It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for: the only list of the best films of last year that actually matters and that represents the indisputable, carved-in-stone, objective truth. If you’ve reached different conclusions, well, shame on you. The usual caveat applies… the list below isn’t ranked and shouldn’t be taken as an accounting of 1-10; I’ve divided the films into very rough thematic groups instead.

I have a couple of the major 2019 movies yet to see, so I’ll hold off on that “best of” list until sometime in January. I am ready, however, to make my voice one more in the chorus of idiots making their selections for the best films of the decade that was.

The necessary caveat: my effort in making this list was to not attempt to present a definitive list of the decade’s ‘best’ movies. The below is a pretty unscientific mix of films, some of which I thought were narratively, aesthetically, or formally important, some of which I found uniquely affecting when I watched them, and most of which are highly, highly debatable. There is no particular order to the below other than to put them in loose categories ordered by loose chronology.

The pivotal scene in Spider-Man: Far From Home comes at the film’s narrative midpoint. Quentin Beck, alias Mysterio, sits down with Peter Parker, alias -- do I really need to tell you? – after the two have teamed up to defeat a fire monster from another dimension. The two have developed a bond over the course of the first half of the movie, as Beck (here delightfully played by Jake Gyllenhaal) has stepped into the father-figure role that Tony Stark had played for Peter up until his death at the end of Avengers: Endgame. They chat, and laugh, and over Beck’s protestations, Peter entrusts him with the pair of glasses left to him by Tony.

These are more than just a stylish set of frames and polarized lenses, however. These particular glasses act as a control interface for… well, it’s really too complicated to explain, but it’s basically an orbital superweapon that Tony thought Peter would be the best custodian for. Peter isn’t interested in being the world’s guardian, though; he just wants to get back to his class trip and tell MJ that he has a crush on her and be a normal teenager. So, impressed by Beck’s demeanor and self-evident heroism, Peter entrusts Tony’s tech to him and goes back to his schoolmates.

Or, A Lawyerly Analysis of the Very Silly Question of Who is the Rightful Ruler of Westeros

If you watch Game of Thrones, you’ve lately had to endure a lot of breathless statements by an array of characters claiming that Jon Snow is the “rightful King” of Westeros by virtue of the revelation of his parentage at the end of Season 7. Now, admittedly we are talking about a fantasy television show that exists purely for the enjoyment of the audience, so what follows below is perhaps the most frivolous thing I’ll ever write. However, that statement as it applies to Jon – and also, by the way, if applied to any of the other claimants in the series – is at best a dramatic oversimiplification, and in pretty much any scenario a gross misrepresentation. Since, as we all know, a gentleman is also a monarchist, I am personally offended by the way this show leads its viewers into terrible misunderstandings about the nature of succession. Consider this, then, an effort to set the record straight.

Us is a movie that contains many ideas and can’t decide which of them it it’s about.

That statement may come across as unnecessarily harsh. This is still a more entertaining film than most movies I’ve seen so far in 2019 (an admittedly small sample size), and it contains a few moments of amazing cinema. For all that, none of it goes anywhere. What follows here will be less a review, therefore, and more a thematic examination.

Guys, Green Book is the Best Picture of 2018! Not only is it the Best Picture of 2018, but, if you’re plugged into the voices of millennial thinkpieces at places like Vox, The Ringer, and The Atlantic, you’re probably also aware that it’s THE WORST BEST PICTURE WINNER SINCE CRASH!(!!!!)

In any case, now that the ceremony is mercifully in the rearview mirror (that’s a Green Book joke, by the way) and the outraged reactions have faded, I wanted to take a moment to gather a few stray thoughts on both the apparently beleaguered state of the Academy Awards and on a couple films.

To start with the most obvious, then…

With just a few hours until the Oscars broadcast, I wanted to take a moment to give some small sense of order to my thoughts on 2018 at the movies. I have a lot of apathy about this years’ Academy Awards, much (though not all) of which has to do with the fact that from my perspective 2018 was a pretty terrible year for movies, and certainly one of the worst that I can remember in my lifetime.

In lieu of writing the “best and worst of” breakdowns that I have done in the past, this year I’m just going to rank the Best Picture nominees in order from best to worst, give some thoughts on each, and then throw out a couple titles of other movies that I liked, or at least found interesting, from 2018.