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Aquaman
The James Wan-directed underwater flick has surpassed the global box-office takings of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice , which was the previous highest-grossing DCEU blockbuster.
As of Saturday (5 January), Aquaman – centred on a character who has been helplessly mocked for years in pop culture – has grossed $887 million, while the superhero brawler Batman v Superman took $873 million over the course of its cinema run.
The King of Atlantis accomplished the huge box-office sum primarily thanks to China, where the film has grossed $279 million, becoming the second highest-grossing superhero film of all time (behind last year’s Avengers: Infinity War ).
Aquaman quickly out-grossed fellow DCEU films Justice League ($657 million) 2013’s Man of Steel ($668 million), 2016’s Suicide Squad ($746 million) and 2017’s Wonder Woman ($821 million), and looks set to take around $1 billion worldwide.
Show all 15 1 /15The 15 best films of 2018 The 15 best films of 2018 15. Shoplifters Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters could be the year’s most disarming film. On first glance, the clan at its centre are just like any other, but their impulsive decision to take in a missing girl begins a series of rug-pulls you wouldn’t expect from a film such as this. A complex heartbreaker, albeit one that starts out looking like the more modest family dramas Kore-eda is known for.
GAGA Pictures / Thunderbird Releasing
The 15 best films of 2018 14. Game Night “We knew there was a bad version of this movie that could exist,” said Game Night ’s co-director John Francis Daley (the kid from Freaks and Geeks ). This certainly isn’t it. Starring Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams as a competitive married couple who mistake an actual kidnapping for a particularly immersive role play game, Game Night is snappy, witty and fully committed to its brilliant, tonally unsettling conceit.
Rex
The 15 best films of 2018 13. Isle of Dogs Any Wes Anderson film is likely to be offbeat, fastidiously stylish and shot through with the auteur's understated drollery. Isle of Dogs is no different. A stop-motion story of abandoned canines taking on a corrupt human government, it's set in a futuristic Japan and deals with some pretty heavy themes (fascism, ethnic cleansing). Funny and full of heart.
The 15 best films of 2018 12. They Shall Not Grow Old Peter Jackson’s First World War documentary is a remarkable step-forward for historical filmmaking. The Lord of the Rings director breathes new life into black and white archive footage from the Imperial War Museum, digitally restoring and smoothing the grainy source material before adding colour and sound. The result is a stunning cinematic experience that vividly brings the past into the present. By using the voices of veteran British soldiers interviewed about their experiences in the trenches, Jackson also includes a fascinating narrative that’s both gripping and informative. A wonderfully apt way to mark the centenary of the Great War.
BBC/IWM
The 15 best films of 2018 11. First Reformed Nobody knew if Paul Schrader still had it in him to make a film as angry or as barbed as First Reformed . There is the same raw power here as found in his earlier features about tormented loners. Cinephiles will delight in the (sometimes a little self-conscious) references to Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky, but you can’t help but relish the intensity and intelligence in Ethan Hawke’s performance as the tormented, guilt-ridden priest.
Picturehouse Entertainment
The 15 best films of 2018 10. Black Panther There were two Marvel films released this year, one of which – Avengers Infinity War – was an over-crowded, if ambitious, sequel. The other was a landmark film – not just for Marvel, but for cinema. Black Panther was fit to bursting with selling points, all combining to deliver the studio’s best film: Michael B Jordan’s standout villain, scene-stealing performances from Danai Guria and Letitia Wright, plus the direction of Creed ’s Ryan Coogler who proved an inspired appointment. Wakanda forever, indeed.
Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
The 15 best films of 2018 9. Cold War Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War , shot in the sleekest black and white, is an effortlessly stylish and romantic drama set in a period of political convulsion. It offers everything from Polish folk music to the sultriest Birth of the Cool-style jazz. Pawlikowski includes moments of reckless hedonism alongside scenes of exile and imprisonment. Best of all, the film has a truly wonderful performance from Joanna Kulig as Zula, the free-spirited young folk singer turned femme fatale.
Kino Świat
The 15 best films of 2018 8. A Star Is Born There are no two ways about it: Bradley Cooper's rock star Jackson Mane inviting Ally – a small-town waitress played by Lady Gaga – onto stage to sing her song in front of thousands of his fans is movie magic. Regardless of your stance on the film's back half and pretty maudlin ending, A Star is Born is an old-fashioned success story with an intensity that brings up the hairs on the back of your neck.
Clay Enos/Warner Bros/AP
The 15 best films of 2018 7. The Rider Director Chloé Zhao took a gamble casting a real-life family in this modern-day western about a cowboy named Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau). It pays off – this an authentic portrait of contemporary rodeo life in South Dakota. From her amateur cast she somehow coaxes performances more memorable than most pros manage in their entire careers. As moving as it is bold, The Rider also offers an all-too-rare female perspective on masculinity.
Sony Pictures Classics
The 15 best films of 2018 6. Leave No Trace Eight years after Winter’s Bone made a star of Jennifer Lawrence, Leave No Trace – director Debra Granik’s first feature film since then – should rightly make a star of Thomasin McKenzie too. Based on the book My Abandonment by Peter Rook, Leave No Trace is virtually a two-hander between McKenzie and Ben Foster. They play a PTSD-suffering war veteran and his daughter, who live in the forests of Oregon, fending for themselves. Even when the two are arrested and placed in government housing, the film refuses to be anything other than understated and is all the more beguiling for it.
AP
The 15 best films of 2018 5. The Shape of Water Loneliness can sometimes feel like your soul has been chained to the bottom of the ocean, at other times it can feel like you’re speaking a language no one else understands. Guillermo del Toro beautifully illustrates both these nuances in his Oscar-winning fantasy romance, in which a mute woman (Sally Hawkins) unexpectedly falls for a strange aquatic creature (Doug Jones), the only one who sees her as she truly wants to be seen. Theirs is a love so mystical, so overwhelming, that it can only be communicated through the language of dreams.
Twentieth Century Fox
The 15 best films of 2018 4. Lady Bird Lady Bird will always be close to our hearts. There are times when it feels less like a film, more like a hand tracing delicately through memories, of what it felt like to grow up, to say goodbye, and to find one's own place in the universe. Greta Gerwig’s story of a teenager, played by Saoirse Ronan, desperate to escape her hometown and seek the intellectual haven of the East Coast colleges (“where the culture is”, she argues) may be specific in its layout, but it is universal in its emotions.
Moviestore/REX
The 15 best films of 2018 3. You Were Never Really Here Whenever Lynne Ramsey attaches her name to a film, you know to expect something special. You Were Never Really Here marks a career-high for the British auteur, who manages to condense the violent story of a former military man searching for a stolen girl into a viciously edited 90-minute thriller. Joaquin Phoenix makes for the perfect enigmatic leading man, while Jonny Greenwood’s mechanical, piercing score adds to the decidedly eerie atmosphere.
Amazon Studio
The 15 best films of 2018 2. Phantom Thread Should Phantom Thread really be Daniel Day-Lewis’s final film, then the actor can retire knowing that Reynolds Woodcock ranks among his greatest roles. Day-Lewis plays the egomaniacal fashion designer with a childish whimsy, but there's also a spectral quality to him that looms in every scene. Lesley Manville’s deliciously funny Cyril and Vicky Krieps’s superbly sharp Alma offer two cunning counters to Reynolds’s growing appetite for self-destruction, making for some wonderfully heated confrontations. Paul Thomas Anderson’s direction allows each character to blossom on screen, in a film that makes for a masterful study of poisonous relationships.
REX
The 15 best films of 2018 1. Roma Loosely based on his own childhood, Alfonso Cuaron's follow-up to the Oscar-winning Gravity is a gorgeous piece of film-making, a quiet paean to the women who raised him. It's a neorealist masterpiece, shot in 65mm black and white, and built from detailed vignettes of domestic life in early 1970s Mexico City, a time there of great social unrest. Savour every scene: the camera takes it all in, as we follow a young Mixtec woman named Cleo (wonderful newcomer Yalitza Aparicio) who looks after a well-to-do family she comes to think of as her own. It's about love, grief and resilience: it will slay you.
Netflix
However, the film will likely not beat the $1.085 billion made by The Dark Knight Rises , which centres on Batman but was not part of the DCEU.
Meanwhile, the director of Aquaman, Wan, has lashed out at the Academy Awards for not shortlisting the film’s VFX team for the best visual effects Oscar.
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