The very best of 2018, from Black Panther rewriting the rules for superheroes, Gary Oldman going to war as Churchill, and Maxine Peake blazing her way through 70s sexism.

All the Money in the World

Raucous thriller about the real-life 1973 kidnapping of J Paul Getty’s grandson, and the billionaire’s subsequent refusal to pay the ransom – a film that became notorious in its own right after reshooting scenes featuring disgraced actor Kevin Spacey.

What we said: With the help of Plummer’s tremendous villain-autocrat performance, Ridley Scott gives us a very entertaining parable about money and what it can’t buy.

Avengers: Infinity War

Third in the powerhouse Marvel series, bringing together a whole gallery of comic-book characters including Doctor Stranger, Iron Man and Black Panther for an epic showdown with supervillain Thanos.

What we said: Colossal, cataclysmic, delirious, preposterous – and always surreally entertaining in the now well-established Marvel movie tradition.

BPM: 120 Beats per Minute

Eighties-set account of the Act-Up protest movement in France, which took on the medical and political establishment over the Aids crisis with guerrilla campaigns and direct action.

What we said: A passionately acted ensemble movie… [that] compellingly combines elegy, tragedy, urgency and a defiant euphoria.

Beast

Creepy, Jersey-set thriller starring Johnny Flynn as a poacher who may or may not be a serial murderer and Jessie Buckley as the unhappy young woman who falls in love with him.

What we said: Beast is a title which might appear to promise horror or melodrama and there is a little of both. But there is always something subtler going on.

Black Panther

Director Ryan Coogler’s film adaptation of Marvel’s comic book seamlessly combines action-adventure and superhero fantasy with questions of racial discrimination and power.

What we said: The intriguing thing about Black Panther is that it doesn’t look like a superhero film – more a wide-eyed fantasy romance: exciting, subversive and funny.

Blockers

Pitch Perfect writer Kay Cannon makes her directorial debut with this hugely entertaining comedy. Its simple premise – three sets of parents frantically attempt to stop their children having sex on prom night – is undeniably compelling. Here is a “cock-block” like never seen before.

What we said: It’s an entirely daft comedy, but its goofy rollercoaster energy and genial good humour keep it barrelling along, with many a bad-taste fiasco as our middle-aged, sex-obstructing adventurers experience quasi-teen nightmares of their own and come to terms with their imminent empty-nest sadness.

Brad’s Status

Ben Stiller takes the lead in this light comedy, playing a down-trodden middle-aged man facing an existential crisis. Racked with envy of those of his friends who have made it, Brad must now also accept that his son Troy’s potential looks just as likely to eclipse his own.

What we said: Brad’s Status is an introspective and downbeat film, but forceful and personal, with excruciating and all-too-real moments of mortification. And it can be weirdly moving, almost out of nowhere.

Coco

Pixar’s animated film is about a young boy who wants to become a musician – against the wishes of his family who want him to be a shoe-maker. Extending to the Land of the Dead, Coco touches on age-old questions of memory, mortality, family and oblivion.

What we said: Being simultaneously life-affirming and death-obsessed is a tough act for any film to pull off, but Coco manages it. This might start bringing Pixar studios back from the dead.

Crowhurst

The second of the year’s two biopics of Donald Crowhurst, who faked his progress in a 1968 round-the-world yachting race. It is a powerful rendering of Crowhurst’s experience: a psychological thriller whose merit lies in its detail.

What we said: Justin Salinger is absolutely superb in the lead role, heart-wrenchingly convincing as the decent British chap who wears pyjamas as he goes to bed on board his boat every night: thin, clenched, wiry, doggedly making the best of it.

Custody

Award-winning French drama from Xavier Legrand, exploring divorce, familial ties and psychological abuse. It is both hard-hitting and minimalistic, with stellar performances from Denis Ménochet and Thomas Gioria as a father and his 11-year-old son.

What we said: There is not much storytelling light and shade in Custody, but it has the shock and swipe of real life”

Darkest Hour

Rousing biopic of Winston Churchill during his wartime greatness, with Gary Oldman on Oscar-winning form as the statesman struggling with appeasers and the Nazi threat.

What we said: This is not so much a period war movie as a high-octane political thriller: May 1940 as House of Cards, with the wartime prime minister up against a cabal of politicians who want to do him down.

Early Man

Another triumphant animation from Nick Park, Early Man is a family comedy that stages an epic football match between the tribes of the stone age and the bronze age. Endlessly good-humoured.

What we said: It’s impossible not to laugh at the inspired silliness and charm of Park’s universe. Early Man is a family film that doesn’t just provide gags for adults and gags for children: it locates the adult’s inner child and the child’s inner adult. It’s a treat.

A Fantastic Woman

Beautiful, Oscar-winning study of a trans woman, Marina (played by Daniela Vega) living in Santiago, who is plunged into a waking nightmare when her lover, Orlando, dies. Marina must not only confront her loss but also an insidious and deepening sense of alienation and cultural diaspora.

What we said: A Fantastic Woman is a brilliant film: a richly humane, moving study of someone keeping alive the memory and the fact of love.

Funny Cow

Maxine Peake stars and produces this savagely comic portrait of a female standup comedian fighting her way through the sexist comedy-club circuit in the 70s.

What we said: Peake gives it a fierce, blazing energy and holds everything together through the magnetic force of her performance.

A Gentle Creature

Nightmarish Russian parable about a woman attempting to locate her husband, apparently in a Siberian prison, through a fug of bureaucratic delay and deflection. In the Fog’s Sergei Loznitsa directs.

What we said: A brutally realist movie – at least at first – that takes its heroine on a pilgrimage into the vast, trackless forest of national suffering.

I, Tonya

Mockumentary-style biopic tells the story of the infamous skating rivalry between Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan: replete with modern-day interviews, voiceovers and asides, it is a raw investigation into a life torn apart by scandal.

What we said: Margot Robbie gives a fantastically uninhibited performance as Tonya – frizzy of hair, angry of demeanour, she often brings out a raptor grimace on the ice, denoting pain or gloating triumph.

Isle of Dogs

Wes Anderson fable set in a dystopian Japan many years in the future, when all dogs have been banished to an offshore island. Twelve-year-old Atari (voiced by Koyu Rankin) goes in search of his beloved dog, Spots.

What we said: Isle of Dogs is another utterly distinctive, formally brilliant exercise in savant innocence from Anderson, somewhere between arch naivety and inspired sophistication.

Journey’s End

Adaptation of RC Sherriff’s classic first world war drama with powerful performances by Asa Butterfield (as the young and excruciatingly innocent Lieutenant Raleigh) and Sam Claflin as Raleigh’s school hero Captain Stanhope, now brutally ravaged by conflict.

What we said: The first world war is one of the 20th century’s oldest, grimmest tales of futility and slaughter. Dibb and his excellent cast put new passion into it.

Lady Bird

Mother-daughter relationships, teenage identity, classroom politics – there is something for everyone in Greta Gerwig’s growing-up drama. An evocative performance by Saoirse Ronan as Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson.

What we said: Greta Gerwig’s feature debut as a writer-director is a gloriously funny and wistfully autobiographical coming-of-age comedy.

Lean on Pete

Andrew Haigh follows 45 Years with this moving portrayal of two runaways: teenage Charlie (played by Charlie Plummer) and the titular racehorse. Slow-paced yet saturated with a natural dignity.

What we said: Haigh has a masterly way with mood and moment, with the play of light on a scene, and with a robust shift from fierce sunshine to sombre night-time.

Let the Sunshine In

Claire Denis creates a superb role for Juliette Binoche as a divorced artist uncertain of her emotional path as she progresses through a number of short affairs and agonised discussions about romance.

What we said: An elegant, eccentric relationship comedy of ideas, highly rarefied and possessed of an almost inscrutable sophistication.

Love, Simon

A coming-of-age and coming-out story, this film offers simple heartwarming romance and a story of self-empowerment as the eponymous Simon, a high-school kid (played by Nick Robinson), comes out as gay.

What we said: With its sheer warmth, openness, likability and idealism, Love, Simon won me over. It takes all the corniness and tweeness of the coming-of-age genre and transplants new heart into it.

Loveless

Leviathan director Andrey Zvyagintsev returns with another masterpiece about Russia’s social and moral breakdown, in which a divorcing married couple realise their 12-year-old son has gone missing.

What we said: A stark, mysterious and terrifying story of spiritual catastrophe: a drama with the ostensible form of a procedural crime thriller. It has a hypnotic intensity and unbearable ambiguity that is maintained until the very end.

My Friend Dahmer

Creepy, unsettling account of the mass killer’s time at high school, adapted from the autobiographical graphic novel by John “Derf” Backderf, in which Dahmer’s teenage strangeness was clear – but perhaps not the direction it would evolve in.

What we said: My Friend Dahmer taps into … the dark side of geekdom, geek rage and geek hate. And mightn’t Dahmer himself have congratulated himself on his nerd destiny: the loser who became super-famous while his tormentors peaked in high school?

The Post

Steven Spielberg’s high-minded account of whistleblowing in the Watergate era, after the Washington Post agonised over the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

What we said: The film is a pointed celebration of liberal decency in the past and implied present … Lincoln-Memorial-level rebukes to today’s various squalid declines in Washington and Hollywood.

A Quiet Place

A post-apocalyptic horror film with an achingly simple premise – humans must remain silent in order to survive being devoured by marauding monsters. Brilliantly performed by Emily Blunt and actor-director John Krasinski.

What we said: This isn’t a young adult drama, it’s a prematurely old adult drama, a world in which innocence, childhood and happiness have been blowtorched off the face of the Earth.

The Rape of Recy Taylor

Nancy Buirski’s documentary broadcasts the extraordinary story of Taylor’s rape by six white teenagers in her Alabama hometown in 1944, and the failure to render her any kind of justice. An angry, instructive film

What we said: Buirski’s vigorous and wide-ranging film draws on the various modes of expression and protest that the Recy Taylor case brought into focus: the black-oriented press and the ‘race film’ industry targeted at black audiences.

The Shape of Water

Multi-Oscar-winning fantasy by Guillermo del Toro, in which Sally Hawkins plays a mute woman who falls in love with an amphibious creature held in a military research facility where she is a cleaner.

What we said: A visually ravishing fantasy romance that almost drowns in its own gorgeousness. It is a Beauty and the Beast fable where both get to be beautiful and neither has to be beastly.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

Despite its ambivalent reception at the box office, this Han Solo origin story is an enjoyable run-through of Solo’s first meeting with Chewbacca, his acquisition of the Millennium Falcon and his brush with the rebels who are trying to weaken the Empire.

What we said: Solo: A Star Wars Story has a glorious origin myth meet-cute to set up one of cinema’s greatest bromances: the stoic wookiee Chewbacca and the insolently handsome freebooting rebel pilot Han Solo – and Alden Ehrenreich absolutely crushes the role to powder.

The Square

Performance art or artistic performance? In Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning satire, art museum director Christian’s mobile phone is stolen, triggering a series of bizarre events. In the process, experience is brought dangerously close to social experiment.

What we said: This movie really brings some gobsmackingly weird and outrageous spectacle, with moments of pure showstopping freakiness.

That Summer

Context-filling documentary about Big and Little Edie, the subjects of Grey Gardens, the Maysles brothers’ celebrated mid-70s study of patrician decay.

What we said: This is basically a must-see, an archival gem with mouthwatering unseen footage of the two women who were turned by [Grey Gardens] into pop-culture legends.

The Third Murder

Multi-layered, complex courtroom drama from Japanese auteur Hirokazu Koreeda. When Misumi (Koji Yakusho) goes on trial for the murder of his factory manager, he pleads guilty. As more evidence comes to light, it becomes increasingly difficult for the defence lawyer to ascertain what happened.

What we said: An intriguing and cerebral quasi-genre picture … that can be read at least partly as a piercing – if not precisely passionate – rebuke to the death sentence.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Martin McDonagh hit the jackpot with this coruscating drama about a woman attempting to shame her local police department over their failure to find her daughter’s killer. A deserved best actress Oscar went to Frances McDormand.

What we said: It is a film about vengeance, violence and the acceptance of death, combining subtlety and unsubtlety, and moreover wrongfooting you as to what and whom it is centrally about.

Western

A meandering exploration of cultural identity, masculinity and individual choice from German film-maker Valeska Grisebach in which a group of German construction workers are sent to build a hydroelectric plant in rural Bulgaria.

What we said: One of the films of the year has arrived – maybe the best of the year – a work of unmatched subtlety, complexity and artistry. It is about tension and transgression and yet also succeeds in evoking a pure and miraculous calm.

The Wound

South African drama directed by John Trengove that investigates Xhosa initiation rituals, as well as the complexities of transgressive sexualities in the same communities, struggling with tradition and modernity.

What we said: Coming-of-age is usually a syrupy Hollywood genre, and it’s bracing to find it given such an unsentimental expression – and to see that it applies not only to adolescents, but to adults, too.

The Young Karl Marx

Raoul Peck’s film is an account of the birth of communism and the blossoming friendship between its key movers – a sort of bromance between Marx the poverty-stricken thinker, always spoiling for a fight, and rich-kid Engels, a dandy from a well-off background.

What we said: It gives you a real sense of what radical politics was about: talk. There is talk, talk and more talk. It should be dull, but it isn’t. Somehow the spectacle of fiercely angry people talking about ideas becomes absorbing and even gripping.

You Were Never Really Here

Lynne Ramsay’s first film since We Need to Talk About Kevin, a scarily violent study of a security guard (played by Joaquin Phoenix) attempting to rescue a teenage girl from sex traffickers.

What we said: A movie that teeters perpetually on the verge of hallucination, with hideous images and horrible moments looming suddenly through the fog.

Zama

Dreamlike fable from Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel, about an 18th-century Spanish colonial administrator posted to an isolated settlement deep in the South American interior.

What we said: Horror and despair hover just out of the frame, or below the surface, or behind the curtain, of Lucrecia Martel’s mysterious and dreamlike movie.