Ranking the Movies of 2018 Week 3

After two weeks at the top, Foxy Brown has finally been dethroned as the best movie I have seen in 2018. My esteem for Pam Grier and Foxy Brown has not diminished in any way but two new movies I saw this past week pushed past Foxy to give me two new movies, right at the top of the list and a new number one that I could never have predicted in the emotional coming of age drama, Just Charlie.

All weekend long I was convinced that I would be putting Christian Bale’s Hostiles at the top of the list. I saw the Scott Cooper directed western last Thursday and found it wildly compelling and fascinating. Christian Bale's focused, angry, determined performance is among the best of his career and Scott Cooper, despite some awkward early exposition, directed Hostiles with confidence and skill. It seemed like a no-brainer for this to be the new number one. Then I saw Just Charlie.

Just Charlie, for those who have yet to read my full-length review, stars Harry Gilby as Charlie, a 14-year-old boy struggling with his identity. On the outside, he’s the incredibly talented soccer playing son of a father, Scot Williams, looking to live his failed dreams through him. Charlie must come to terms with telling his father, and his entire family and circle of friends that he is in fact a girl, not a boy.

Just Charlie is smart and sensitive and is populated by an amazing cast that gets to the heart of the fear and confusion at the heart of gender confusion. Harry Gilby’s standout performance does slip to the back of this ensemble a little too much for my taste but the big emotional moments of Just Charlie hit hard enough that I didn’t linger on the minor issues like Charlie not being front and center enough and some overly conventional storytelling choices.

Just Charlie hit me in the heart and I am not ashamed to say I cried my way through much of the film, watching Charlie muster the strength to be herself for the very first time and being repeatedly let down by the people who should be helping and taking care of her. I want to urge anyone who has someone like Charlie in their life to visit MermaidsUK.org, the website Charlie’s family goes to in the film for information and support. It’s a remarkable and necessary resource.

In terms of themes of the movies of 2018, identity is definitely one that is emerging. Just Charlie reminded me of another 2018 movie on this list, the excellent Sheikh Jackson. That film is about a devout Muslim questioning his faith after the death of his childhood hero, Michael Jackson. The film is about the ways in which the lead character hid a portion of himself away from the world and how he could not move on in life if he did not find a way to reconcile who he was with who he is.

Just Charlie tackles a similar theme with just as much seriousness. Charlie is trying to reconcile having been born in the body of a boy but knowing that he is really a girl. Like Sheikh Jackson, Charlie is deathly concerned about how people around him will accept him once his secret is out and both films deal with the consequences of someone declaring their true identity to the world.

This is a wonderful theme for this time. It’s timely and necessary and I am enjoying the way films like Sheikh Jackson and Just Charlie have opened a window into portions of society that aren’t often portrayed in movies. That both films are foreign, Sheikh Jackson is an Egyptian production and Just Charlie is from England, does show international cinema as a great deal more progressive than American cinema but both of these films are available to watch right now in America via streaming services so distribution is, at the very least, becoming more open and diverse.

A theme on a much smaller scale is the continuing failure of myself and my co-hosts on the "Everyone is a Critic movie podcast" to pick a classic movie that doesn’t stink. Sure, we were smart enough to watch the brilliant Foxy Brown but we swung and missed badly with Burnt Offerings, missed slightly on the middling Heat, and this week’s Hostiles-related classic, the Dustin Hoffman raised by Indians drama, Little Big Man was another big swing and a miss.

Little Big Man is a bizarre experience. Dustin Hoffman is so weirdly miscast in the role of teenager and a 120 year old man that the dissonance is clattering. The story is told in flashback as 120 year old Little Big Man, now in a nursing home, is telling his story to a reporter who wants to know what the old west was like. From there we get a remarkably irritating and affected voiceover to a flashback of scenes that rattle violently between screwball comedy and dark drama.

Little Big Man was directed by Arthur Penn, who had made his name with the ultra-violent Bonnie & Clyde just three years prior to making Little Big Man. Penn’s skillful direction of Bonnie & Clyde is entirely lacking in Little Big Man which has no tone, awful humor and a bizarre structure that has no momentum. Instead, Little Big Man plays like a series of skits that sort of link together but are wildly uneven and often quite off-putting.

Things should improve on next week’s show as we will have two classics to fill a void of new releases. With Phantom Thread finally arriving in our small corner of the Midwest, our first classic will be Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. The other classic is related to our this week in 1988 segment. This weekend in 1988, Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow was released and with that in mind we will look back on Wes Craven’s breakthrough feature, Last House on the Left.

The only other new release of the weekend is Winchester starring Helen Mirren. Based on a true story of sorts, Winchester tells the story of the widow heir to the Winchester gun fortune who, late in life, came to believe that the souls of people killed by the Winchester rifle were coming for her. To keep the ghosts at bay, Mrs. Winchester built the largest home in American history and for a time, she never stopped adding onto the home, believing that each ghost needed a room for safe keeping.

Here are the new rankings for this week. Oh, I forgot to mention that I have a new last place movie for 2018. Even as bad as Forever My Girl is, Maze Runner: The Death Cure is somehow worse.

1 Just Charlie

2 Hostiles

3 Foxy Brown

4 12 Strong

5 Act & Punishment

6 Insidious The Last Key

7 Sheik Jackson

8 Heat

9 Almost Paris

10 Burnt Offerings

11 Paddington 2

12 Proud Mary

13 Den of Thieves

14 The Commuter

15 Forever My Girl

16 Maze Runner: The Death Cure