I didn’t watch as many movies in 2018 as I had in previous years, but I still did pretty well by most standards. I ended up watching 413 movies in a theater and 378 outside of a theater, for a total of 791 total.
The only movies I saw in a theater were at an Alamo Drafthouse (335 movies) or at the Austin Film Society (78 movies). 267 of those movies were projected digitally, 137 on film (126 in 35mm, 6 in 16mm, and 5 in 70mm), and 9 were on VHS.
The best new releases I saw in the theater include:
- Bad Times at the El Royale
- Border
- Green Book
- The Guilty
- Hold the Dark
- I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore
- Incredibles 2
- Juliet, Naked
- Love, Simon
- Lowlife
- Paddington 2
- Princess Cyd
- Ready Player One
- RBG
- A Simple Favor
- The Shape of Water
- Sweet Country
- Three Identical Strangers
- Thunder Road
- Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
I also saw some great new movies at the Fantastic Fest film festival, but I’m not sure that they have been officially released yet. The best of them include:
- The Boat
- Chained for Life
- Goliath
- Slut in a Good Way
- The Standoff at Sparrow Creek
- The Unthinkable
- The World Is Yours
And even if I didn’t think they were the best in a conventional sense, I had a heck of a good time watching a few other new releases:
- Between Worlds (though I don’t think it’s actually out yet)
- The Meg
- Twisted Pair
And these surprised me by being quite a bit better than I expected, even if they’re not among the best of the year:
- Blockers
- Game Night
- Tag
On the other hand, these were the new releases that everyone else seemed to love, but I strongly disliked:
- The Favourite
- Ghost Stories
- Hereditary
- Mandy
- Mission: Impossible — Fallout
- A Quiet Place
And one of the great things about the film scene in Austin is that we get to watch a ton of repertory films on the big screen. The best older movies I saw for the first time in 2018 included:
- The Awful Truth (1937)
- The Big Heat (1953)
- Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)
- Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
- Coming Home (1978)
- Deadly Games (aka Dial Code Santa Claus; 1989)
- Girlfriends (1978)
- I Walk Alone (1947)
- Jawbreaker (1999)
- Kitten With a Whip (1964)
- Lady Snowblood (1973)
- Lake of Dracula (1971)
- Last Night at the Alamo (1983)
- The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
- The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950)
- A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
- Midnight Express (1978)
- Out of the Past (1947)
- Quiet Please, Murder (1942)
- The Raven (1935)
- Roadgames (1981)
- Starstruck (1982)
- Stranger in Our House (aka Summer of Fear; 1978)
- Summertime (1955)
- To Have and Have Not (1944)
- The Unsuspected (1947)
As far as watching movies outside of a theater, I kind of went down a rabbit hole of Lifetime and Hallmark movies (especially at Christmas), so I didn’t watch as many classic films as I probably should have, and even though I enjoy them, it’s hard to put them in the same class as most movies with higher production values and less predictable plots (but I do thoroughly enjoy the Murder She Baked, Aurora Teagarden, and Jane Doe mystery series, and I thought that Dangerous Child, Evil Nanny, and Killer Body aka The Wrong Patent were among the better ones). Nevertheless, the following were among my favorite first-time watches outside of a theater in 2018:
- Bachelor Mother (1939)
- The Cheyenne Social Club (1970)
- Dark Passage (1947)
- Father Goose (1964)
- First Reformed (2017)
- From Beyond the Grave (1974)
- Hearts Beat Loud (2018)
- Psychos in Love (1987)
- Seven Chances (1925)
- Too Many Husbands (1940)
