Issue 67: Best of 2018 Archives - Bright Wall/Dark Room

Much of what I saw in 2018 reflected a related range of anxieties—about difference, catastrophe, isolation, belonging. Maybe that’s every year. Likely it’s too soon to tell. But among the things I saw, in a year of personal and political upheaval and ambivalence, these are the moments that solicited my attention most memorably.

(S)he Eats Planets: On Mandy, Grief, and Mandy

Travis Woods·

Issue 67: Best of 2018

Mandy is a visionary catalogue of the ways in which we attempt to survive, embrace, or succumb to the pain of living with death, and what happens when we lose the one thing that holds our world together.

Disobedience as a Path to God

Thomas Harlander·

Issue 67: Best of 2018

Disobedience is a film as fluent in its rendering of the burden of orthodoxy as it is well-versed in the holy liberation of letting go.

Annihilation (2018) | Paramount Pictures

When Our Bodies Are Not Our Homes

Kelsey Ford·

Issue 67: Best of 2018

In both The Haunting of Hill House and Annihilation, landscapes are the loci of the characters’ malfunctions. Hill House and Area X, respectively, give their characters a place to focus their energy—and then use that energy, that sense of comfort, to undo them.

Born A Smokeless Flame: Jinn & Black Girls’ Sexuality

Vanessa Taylor·

Issue 67: Best of 2018

Jinn’s exploration of Black Muslim girlhood stems from a long tradition of Black women exploring and constructing their own selves.

The Gentle Reprieve of Schitt’s Creek

Hope Rehak·

Issue 67: Best of 2018

To watch the show’s four seasons is to watch broad types and tropes become subtler episode by episode, making us slowly question what, and who, the real object of the joke is.

Eighth Grade (2018) | art by Brianna Ashby

My Loneliness is Killing Me

Isabel Cole·

Issue 67: Best of 2018

This is where humiliation lives: in the gap between the self we want to be and the self we actually are.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post | FilmRise

Summer Camp Shame and Self-Loathing

Spencer Williams·

Issue 67: Best of 2018

As much as The Miseducation of Cameron Post is about finding salvation within one’s self, it is also about finding hope and protection in the arms of a chosen family.

The Last One

Brian Brems·

Issue 67: Best of 2018

It's hard to know whether The Mule will be Clint Eastwood’s final film, either in front of or behind the camera—but it sure feels like it.

First Reformed (2018) | art by Brianna Ashby

I Can Whistle With That: What the Stories of 2018 Show Us About Responding to Despair

Ethan Warren·

Issue 67: Best of 2018

On the one hand, everything we do may be meaningless. Oblivion may be the only truth. But on the other, maybe it’s exactly this ultimate despair that makes our all our everyday actions essential.

There Will Never Be Another You

Karina Wolf·

Issue 67: Best of 2018

A mid-winter love affair feels decadent but also rather necessary, and Cold War rewards like a hot chocolate spiked with brandy: warming, bracing, to be savored.

Party Foul: Fear and Loathing in Support the Girls

Sarah Welch-Larson·

Issue 67: Best of 2018

This scream is a scream of defiance.