These Are The Best Movies Of 2018

On the surface, Blockers didn't look destined for critical acclaim. A teen sex comedy with a borderline offensive title (the poster features a silhouetted image of a rooster above the word "Blockers" ... get it?), with none other than wrestler-turned-terrible-rapper-turned actor John Cena in a main role, the film looked like an easy target for critics to line up and take shots at. But then, a funny thing happened: ex-30 Rock and Pitch Perfect series writer Kay Cannon, making her directorial debut, delivered a surprisingly funny, honest, and heartfelt feature which some of those critics are calling the best comedy of the year.

Comedic plots don't get any more straightforward: three teenage girls want to have sex on prom night, and their parents try to stop them. But along with the over-the-top set pieces comes a surprising amount of sensitivity; Midwest Film Journal's Nick Rogers proclaimed it to be "one of the best mainstream sex comedies in years — demystifying teen intercourse, poking holes in gender-based double standards of lost virginity and encouraging kindness and empathy among everyone at the story's center," and Cannon was uniformly praised for her ability to hit comedic as well as sympathetic notes with equal aplomb, and for bringing out the absolute best in every member of her cast. Finding a way to reinvigorate the raunchy sex comedy is no small feat, but in Blockers, we just might have an American Pie for the new generation.

Writer/director Alex Garland is making a name for himself with the kind of dark, cerebral sci-fi thrillers that aim for a realm beyond simple entertainment. After penning the screenplays for such well-received flicks as 28 Days Later and Dredd, he made his directorial debut in 2015 with Ex Machina, which garnered him his first Academy Award nomination for his screenplay and led to a television development deal with FX. His sophomore feature Annihilation, adapted from Jeff VanderMeer's 2014 novel, continues in the heady tradition of its predecessor with a mind-blowing, genre-subverting story that makes good use of Garland's talent for atmosphere — not to mention its roundly excellent cast.

Headed up by Natalie Portman and featuring Tessa Thompson (Thor: Ragnarok) and Oscar Isaac (Star Wars: The Last Jedi), Annihilation follows a team of scientists who dare to explore the Shimmer, an anomalous area in which the very concept of reality doesn't seem to apply. Collider's review heaped praise on the film, calling it "a stunning, sweeping metaphor for the way human beings tear themselves apart. It's wildly ambitious, occasionally alienating, and consummately perplexing; an irritant to the mind and spirit that demands self-reflection." Other critics bandied about words like "hypnotic," "challenging," and "audacious" — which makes us all the more sad that Garland's original script for Halo never got off the ground.

Regardless of whether it had been much good, Love, Simon was destined for praise for one simple reason: it's the first major studio Hollywood film to focus on a gay teen romance, a groundbreaking endeavor in and of itself. Fortunately, director Greg Berlanti (Life as We Know It) and screenwriters Elizabeth Berger (who has recently worked on the hit NBC drama series This Is Us) and Isaac Aptaker (About a Boy) delivered a film that's notable for more than just that reason — it's a funny, disarmingly sweet rom-com that some critics are comparing to the best work of John Hughes.

Working from a 2015 YA novel with the slightly clunkier title& Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens' Agenda, Berger and Aptaker populated their script with strongly drawn characters with feelings and motivations familiar to any of us — some of them just happen to be gay — and Nick Robinson (Jurassic World) was singled out for praise in the lead role, among a strong cast which includes Jennifer Garner, Josh Duhamel, and Alexandra Shipp (X-Men: Apocalypse, Straight Outta Compton). RogerEbert.com's Sheila O'Malley called the film "a radically inclusive act," which was a common theme throughout most of the glowing reviews; Den of Geek's Delia Harrington proclaimed it a "rare, uplifting, 'romantic AF' LGBTQ movie ... to be prized. With a modern soundtrack and a diverse cast, Love, Simon is the kind of movie many people wish they had growing up."

Scottish writer/director Armando Iannucci is perhaps best-known stateside for his work on the HBO series Veep, and he's taken his gift for political satire to a whole new realm with The Death of Stalin, an adaptation of a French graphic novel which provides an inside look at the chaos, humor, and horror surrounding the demise of the Russian dictator. It may seem an unlikely subject for a farce — but the pitch-black comedy garnered the kind of eye-popping reviews normally reserved for prestige pictures, with some reviewers labeling it a masterpiece.

Featuring a stellar international cast which includes Steve Buscemi (as Nikita Khrushchev, no less), Michael Palin (of Monty Python fame), and Jeffrey Tambor, the ambitious film hit the sweet spot with critics: Saporta Report's Eleanor Ringel Cater declared Iannucci's comedic touch "swift, sure and utterly poisonous," and his film "as much Monty Python and Marx Brothers as it is social commentary." Adam Graham of the Detroit News took care to point out the film's relevance to the current political climate, saying that it "has a timely urgency that mirrors today's political chaos ... rooted in enough political reality that it hardly feels sensationalized. And given the current state of politics, it's as on-point as a breaking news alert." Many notices suggest that even viewers who are completely turned off by politics at this point will be won over by the whip-crack writing and first-rate cast — an impressive feat unto itself.

With director Ryan Coogler (Creed) as well as writing partner Joe Robert Cole and star Chadwick Boseman (who introduced the character in Captain America: Civil War) onboard, Black Panther was expected to be another winner for Marvel — but the film managed to surpass those high expectations with box office receipts making it the highest-grossing superhero movie of all time.

Much has been made, and rightly so, of the film's importance to black audiences — but Black Panther conquered the box office not only by giving that underserved demographic a hero of their own to cheer for, but by virtue of being astonishingly good. Many critics proclaimed it to be on a totally different level from the rest of the MCU's consistently high-quality fare, exploring themes of alienation and loss more effectively than a comic book film has any right to — particularly by way of Michael B. Jordan's conflicted villain Erik "Killmonger" Stevens, who has been cited as the MCU's best villain ever thanks largely to Jordan's towering performance. Slashfilm summed it up the best: "Run, don't walk, to the theater to see Black Panther. This is not hyperbole ... saying it's just 'good' is underselling it ... [perhaps] the best film of 2018."

Even the eye-popping box office success of Black Panther was only a warmup act for Avengers: Infinity War, which has shattered too many records to list here. Part one of the culmination of Marvel's three-phase mega-arc, in which the powerful Infinity Stones are collected by the Mad Titan Thanos with the goal of eradicating half of all life in the universe, brought together nearly every important character introduced in the MCU thus far — and fans responded by putting up the kind of box office numbers which made it one of the top worldwide hits of all time.

While Infinity War didn't earn the widespread critical adoration enjoyed by Black Panther, positive reviews recognized it as a singularly Herculean feat of storytelling, one which takes time to deliver meaningful arcs for characters we've come to know and love over the years — and, notably, for its villain. Josh Brolin's motion-capture performance as Thanos moved some critics to declare the Mad Titan the MCU's best villain ever, and — especially given the film's amazingly dark cliffhanger ending — the only one to ever pose a true threat to Earth's Mightiest Heroes. Said ending was a sticking point for some reviewers (with some labeling it "half a movie"), but perhaps their tune will change when Avengers 4 — which directors the Russo brothers promise will hold many surprises — debuts in May of next year.

Fans of Ryan Reynolds' Merc With a Mouth eagerly awaited the followup to 2016's ridiculously huge, comparatively low-budget R-rated hit Deadpool — and Reynolds, along with incoming director David Leitch (responsible for some choice scenes in John Wick and the entirety of Atomic Blonde) didn't disappoint. Those who were even vaguely familiar with the original knew what they could expect in terms of insane action and over-the-top vulgarity — but many of them weren't ready for the surprising amount of character building and emotion brought by returning screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (along with Reynolds, who of course contributed) this time around. Plus, as promised, they did give us Cable in this one.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune's review carried a headline that echoed many critics' sentiments ("Deadpool 2 is more of the same, but more so") while praising the performances of Zazie Beetz as Domino and Josh Brolin, in his second major role in a tentpole comic book film in 2018, as time-traveling cyborg Cable. Wired also gushed over the performances of the entire cast, noting that Deadpool's assembly of the mutant superhero team X-Force "gives Deadpool 2 a much stronger narrative arc, and emotional payoff, than its predecessor," and praising the "surprisingly heartfelt ending... this sequel actually set out to be a movie, not just a series of jokes stuck to a Macguffin." It's the rare sequel that lives up to its beloved predecessor — plus, some critics are calling its post-credits scene the best one ever, which is really saying something.

Leigh Whannell is the scribe behind the enormously profitable Saw and Insidious series, and after taking the directorial reins for this year's Insidious: The Last Key, he returned with a very different sophomore effort. A sort of modern-day spin on RoboCop crossed with Death Wish, Upgrade features Logan Marshall-Green (Spider-Man: Homecoming) as a man left paralyzed after a mugging in which his wife is murdered. A billionaire investor may have the answer to his problems: a new technology which will "upgrade" the man's paralyzed body in spectacular fashion, enabling him to exact terrifying vengeance on the thugs who destroyed his life.

According to The Detroit News' Adam Graham, the film "is a cuckoo science fiction horror pastiche that's smarter than it looks but disguises its ambition with low-grade, B-movie thrills," while critic Matthew Pejkovic asserted that Upgrade "just might be the breakaway film needed to re-establish director Leigh Whannell's standing as one of Australia's leading genre filmmaker talents." With recent mainstream sci-fi and horror efforts becoming increasingly high-minded, Whannell's vicious little thriller is just what the doctor ordered for fans craving visceral, well-crafted shocks.

As the longtime frontman of the Oakland rap group the Coup, Boots Riley has long been a respected figure in the world of hip-hop, but he's not exactly a household name. That may be about to change: critical notices for his feature directorial debut Sorry to Bother You were nothing short of over the moon, with more than a few reviews suggesting that the picture marks Riley's arrival as a major new filmmaking talent.

The film follows the story of Cassius Green, a struggling black telemarketer who unlocks the key to success by discovering his "white voice." But as he begins to climb the corporate ladder, he finds himself navigating a surreal world of drugged-out CEOs and anti-corporate activists. The critical consensus pegs the film as something of a brilliant mess which isn't as undisciplined as it seems on the surface; Adam Graham of the Detroit News called it "An absurdist, startlingly original Molotov cocktail through the pane glass window of Hollywood" that "travel[s] to bizarre places, making Get Out look like a fairy tale." Observers mostly agreed that not all of the jokes land, as the film continually swings big — but when it connects, it connects hard. Subversive and even militant (no surprise to any fan of the Coup), Sorry to Bother You is an astoundingly original, timely piece of filmmaking summed up best by Bernard Boo of Pop Matters: "This film is dope as hell."

For over two decades, Tom Cruise has put himself in mortal danger for our amusement by way of the surprisingly resilient Mission: Impossible series, which has failed to lose even an iota of momentum despite its star's advancing age. Now in his 50s, Cruise continues to insist on doing every stunt that physically possible for him to do, which somehow seems to always be "pretty much all of them." The series has long favored top-shelf action set pieces over plot and characterization; audiences don't go to a Mission: Impossible film for character beats or high drama, they come to see which unbelievably insane stunts Cruise will pull off this time, and Mission: Impossible – Fallout delivered in spades.

Director Christopher McQuarrie (Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation) became the series' first returning director, remaining in the seat previously held by such luminaries as Brad Bird, John Woo and Brian De Palma. His sure hand behind the camera, plus Cruise's otherworldly dedication to the role of eternally put-upon IMF agent Ethan Hunt, resulted in a crackerjack picture which pulled down some of the best reviews of the entire series. As Impossible as it might seem, this venerable action franchise and its star just seem to keep getting better with age — or, as succinctly put by the Detroit News' Adam Graham, "Bless this franchise, we're truly not worthy."

The producing team behind Crazy Rich Asians, an adaptation of the 2013 novel of the same name, made an incredibly gutsy decision when fielding distribution offers for the film. Their two suitors: Warner Bros., who promised a theatrical release and not much else, and Netflix — who were ready to greenlight an entire trilogy based on the property and were offering a ridiculous amount of money. The novel's author, Kevin Kwan, and the film's director Jon M. Chu decided to go with Warners, ensuring that the only romantic comedy in recent memory to feature a nearly all-Asian cast would see a theatrical run. It turned out to be a good choice.

The film, featuring Constance Wu (Fresh Off the Boat) as a native New Yorker who accompanies her boyfriend to a wedding in Singapore, became a surprise critical smash and a cultural phenomenon. Online reviewer Rendy Jones encapsulated the consensus in concluding his review, "Crazy Rich Asians takes familiar tropes and revitalizes them and its entire genre... a great cast, amazing direction, and powerful writing." Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal called it "hugely enjoyable, and hooray for Hollywood for making it happen." Like Black Panther before it, Asians constitutes a clear message to Hollywood execs that heartfelt, well-executed stories featuring people of color can not only cross cultural boundaries, but smash them — and earn huge box office in the process.

John Cho is perhaps best known as Harold from the Harold and Kumor movies and Sulu in J.J. Abrams' rebooted Star Trek series, but that may be changing. He fills the lead role in Searching — and while the thriller didn't exactly tear it up at the box office, the critical response to the film, and Cho's performance, should ensure that this talented actor will soon be landing more juicy leads.

Searching borrows a page or two from producer Timur Bekmambetov's Unfriended playbook, as the film takes place within the confines of laptop and smartphone screens. A distraught father (Cho) is frustrated with the lack of a police response when his 16-year old daughter goes missing, eventually taking matters into his own hands by using the girl's digital trail to determine her whereabouts. As with Unfriended and its sequel, the "screen within the screen" gimmick works remarkably well — and while some of the cast seem a tad thrown off by the conceit, Cho improbably thrives in it. 

Vince Mancini of Uproxx lavished praise on his performance, saying, "It sounds more like a cheap gimmick than it actually is, and if I'd skipped it I would've missed the ultimate evidence of John Cho's remarkable evolution into a capable leading man." Critical consensus pegged the film as a well-made, suspenseful thriller with a timely message — namely, that nobody's secrets are safe online — but Cho's engaged and emotional performance helped elevate Searching from genre standout to one of the summer's best films.

A Star is Born is a classic Hollywood story, one that's been revisited no fewer than three times since the 1937 original. The 1976 version, starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, was the third-highest grossing picture of that year and won an Academy Award for Best Original Song — but in 2018, we got a lovingly crafted retelling that may prove to be not only the finest version of the story put to film, but one of the greatest remakes of all time.

Helmed by Bradley Cooper (who also stars) in his directorial debut, the film tells the story of up-and-coming singer Ally (Lady Gaga), who falls in love with an established musician (Cooper) and begins her ascent to stardom even as the career of her mentor and lover begins to decline. Cooper displays a sure directorial hand; Adam Epstein of Quartz calls his direction "instinctive," with "remarkably orchestrated" scenes which enhance his own spot-on performance while taking full advantage of Gaga's smoldering star power. To nobody's surprise, she absolutely crushes it in her first big-screen leading role, with piles of notices singling out the realistic chemistry between the two leads and Gaga's "powerful and winning" screen presence. Said Jmuvies' John Urbancich, "Expect [Oscar] nominations all around, with actor/writer/director/producer and songwriter Cooper on the verge of a boatload." 

We waited all year for it, and it delivered. Halloween, a direct sequel to the seminal 1978 film of the same name and made with the blessing of (and with a new score by) original director John Carpenter, finally gave fans of the Shatner-faced slasher Michael Myers a sequel worthy of his towering legacy. Co-writer and director David Gordon Green and fellow scribes Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley were criticized in some quarters for relying too heavily on the story beats of the original, but most fans found Halloween to be more of a loving, skillful homage than a blatant remix — and spot-on performances by Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode and Nick Castle as Myers (reprising their roles from the original film) brought this excellent sequel home.

Laura Delaney of RTE found the film to be "the perfect companion piece to John Carpenter's 1978 classic, with a boundary-pushing script offering fans something truly cutting," while Medium Popcorn's Brandon Collins called back to the underrated H2O (which this film wiped from the series' continuity, along with all the other sequels) by labeling the film "A really good follow-up to the first one, and the best Halloween in 20 years." It may not have reinvented the absurdly large kitchen knife, but it gave fans a worthy canonical followup to one of the greatest horror films of all time — and 40 years down the road, that's no small feat.

Amandla Stenberg, a fine young actor, has been in search of her breakout role for awhile now. 2018's The Darkest Minds may have provided it had it not fallen resoundingly flat with critics and audiences, but The Hate U Give put that swing-and-miss squarely in the rearview mirror. Stenberg's portrayal of Starr Carter, a black teen whose world is upended when she witnesses the murder of a friend by a police officer, has drawn rave reviews from all quarters — and the film itself has garnered near-universal acclaim for its confident handling of a difficult subject.

Variety's Owen Gleiberman positively lavished praise on the film, saying, "[It's] the rare racial drama that will detonate the complacency of even those who are drawn to see it... a stunningly acted movie that never panders or settles for middlebrow piety... Amandla Stenberg makes [Starr's] journey at once stirring and psychologically riveting. This is a performance everyone should see." Ben Sachs of the Chicago Reader went even further in his praise, saying it deserves to be held up against To Kill a Mockingbird and adding, "The filmmakers understand their characters so thoroughly that the insights seem to grow organically from their experiences. This is American studio filmmaking at its finest." Hollywood hasn't always given us the most nuanced examinations of race relations — hello, Crash — but The Hate U Give proves cinema can still be a powerful tool in forging understanding between human beings of all stripes.

2015's Creed was many things: a surprisingly vital entry into the well-worn Rocky franchise, an excellent and compelling sports film, and something of a coming-out party for director Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan (who also teamed up for 2018's Black Panther). For Creed II, Coogler ceded the director's chair to sophomore feature director Stephen Caple, Jr., resulting in a film slightly less kinetic — but with just as much on its mind — as the original, featuring another stellar performance from Jordan and the return of Dolph Lundgren as Ivan Drago, the role that made him famous in 1985's Rocky IV.

Newcomer Florian Munteanu delivered a solid performance as Viktor Drago, the near-unstoppable son of Ivan, who emerges to challenge Jordan's Adonis Johnson in the ring — and if the storyline seems a little familiar, well, that's not necessarily a bad thing. The great Chicago Sun-Times critic Richard Roeper hit the nail on the head in his review, saying, "Even though we've seen this movie before (and more than once), there's a strong beating heart to this franchise." That heart would be Jordan, who (as always) earned heaps of praise for his masterful sketching of his character's personal growth. Also a standout: Lundgren, who showed off the acting chops that fans always knew he had by humanizing the monstrous Drago with a simmering performance. The general consensus: not quite as good as the original, but a worthwhile entry which sets the stage for a potentially fantastic finish.

The films in the Transformers series, never critical darlings to begin with, have produced consistently diminishing returns both critically and at the box office, and observers could be forgiven for expecting spinoff Bumblebee to offer more of the same. But with director Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings) taking over for Bay and working from a smart, '80s-set script by Christina Hodson (Shut In), a funny thing happened: Bumblebee debuted to absolutely stellar reviews, with near-universal praise for its smaller, more personal story and throwback vibe, which drew favorable comparisons to the work of Steven Spielberg in his Amblin-era prime.

In what may constitute a first for the entire series, lead Hailee Steinfeld was singled out early and often for her heartfelt, nuanced performance ("We haven't seen such a well-realized character in any of the other Transformers movies," opined one observer). Critics simply found the movie to be more pleasant to look at and easier to follow than Bay's famously busy, jumbled offerings, with Knight's empathetic direction marking a refreshing change of pace. Simply put, Bumblebee served up what the series had thus far struggled to provide: heart, wonder, and fun. Said Rolling Stone's David Fear: "It's a blockbuster that, with a few whirring movements and a half dozen clicks and beeps, transforms itself into something meant to be watched by actual thinking, feeling human beings. For once, there really is more than meets the eye."

1964's Mary Poppins was many things: a star-making hit for Julie Andrews, a groundbreaking mix of live action and animation, a delivery mechanism for a slew of iconic children's tunes, and a showcase for one of the most terrible English accents ever performed by an American actor (Dick Van Dyke). P.L. Travers, the author of the novel upon which it was based, was famously displeased with the adaptation — but that didn't stop Disney from making Mary Poppins Returns, featuring Emily Blunt in the title role. 

While some reviews acknowledged that diehard fans of the original might find fault, the film charmed the socks off the majority of critics and audiences. Blunt's winning performance was found to measure up favorably to Andrews' take; Matthew Norman of the London Evening Standard found her Poppins to be "the same irresistible amalgam of the brisk and brusque, the kindly and mischievous, the vain and magical... and the intriguingly enigmatic." Director Rob Marshall drew praise for doing "a canny job of suggesting, if not replicating, the treasures of the original movie... this new film hardly feels as if it were made in 2018 at all." Overall, it was received as a worthy sequel to a timeless classic, which one review summed up in truly Poppins-like fashion: "While it may not be practically perfect in every way, Mary Poppins Returns is never less than perfectly palatable, and in some ways comes close to perfection — practically speaking."