By this time in December, the usual onslaught of critics’ polls and nomination lists has given movie lovers a feeling of consensus about what was unmissable over the past twelve months. We were curious about the oddities, rarities, and repertory discoveries that tend to get left out of this year-end picture, so we asked a few of our contributors to share some favorites that were a little more off the beaten path—films, artists, books, or other cinema-related artifacts that took them by surprise and have stuck with them since. Here’s what they came up with.

Ashley Clark, film programmer and critic

In March, acting on a recommendation from the website Screen Slate—an increasingly essential resource in this rep coverage–starved age—I took myself to Manhattan’s Electronic Arts Intermix to see a shorts program by a grandly named video and performance artist whose work had hitherto escaped my notice: Ulysses S. Jenkins. The L.A.-based Jenkins was an early adopter of consumer-grade video cameras and used this emergent technology to conjure idiosyncratic portraits of African-American life that challenged dominant—that is to say largely racist and reductive—depictions. “Idiosyncratic,” it must be said, barely begins to describe the pick of the program, Two-Zone Transfer (1979), a discombobulating fever dream starring Jenkins and friends (including artist Kerry James Marshall), and involving blackface and minstrel imagery, hideous rubber masks (Richard Nixon!), religious preaching, an indefatigable smoke machine, and an ecstatic yet uncomfortably attenuated dance to a James Brown song. Two-Zone Transfer is an anxiously personal take on black cultural representation and artistic production, and an early point on a continuum of caustic, thematically-related fare like Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000) and this year’s essential HBO show Random Acts of Flyness. It was my revelation of the year.

Farran Smith Nehme, critic My favorite film discovery of 2018 came courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art and its series of restorations from Republic Pictures. The penny-pinching studio boss Herbert Yates was reluctant to pay the fees required for processing Technicolor. The solution: Trucolor, the three-strip version of which adds considerably to the strangeness of Johnny Guitar and Fair Wind to Java. The Trucolor I fell in love with is the two-strip process, used to fantastic effect in R. G. Springsteen’s 1949 western Hellfire, a tale of a gunfighter turned Bible-toting preacher that renders good vs. evil as blue vs. orange. The landscape bakes in brown and umber; the azure eyes of Marie Windsor glitter as her character stalks and shoots the man who done her wrong. Carefully restored by Paramount Pictures and The Film Foundation, Republic’s two-strip Trucolor offers a different dreamlike vision of pre-1960 Hollywood.

Girish Shambu, critic This year, very belatedly, I discovered bell hooks’s classic collection of film essays and interviews, Reel to Real: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies (1996). Hooks, a formidable cultural critic and feminist theorist, is also a brilliantly lucid and forceful writer. The last couple of years have witnessed a radical shift in film culture, with issues of representation demanding to be taken as seriously as those of aesthetics. Hooks’s writing feels thrillingly prescient in this regard. Her sharp and detailed critiques of indie icons such as Pulp Fiction, Hoop Dreams, and She’s Gotta Have It were out of step with the critical acclaim surrounding these movies at the time. But it is now time for hooks’s work—with its firm belief in movies as both a source of great pleasure and a pedagogical tool—to find a large popular audience.