Village Voice Film Poll 2018

Here's how it shook out. Not the winner I expected! (Note: If you're reading this on mobile, explanatory text can be found at the bottom of the page. Otherwise, it's right over there. →)

01. First Reformed (264/38)
02. Roma (251/34)
03. Burning (201/35)
04. Support the Girls (146/25)
05. Zama (130/23)
06. If Beale Street Could Talk (122/21)
07. Cold War (120/20)
08. Leave No Trace (119/26)
09. The Favourite (114/20)
10. The Rider (108/20)
11. Shoplifters (105/20)
12. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (101/21)
13. Paddington 2 (99/14)
14. You Were Never Really Here (98/16)
15. The Other Side of the Wind (90/13)
16. Minding the Gap (89/14)
17. Can You Ever Forgive Me? (86/16)
18. BlacKkKlansman (81/18)
19. Private Life (80/14)
20. First Man (79/14)
21. A Star Is Born (76/13)
22. Eighth Grade (72/15)
23. Annihilation (69/13)
24. Happy as Lazzaro (67/15)
25. Hereditary (66/13)
26. Let the Sunshine In (62/12)
27. Widows (61/10)
28. The Death of Stalin (60/9)
29. 24 Frames (59/9)
30. Madeline's Madeline (58/10)
31. Blindspotting (53/10)
32. Mission: Impossible—Fallout (51/10)
33. Western (49/9)
34. Hale County This Morning, This Evening (39/7)
35. Sorry to Bother You (37/9)
36. Mandy (36/7)
37. The Day After (36/6)
     The House That Jack Built (36/6)
39. Bisbee '17 (35/5)
40. Amazing Grace (33/6)
41. Black Panther (32/6)
      Monrovia, Indiana (32/6)
      Shirkers (32/6)
44. Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (31/5)
45. The Tale (30/7)
46. Isle of Dogs (30/5)
47. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (28/7)
48. Suspiria (27/4)
49. Dead Souls (23/4)
      Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (23/4)
51. Vox Lux (21/6)
52. Thoroughbreds (21/4)
53. Before We Vanish (17/3)
      Infinite Football (17/3)
      Milla (17/3)
56. The Green Fog (16/4)
      I Am Not a Witch (16/4)
      Lean On Pete (16/4)
      PROTOTYPE (16/4)
60. Life and Nothing More (16/3)
61. The Old Man & the Gun (15/4)
62. Avengers | Infinity War (15/2)
      Beychella (15/2)
      Personal Problems (15/2)
65. High Life (14/3)
66. Incredibles 2 (14/2)
      The Mule (14/2)
68. The Sisters Brothers (13/3)
69. Cam (13/2)
      Tully (13/2)
71. At Eternity's Gate (12/2)
     Classical Period (12/2)
     The Little Stranger (12/2)
     Notes on an Appearance (12/2)
     Revenge (12/2)
     Three Identical Strangers (12/2)
77. Game Night (10/3)
78. Border (10/2)
      Claire's Camera (10/2)
      Free Solo (10/2)
      Mary Poppins Returns (10/2)
82. The Miseducation of Cameron Post (10/1)
      The Wild Boys (10/1)
84. A Quiet Place (9/4)
85. Summer 1993 (9/2)
86. Green Book (9/1)
      Lathe Joshi (9/1)
      We the Animals (9/1)
      Wildlife (9/1)
90. Gabriel and the Mountain (8/2)
91. Cielo (8/1)
      Distant Constellation (8/1)
      The Last Race (8/1)
      Love After Love (8/1)
      ⋆ (8/1)
96. Capernaum (7/1)
      The Captain (7/1)
      The Hate U Give (7/1)
      Liz and the Blue Bird (7/1)
      Lover for a Day (7/1)
      Milford Graves Full Mantis (7/1)
      Nude: Chitraa (7/1)
      Oh Lucy! (7/1)
      Vice (7/1)
105. Crazy Rich Asians (6/2)
106. Cocote (6/1)
       Devilman Crybaby (6/1)
       Dim the Fluorescents (6/1)
       Double Lover (6/1)
       Let the Corpses Tan (6/1)
       Skate Kitchen (6/1)
       Unfriended: Dark Web (6/1)
       Unsane (6/1)
114. Araby (5/1)
       Damsel (5/1)
       Dovlatov (5/1)
       Electro-Pythagoras: A Portrait of Martin Bartlett (5/1)
       Good Luck (5/1)
       Ismael's Ghosts (5/1)
       Museo (5/1)
       A Paris Education (5/1)
       Pow Wow (5/1)
       A Simple Favor (5/1)
       Transit (5/1)
       Werewolf (5/1)
126. Kinshasa Makambo (4/2)
127. Charm City (4/1)
       Destroyer (4/1)
       Last Letter (4/1)
       My First Film (4/1)
131. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (3/2)
       Thunder Road (3/2)
133. Bitter Money (3/1)
       Custody (3/1)
       Golden Exits (3/1)
       Hearts Beat Loud (3/1)
       ManHunt (3/1)
       What Will People Say (3/1)
139. All the Cities of the North (2/1)
       American Animals (2/1)
       Aquaman (2/1)
       Bhasmasur (2/1)
       Bodied (2/1)
       The Commuter (2/1)
       Deadpool 2 (2/1)
       Makala (2/1)
       Nico, 1988 (2/1)
       1985 (2/1)
       A Private War (2/1)
       Sweet Country (2/1)
       They'll Love Me When I'm Dead (2/1)
       306 Hollywood (2/1)
153. Apostle (1/1)
       En el Séptimo Día (1/1)
       Fatal Pulse (1/1)
       Good Manners (1/1)
       In Syria (1/1)
       Night Is Short, Walk On Girl (1/1)
       Of Fathers and Sons (1/1)
       RBG (1/1)
       The Road Movie (1/1)
       Small Town Crime (1/1)
       The Strangers: Prey at Night (1/1)
       Swimming With Men (1/1)
       Welcome to Marwen (1/1)
       A Wrinkle in Time (1/1)

WHAT THIS IS: My quixotic effort to determine what the results of a 2018 Village Voice Film Poll might have been, had the paper not suddenly died of corporate greed following a long illness.

WHY THIS IS: For one thing, I still nostalgically think of the Voice poll as the "real" critics' poll, because it was the first really notable effort of its kind—a very belated (kinda can't believe it didn't happen until 1999) cinematic correlative to the paper's fabled Pazz & Jop survey. The reality is more slippery: Dennis Lim created the poll, and he essentially took it to Indiewire after the Voice canned him, so that for a while I thought of Indiewire's poll as the "real" Voice poll (even as the actual Voice poll continued under new management, and I always voted in both). By 2017, each was decidedly its own, non-Lim thing, but the Voice poll had become more selective with its roster of critics, and its results skewed considerably artier. That's less the case this year, though there's still some significant divergence—Support the Girls fared much better here than it did with the larger Indiewire pool, for example, and Green Book fared much, much worse.

The main reason I wanted to do this, though, is that most of the fun in perusing polls—for me, at least—involves browsing through individual ballots and investigating who voted for the films (and performances and other categories, in the actual polls) that aren't at the top of the list. Indiewire, for whatever reason, no longer makes this information available, which means that I now glance briefly at the entirely predictable results (unless one is very invested in what widely acclaimed film finishes 3rd vs. 4th) and move on. Here, you're invited to explore. Who thought Aquaman was one of the year's ten best? Oh, of course, it was Jordan Hoffman. What else did he vote for? Gabriel and the Mountain? Who else really dug that? And so on, clickity click. Might only be of interest to other critics and the most hardcore cinephiles, but those are my people.

WHAT THIS ISN'T: Any part of the Voice poll apart from Best Film. Replicating the entire thing would have been way too much work, given that I'm doing this gratis in my free time. And while most working critics publish a top 10 list, which I could use as his/her submission in cases where I didn't hear from the person directly, very few compile lists of favorite performances, directors, screenplays, etc. If anybody wants to hire me to do it right next year, however (rebranding it for your own publication, natch), I'd definitely be game.

HOW THIS WORKS: I used the same tabulation rules as last year's Voice poll, as stated in their fine print. For ranked lists (the vast majority), a film ranked 1st received 10 points, 2nd got 9 points, 3rd got 8, etc. The handful of unranked lists generated 5 points per film.

You'll see a very small number of votes for films that shouldn't have been eligible according to the poll's rules, e.g. Denis' High Life and Petzold's Transit (both of which are due for commercial U.S. release in 2019, though they premiered on the fest circuit in 2018). Had this been a real poll, I'd have sent those ballots back with a request for revision. Didn't seem worth the bother in this case (and I had no means of contacting certain critics), so I went ahead and included them.

WHO ALL VOTED: Here's the complete, clickable list. My thanks to everyone who sent me a top 10, and my apologies to the folks whose submissions I didn't use. (See link for an explanation.)

WHO ALL CODED: Me. I'm not good at HTML. Bare bones is all I can manage.

I SCREWED UP: One unranked, alphabetical list accidentally got tabulated as a ranked list. This has now been fixed. Didn't change anything dramatically, but First Reformed and Roma are now in even more of a photo-finish than I noted in the Slate piece. And then, ugh, a Letterboxd "Best of 2018" list that I'd assumed was preferential turned out to be chronological. That, too, has been fixed, with a more significant effect on the results (including making First Reformed a clear winner, plus ruining my "five score and nice" joke due to the elimination of three single-vote films altogether, for a new total of 166).