Justin Chang

High Life is like no outer space movie you've ever seen, even if you recognize some of its artistic influences.

A bare description of the plot — about a doomed crew of astronauts traveling millions of miles from Earth — might suggest Ridley Scott's Alien and its countless gory imitators. The spaceship has a lush greenhouse that seems inspired by Douglas Trumbull's eco-parable Silent Running, while the mood of existential gloom feels straight out of Andrei Tarkovsky's science-fiction landmarks Solaris and Stalker.

Eight years ago, the British comedian Joe Cornish wrote and directed Attack the Block, a sci-fi horror-comedy about a bunch of rowdy South London teenagers warding off aliens from outer space. It was funny, scary and also touchingly sincere in its belief that children are the future, that the fate of the world really does rest on our young people's shoulders.

So many of my favorite films this year seemed to be in close conversation with each other that it didn't make sense, in the end, for me to separate them. So I didn't. Here are my 12 favorite movies of 2018, listed as a series of themed pairings. You can read my full write-ups of these pairings here, or find a simple list below:

I can't imagine a harder act for a filmmaker to follow than Moonlight. That movie, a quietly shattering portrait of a young black man wrestling with his sexuality, held you rapt with its intimacy; it left you feeling as if you'd stared deep into that young man's soul.

Nearly every review I've read of Alfonso Cuarón's Roma has insisted that you must see it on the big screen, and it's hard not to agree. You can certainly watch and appreciate this immaculately photographed movie when it hits your Netflix queue, but it's hard to imagine its immersive storytelling and virtuoso camerawork having quite the same effect.

Joel and Ethan Coen have an erratic body of work but a remarkably consistent worldview. So it's no surprise that their six-part Western anthology, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, feels like both an entirely coherent vision and something of a mixed bag.

The ingeniously high-concept whodunit Searching isn't the first movie to turn the big screen into a computer screen, to make you feel as if you're eavesdropping on online conversations and surfing the Internet alongside its characters. You might have seen the 2014 horror movie Unfriended, where a group chat suddenly turns deadly — basically the Skype version of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None.

The city of Oakland, Calif., is experiencing something of a renaissance moment in the movies. You could trace it back to 2013, when the Oakland-born director Ryan Coogler made Fruitvale Station, his ripped-from-the-headlines drama about the fatal police shooting of Oscar Grant III.

After seeing Eighth Grade, Bo Burnham's enormously affecting new movie, you might assume that a lot of the dialogue was improvised. Most of it was, in fact, carefully scripted, which makes it all the more remarkable: It's been a while since I've heard a screenplay so fully master the awkward, hesitant rhythms of everyday teen speak. Burnham's young characters talk in long, rambling but more-or-less coherent sentences, each thought punctuated with a perfectly timed "um" or "like" or "you know."