This one percolated to the top of my lists due to its many rave reviews and the awards it won. But after only recently watching Sixteen Candles, it also makes for a fantastic counter-example of how get a film about an adolescent girl right, a claim made by no less an authority than Molly Ringwald herself. This director Bo Burnham’s directorial debut and it seems apropos to our times and this film that he first made his name as a YouTubber himself.

After two films directed by Jia Zhangke that stars his wife and muse Zhao Tao we already know what to expect and indeed this newest film is more of the same. Indeed the director even indulges in his usual obsessions with the Three Gorges Dam and UFOs even as he experiments with the theme of the well known underworld honor among thieves.

This has been on my to watch list ever since I saw A Quiet Passion which I continue to love. A documentary, essentially a love letter, made up of old newsreel footage about the city of Liverpool where director Terence Davies grew up, sounds very appealing. However documentaries are especially difficult to track down and it took me a long time to find an acceptable copy.

This film made some waves at the Oscars last year, notably clinching a nomination for Best Picture despite being not an American film at all. It was directed by Italian director Luca Guadagnino, there is dialogue in English, French, Italian and a sprinkle of German and it is set and filmed entirely in northern Italy. It’s also one of the most unashamedly positive, beautiful films I’ve ever seen with not the slightest touch of darkness in it and somehow it all work out perfectly.

This Singaporean documentary has such an intriguing backstory that it simply demands to be watched. Essentially the director of this film Sandi Tan and her friends decided to make a movie in Singapore in the 1992 when they were in their late teens. However shortly after the completion of filming, the director of that project and their mentor, an American named Georges Cardona, absconded with all of the footage and they never saw it again for nearly 20 years. This documentary was made after they recovered the footage and makes use of it to tell the story of its making and the people involved.

Together with Sorry to Bother You, this was the other of the two important black films released last year though characteristically for the of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, it was a third film, the less lauded Green Book, that actually won the Best Picture award. This is one of those based on real life stories that is so good that it just had to be made into a film though I understand that most of the later parts are fiction.

The critical consensus is that Roma is the best film of 2018 so watching this is certainly a must. I don’t think that it is the very best even with 2018 not being a very good year for films but it is a very strong contender. It is also easily one of the most technically impressive films I’ve seen all year and I’m amazed that Alfonso Cuarón managed to pull off a project of this scope.