The Movies I Watched in 2018

/ Neil Wilson

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)