The Best Film Scenes of 2018
We’re just days away from revealing our best and worst films of 2018. In the meantime we’ll be announcing a few sub-categories, and today it’s time to discuss the 10 individual scenes that made the most impact on us this year.
We’ve limited our choices to 1 scene per film. Otherwise this list would consist entirely of Mission: Impossible — Fallout and Widows. Sorry.
1. THE EXTRACTION
Mission: Impossible — Fallout provided several of the year’s most unforgettable sequences (honourable mentions to the HALO jump, bathroom brawl and London chase), but the most riveting of all is a near-silent, profoundly Nolanesque sequence that sees terrorist Solomon Lane violently extracted on the streets of Paris, followed by a heart-stopping motorbike chase. Shoutout to composer Lorne Balfe, who almost gave us a stroke with his drums and electric violin.
2. MA’S FUNERAL
As a mourning cop struggling to play Springsteen’s Thunder Road on a pink children’s CD player, Jim Cummings gives one of the best performances of the year in one seven-minute take; an extraordinary cacophony of male emotion exposed to a room of uncomfortable onlookers. Bojack Horseman attempted something similar with the episode “Free Churro”; this is entirely superior.
3. BIRTH
It took Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma two acts to get our attention, but when Yalitza Aparicio’s young maid Cleo is brought to the maternity ward to give birth, it launches into one of the most relentlessly traumatising and tragic depictions of the maternal experience committed to film.
4. SUPER TROUPER
A ceiling-shattering Cher performance erupts into a magnificent, insane group number to round out one of the weirder movie musicals ever made. Meryl Streep’s screentime in Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again is almost entirely this credits sequence. Highlights include Colin Firth dancing flirtatiously with the actor playing his younger self.
5. GOODBYE CHRISTOPHER ROBIN
Eoyore’s poem. Tigger’s cake. The opening of Disney’s Christopher Robin — a sad and sensitive revisiting of the Winnie the Pooh fable — had me weeping for a solid half hour. Friendship can be pure and beautiful.
6. I’LL NEVER LOVE AGAIN
You knew Lady Gaga could sing. But did you know she can deliver an incredible dramatic performance at the same time? A Star is Born’s tragic ending comes with a heartbreaking coda: Ally’s tremendous rendition of “I’ll Never Love Again”, a big unsubtle ending to a big unsubtle movie.
7. HELEN & EVELYN
If you search online for “Helen and Evelyn”, you get a shocking amount of lesbian slash fiction. Such is the intense energy between the two middle-aged women at the centre of Incredibles 2’s primary conflict, who sit down halfway through the movie for an extended chat about femininity, innovation and industry. In a kid’s movie. Bless you, Brad Bird.
8. MULLIGAN’S DRIVE UPTOWN
Widows is a phenomenally woke film, but its focus on social unrest in Chicago’s southside is presented most clearly, and effectively, in a single take of Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell)’s car driving from a poor black area into the wealthy political/financial district. Steve McQueen directs heist thrillers like visual art pieces, and he needs to make *all* the movies.
9. CHICKEN
The only moment when Peter Farrelly’s ludicrous drama Green Book fully embraces its problematic concept is the scene in which Viggo Mortensen’s character forces Mahershala Ali to eat fried chicken — “the food of your people” — and Ali’s character (a precocious pianist) complains that grease is getting on his blanket.
10. SMOKE & MIRRORS
The only scene in Skyscraper that’s even vaguely memorable is a fight between The Rock and some villainous goons in a futuristic gallery decorated with digital screens, many of which display his own face and he hides behind them. It’s a brilliant bit of visual trickery. Pity the rest of the film was so awful.
AND… THE WORST SCENE OF 2018
First Reformed almost had us convinced it was really good for a while. Then, this happens. The stupidest scene in a serious film since A Ghost Story’s pie-eating torture.
