A Film Snob’s Favorites of 2018

Chris Dashiell names his favorite films that were released last year. There were some miraculous films in 2018. I’ve learned to be grateful, and not to take these things for granted. Roma (Alfonso Cuarón). Cuarón’s masterpiece is inspired by the story of his own family during one tumultuous year in Mexico City in the early 1970s. But he tells it from the point of view of the family’s live-in housekeeper and nanny Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio). In a way, it’s a tribute to a common figure that usually goes unacknowledged: the working people of color, usually of native origin, who carry the predominately white middle and upper class by their labor. The proximity of servant and employer is the basic fact underlying the story, but Cuarón also respects the inherent distance involved. Cleo has had to leave her village and her family in order to make a living, and although she is relatively well treated, there is still a basic separateness and absence in her situation. The texture, the experience of this beautiful film is the day-to-day life of Cleo, both in her private, separate existence and with the family that employs her. What sets the picture apart is that the film’s style and techniques are essential parts of the picture’s meaning for audiences to absorb. The constant use of extreme wide-lens shots with long takes, within which the characters move and interact, along with the exquisite black and white photography, is meant to call attention to the film’s craft as well as its story. Audiences sense this and respond do it, both as visual beauty and evocation of life’s struggle. Rather than the traditional sequence of scenes along a linear timeline, we are immersed in the moment. The past is made present with an intensity that seems magical. Zama (Lucrecia Martel). Martel’s first period film, and first literary adaptation, finely displays her unique style. Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), is an 18th century colonial magistrate in an unnamed country in South America. After years of toil in this backwater of the Spanish empire, Zama longs to rejoin his family, but all his efforts to get transferred, including attempting to seduce the wife of a local official, go for naught. He thinks of himself as Spanish, but he was born in the New World, so other Spaniards see him as beneath them. As a judge he’s relatively fair, and we sympathize with his despair and weariness, but from the attitudes of blank obedience and indifference he receives from the natives, servants, and slaves, we see how the uprootedness of the colonizer poisons every aspect of life. Martel gives us scenes that start in the middle, studied indirection in the editing and camera movement, and an evenness of tone that conveys the sense of being stranded in a meaningless job day after day. The darkness of the makeshift dwellings, the dusty uniforms of the Spanish officials, the ever present horses, mules and llamas blithely coexisting in the same living spaces—all this is beautifully conveyed, and the digital color photography by Rui Porças is absolutely stunning. An atmosphere is carefully created, an environment in which one’s awareness is heightened, and by which we perceive the unspoken aspects of relationships. Shoplifters (Hirokazu Koreeda). Koreeda has always had a great talent for exploring issues of family and children, and I wondered if he could go any further. I needn’t have. Shoplifters