Ranking the Movies of 2018: Week 20

Solo: A Star Wars Story arrived in theaters this week and while much of the media has been focused on the film’s box office prospects, the film at the heart of Solo: A Star Wars Story is actually pretty good. Ron Howard may not be a director of much daring but he is a professional and he delivers solid action, a touch of comedy and a group of colorful characters, those we know and those we’re meeting for the first time.

Solo: A Star Wars Story packs a little too much of Han Solo’s backstory into a very short frame of time but it works because the characters are fun and the action set pieces are strong. I could complain about the villain being weak and the ways in which the humor has been muted from what we can assume was the comic approach that got Lord & Miller fired from the project but those complaints are minor compared to what I enjoyed about Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Because of Solo: A Star Wars Story, our classic this week on the Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast was Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s desolate tale of Fascist corruption. The two movies have nothing in common except that Solo kind of sounds like Salo and they’re both four letter words. Salo is not a movie you watch but rather a movie that you endure.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s dispassionate camera captures four horrific libertines, the Governor, The Magistrate, the Bishop and The President indulging in their deepest, darkest violent and vile sexual fantasies. These despicable fantasies are acted out on teenagers kidnapped from nearby Northern Italian villages circa 1944, the last days of Mussolini’s Fascist reign. The degradation acted out in Salo is provocative and Pasolini’s withdrawn, stoic direction and opulent production design underline the horror.

I can’t rank Salo highly on this list because it has almost no re-watch quality. I never want to see Salo again in my life and that pushes it lower on this list even as I must admit admiration for the art of Salo and Pasolini’s strange, powerfully dispassionate direction that keeps us at a terrifying emotional distance from the terror on screen. It’s a remarkably artful work even as it is a movie that disgusts me to the point of never wanting to see it again.

Best Friends Volume 2 starring Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero arrived in theaters for a two night only engagement and I was lucky to get a look before audiences did, earlier this week. Best Friends Volume 2 is not as mindblowingly baffling as Best Friends Volume 1 but it has its moments. Best Friends Volume 2 is completely hysterical as it traverses the uncanny valley of so-bad-it's-brilliant.

Coming next week Johnny Knoxville stars in Action Point, Shailene Woodley is Adrift, Leigh Whannell directs Upgrade, and the festival hit The Rider receives a national release. Our classic for the Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast is the disaster-piece, The Poseidon Adventure; in honor of the ocean-set, Adrift.

New rankings below and new additions to the list are in bold type…

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2. Juno
3. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
4. Black Swan
5. Legally Blonde
6. Phantom Thread
7. Black Panther
8. Tully
9. His Girl Friday
10. Best F®iends Volume 1
11. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
12. Annihilation
13. Kodachrome
14. Unsane
15. Just Charlie
16. Columbus
17. Young Adult
18. The Death of Stalin
19. Hostiles
20. Best F®iends Volume 2
21. Deadpool 2
22. A Wrinkle in Time
23. Solo: A Star Wars Story
24. Foxy Brown
25. Becks
26. A Quiet Place
27. Captain America Civil War
28. Game Night
29. Are We Not Cats
30. Boogie Nights
31. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
32. 12 Strong
33. Red Sparrow
34. Mean Girls
35. Act & Punishment
36. Life of the Party
37. Los Angeles Overnight
38. Always at the Carlyle
39. Salome & Wilde Salome
40. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
41. Salo: 120 Days of Sodom
42. Actors of Sound: A Foley Artist Documentary
43. Switching Channels
44. I Feel Pretty
45. Tomb Raider
46. Stormy Monday
47. Ready Player One
48. Insidious: The Last Key
49. Sheikh Jackson
50. Gringo
51. Love, Simon
52. Isle of Dogs
53. War Games
54. Samson & Delilah
55. Heat
56. Hell’s House
57. Hurricane Heist
58. The Miracle Season
59. Blockers
60. Avengers Infinity War
61. Early Man
62. Almost Paris
63. Bloodsport
64. The Last Movie Star
65. Play Misty for Me
66. Frantic
67. Willow
68. Reds
69. 7 Days in Entebbe
70. Taffin
71. Beirut
72. Super Troopers
73. Super Troopers 2
74. Samson
75. Friday the 13th
76. Rambo 3
77. Rampage
78. Last House on the Left
79. Burnt Offerings
80. Paddington 2
81. Traffik
82. Pacific Rim Uprising
83. Sherlock Gnomes
84. Chappaquiddick
85. Cloverfield Paradox
86. Breaking In
87. Peter Rabbit
88. Overboard
89. Proud Mary
90. The Mist
91. God’s Not Dead: A Light in the Darkness
92. Den of Thieves
93. Death Wish 1974
94. Death Wish 2018
95. Bad Samaritan
96. Knowing
97. The Commuter
98. Fifty Shades Freed
99. Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built
100. Midnight Sun
101. Forever My Girl
102. Every Day
103. Strangers Prey at Night
104. Book Club
105. Show Dogs
106. 15:17 to Paris
107. Truth or Dare
108. The Greasy Strangler
109. Maze Runner: The Death Cure