Year in ReView: Vanyaland’s favorite films of 2018

Best Afternoon Spent Wondering Why A24 Buried This Wonderful Film

How to Talk to Girls at Parties

From my review: “It’s interesting that the critical discourse around this film is shaping up to be a record-collecting dick measuring contest, where the competing ideologies in all forms of “punk” as we know it have taken root in the minds of different writers, each who have their own idea (and knowledge) of the ethos behind one of the most amorphous movement this side of the jazz-and-golf-playing anarchists in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. Though I don’t totally agree with this, it could be argued that punk initially was nothing more than a cash grab — a rock and roll swindle, if you will — by a group of adults looking to pry money from the disaffected youths willing to go into their stores and buy their records and clothes to be fashionable or to feel a part of something. Punk, to me at least, was never about what the Malcolm McLarens of the world tried to market to you: It was a germ of an idea that only had meaning when its adherents gave it their own. So Mitchell’s vision of a punk coming-of-age may not fit in the hell-raising category that so many people want it to be, but I quite appreciated the tenderness of How to Talk to Girls at Parties and its deeply-felt belief that the most punk thing you can do is give a shit, to love fully and earnestly.”