Robbie Collin's 20 best movies of 2018
From stomach-churning horror to soul-stirring drama, these are the 20 best films of the year, as selected by The Telegraph's Robbie Collin
20. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Dir: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman
The year’s best superhero film, animated or otherwise: a dazzling work of pop-art cinema, and a witty fable of 21st century fandom in all its fractalising craziness. Read the review
19. Shirkers
Dir: Sandi Tan
A young Singaporean woman shoots her country’s first road movie, then her kindly male mentor vanishes with the footage. A perplexing, ingenious, timely documentary, that pries the lid off a shaken jigsaw box of broken dreams.
18. Sweet Country
Dir: Warwick Thornton
A wanted aboriginal stockman is hunted by a posse of white settlers in this sweeping, starkly beautiful outback western, which recasts a tale of frontier injustice as a national origin myth. Read the review
17. Private Life
Dir: Tamara Jenkins
A thrillingly quick-witted fertility comedy that gets you right in the…well, you can guess, with an outstanding Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti as would-be-parents weighing their options to the tick of the clock.
16. First Man
Dir: Damien Chazelle
The Neil Armstrong story seen through truly fresh eyes: a putative great-man biopic that bucks every glory-hunting motif with unassuming brilliance, and grows in both stature and wonder every time you think of it. Read the review
15. Mary and the Witch’s Flower
Dir: Hiromasa Yonebayashi
In a consistently strong year for animation, Studio Ponoc's hand-drawn fairy tale of a girl, her broomstick and a castle past the clouds showed the medium at its most enchanting, imagination-tickling best. Read the review
14. Ex Libris
Dir: Frederick Wiseman
The octogenarian documentarian trains his gaze on the New York Public Library, uncovering a trove of human knowledge that’s near-Borgesian in scope and exhilaratingly alive. Read the review
13. Annihilation
Dir: Alex Garland
Natalie Portman versus the Colour Out of Space: a path-breaking sci-fi horror pilgrimage, full of images and ideas that exert a mesmerising white-knuckle grip. Read the review
12. Mary Poppins Returns
Dir: Rob Marshall
“Can't put me finger on what lies in store, but I feel what's to happen all happened before”: Dick Van Dyke saw it coming in song, 54 years before the fact. A giddily triumphant return, and one of the great studio musicals of the age. Read the review
11. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Dirs: Joel and Ethan Coen
With dizzying showmanship and nerve, the Coens park themselves at the Old West poker table and play the hand each of us is dealt to its unavoidable conclusion, card by blood-splotched card. Read the review
10. Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
Dir: Stephen Nomura Schible
The Japanese composer reckons with mortality, and art’s slippery knack for eluding it, in one of the finest documentaries ever made about the creative process. Read the review
9. Hereditary
Dir: Ari Aster
Families can be hell – or at least a fast-track to it – in this truly terrifying debut feature, with a sensational Toni Colette as a mother of two who unearths her unique psycho-spiritual inheritance. Read the review
8. A Gentle Creature
Dir: Sergei Loznitsa
Inspired by Dostoyevsky, but closer in spirit to Kafka meets Borat, this fearsome horror-satire reveals Russia as a many-bellied beast chewing up her citizens for sport. Read the review
7. The Other Side of the Wind
Dir: Orson Welles
Part scathing self-portrait, part bamboozled screwball, and unmistakably all-Welles to the core. The late master’s long-unfinished swan song was worth the three-decade wait. Read the review
6. You Were Never Really Here
Dir: Lynne Ramsay
The classic vigilante thriller template, thrown headlong through a plate glass mirror, with Joaquin Phoenix as the taciturn hitman at the eye of a chillingly contemporary storm of violence, corruption and sleaze. Read the review
5. Shoplifters
Dir: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Cannes’ best Palme d’Or-winner in years was this achingly gorgeous family portrait from an undisputed master of the form, snapped on modern-day Tokyo’s hardscrabble fringes. Read the review
4. Suspiria
Dir: Luca Guadagnino
The Berlin dance academy riddled with witches is familiar from Dario Argento’s classic 1977 giallo, but Guadagnino’s radical reworking conjures no end of dark, allusive new terrors. Read the review
3. A Star Is Born
Dir: Bradley Cooper
This fourth-hand remake turned out to be the year’s boldest studio production: an old-school melodrama with heart-shredding tunes, and the vaunted star power in abundance. Read the review
2. Phantom Thread
Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson
Daniel Day-Lewis’s (purported) last performance is the crowning glory of this impeccable haute couture comedy, about an exacting fashion designer in 1950s Fitzrovia and his headstrong muse. Read the review
1. Roma
Dir: Alfonso Cuarón
In the Gravity director’s hands, this year in the life of a Mexican housekeeper is history writ mountainous, with the spiritual sweep of an Ansel Adams landscape. Read the review.
You've read Robbie's choices for the best films of 2018, now find out what Telegraph readers thought here.
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