50 Wonderful Things From 2018
Standard caveats (really standard — same as last year!): I don't watch everything. I am behind on many things. That's just the way the world is. So if something you loved isn't here, it is not a rebuke.
And: These are cultural — mostly pop-cultural — things. These are not the best things in the world. Like yours, my actual list of wonderful things from the year, if I wrote it in a journal instead of for work, would be a list of people and moments spent with them, of days when it was unexpectedly sunny and of times when things suddenly felt better. But whatever journey you're on at any given moment, you can always use more good things. So here we go.
1. Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda's lively performance of "A Cover Is Not the Book," a preposterously catchy dance-hall number in Mary Poppins Returns.
2. Miles Morales' father talking to him through his door in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The film is full of visually inventive sequences, but this emotional scene between father and son might be its most important moment.
3. "Must the duck be here?" Yorgos Lanthimos' royal court comedy-drama The Favourite isn't as fussy as it could have turned out, and it runs on the performances of Olivia Colman, Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz. Its absurdity is carefully apportioned, including when Harley (Nicholas Hoult), exasperated by a companion's feathered pal, wonders whether the room could be smaller by a couple of webbed feet.
4. The climactic moment of Steve McQueen's Widows. It's been hard to explain this difficult and thoughtful but also exhilarating heist film to audiences. But as it reaches its end and concludes as it must, Viola Davis stands in for many women who have simply had enough.
5. The gold shades of If Beale Street Could Talk. Barry Jenkins' is a series of lush images, beginning with the breathtaking opening shots, in which Tish's (KiKi Layne) coat and Fonny's (Stephan James) shirt and the canopy of leaves in their neighborhood are all the same autumn gold.
