Before I list my favorites of 2018, here’s a recap of other films covered by CHIRP’s Fourth Wall last year:
One of my all-time favorite relationship films, Drinking Buddies delves into a quartet of intertwined Chicagoans, two of whom are co-workers at a local microbrewery. What are we all looking for in relationships? Director Joe Swanberg emerged a decade ago as one of the champions of the “mumblecore” film movement which strives for authenticity, and here, all four characters seem completely honest and real.
When it comes to the bank-robbing brothers Connie and Nick in Good Time, well — the ultra-suave Rat Pack this is not. After a bungled heist ends with a sack of worthless money and Nick in custody, Connie is forced to ad-lib an assortment of schemes over the next 24 hours in the hopes of freeing him… with misfortune befalling any unfortunate soul who gets sucked in along the way.
With any and all political documentaries, “truth” is a murky subject, and it’s no different in 13th. Director Ana DuVernay’s agitprop film was a compelling launching point for a discussion on race, politics, and the criminal justice system. As for her answers? Your Mileage May Vary based on your worldview.
In director Jason Reitman’s Tully, there’s a montage early on that spins us between diaper-changing, wailing, and assorted spills in rapid-fire fashion. It didn’t take much imagination for this humble scribe to visualize childrearing as an exhausting horrorshow. So how does Marlo (Charlize Theron) deal? Enter Tully…
While I was disappointed with his latest offering The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos’ distinctive brand of deadpan weirdness was on full display in his previous film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Here, he asks the question: how much stress can we inject into a household before even fundamentally serene people start to crack?
And now for my Top 10 of 2018: