The Best iTunes Movies of 2018 So Far
It’s hard to believe, but true: 2018 is already half over.
Each year, hundreds of new movies hit theaters, iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix... but which ones are actually good? With so many options, it's getting harder and harder to figure out which movies are the best. Not all of the movies played in theaters; not all of them are to everyone’s taste. What they have in common is their ability to surprise and confound and even infuriate the audience. Here are the 10 best movies of 2018 so far, why you should watch them and how you can watch them.
No.10 Black Panther
Director: Ryan Coogler
Black Panther is unlike almost all the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies that have come before it. Director/writer Ryan Coogler (Creed) and co-writer Joe Robert Cole (American Crime Story) have found just the right sweet spot to tell a story that is deeply Afro-centric and affirmatively political in its themes and concerns, while dressing it in some of the familiar Marvel superhero pyrotechnics and adding a dash of James Bond espionage thriller. In other words, they’ve made a movie that speaks to a segment of the populace who have long awaited a mainstream film that addresses them directly, yet in no way does Black Panther alienate anyone else--this is still a comic book adventure for everyone.Gihosoft Free iPhone Data Recovery is a professional iPhone Data Recovery software to get back all your lost text message, photo, video, call history, note, contact and more from iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch.
No.9 Paddington 2
Director: Paul King
Children — and adults — deserve more movies as generous and lovingly made as Paddington 2. The sequel follows the template of the original almost to the minute, but manages to inject even more fun, freewheeling energy into each beat. In this installation, the Peruvian bear voiced by Ben Whishaw tries to find a job and winds up … enacting prison reform instead? Director Paul King still has loads of visual tricks up his sleeve that never feel too imposing on the story, and Hugh Grant gives one of the best unqualified performances of the year as a washed-up actor Paddington runs afoul of. The whole thing is a delight from start to teary-eyed finish.
No.8 The Endless
Director: Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead
Indie directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s first two features, 2012’s Resolution and 2014’s Spring, were an idiosyncratic blend of indie character drama and supernatural menace and madness. Following their Lovecraftian modern cult classic Spring, acclaimed filmmakers Moorhead and Benson return with this mind-bending thriller that follows two brothers who receive a cryptic video message inspiring them to revisit the UFO death cult they escaped a decade earlier. Hoping to find the closure that they couldn’t as young men, they’re forced to reconsider the cult’s beliefs when confronted with unexplainable phenomena surrounding the camp. As the members prepare for the coming of a mysterious event, the brothers race to unravel the seemingly impossible truth before their lives become permanently entangled with the cult.
No.7 Filmworker
Director: Tony Zierra
Filmworker, Tony Zierra's extraordinary documentary, dives in to what happened next: Vitali's agent calls him, saying that the American ex-pat was adapting William Thackeray's 1844 novel Barry Lyndon and was interested in the actor for the role of the dastardly Lord Bullingdon. After wrapping in July of 1974, Vitali moved on to other gigs, but they paled in comparison to being in the presence of a cinematic genius. Then Kubrick sent him Stephen King's The Shining, with a note that simply said: "Read it." He asked the performer if he could help find a child to play the movie version's psychic youngster. Vitali said yes – and ended up employed by the filmmaker as an all-purpose guy Friday, acting coach, archivist, casting director, Foley Artist, designer of feline surveillance systems, personal assistant, sounding board, punching bag and much more for the next 30 years of his life. Not even Kubrick's death in 1999 could keep the acolyte from serving his perfectionist deity in perpetuity.
No.6 24 Frames
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
For what would prove to be his final film, Iranian director AbbasKiarostami gave himself a challenge: to create a dialogue between hiswork as a filmmaker and his work as a photographer, bridging the twoart forms to which he had dedicated his life. Setting out toreconstruct the moments immediately before and after a photograph istaken, Kiarostami selected twenty-four still images, most of them starklandscapes inhabited only by foraging birds and other wildlife, and digitally animated them into subtly evolving four-and-a-half-minutevignettes, creating a series of poignant studies in movement,perception, and time. A sustained meditation on the process of imagemaking, 24 Frames is a graceful and elegiac farewell from one of thegiants of world cinema.
No.5 First Reformed
Director: Paul Schrader
Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) is a solitary, middle-aged parish pastor at a small Dutch Reform church in upstate New York on the cusp of celebrating its 250th anniversary. Once a stop on the Underground Railroad, the church is now a tourist attraction catering to a dwindling congregation, eclipsed by its nearby parent church, Abundant Life, with its state-of-the-art facilities and 5,000-strong flock. When a pregnant parishioner (Amanda Seyfried) asks Reverend Toller to counsel her husband, a radical environmentalist, the clergyman finds himself plunged into his own tormented past, and equally despairing future, until he finds redemption in an act of grandiose violence.
No.4 The Rider
Director: Chloé Zhao
The West is wild to its core in Chloé Zhao’s The Rider, a stunning verité drama about a young rodeo star facing an uncertain future after a catastrophic accident. Zhao amalgamates fact and fiction for her sophomore effort, as her story is based in part on the life of actor Brady Jandreau (here cast alongside his own relatives and acquaintances in his native South Dakota). That life-art marriage lends bracing potency to this ode to frontier existence, as does the quiet magnetism of its twenty-something lead.
The material is truly enlivened by the director’s artful aesthetics, which balance intimate close-ups and at-a-remove panoramas of solitary figures set against expansive rural landscapes—never more so than in a late oncoming-storm shot that could double as an Old West painting. Meanwhile, multiple sequences in which Jandreau trains wild stallions provide a powerful, tactile sense of communion between man and beast, and in doing so silently evoke the warring emotions battling for supremacy in the young bronco rider’s soul.
No.3 Love After Love
Director: Russell Harbaugh
What happens when you lose the foundation of your family? In the wake of a husband and father's death, the family members he leaves behind find themselves adrift-and in danger of drifting apart-as they each try to find meaning in a world without the man who held them together. Mother Suzanne (Andie MacDowell) tentatively seeks companionship-but her attempts at dating only drive a wedge between her and older son Nicholas (Chris O'Dowd), whose own relationship with his girlfriend is disintegrating. Meanwhile, younger son Chris (James Adomian) deals with grief in his own complicated-and increasingly worrying-way. What plays out between the trio is a beautifully observed, powerfully emotional journey that speaks to the strength of family ties.
No.2 You Were Never Really Here
Director: Lynne Ramsay
You Were Never Really Here is a taut and almost unbearably intense 90-minutes, without an ounce of fat on it. With her new Joaquin Pheonix-led movie, You Were Never Really Here, Ramsay has made an unflinching thriller that follows its own rules instead of conventions. Based on Jonathan Aames‘ (Bored to Death) novel, Ramsay uses a few familiar genre elements to tell a story that’s as much about PTSD as it is about an assassin searching for a kidnapped teen.
A thriller told through Ramsay’s lens has the physical action play off-screen, and what’s going on within Phoenix’s character take center stage in almost every frame. The way Ramsay and her collaborators depict the character’s point-of-view and New York City is unnerving, sometimes hellish. Even a shot of a jelly bean is hard to shake after watching You Were Never Really Here.
No.1 Annihilation
Director: Alex Garland
Annihilation is a science fiction psychological horror film, based on the novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer. Alex Garland has made a perceptive and sometimes ponderous tome for his second writing and directing feature after the masterful Ex Machina. Like that film, and several of the other screenplays he’s penned, the filmmaker borrows familiar genre conceits to craft something provocatively counterintuitive and richer than many of its conceptual influences. Also more ambitious and epic in scope than Machina, Annihilation features a strong and wide ranging cast of curious and enigmatic women, including a tenacious Natalie Portman, trapped in an even more imposing mystery box.
