loudness of their popcorn crunching, makes for one of 2018’s great cinematic pleasures.

TERROR NULLIUS

In the horrifying media/political climate of contemporary Ozzz, is there greater praise than being called ‘un-Australian’? Soda_jerk’s hilarious, ridiculous, scathing mash-up of cinematic/cultural Australiana is timely, trenchant, and a fucking blast.

THELMA

In Joachim Trier’s artful, eerie, ultimately-feelgood fable, its titular teen discovers the ultimate super-power: same-sex attraction! With eye-of-God overheads, throbbing strobes, Okay Kaya, and disorienting surrealism, Trier matches art-movie visuals to blockbuster-adjacent supernaturalism, summoning something that seems suspiciously like an instant coming-of-age classic.

THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS

The ultimate stranger-than-fiction flick, this crowdpleasin’ doc delights in retelling a tale that goes from unbelievable to — via various vicious, sinister revelations — unfuckingbelievable.

TOWER. A BRIGHT DAY.

“Based on future events,” Jagoda Szelc’s poetically-titled picture tracks out to a cabin by the woods, where a family gathering begets claustrophobic paranoia and collective terror; score, sound design, and auditory tricks creating a hallucinatory cinematic state.

TRANSIT

By setting a WWII tale of Occupied France in contemporary France, Christian Petzold’s latest arthouse-thriller takes place in a time neither past nor present, this cinematic sleight-of-hand foregrounding Transit’s theme of history — wartime migration, persecution of immigrants, unfeeling states — repeating.

YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE

‘A hammer-wielding hero on a vigilante revenge mission’ sounds like an Oldboy rewrite, but Lynne Ramsay’s long-awaited return turns out to be a work of deliberate disorientation and obfuscation, bloodied action pushed out of frame as the narrative is hijacked by its anti-hero’s unreliable mental state.