Runners-up: Suspiria, Black Panther, First Man, Paddington 2, The Favourite, The Rider, You Were Never Really Here, Annihilation

Carlos Somonte / Netflix

Over the years, Alfonso Cuarón has demonstrated that he is good at, essentially, everything, whether it’s a sexual coming-of-age film or a Harry Potter movie, a dystopian thriller or a breathless adventure in space. Roma, which is set in the 1970s Mexico City of Cuarón’s youth, is the director’s most personal movie to date and easily his best. From its opening frames to its closing ones, it is a masterpiece of cinematic technique, the story of a well-off family told through the eyes of its indigenous maid (Yalitza Aparicio). For a while, the film seems like it will be principally an exercise in visual storytelling. (Cuarón handled the utterly stunning black-and-white cinematography himself.) But before it runs its course, Roma will nail you to your seat. It will shock you. It will break your heart and then put it back together again. You will not see a better picture this year.

MK2 Films

2. Cold War

The director Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War is another film that, like Roma, tells a vast story through a narrow lens. It plays almost as the shadow twin of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg: two lovers, separated by geopolitical events, against a backdrop of music. In this case, though, the lovers are Polish members of a musical troupe (played by Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot), buffeted by the upheavals of the Soviet empire in the 1950s and early 1960s. The movie packs more raw emotion into its slender 85-minute running time than many good and far lengthier films do. And its black-and-white evocations of Warsaw, Berlin, and especially Paris will take your breath away. “Time doesn’t matter when you’re in love,” one character tells another. Cold War simultaneously proves and refutes this maxim.

Clay Enos / Warner Bros.

3. A Star Is Born

After two foreign-language films (in black-and-white, no less), it’s time to give Hollywood its due. I was not a particular fan of either the Judy Garland or the Barbra Streisand version of A Star Is Born, and yet another remake of the story—the fifth overall—initially seemed to me a poor idea. But in his directorial debut, Bradley Cooper continues to prove that he can do more, so much more, than almost anyone imagined back when he was pigeonholed in cocky, ladies’-man roles. As an actor, he has a range that has been expanding with every passing year: In the familiar leading roles of this film, he and Lady Gaga are both fresh and both fantastic. And as a director, Cooper gets so many little things right that it’s hard to believe he hasn’t been doing this for 20 years. A star is born, indeed.

A24

4. First Reformed

This was a year in which the best films I saw were generally triumphs of execution rather than of conception. The writer-director Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is an exception. Schrader is best known for the scripts he worked on for Martin Scorsese, including Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ. The screenplay for First Reformed is the equal of any of them—and Schrader’s execution is likewise superb. Ethan Hawke gives the best performance of his career as the reverend in charge of a 250-year-old church in upstate New York, forced by its dwindling congregation to rely on a local megachurch for support. Like Schrader’s best work before, First Reformed is a tale of spiritual crisis, of a man who is gradually unraveling before our eyes. It’s a marvel.

Marvel Studios

From a marvel to Marvel. Who ever imagined that a superhero movie could be so politically sophisticated? Yes, yes, I know, The Dark Knight. But Christopher Nolan’s film was an achievement as much of mood as of ideology. Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther largely maintains the aesthetics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe—though the Africa-influenced production (and costume) design is exceptional—while offering multiple layers of political introspection. Twinning a fictional rich and high-tech African state of Wakanda with Coogler’s native Oakland is a tremendous first step. Using the pair to begin a tripartite argument about race is nothing short of brilliant. A film that begins with Wakanda enjoying its wealth in isolation and secrecy asks: What if the nation instead chose to help those of African ancestry worldwide? And then, a step further: What if it engaged in global conquest and an inversion of the colonialist order? A terrific movie with a terrific cast, Black Panther raises the bar for the entire superhero genre.

Fox Searchlight Pictures

At 93 minutes, The Old Man & the Gun is a relatively small and unassuming film. It is also a reminder that both of these characteristics can be signal virtues. Based on David Grann’s eponymous 2003 piece in The New Yorker, the film by David Lowery sands down some of the rough edges of its protagonist, 70-something lifelong bank robber Forrest Tucker. But that’s okay, because Tucker is played, with peerless wit and charm, by Robert Redford, in what the actor has said will be the final film role of his almost-60-year career. Whether or not the role proves to be final, it is one of his very best. (Sissy Spacek is wonderful, too.) In a perfect world—and there is very little sign that we are living in anything approaching one—Redford would be taking a Best Actor Oscar statue with him into a much-earned retirement.

Twentieth Century Fox

7. Widows

Widows, directed and co-written (with Gillian Flynn, of Gone Girl fame) by Steve McQueen, is that most delightful of cinematic delicacies: a genre film that transcends its genre. It’s a heist movie, but also a film about female empowerment. (The premise is that after an all-male criminal gang gets blown up, the men’s widows take on what was to be their husbands’ final job.) But Widows is also a deep dig into the sociology of Chicago, with a major subplot about an alderman’s race between the scion of a corrupt Irish political dynasty and a black gangster trying to go more or less straight. The cast, headed by Viola Davis, is excellent, and while the script has an occasional head-scratching moment, it is for the most part taut and clever. It all adds up to an immensely satisfying movie-night movie.

IFC Films

What do you do when the political black comedies on which you’ve based your career can’t keep up with political reality? If you’re Armando Iannucci (who, before making HBO’s Veep, was the creator of The Thick of It and In the Loop, neither of which I can possibly recommend highly enough), you delve into one of the blackest political moments in modern history: Stalin’s Great Purge and the power struggle that followed the dictator’s death in 1953. There are oddities on display here, notably that the multinational cast members all speak in their native accents. (It takes a moment to get used to Stalin’s cockney drawl.) But Iannucci takes an enormous gamble here, and it mostly pays off—at least if you’re open to a comedy that’s premised on mass murder.

Sony Pictures Classics

Another film that is exquisite in its smallness. It’s hard to imagine a more improbable project: The Chinese writer-director Chloé Zhao met Brady Jandreau, a Lakota Sioux rodeo rider, while making her first feature, 2015’s Songs My Brothers Taught Me. He subsequently suffered a severe head injury when he was thrown from a horse, and was then prohibited from further riding. The Rider is a lightly fictionalized version of this story featuring Jandreau himself (his surname is changed to Blackburn), his family members, and the partially paralyzed former rodeo star Lane Scott (who also plays a version of his real-life self). Rarely have nonprofessional actors managed to bridge the gap between reality and mimesis as beautifully as they do under Zhao’s direction.

Peter Iovino / Lionsgate

10. A Simple Favor

Is this genuinely one of the 10 best films of 2018? Of course not. But different moods call for different movies, and A Simple Favor is custom designed—and wonderfully engineered by the director Paul Feig—for those times when you want a movie that is highly entertaining and in no way challenging. Anna Kendrick is at her Anna Kendrick–iest as a food-vlogging single mom whose best friend has disappeared. And, as said best friend, Blake Lively is a true revelation—a contender for the most effortlessly charismatic femme fatale since Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. I can’t wait to see what she does next.