We are now halfway through the year and as has become an annual tradition here at The End, it’s time to look back at the best movies of the year so far. As I discussed in the 2013 halfway post, the consensus movie-dating system is nonsensical and posits New York as the center of the universe. Far more logical (and much easier to use) is a system reliant on imdb’s dating system, which locates a film in whatever year it first played for an audience. That’s what we use here for all Rankings & Awards as it’s the most fair to all eras and areas. (A dating system reliant on playing in a certain locality I think can be valuable for a publication that is geographically specific, like a local newspaper or website. But here at The End, we have a global reach.)

A by-product of the system is that a number of films that first go into wide-release in any given year actually had their premiere in the year before. A number of the films on many critics’ halfway-point lists will include these films, films that find their proper home here on my 2017 list. And so here we have two lists: the Best Movies of 2018, following the strict imdb dating system, and the Best 2017 Movies of 2018, which includes those films from last year that you might find on a more chronologically-illogical list. I also have a third list, Best Unreleased Movies of 2017, of last year’s films that have yet to see a New York release and therefore don’t (yet) exist by the standards of most critics. And a fourth list, a halfway version of my annual Best Older Movies list, counting the top movies I saw for the first time this year that are more than a few years old.

The Best Movies of 2018 (So Far)

1. Grass (Hong Sangsoo)
2. Little Forest (Yim Soonrye)
3. Dead Pigs (Cathy Yan)
4. The 15:17 to Paris (Clint Eastwood)
5. Matangi/Maya/MIA (Steven Loveridge)
6. Operation Red Sea (Dante Lam)
7. The Monkey King 3 (Soi Cheang)
8. Avengers: Infinity War (Anthony & Joe Russo)
9. Isle of Dogs (Wes Anderson)
10. Black Panther (Ryan Coogler)
11. La cartographe (Nathan Douglas)
12. Girls Always Happy (Yang Mingming)
13. How Long Will I Love U (Su Lun)
14. Detective Chinatown 2 (Chen Sicheng)
15. The Widowed Witch (Cai Chengjie)
16. The Commuter (Jaume Collet-Serra)

The Best 2017 Movies of 2018 (So Far)

1. Claire’s Camera (Hong Sangsoo)
2. 24 Frames (Abbas Kiarostami)
3. The Green Fog (Guy Maddin, Evan & Galen Johnson)
4. Let the Sunshine In (Claire Denis)
5. Angels Wear White (Vivian Qu)
6. The Day After (Hong Sangsoo)
7. 1987: When the Day Comes (Jang Joonhwan)
8. Before We Vanish (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
9. Western (Valeska Grisebach)
10. Zama (Lucrecia Martel)
11. The Death of Stalin (Armando Iannucci)
12. Ismael’s Ghosts (Arnaud Desplechin)
13. Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (Travis Wilkerson)
14. Lu Over the Wall (Masaaki Yuasa)

The Best Unreleased Films of 2017 (So Far)

1. Maison du bonheur (Sofia Bohdanowicz)
2. Bad Genius (Nattawut Poonpiriya)
3. Love and Goodbye in Hawaii (Shingo Matsumura)
4. The Village of No Return (Chen Yu-hsun)
5. 77 Heartbreaks (Herman Yau)
6. The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts (Don Hertzfeldt)
7. Fail to Appear (Antoine Bourges)
8. Hit the Night (Jeong Gayoung)
9. Love Education (Sylvia Chang)
10. Pumpkin Movie (Sophy Romvari)
11. SPL: Paradox (Wilson Yip)
12. Prototype (Blake Williams)
13. Sekigahara (Masato Harada)
14. Chang-Ok’s Letter (Shunji Iwai)
15. Wrath of Silence (Xin Yukun)
16. The Great Buddha+ (Huang Hsin-yao)
17. Wasteland No. 1: Ardent Verdant (Jodie Mack)
18. Mr. Long (Sabu)
19. From Nine to Nine (Neil Bahadur)
20. Scaffold (Kazik Radwanski)
21. Manhunt (John Woo)

2018 Discoveries (So Far)

1. Kamikaze Taxi (Masato Harada, 1995)
2. Long Arm of the Law (Johnny Mak, 1984)
3. Final Victory (Patrick Tam, 1987)
4. Lost in the Mountains (Hong Sangsoo, 2009)
5. That Day, On the Beach (Edward Yang, 1983)
6. Dream Lovers (Tony Au, 1986)
7. Love Unto Waste (Stanley Kwan, 1986)
8. Cops and Robbers (Alex Cheung, 1979)
9. Princess D (Sylvia Chang, 2002)
10. Tonight Nobody Goes Home (Sylvia Chang, 1996)
11. Crime Story (Kirk Wong, 1993)
12. Duel to the Death (Ching Siu-tung, 1983)
13. Siao Yu (Sylvia Chang, 1995)
14. Women (Stanley Kwan, 1985)
15. Passion (Sylvia Chang, 1986)
16. Hit Team (Dante Lam, 2001)
17. Clan of the White Lotus (Lo Lieh, 1980)