The Ten Best Dance Sequences of 2018

Each day a new year in review list. Here's Dancin' Dan

If there was a common theme among the films of 2018 when it came to dance, it's the idea of losing yourself to the dance, of dancing as a trance-like state where either the viewer, the dancer, or both can shut everything else out and focus on this one thing. I think that's something we all could have definitely used in 2018, but it certainly wasn't all happiness and fun that was offered up for us to get lost in.

Before the countdown begins, though, a shout-out to three honorable mentions: Marina's disco fantasy in A Fantastic Woman (which was kind of last year but also kind of this year which makes listmaking INFURIATING), the climactic lighthouse sequence of Annihilation (which isn't technically a dance, but sure as hell feels like one), and this rightly cut but nonetheless adorable scene from A Simple Favor (Henry Golding has never been so adorable).

And now, let's get down and dirty...

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Let's dance

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Review: "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms"

by Chris Feil

Yes, Disney’s The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is another attempt to monetize a familiar property into CGI fantasy excess. This time it is the Tchaikovsky ballet (itself an adaptation of an adaptation) getting the family film treatment, often owing more narratively to its cinematic genre predecessors like Alice in Wonderland and the Narnia movies than its actual source material. While it does fall into the garish trappings of those films, the film gets a good bit more mileage out of not taking itself so straightfaced. Within that familiar framework, the film fascinates by letting itself get a little cuckoo.

Mackenzie Foy is Clara, a young girl mourning the death of her mother, bestowed a mysterious egg-shaped lockbox as a Christmastime dowry. Spiritually guided by her godfather, played by Morgan Freeman In An Eyepatch, she ventures into the fantasy land formerly visited by her mother. But now that wintery world is at war with itself, three of its more upbeat realms against a foggy, mouse-infested one lorded over by Helen Mirren’s Mother Ginger.

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Queer TIFF: "Climax"

by Chris Feil

The first third of Climax achieves the most gobsmacking of feats: it convinces you, and wholeheartedly, that provocateur Gaspar Noé might actually have gotten his shit together. After languorous attempts to shock like Love, overly lethargic flashes of innovation like Enter the Void, and burdensome levels of grimness like Irreversible, his new film emerges as something both audacious and (most importantly) succinct. But jokes on us because this is, after all, a Gaspar Noé experience. It also happens to be the best one yet.

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Dance Break: "A Lot in Common"

Fred Astaire and Joan Leslie tapping up a sweet storm 75 years ago in The Sky's The Limit (1943). Just because.