Excellents of Eighteen

This past year may go down as the hardest year for me to craft my top ten list. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the main one is that there wasn't a clear number one movie for me. In year's past there has always been a single cinematic experience movie that jumped out, grabbed me and held on strong as I continued to watch other films. But in 2018, this never happened, and I never had that "singular moment." Despite this, I did force myself to rank my movies, but if I'm being completely honest, depending on my mood or the type of genre I'm looking for, any one of these ten movies could be my number one. There is horror, animation, super-hero, fictional biopic, semi-historical biopic, action, and a new genre I'm calling post-modernist mish-mash where director Steven Spielberg reflects on and actively processes the decades-long oeuvre of Steven Spielberg.

Ranking my favorite TV shows was a much simpler endeavor, mainly due to the fact that I had very clear emotional responses to certain TV shows. These feelings were conveniently elicited in such a way that they were was easily rankable. The year in television (and this has been the case for a while now) was once again the more exciting and interesting venue for compelling visual storytelling. Whether it was Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) brilliantly bumbling along as she chased a sociopathic assassin or Barry Block (Bill Hader) brilliantly bumbling along as he hid the fact that he was a sociopathic assassin (big year for assassins). Over on FX, Donald Glover continued to push the envelope for the 30-minute format as his Atlanta got weirder and more insightful while Glover continued to explore his voice as one of the most exciting and creative story-tellers working today (Teddy Perkins anyone?). And (unfortunately) it was on the small screen where we found the finest cinematography of any movie or TV show within Sam Esmail's Homecoming (yes even better than the master Alfonso Cuarón's ROMA*).