Chuck – Memphis Flyer

If there is a common theme among the best films of 2018, it’s wrenching order from chaos. From Regina Hall trying to hold both a restaurant and a marriage together to Lakeith Stanfield navigating the surreal moral minefields of late-stage capitalism, the best heroes positioned themselves as the last sane people in a world gone mad.

Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades Freed

Worst Picture: Fifty Shades Freed

In her epic deconstruction of the final installment of everyone’s least favorite BDSM erotica trilogy, Eileen Townsend called Fifty Shades Freed a “sequence of intentionally crafted visual stimuli” that “bears coincidental aesthetic similarity to a movie … But I believe Fifty Shades Freed is nonetheless not a movie at all, but something far more pure — a pristine document of the market economy, a kind of visual after-image created as an incidental side effect of the exchange of large sums of capital…We literally cannot perceive the truest form of Fifty Shades Freed, because to do so, we would have to be money ourselves.”

Sunrise over the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey

Best Moviegoing Experience: 2001: A Space Odyssey in IMAX

The Malco Paradiso’s IMAX screen, which opened last December, has quickly earned the reputation as the best theater in the city. During the late-summer lull, a new digital transfer of 2001: A Space Odyssey got a week’s run to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Even if you’ve watched Stanley Kubrick’s film a dozen times, seeing it the size it was intended to be seen is a revelation. Also, all lengthy blockbusters should come with an intermission.

Chuck, the canine star of Alpha

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Chuck, Alpha

Director Albert Hughes’ Alpha is a sleeper gem of 2018. The star of the story of how humans first domesticated dogs is a Czech Wolfhound named Chuck, who dominates the screen with a Lassie-level performance. Chuck and his co-star, Kodi Smit-McPhee, spend large parts of the movie silently navigating the hazards of Paleolithic Eurasia, and the dog nails both stunts and the occasional comedy bits. Chuck is a movie star.

KiKi Layne and Stephan James in If Beale Street Could Talk

Best Scene: The Family Meeting, If Beale Street Could Talk

Most of Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel is an intimate, tragic love story between Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne) and Fonny Hunt (Stephan James). But for about 10 minutes, it becomes an ensemble dramedy, when Tish has to tell, first, her parents that she’s pregnant out of wedlock with a man who has just been arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, then his parents. If you pulled this scene out of the film, it would be the best short of 2018.

Rukus

Best Memphis Movie: Rukus

Brett Hanover’s documentary hybrid had been in production for more than a decade by the time it made its Mid South debut at Indie Memphis 2018. What started as a tribute to a friend who had committed suicide slowly evolved into a mystery story, an exploration into a secretive subculture, and a diary of growing up and accepting yourself.

Ethan Hawk stars as a priest in existential crisis in First Reformed.

Best Screenplay: First Reformed

Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader penned and directed this piercing drama about a small town priest, played by Ethan Hawk, who undergoes a crisis of faith when a man he is counseling commits suicide. 72-year-old Schrader is unafraid to ask the big questions: Why are we here? Is it all worth it? His elegantly constructed story ultimately looks to love for the answers, but the journey there is harrowing.

Michael B. Jordan as Killmonger in Black Panther

MVP: Michael B. Jordan

Michael B. Jordan played a book-burning fireman with a conscience in HBO’s Fahrenheit 451 adaptation and the heavyweight champion of the world in Creed II. But it was his turn as Killmonger in Black Panther that elevated the year’s biggest hit film to the realm of greatness. Director Ryan Coogler knew what he was doing when he put his frequent collaborator in the the villain slot opposite Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa, making their personal rivalry into a battle for the soul of Wakanda.

Regina Hall in Support The Girls

Best Performance: (tie) Regina Hall, Support the Girls and Elsie Fisher, Eighth Grade

In a year full of great performances, two really stood out. In Support the Girls, Regina Hall plays Lisa, a breastaurant manager having the worst day of her life, with a breathtaking combination of technique and empathy. We agonize with her over every difficult decision she has to make just to get through the day.

Elsie Fisher as Kayla in Eighth Grade

Elsie Fisher started work on Eighth Grade the week after the 13-year-old actually finished eighth grade. She carries the movie with one of the most raw, unaffected comic performances you will ever see.

Emma Stone takes aim in The Favourite.

Best Director: Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ previous efforts has been bracing, self-written satires, but he really came into his own with this kinda true story written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara. Everything clicks neatly into place in The Favourite. The central troika of Olivia Coleman as Queen Anne and Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz as backstabbing cousins vying for her favor are all stunning. The editing, sound mix, and costume design are superb, and I’ve been thinking about the meaning of a particular lens choice for weeks.

Daniel Tiger (left) and Fred Rogers, star of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood

Best Documentary: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Once in a while, a movie comes along that fills a hole in your heart you didn’t know you had. Morgan Neville’s biography of Fred Rogers appears as effortlessly pure as the man himself. Mr. Rogers’ radical compassion is the exact opposite of Donald Trump’s performative cruelty, and Neville frames his subject as a kind of national surrogate father figure, urging us to remember the better angels of our nature.

Sorry To Bother You

Best Picture: Sorry to Bother You

Boots Riley’s debut film is something of a bookend to my best picture choice from last year, Jordan Peele’s Get Out. They’re both absurdist social satires aimed at American racism set in a slightly skewed version of the real word. But where Get Out is a finely tuned scare machine, Sorry to Bother You is a street riot of ideas and images. When his vision occasionally outruns his reach, Riley pulls it off through sheer audacity. No one better captured the Kafkaesque chaos, anger, and confusion of living in 2018.

Ever since I saw Werner Hertzog’s 2010 documentary Cave Of Forgotten Dreams, I have been interested in—possibly obsessed with—deep prehistory.

Homo habilis, the first known tool-making hominid, first appeared in the fossil record about 2 million years ago. Homo errectus learned to use fire about 1 million years ago, but it would be another 300,000 years before our ancestors learned to make it for themselves, and another 300,000 years before they started building hearths to cook on.

Homo sapiens—us—are only about 200,000 years old, and for 150,000 of those years, we had no art beyond decorative beads and jewelry made from seashells. Then, about 40,000 years ago, something happened—complex, figurative art appears. The paintings in the Chauvet caves which Hertzog captured in his documentary represent a complete change in how humanity interacted with the world, and how we understood ourselves.

Alpha is an ambitious film about another such moment when humanity changed: the domestication of dogs. The 3D film is set in postglacial Europe 20,000 years ago. Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a young man coming of age in a hunter gatherer tribe. He sets out from the village on his first hunt with a band led by his father Xi (Jens Hultén). Their mission is walk a torturous path laid down by ancestors as far back in their past as they are in ours. At the end, they will intercept a herd of migrating bison and, if they’re lucky, bring back enough food for the tribe to make it through the winter.

But it turns out Keda kinda sucks at being a caveman. It’s hard to be a good hunter when you’re too kindhearted to kill. Plus, he’s really bad in the fire-making department. When they finally find the elusive bison, he’s separated from the hunting band in the resulting melee and left for dead.

Jens Hultén and Kodi Smit-McPhee prepare to hunt the bison

Through a combination of luck and pluck, Keda survives, alone in the harsh world. When he’s attacked by a pack of wolves, he drives them away, and they leave behind a wounded wolf. Instead of slaughtering it for food, he takes it back to the cave where he’s found shelter, and together they nurse each other back to (relative) health. Then the unlikely and still untrusting pair try to make their way back across the steppe to Keda’s village.

The film is the first solo effort from Albert Hughes, a director who has formerly shared a credit with his brother Allen for films like Menace II Society and From Hell. It is very nearly derailed right at the opening, when the story starts with the buffalo hunt before flashing back a week to what were surely the original opening scenes in the village. I’m sure this was the result of someone thinking this pastoral picture needed to start with a bang, but it was exactly the wrong thing to do.

Instead, they should have trusted the intelligence of their audiences and the power of the performance from Smit-McPhee. Long stretches of Alpha are wordless, and the rest is in a language that is supposed to be something like Proto-Indo-European, with English subtitles. That’s a hard row to hoe for an actor (ask anyone who has ever tried to play a Klingon on Star Trek how easy it is act in a made-up tongue), but amazingly, the young lead pulls it off, becoming more endearing with each near death experience.

Chuck, the titular star of Alpha

But the Paleolithic proceedings really take off when Chuck the wolfhound arrives. This is a Lassie-level performance from a canine star who can summon easy laughs with a hangdog look. Smit-McPhee and Chuck have easy chemistry, and Hughes knows how to throw just enough challenge at them to keep it interesting. You really believe that every day life for these early people is like The Revenant, only with more psychedelics and shamanism.

Alpha has moments when it descends into cheese, and somehow, the parade of prehistoric 3D spectacle never looks quite as good as the Dawn Of Man sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. There’s also the nagging question of why Keda would name his proto-dog Alpha when the Greek alphabet wouldn’t be invented for another 17,000 years. But Alpha ultimately won me over with its pluck. It’s not a perfect movie, but its heart is in the right place, and that’s what counts.

Alpha