With the sun now setting on 2018, Taste of Cinema offers up our favorites from the exciting year that was. To anyone of the opinion that 2018 was a mediocre year at the multiplex, you just weren’t looking hard enough. Even just narrowing the titles down to a workable 30 titles was no small feat – I cringe at the many worthy films that didn’t make the cut (and be sure to look at the Honourable Mentions section for more list-worthy titles).

The films on this list show a wide-ranging assortment including auteur-driven films, populist fare, plentiful arthouse gems, genre films, and many magnificent female-led projects, too (five of the top ten films are from women directors; a refreshing and restorative sign of things to come).

One quick note, the films that follow do NOT include any documentaries (that’s a separate list), though if it did you can bet that Free Solo, Minding the Gap, They Shall Not Grow Old, and Won’t You Be My Neighbour? would be roundly represented.

And now, without further ado, let the roundup commence:

30. The Sisters Brothers

French filmmaker Jacques Audiard adeptly adapts Patrick deWitt’s beloved, prize-winning 2011 historical novel about a pair bickering siblings who earn a living as hitmen in the Wild West of the 1850’s.

Buoyed by some of the year’s very best casting, The Sisters Brothers features John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix are ideal as Eli and Charlie Sisters, hitmen hired by the Commodore (Rutger Hauer) to murder prospector Hermann Warm (Riz Ahmed) who may just be in cahoots with a crooked detective named John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal).

Audiard and cinematographer Benoît Debie (Enter the Void [2009], Spring Breakers [2012]) are a perfect pairing, not unlike Reilly with Phoenix, and such brotherly esprit de corps gives The Sisters Brothers a seeable splendour and a muscular poetry that muzzles the American West in ways we’ve not fully embraced since the genre’s heyday.

29. Under the Silver Lake

“It’s silly wasting time on something that doesn’t matter,” says a dreamy young woman with a fondness for balloons (Grace Van Patten) to an embittered and unemployed young man turned would-be detective named Sam (Andrew Garfield) in writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s surreal Under the Silver Lake.

Sam isn’t a very likeable layabout, he’s months behind in his rent at a rather low-key lovely apartment complex in the trendy neighborhood of Silver Lake. When he’s not spying on his neighbors with high-powered binoculars, masturbating to vintage Playboys, distractedly screwing his kinda sorta actress girlfriend (Riki Lindhome), or watching old black-and-white movies, Sam is pining over his pretty and provocative neighbor, Sarah (Riley Keough).

Under the Silver Lake is dividing audiences down the middle, and that’s to be expected given that it offers an overlong study of self-important, wealthy, and white spoiled brats. These L.A. rats, each in a state of arrested adolescence, fixate on shiny surfaces and shallow beauty and the result is one of the most audacious, campy, and crass offerings of the year.

28. An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn

Jim Hosking, the demented and depraved mind behind 2016’s The Greasy Strangler, finds his sea legs with his artfully inspired sophomore effort, probably the finest comedy film we’ll see all year, the jet black absurdist rom-com An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn.

We’d be remiss not to mention that this brand of outsider cinema will appeal to fans of John Waters in his heyday, but Rick Alverson’s name springs to mind too, and with a cast populated by such stunning, strange, cutting-edge comic actors as Matt Berry, Jemaine Clement, Maria Bamford, and Craig Robinson, all led by Aubrey Plaza, this movie is guaranteed a cult embrace forevermore.

Annoyed and outraged by her domestic life, Lulu Danger (Plaza) finds herself smitten with an incredibly inept hired gun named Colin Keith Threadener (Clement) and plots a reunion with a mysterious tub of guts from her past, the eponymous Beverly Luff Linn (Robinson).

Totally absurd, delightfully over-the-top, An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn is time well spent for adventurous audiences with fittingly strange sensibilities, a love of the surreal and, as Variety’s Amy Nicholson puts it, “those who delight in championing the next cult film leader [and] will nod along with Clement when he grins, ‘Although I don’t know what what’s going on here, I’m having a great time.’”

27. Cam

Cam toys and twists with psychological-horror tropes while shrewdly messing with darker existential ideas in a wonderfully impressive debut from director Daniel Goldhaber and screenwriter Isa Mazzei. The often episodic story, drawn from Mazzei’s own past experiences as a camgirl (a video performer who uses a live webcam to stream often erotic and subversive content on the Internet), follows up-and-coming camgirl Alice Ackerman aka Lola (Madeline Brewer, fantastic). It’s not long before Alice discovers that her Lola persona has inexplicably and eerily been replaced on her site with a doppelgänger.

As Alice searches for whomever has hacked her and tries to figure out the nature of her dead ringer proceedings grow all the more frantic and fucked up. Goldhaber advances this tale cleverly, with developments both evocative and inventive, and all of it graced by Brewer’s herculean performance, essentially a dual one that can swing from seductively sexy to panicked and undone in the bat of a lash.

Whatever Goldhaber and Mazzei have in store for genre fans next will be enticing and exciting to see, let’s hope we won’t have to wait too long.

26. Damsel

The writer-director duo of David and Nathan Zellner follow up 2014’s impressive Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter with the often knee-slapping and consistently subversive revisionist Western, Damsel.

Samuel Alabaster (Robert Pattinson) appears, an articulate dandy of a fella, in unfamiliar territory he is accompanied by a miniature horse named Butterscotch, and shares his intent on rescuing his beloved Penelope (Mia Wasikowska) from the vile kidnappers who snatched her away. Or so Samuel frames it when talking to Parson Henry (David Zellner), a wayward man of the cloth hired on to officiate their wedding vows, if would-be gunslinger Samuel can indeed rescue his damsel, and if indeed Penelope is a prisoner at all.

The Zellner brothers brilliantly blur the fine lines between hero, villain, damsel and deerstalker in this odd odyssey that occasionally echoes both Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles (1974) and John Maclean’s Slow West (2015), with just a splash of Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar(1954) for good measure, in a film that effortlessly trots between uproarious comedy and unsettling tragedy with a slick straphanger’s gait.

25. Virus Tropical

Recipient of South By Southwest’s prestigious Audience Award earlier this year, and adapting Powerpaola’s gripping 2011 memoir graphic novel of the same name, Santiago Caicedo’s black-and-white animated marvel Virus Tropical is warranting all sorts of buzz, and all of it is warranted.

Told in picaresque fashion as it recounts Paola’s formative years in a matriarchal home environment near Ecuador and Colombia, this wryly comic, keenly observational, and excitedly original animated tale is full to bursting with familial dysfunction, coming-of-age tenderness, bold intimations, and universal truths amidst the stirring and strife motherhood, artistic awakening, and so much more.

While comparisons to Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi’s 2007 film Persepolis are not unwarranted (both are monochromatic adaptations of graphic novels with coming-of-age heroines at their center), Virus Tropical blazes its own brilliant trail.

This relatable tale is the sort you don’t want to end, and the 1980s nostalgia (including a singalong to Warrant’s crotch rock anthem “Cherry Pie”, Alf dolls, and Barbie doll makeout sessions being amongst the most memorable) adds extra appeal. Caicedo is definitely a detailed, gifted, and nuanced filmmaker to watch.

24. Thunder Road

Writer-director-actor Jim Cummings wonderful debut film Thunder Road (an expansion of his 2016 short film) was little seen outside the festival circuit, where it was winner of the Grand Jury Award for Best Feature at South By Southwest and the New American Cinema Award at the Seattle Film Festival, and it’s a shame. Marking the arrival of an exciting new talent, Thunder Road walks the fine line between uncomfortable comedy and heartfelt drama with gusto.

Officer Jim Arnaud (Cummings, excellent) is a small town Texas cop who is quickly losing his grip in the face of an impending divorce, losing the custody of his daughter, and his mother’s untimely passing.

We first meet Jim at his mom’s funeral where he delivers an excruciating eulogy, which also includes an oh-no-please-don’t interpretative dance inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” (hence the film’s title). The opening perfectly forecasts the funny/mortifying balance of the film, where one moment’s touching tenderness is the next moment’s ludicrous say wha—?

Tragic and simultaneously comic, Thunder Road is a strangely touching film that will keep you guessing and grinning throughout all manner of discomfort. Recommended.

23. The House That Jack Built

In recent years it seems like Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier’s brand has become one of polarization. Seeing The House That Jack Built at a film festival, well ahead of the film’s wide release, I wasn’t surprised that the majority of attendees seated around me got up and left in outrage around the time Jack (Matt Dillon, excellent) performed his macabre mastectomy on a fraught young woman named Simple (Riley Keough)––a sordid leaf torn from Jack the Ripper’s libretto.

Occupying a 12 year span during the 70s and 80s in the Pacific Northwestern United States––an area traditionally thought to be a hotbed for serial killer activities––the film follows the career of our titular murderer, sometimes referred to as “Mr. Sophistication”.

As Jack leads the viewer down an ever-swirling quagmire of obscenity and slaughter, he shares a back and forth with an almost unworldly figure named Verge (Bruno Ganz)––a perhaps too obvious sobriquet that bluntly suggests he’s Virgil to Jack’s Dante on a tour through Hell and Purgatory.

The film is a self-consciously reflexive, self-defeating, convention-crushing, neo-slasher that will reward the right kind of viewer with its masterful mesh of allusions, pitch-dark designs and dismayed poetry.

22. A Quiet Place

A menacing horror movie set in a pitilessly silent world, director John Krasinski’s latest film A Quiet Place is also a fine sample of smart sci-fi, solidly backed by arresting human drama.

Written by the genre specialists/screenwriting duo of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (Nightlight [2015]), Krasinski, who further developed the screenplay with them, also co-stars along with brilliant actress and wife Emily Blunt. Unraveling in an eerie, post-apocalyptic world where childhood innocence, family life, and joy have been swept away by hard-to-fathom ferocity and intense fear.

While being economically sparing with the details, A Quiet Place is immediately open about its premise. In a not-too-distant future a race of mean, massive, unmanageable, multi-appendaged spider-like monsters have appeared. In this bleak tomorrow, the scant survivors have to adapt to a world of deliberate silences. Such are the Abbott family, Lee (Krasinski) and Evelyn (Blunt), who along with their three young children — sons Marcus (Noah Jupe) and Beau (Cade Woodward), and deaf daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) — have turned their remote farmhouse and environs into an efficacious survivalist ranch.

A Quiet Place will be forever remembered for its brilliant use of sound (see the next section of this list for more detail on this), but it would be folly to overlook the numerous and many clever and well-executed tableaus that Krasinski and Charlotte Bruus Christensen capture on camera, that help bring the dynamic sound design to brilliant, and nail-biting life.

21. Parallel

As usual with filmmaker Isaac Ezban (The Incident [2014], The Similars [2015]), the firmament is streaming with high concept ideas, adverse emotions, and a stiff shot of the supernatural in the highly satisfying genre mashup, Parallel.

Ostensibly the ill-fated tale of four app developer friends; Devin (Aml Ameen), Josh (Mark O’Brien) Leena (Georgia King), and Noel (Martin Wallström), who are frustrated by setbacks both financial and personal. The group share an old house with a history to it, and one night they stumble upon a secret stairway that leads to a part of the house nobody knew existed.

Amongst the neglected items in the furtive attic space is a mirror that turns out to be a portal to a seemingly endless array of alternate universes.

And so our protagonists are lured into a series of multiverse expeditions, first to overcompensate for a few missed opportunities, and then to acquire continued prosperity and public esteem.

As Parallel breathlessly speeds towards its precarious finish, the audience is easily swept up in the complexities of time, identity, morality and the ethics of technological analysis couched in the form of a chic, ultra-slick and yet shrewdly nuanced weird-science psychodrama.

Capturing the genre jeu d’esprit, Ezban gives us one of the strongest sci-fi offerings of the year, a film that is endlessly inventive, and sheerly enjoyable.

Already we’re at the midpoint of 2018 (where does the time go?), and anyone of the opinion that it’s been a mediocre year at the multiplex just wasn’t looking hard enough. Why even narrowing the titles down to a workable 20 titles was no small feat – I cringe at the many worthy films that didn’t make the cut and we still have six more months of amazing movies to go – and a cursory glance at the titles assembled here shows a wonderful and wide-ranging miscellany.

The auteur is alive and well, arthouse and blockbusters are plentiful, genre films are stronger than ever, female-led projects are populist and bankable, as are strong women characters (a trend that we’re happy to say continues to flourish in a very male dominated industry).

So take a look at our favorite 20 films so far from 2018 – hopefully several of these selections are new to you – be sure to add any titles we’ve missed or that you’re excited for that will be released later this year, and above all, keep watching and enjoy!

20. November

Set in the wintry landscape of 19th century Estonia, director Rainer Sarnet’s pagan-fuelled, black-and-white fantasy is a loose adaptation of Andrus Kivirähk’s 2000 novel “Rehepapp ehk November” (Old Barny aka November). It’s a bizarre and beautiful world of werewolves, spirits (including a personification of the Black Death), Christ, and “kratts” –– mythological “helpers”, scarecrow-like in appearance, made of bones and rusting farm tools that assist the peasantry in a myriad of ways.

And in this icy snowscape a farmer girl named Liina (Rea Lest) has eyes for a local lad named Hans (Jörgen Liik), who himself is besmitten with the unattainable aristocratic daughter (Jette Loona Hermanis) of the resident Baron. As the two evoke dangerous and double-edged mythical powers to quell their heart’s desires, only tragedy can result.

Sarnet’s monochromatic visuals, expertly lensed by cinematographer Mart Taniel, are frequently breathtaking, deeply strange, wholly outlandish, and all told, rather wonderful to behold. Equal parts funny and fucked up, November is a very singular cinematic expression of folkloric fantasy. It’s not for everyone, but the best kinds of strange, saga-like sojourns seldom ever are.

19. Double Lover

The always unpredictable and deftly handed director François Ozon (8 Women [2002], Swimming Pool [2003]) turns once more towards the erotic thriller with Double Lover, offering up a menacing psychological quagmire that fans of Brian De Palma will rightly go ape over.

Chloé (Marine Vacth) is a fragile and susceptible young woman, who falls for her psychoanalyst, Paul (Jérémie Renier). Soon she’s moving in with him, but begins to suspect he may be concealing something from her. Is it another side of his personality, or something altogether more effed up?

Ozon’s inspired adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s 1987 “Lives of Twins” embraces the idea that we’re all potentially very multifaceted when it comes to desire, and the results, writes Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Nashawaty, “is like Dead Ringers meets Body Double with a kinky, winking full-frontal Gallic twist.”

18. Ready Player One

Adapted from Ernest Cline’s pop culture soaked sci-fi best-seller from 2011, and custom made director Steven Spielberg’s strengths as populist blockbuster architect, Ready Player One is a shit ton of fun.

The best way to enjoy this endless procession of references to films, TV shows, music, toys, anime, video games, and comic books, is to turn your brain down low and your inner child all the way up. This is a full on “movie ride” experience and it’s nonstop. Beyond the ten or so minutes of exposition, the ensuing two-plus hours of action never lets up and it is one long o-faced nerdgasm.

Cline himself described his premise as “what if Willy Wonka designed video games instead of candy?” Veering here and there from Cline’s tome, Spielberg is largely faithful to the source material, or at least its spirit, set in the year 2045 on an overpopulated earth where much of humanity seeks escape into the virtual reality world of OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation).

Our hero is Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a teenage gamer who discovers clues to a hidden game within the OASIS that promises the winner full ownership of the OASIS program, and he soon joins several allies to try to complete the game before indentured players working for a large company, Innovative Online Industries (IOI), run by Nolan Sorrento (Sam Mendelsohn), can do the same.

Spielberg and his producers spent years securing the rights for the copyrighted elements used in Ready Player One, and there’s so much to see in the film that a single viewing cannot possibly contain them all; from a gasp-inducing sequence centered on The Shining, to fist-pumping cameos from the likes of Mobile Suit Gundam, the Iron Giant, Freddy Krueger, Robocop, Bill and Ted, Back to the Future, Twisted Sister, Rush, A-ha, and so much more, including a laugh-out-loud Child’s Play detail (“It’s fucking Chucky!”), Ready Player One is all bombastically merry recontextualizing and controlled explosion of pop-culture eye candy, non-stop nostalgia, and sci-fi spectacle.

17. How to Talk to Girls at Parties

Admittedly the latest from John Cameron Mitchell, like his best known works, 2001’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and 2006’s Shortbus, is an acquired taste that will only appeal to niche audiences looking for their next cult film fix. To that end, Mitchell’s got an ace in his sleeve in that his gloriously goofy sci-fi rom com, How to Talk to Girls at Parties, is an oddball adaptation of a celebrated 2006 short story from iconic comic book/sci-fi and fantasy scribe Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, American Gods, Coraline). So there’s a lovingly loopy fanbase already waiting in the wings.

Mitchell doesn’t disappoint, and this is the sort of late-at-night, punk-addled, quip-fuelled foray that will have fans of subversive musicals like Phantom of the Paradise (1974), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), or Mitchell’s aforementioned Hedwig.

Enn (Alex Sharp) is a shy teenager on the fringes of the punk scene in 1970s London where he meets Zan (Elle Fanning), a charismatic young lass who rolls with a bizarre group of otherworldly girls at one of the most energetic and gonzo parties that Enn has ever been to. Soon there’s a showdown between punks and aliens –– with Nicole Kidman in the mix as an old school punk priestess named Queen Boadicea.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties is a mixed bag in places (the punk rock musical aspect may be the film’s weakest link), but when it’s a teen love story with sci-fi interludes and funny performances from the two leads, it’s a pretty fantastic distraction and a joyful journey of youth in revolt.

16. Summer 1993

Subtle, touching, but never maudlin, Catalin writer-director Carla Simón’s Summer 1993 is a nuanced film about childhood and, more specifically, a young girl’s apprehension of devastating personal tragedy.

Six-year-old Frida (Laia Artigas) stares in helpless silence as the last possessions of her recently deceased mother are packed away into boxes and she bids a bitter farewell to the Barcelona apartment they shared. A victim of AIDS, Frida tries to get her head around the fact that she will never see her mother again, even though her aunt, uncle, and young cousin have taken her in and have a new home and life for her in the bucolic Catalan countryside.

Artfully employing an unobtrusive camera, Simón, who based much of Summer 1993 on her own personal experiences, also bays somewhat at the heels of Victor Erice (The Spirit of the Beehive [1973]), and Maurice Pialat (Naked Childhood [1968]), who’s influence mark much of the film.

Summer 1993 is an aching song of delicacy, purity, and restraint, and the results are a vibrant, in spite of the heartache at its core. Simón, who is cresting a wave of Catalin women directors, and her naturalistic style and sensibilities ensure a great career ahead of her, and this is her first small-scale masterwork.

15. American Animals

BAFTA winning documentarian Bart Layton (2012’s The Impostor) conjures Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon as he mixes subjectivity and high-stakes suspense in American Animals, based off the true story of a daring and ridiculous 2004 library heist at the Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky.

Misguided, blundering, and delusional wannabe criminal ringleader Warren Lipka (Evan Peters, excellent), and his childhood BFF Spencer Reinhard (Barry Keoghan, continuing his winning streak after a dazzling turn in 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer), egged on by suburban ennui, their favorite film noir anti-heroes, and their knowledge of TU’s special collections library holding incredibly valuable Audubon prints and rare books leads them into an outrageous caper that can only end in disaster.

“Performed with piss, vinegar and some poignancy,” writes Variety’s Guy Lodge, “Layton’s crowdpleasing Sundance competition entry is tricked out to the max with lithe structural fillips, flashes of cinematic quotation and formal sleight of hand.”