By Isaac Handelman

I am not qualified to speak about the “best” films of 2018, because I have seen only a tiny handful of the myriad, wonderful films that released this year. I wish this were not the case. I wish I could say I’d seen every worthy film, from Shoplifters to Eighth Grade , Sorry to Bother You to Leave No Trace . But the truth is, I haven’t. I am a student and a freelance writer, and I do not have the time nor the disposable income that would allow me have a comprehensive knowledge of 2018 in film; the films I have seen are disproportionately American. But I still would like to share my favorite films of the year, however incomplete my filmic experience has been, and however much my feelings might change as I continue to absorb 2018’s cinema in the new year. So, here is my woefully incomplete portrait of a year that, for all its political toxicity and global violence, at least offered up some great movies. I’ll be doing my best to add one new entry on each of the last five days of this...

This article contains relatively major spoilers for all seasons of 'Channel Zero'. Nick Acosta’s Channel Zero is a show with so much to offer. At its highest points, it's the scariest thing on television, probably by a long shot. It can be so adept at its get-under-your-skin-and-make-it-crawl approach so as to rival the most unsettling sequences in popular horror media. But then it goes off the rails. Off the deep end. It takes things too far, and instead of going lovably bonkers, it just gets boring. This is not an isolated occurrence — I'd argue that it's happened, to an extent, in every season of this underappreciated SyFy anthology series, each incarnation of which adapts a different creepypasta story from the dark corners of the web. In the first season, Candle Cove , a blood-curdling opening scene gives way to a genuinely chilling mystery surrounding a shady children's TV show and a creepy, clicky, child-snatching tooth monster... and then the toot...

One cannot separate the art from the artist; they are deeply intertwined. To understand why, consider this scenario: We choose to study the films of Roman Polanski in-depth, without considering the fact that, while in his forties, the director raped a thirteen year old girl. On the surface, the argument is simple: we wish only to consider the art, the form of the films, the narrative content and the thematic subtext. We do not wish to get caught up in the personal life of the artist, however egregious his actions might have been, because such a line of inquiry is not relevant to a survey of the art itself. But then, we should surely be able to teach a similar class on the visual art of Adolf Hitler, who was famously rejected from an art school years before overseeing the mass murder of more than 11 million innocent people. Of course, that would be impossible. With the weight that the name "Hitler" carries, how could one possibly teach a class on his art without address...