C O N S I D E R - Actresses of 2018, First Half of Year

With the year half over, it's time to look back on the first six months and what treasures they brought us. Here are the 18 performances by actresses we treasured most at the movies thus far this year. We've previously shared the biggest hits in multiple categories at the box office and 18 fav performances by male actors. We hope you'll sound off on these and share a few of your own in the comments... and we hope this list serves as a reminder to Oscar and Globe and SAG voters that amazing performances can happy at any time of the year. Why wait til December to start considering your "Best of" ballot? 

Disclaimer: before we begin I should note that there were a few key bits of actressing I have not yet seen that might have factored in like performances from Game Night, The Seagull, or Hearts Beat Loud.

Okay here we go...

7 LEADING ACTRESSES
(Jan 1st - June 30th releases) 

Toni Collette as "Annie" in Hereditary
What can we add to the already robust conversation around her brilliance? The nuanced construction is a marvel: she's giving you a portrait of an artist's idiosyncractic point of view and convictions, an adult child's contemptuous grief and anger about her parents, and, best of all, her own not always pleasant relationship to mothering. She does all of that while peppering in alarming details that prepare you for the climax. And the crescendo of this star turn! Movies are shot out of sequence which makes this performance even more of a wow.

Rachel McAdams as "Esti Kuperman"
and Rachel Weisz as "Ronit Krushka" in Disobedience
McAdams is in fine form as a woman who's repressed her sexuality for years and surprises with sharp glimpses into the woman that could have been or once was in younger form. But Weisz is holding the whole picture together with a complex take on a more self-actualized woman who nevertheless struggles with intimacy and with reconciling the first half of her life (religious) with the second (secular). It's right up there with her work in Constant Gardener and Deep Blue Sea as the holy trinity of her career.

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Blueprints: "Hereditary"

This week, Jorge dives into how the setting and character introductions made this one of the most unsettling movies in years.

Horror films are far scarier when they are grounded by real fears. Sure, a ghost flying towards you or the sight of a little girl head’s spinning are objectively terrifying. But when a character's terror reflects the way we have felt at dire points, the horror movie seeps into our own lives, suddenly tangible. 

Hereditary is as much of a family melodrama as it is a horror film. Its scariness doesn’t rely on a supernatural force (although there is one), or on gory and violent imagery (though there’s definitely some of that). The horror taps into the dynamics and secrets of family life. It takes regular fraught human emotions and raises them to unbearable levels...

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Tweetweek: Bowing Down to Extra Divas

Tweet of the week... no, year. 

Sadly Marvel didn’t take my suggestion of a 30 min sequence in #AntManAndWasp where everyone shrinks down slightly smaller than Michelle Pfeiffer and bows their heads, refusing to look her in the eye because they’re not worthy.

— mat whitehead (@matwhi) July 4, 2018

After the jump the poor man's Johnny Depp, Mamma Mia Fallen Kingdom, Disney Princesses, actress kerfuffles, and a bit of politics because who can avoid it now...File the next two tweets under 'You learn new things every day!'...

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Netflix in July: Troy's Straight-Washing, Blue Valentine's Brilliance.

Time to play Streaming Roulette. Each month, to survey new streaming titles we freeze frame the films at random places with the scroll bar and whatever comes up first, that's what we share!

July is kind of a quiet month on Netflix but which of these films will you be streaming for the first time or as a rewatch? Which do you have strong feelings about. Please do tell us in the comments. Ready? Let's go...

ARE YOU CRAZY?!? IF I CAN'T PULL MY CHUTE, YOU'LL DIE TOO!

Get Smart (2008)
Despite being an Anne Hathaway disciple I have not seen this. Worth a watch? Anyone? 

Hey, can I ask you something else: What's the story of that girl that was in here a month ago? 

Blue Valentine (2010)
Ryan Gosling is visiting his grandma because he's a sweet soul. I especially love the editing here. The image cuts to this for the rest of the visiting grandma dialogue...

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Months of Meryl: Music of the Heart (1999)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

#27 — Roberta Guaspari, a real-life violinist and instructor who brought music education to the classrooms of Harlem.

MATTHEW:  One of the pitfalls that tends to come with occupying such a prominent position in the highly public realm of moviemaking is a gradual inability to disappear into the most straightforward of roles. I’m not talking about the magical acts of self-vanishing that allow Daniel Day-Lewis to seemingly become figures as disparate as Bill the Butcher and Abraham Lincoln nor the larger-than-life personas achieved through virtuosic, full-scale deglamorizations by the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Charlize Theron, but rather the everyday characters who may achieve great things but whose lives are decisively rooted in reality, their appearances neither remarkable nor particularly conspicuous. No matter how hard a performer tries to shed her star persona and immerse herself in distinctly un-Hollywood settings, it is often up to us, the viewers, to forget everything we know about a star in order to actually believe her as, more or less, one of us...

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