2018’s Top Ten Movies

I loathe the film-reviewing tendency to insist that three-hour Romanian divorce dramas are obviously far more interesting than Hollywood fare. Still, some of the best movies I saw this year were modestly budgeted independent films. The purpose of a film is to move you, to draw an emotional reaction, to make you gasp or cry or sweat. These are the ones that blew me away in 2018, whether with their inventiveness, their plot twists, their terror, or their heart. I’ll go in reverse order and lead up to my pick for the best movie of the year.

10. The Mule (in theaters). Directing himself in a film for the 23rd and perhaps final time, 88-year-old Clint Eastwood creates a typically thorny and abrasive character in Earl Stone, a rotten father and husband who blithely accepts an offer running drugs from Texas to the Midwest for a nasty Mexican cartel. Very much in the vein of Gran Torino, whose screenwriter Nick Schenck also wrote this film, and carrying the air of a confessional, The Mule doesn’t ask us to love Earl, but as his life nears completion, we’re rooting for him to at least own up to his many mistakes.

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Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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I loathe the film-reviewing tendency to insist that three-hour Romanian divorce dramas are obviously far more interesting than Hollywood fare. Still, some of the best movies I saw this year were modestly budgeted independent films. The purpose of a film is to move you, to draw an emotional reaction, to make you gasp or cry or sweat. These are the ones that blew me away in 2018, whether with their inventiveness, their plot twists, their terror, or their heart. I’ll go in reverse order and lead up to my pick for the best movie of the year.

10. The Mule (in theaters). Directing himself in a film for the 23rd and perhaps final time, 88-year-old Clint Eastwood creates a typically thorny and abrasive character in Earl Stone, a rotten father and husband who blithely accepts an offer running drugs from Texas to the Midwest for a nasty Mexican cartel. Very much in the vein of Gran Torino, whose screenwriter Nick Schenck also wrote this film, and carrying the air of a confessional, The Mule doesn’t ask us to love Earl, but as his life nears completion, we’re rooting for him to at least own up to his many mistakes.