Ranking the Movies of 2018: Week 11

A new number one. After several weeks of celebrating my love for my rewatch of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a conversation on the latest Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast made me finally push a movie past the Jimmy Stewart classic. Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s remarkable love story, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, moved me so much in my recent rewatch that I could not stop gushing about it.

In fact, while I would love to account for some recency bias, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has risen in my mind to be one of my favorite movies of all time alongside Casablanca and my favorite film ever, The Big Lebowski. The phrase, "Meet me in Montauk" resonates in my mind like one of the great film quotes ever. It’s one of the more frequent movie refrains for me, like a song stuck in my head.

It’s so damned romantic and hopeful; a perfect encapsulation of that thought in your head that if you do something seemingly illogical or nonsensical something incredible may happen. The film has a logical explanation for why Joel follows this voice in his head—one that comes to light as we travel through time and the life of Joel and his beloved Clementine, but there is something so real for me about the romance and hopefulness in this line that leads me to wonder about the times in my life when I didn’t listen to that voice telling me to do something without telling me why to do it.

Jim Carrey fully escaped Ace Ventura with his performance here. I never believed he could shed that particular monkey on his back or that he’d want to escape such a great success. Here, however, his heartache and romantic longing is so incredibly real and sympathetic in ways that Carrey had only ever hinted at in earlier performances in his career prior to Eternal Sunshine.

Yes, Carrey demonstrated range in The Truman Show but not without the schtick that had propelled him to the star-power needed to make such an esoteric and challenging movie. Carrey was the mainstreaming that The Truman Show needed to get past the studio gates and assure Hollywood that the movie was bankable and so Carrey had to have enough Jim Carrey the persona in that performance to make that work.

Man on the Moon further helped Carrey break the mold but the high level mimicry of his performance as Andy Kaufman still played a lot like Jim Carrey playing Andy Kaufman rather than fully embodying the character of Andy Kaufman. That’s not to say that I don’t love Man on the Moon, I do, but again, Carrey is the mainstreaming of that story. He’s the bankable element that gets that movie made by Hollywood executives likely squeamish about the moneymaking possibilities of the cult comic Kaufman.

In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, however, Carrey was the one who needed the movie. The movie didn’t need him. Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman, while not bankable Hollywood power players, could have made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind without Jim Carrey in the lead role. It was Carrey who had to prove that he belonged in the movie and he achieves that with unquestionably the best performance of his career.

I could go on about Charlie Kaufman’s obsessively complex script and Michel Gondry’s delightfully artful direction, but the core of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for me is the romance. The idea of love so strong that it overcomes being literally erased from the minds of the lovers is so powerful to me. There are times in my life and yours that we’d love to have erased but Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind wonderfully reminds us that pain may linger but so does joy, so does love, and you don’t want to lose things, no matter the emotional toll.

How many movies reach for such an emotional revelation and are as artistically accomplished as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? I can count on one hand the number of movies as romantically ambitious as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and fewer still are as well made. Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman created a true modern masterpiece.

The biggest new movie on this list is Steven Soderbergh’s incredible, experimental horror thriller, Unsane starring Claire Foy. While most people are talking about the fact that Soderbergh shot the movie using six different iPhones, I was blown away by the terrifying and electrifying storytelling. The look of the film is secondary for me to the stunning horror-thriller that Soderbergh has crafted.

Unsane is legitimately terrifying with lead performances from The Crown star Claire Foy and Blair Witch alumni Joshua Leonard that are pitch perfect. Foy plays a woman who goes to a counselor to discuss some emotional issues and is placed on a 24 hour voluntary commitment to a mental hospital against her will. While there, she finds that her long time stalker has found her and somehow taken a job working in the hospital. Naturally, because everyone believes she is mentally ill, no one believes her story.

It’s a terrifying plot and Soderbergh is very clever in the ways he makes all of this so frighteningly plausible. A character played by comedian and Saturday Night Live alum Jay Pharoah is essential to the plot as well and watching his subplot play out is nearly as gut-wrenching as the main plot. Forget the iPhone, this is a movie on par with last year’s Split as one of the best modern horror thrillers we’ve seen this decade.

I said Unsane is the biggest new movie on this list because it is the movie with the widest release. The highest debuting movie on this list, however, is Best F®iends, the new movie from Tommy Wiseau and his The Room co-star Greg Sestero. Best F®iends is an experience as much as it is a movie. Somehow, Wiseau, Sestero and director Justin MacGregor have made a movie just as WTF fascinating as The Room and it’s a glorious laugh riot. Whether that’s intentional or not is up for debate and that just makes it so much more fun and fascinating.

Yes, I saw Pacific Rim Uprising and Sherlock Gnomes, but neither needs much discussion here as you can tell by their low placement on this list. I will mention The Last Movie Star, a new A24 release starring Burt Reynolds. This entertaining and deeply flawed film uses Burt Reynolds career as the template for a fake movie star named Vic Edwards and the meta portions of the movie are challenging and unique. Sadly, the film is poorly directed and suffers from a lack of a visionary director who could have made so much more of this meditation on identity and aging. As it is, it’s a really good sitcom with a clever premise.

Next week, Ready Player One joins this list along with our Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast classic War Games, which is heavily featured in the book Ready Player One, though not mentioned in the film adaptation. Also, because apparently I have angered the movie Gods in some way, we will have the third movie in the God’s Not Dead trilogy and a brand new Tyler Perry movie, Acrimony, on the same weekend. Pray for me.

Oh, and Beetlejuice is turning 30 years old this weekend and I have a rewatch planned for that childhood classic.

New movies are in Bold Type.

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
3. Black Swan
4. Phantom Thread
5. Black Panther
6. His Girl Friday
7. Best F®iends
8. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
9. Annihilation
10. Unsane
11. Just Charlie
12. Columbus
13. Hostiles
14. A Wrinkle in Time
15. Boogie Nights
16. Foxy Brown
17. Becks
18. Game Night
19. Are We Not Cats
20. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
21. 12 Strong
22. Red Sparrow
23. Act & Punishment
24. Los Angeles Overnight
25. Switching Channels
26. Actors of Sound: A Foley Artist Documentary
27. Tomb Raider
28. Insidious: The Last Key
29. Sheik Jackson
30. Gringo
31. Love, Simon
32. Hurricane Heist
33. Samson & Delilah
34. Heat
35. Hell’s House
36. The Last Movie Star
37. Early Man
38. Almost Paris
39. Bloodsport
40. Reds
41. Play Misty for Me
42. Frantic
43. 7 Days in Entebbe
44. Taffin
45. Samson
46. Last House on the Left
47. Burnt Offerings
48. Paddington 2
49. Pacific Rim Uprising
50. Sherlock Gnomes
51. Cloverfield Paradox
52. Peter Rabbit
53. Proud Mary
54. Den of Thieves
55. Death Wish 1974
56. Death Wish 2018
57. The Commuter
58. Fifty Shades Freed
59. Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built
60. Midnight Sun
61. Forever My Girl
62. Every Day
63. Strangers Prey at Night
64. 15:17 to Paris
65. The Greasy Strangler
66. Maze Runner: The Death Cure