As if I were watching alphabetically

Tomorrow night I will wrap up my 2018 viewing season with Lucrecia Martel's Zama, the only 2018 movie I will see that starts with Z.

It's a heavier final dish than I would have liked. That's both because it could be long and ponderous -- Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, a huge fan, nonetheless warned not to start it at 9:30 after a couple of beers -- but also because it's got an outside chance to rank very highly on my chart. (Though Martel's The Headless Woman, which I admired but which was pretty head-scratching, suggests it's likelier to end up in my respectable mid-40s.) Ideally, you'd prefer to finish off with something you can be safely sure you'll stash away somewhere around the middle of your rankings.

It'll possibly be the only time I've wrapped up with a foreign language film, adding to the degree of difficulty when I've got cumulative exhaustion coming out the wazoo.

However, it's not the only time I've given myself a challenge on my last day of film watching. Far from it. Films that ended up in my top ten for the year after watching them on the last day included Inside Llewyn Davis (#3 of 2013) and The Hateful Eight (#6 of 2015), both of which I couldn't watch any earlier because they hadn't been released yet, and Love is Strange (#7 of 2014), which, like Zama, was just a random final day viewing selection.

Just last year my final viewing, Darkest Hour, nearly crept into my top ten, finishing at #12 -- though I suspect recency bias had something to do with that. However, recency of viewing isn't likely always to benefit a film. I think if I'd had two more weeks to sit with Llewyn Davis I would have named it my #1 film of that year, since I now think of it as that and have already seen it thrice.

I don't really have anything profound to say about Zama and have already elongated this post more than it probably needed to be. Maybe I just didn't want my last non-year end wrap-up post to be a screed about Lars von Trier.

Next time you hear from me, I'll reveal my 2018 rankings from #1 to # whatever. Come on, pretend you're as excited as I am about this.