The 25 movies, shows and music that defined 2018

American cinema’s greatest living provocateur leapt into the politically charged fray with two furious indictments of institutionalized racial oppression. “BlacKkKlansman” recounts the real-life tale of African-American cop Ron Stallworth, who infiltrated the Colorado Springs branch of the Ku Klux Klan with the help of his Jewish partner. “Pass Over” is his filmed production of Antoinette Nwandu’s “Waiting for Godot” riff set in a rundown Chicago neighborhood. These films couldn’t be timelier, and Lee is at the absolute height of his filmmaking powers in both.

Alfonso Cuarón’s semi-autobiographical family drama set in 1970s Mexico is the most visually and aurally arresting film to come along since, well, Cuarón’s “Gravity." It is sheer, deeply personal poetry that captures its time and place with an immersive clarity that makes you feel as if you’re in the moment with the characters. Watch this one on the biggest screen possible with the best sound setup you can afford/manage. Or, if you’re major media market, in an actual movie theater.

GLOW followed up its terrific first season with a bravura sophomore session that found its 1980s lady wrestlers attempting to make the leap to wider TV syndication. There isn’t a better ensemble cast on television at the moment, from the friends-turned-rival leads Ruth (Alison Brie) and Debbie (Betty Gilpin) to the supporting players. (Kia Stevens got a wonderful episode where she visits her son at Stanford.) Sure, the ‘80s trappings are good, garish fun, but the show is so much more than a nostalgia trip.

The second season of Donald Glover’s Emmy Award-winning series went downright bonkers at times, particularly in the “Teddy Perkins” episode, which found the star playing a photosensitive eccentric who’s giving away a piano to Darius (Lakeith Stanfield). The whole season was great, but this bizarre digression felt as revolutionary as the first Black Lodge episode of “Twin Peaks." Steven Soderbergh hailed the Hiro Murai-directed effort as “the most beautifully photographed half-hour of TV I’ve ever seen.”

Justin Simien’s small-screen expansion of his 2014 indie film found a new gear in its second season. The main arc concerning Samantha (Logan Browning) being harassed by an alt-right Twitter troll provides an engrossing whodunit framework. But the knockout episodes come early, especially the Kimberly Peirce-directed heartbreaker centered on Coco’s unexpected pregnancy.

The revival of Norman Lear’s hit 1970s sitcom continues to be one of the most consistently entertaining shows on television. The dynamite cast led by Justina Machado and the legendary Rita Moreno evokes laughter and tears in equal measure, while the writing staff headed up by Gloria Calderon Kellett and Mike Royce handles serious issues like PTSD and sexism with remarkable grace.

This corrosive HBO drama from “The Thick of It” writer Jesse Armstrong focuses on the conniving family of Logan Roy (Brian Cox), a global media baron who’s cut from the same ruthless cloth as Rupert Murdoch. When Roy suffers a near-fatal stroke, his wife and children begin plotting to wrest control of the empire. It’s nasty business, but the characters are so sharply drawn that you don’t mind that they’re completely reprehensible. Jeremy Strong turned in Emmy-worthy work as Roy’s recovered-addict second son, Kendall.

Based on a podcast by Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg, this psychological thriller series from “Mr. Robot” creator Sam Esmail gave Julia Roberts her first major episodic TV role, and she responded with a performance that ranks among her best. The show is chockablock with semi-obscure movie references and borrowed score cues from classic films, which has made it a favorite among cinephiles. But that’s just decoration. You don’t need to be able to identify Pino Donaggio’s “Body Double” score to get caught up in the central mystery regarding the soldier transitioning facility.

The 270-minute run-time might seem daunting, but Judd Apatow’s warts-and-all tribute to his comedy mentor is a revelatory insight into the creative mind. Comprised of interviews with dozens of friends and collaborators and dappled with snippets from Shandling’s journals, Apatow paints a surprisingly uplifting portrait of a brilliant, conscientious artist who was his own harshest critic. 

It’s hard to imagine this Donald Glover/Ludwig Göransson jam leaving as deep an imprint as it did without the Hiro Murai-directed music video that features Glover writhing around a hangar clad in nothing but gray sweatpants and committing atrocities like gunning down a church choir before getting chased off by a mob of white people. But it’s one hell of a video, even if its emotional impact was eventually dwarfed by its meme-ability.

It's an epic kiss-off track in which Ariana Grande professes she’s “so f***ing grateful” to the various ex-lovers who’ve passed through her life. There’s some emotional resonance here given the recent passing of her former beau Mac Miller (she excludes him from the burn book in the music video that makes amusing reference to “Bring It On," “Mean Girls” and “Legally Blonde”), but it’s mostly an easy, breezy earworm.

Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers combined their considerable musical talents for the six-track boygenius EP, and as far as indie rock supergroups go, they’re in the conversation with The New Pornographers. “Bite the Hand” is the standout song, fronted by Dacus and drilled home with the unapolagetic refrain “I can’t love you how you want me to.” We’ll take an LP when you’re ready, ladies.

Bradley Cooper shocked the world as a fully formed auteur with this fourth-time’s-still-the-charm adaptation of the hoary old tale of a tortured male superstar who is eventually eclipsed by the talented singer he discovers and loves. Lady Gaga is phenomenal as the up-and-comer, and she’s in brilliant voice when she belts out the instant power ballad classic “Shallow." It’s starting to look like this is her “The Bodyguard."

Samesies, Robyn. The pop songstress’ return after an eight-year layoff was one of the happiest pop cultural events of 2018. There’s nothing particularly revolutionary about “Missing U." It’s a vintage Robyn track that plays just as well at the club as it does throbbing out of your car stereo. It may not blow you away on your first listen, but good luck getting it out of your head.

This perfectly above-average Beyoncé/Jay-Z collaboration got a crazy infusion of swagger thanks to its Ricky Saiz-directed music video shot in the Louvre. This is gaudy gesture stuff: The video opens with the Carters regally posed in front of the “Mona Lisa," and we later see them performing in front of the “Venus de Milo." But what does it mean? “Gimme my check, put some respeck on my check/Or pay me in equity, pay me in equity.” Same old braggadocio, but the video is undeniable.

Janelle Monáe distills the Essence of Prince — he apparently created sounds for this song before he passed away in 2016 — with this filthy-funky track off her excellent LP, “Dirty Computer." There will never be another Prince, but there’s no one out there crafting nasty, undulating pop like Monáe. It’s a little “Dirty Mind," a little “Controversy” and a dash of “Parade” thrown in for good, gyrating measure. Long may she reign.

“P***y so good, I say my own name during sex.” Song of the year? Yeah, song of the year. Cardi B is an insanely gifted emcee, and this Murda Beatz-produced track showcases her lyrical flow to profane perfection. And just when you think it can’t get any better, SZA jumps in and tears the roof down. As an emphatic album closer, it belongs in the pantheon with A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario."

There’s a case to be made that the “Free Churro” episode in the fifth, and best, season of “BoJack Horseman” was the most emotionally devastating half-hour of television that aired in 2018. And this is from an animated show about an anthropomorphic horse living off the fumes of a hit 1990s sitcom. Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s inexplicable series is hitting on all absurdist cylinders. It’s insane and wonderful that we have a sixth season on the way.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ deliciously sordid costume drama about two cousins (Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone) vying for the affection of a gout-ridden Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) plays like Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” on absinthe. The filmmaker’s compositions are all completely distorted by fish-eye lenses, which enhance the perverted jockeying between the two power-hungry attendants. It’s the most fiendishly funny film of the year.

Steve McQueen’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning “12 Years a Slave” is a crowd-pleasing heist film with loads of smuggled-in sociopolitical content. A group of widowed women, led by Viola Davis, step up to pull off a robbery planned by Davis’ deceased husband (Liam Neeson), and they find there’s much more to the gig than they bargained for. McQueen’s keen juxtaposition of wealthy and poverty-stricken Chicago amps up the stakes and gives this meticulously structured thriller a thematic depth it might’ve lacked in the hands of a lesser director.

Ethan Hawke gives the performance of his career thus far as an alcoholic pastor/caretaker of a 250-year-old church whose conscience gets pricked by a despairing parishioner. Paul Schrader’s moral tale fascinatingly parallels the journey of his psychotic protagonist Travis Bickle from “Taxi Driver”; the twist here is that the audience is kind of on Hawke’s side. The ending is a bit of a cheat, but the central dilemma is one people of conscience are struggling with in this wayward age.

Lakeith Stanfield becomes an overnight telemarketing sensation thanks to his “white voice” in Boots Riley’s savage satire about corporate America. It’s a raucous, visually inventive movie that kicks off as a goof but builds to a call for revolution — and it’s almost convincing. There are dozens of brilliantly irreverent ideas in the film (e.g. Stanfield crashing into the living rooms of the people he’s calling), and even if it doesn’t land as flush as intended, Riley’s film took more risks than any film released this year.

“The emotions you are having are not your own. They are someone else's. You are not the cat. You are inside the cat.” Thus begins Josephine Decker’s mind-bending drama about a precociously talented young actress who finds herself in a tug-of-war between her theater director and her mother. There’s abuse on either side, but the story winds up being one of liberation, and the performance turned in by Helena Howard is one of the most exciting debuts ever committed to film.

Having used almost all of Margaret Atwood's novel for the first season, the writers were largely left to their own narrative whims this season and, my, what a brutal run it was — necessarily so. The totalitarian dystopia that is Gilead steadily grew bleaker and bleaker; this was perhaps an accurate reflection of the current downbeat direction of the United States, but it didn't make for terribly enjoyable viewing. It was a great and terribly depressing season.

A cliffhanger was all but guaranteed from this third congregation of the "Earth’s Mightiest Heroes," but no one had Thanos wiping out half of the world’s population and a hefty chunk of the super-powered dramatis personae with a snap. The Marvel films have consistently delivered since 2008’s “Iron Man," but they’ve never left audiences gasping like “Infinity War” did last April. No one’s ever really dead in the comic books, but how they convincingly bring back Spider-Man, Black Panther and Doctor Strange might determine the future of the MCU.