Australia's Cardinal and his exposed sin.

That in the middle is Australia's most senior Catholic cleric, and the Vatican's treasurer, Cardinal George Pell. This week, after several investigations and a Royal Commission over the last three years, he was convicted of molesting two choirboys in 1996 when he was the Archbishop of Melbourne, and gaoled. His sentencing is to due handed down within a fortnight. For anybody who's followed cases like his (whether they're religious or not) for any decent stretch of time, or even just seen the Oscar-winning film Spotlight, this really shouldn't have been shocking. 

This news is great for anybody who, like me, believes absolutely nobody should be legally untouchable, and especially, of course, for any survivor of or activist against institutional abuse. Since Pell's conviction this week, Pope Francis has ordered a crackdown on clerical abuse and misconduct in the Vatican and I suppose that's something, but casting the net further to prevent such occurrences happening in the future as well as investigating suspicious individuals - and disciplining them if necessary - before outside authorities catch and expose them would be everything. If the Church's high brass at least tried to do both of those, they would improve their public image, save legal authorities a great deal of work and stress, and maybe even acquire more followers. But as it stands, until they forego the Seal of Confession and dare to blow the whistle, they are condoning such abusive treatment. Ditto for practicing Christians among the general public who don't speak out against them.

Back home, there are now calls for Pell to be stripped of his Order of Australia membership, and ultra-conservative former prime minister John Howard, one of the few people who make me genuinely ashamed to be an Australian and the man who bestowed that honour on Pell in 2005, has given him a character reference. Yet another reason for me to despise him. 

But I digress. Pell's faith is no better or worse than any other, and it's only a problematic factor if you consider the vow of chastity demanded of priests to take and keep. But whatever your beliefs, the bottom line is Pell and his ilk are trusted to care for, nourish, discipline and be positive role models for children in their custody and when so many of them choose to instead mistreat them, they are betraying that trust of the children and their families. Pell is 77, a factor which also reportedly inspired a court to withhold his conviction. That is no excuse for clemency for anybody, and if an English court could convict Rolf Harris for the same crimes in his 80s, this court could (and should) have done likewise. And now, Pope Francis has called critics of Catholicism "friends of the Devil." Well, I think that's a quite fitting description for most of his colleagues. But at least, alas, Pell is in the slammer now and hopefully for a long time.

My top 10 of 2018 in cinema (from what I've seen)!

10-1:

While I didn't enjoy it quite as much as Ernest Cline's novel (mainly because that made the protagonist, Wade Watts/Parzival, work harder for our affections because in it he's quite rebellious and obscene), Steven Spielberg as a long-time video game fan brought his own zest and enthusiasm to this voyage through 1980s pop culture involving a multiplayer game for virtual Easter eggs in an enormous online virtual reality world known as the OASIS in 2044.

Albert Hughes takes us right back to the Ice Ages with this gripping and visceral coming-of-age survival story. It follows Keda (Aussie Kodi Smit-McPhee), a teenage hunter-gatherer who is separated from his tribe during a buffalo hunt and almost dies until he encounters a lone wolf, itself separated from its pack. After Keda reluctantly takes the wolf in and gradually bonds with it, they trek together through an overpowering winter to be reunited with their respective families. From its premise you could be pardoned for thinking Alpha sounds like just another boy-and-dog journey tale but I promise you: this one has real teeth. Hughes invokes utterly authentic locations and detailed CGI to depict the prehistoric world as it could've been, and sharp cinematography and editing to emphasise the urgency of Keda's and the dog's situation. It's also completely in a fictional prehistoric language, a pleasantly defiant choice on Hughes' part. Alpha is like War Horse meets a live-action Ice Age, but still feels fresh and suspenseful throughout.

Written and directed by and starring Madeleine Sami and Jackie van Beek, this blisteringly funny and realistic rom-com follows Jen and Mel, two young women so over romance that they've established an agency for getting people out of unhappy relationships. Their business and personal relationship are going fine, until they meet aspiring NRL player Jordan (James Rolleston) who wants to ditch his clingy girlfriend and quickly catches both our heroines' eyes. The Breaker Upperers defies most of the rom-com cliches I know of, and invokes the others just to avoid excessive cynicism. For me it was the funniest flick of 2018.

I grew up during the Bush/Cheney administration and have no time for either man to this day, but Adam McKay's Vice somehow manages to be a very effective and cohesive dramedy as a satire of Cheney's political career but simultaneously a very serious and impartial study of Cheney, the family man. Christian Bale (whose previous collaboration with McKay, The Big Short, I think should've been called The Big Shit) gives a muscular turn as this very complex and secretive individual, with Amy Adams as Lynne Cheney and Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld giving solid support. But its most memorable aspect is how McKay divides it into chapters for each of Cheney's White House offices and even includes a brilliantly realized trip through an animated Washington D.C. with rolling dice. Vice is subversively mischievous fun, but don't fall for the first lot of end credits.

Michael Moore is back with his best and most powerful effort since Bowling for Columbine. Love or hate him, Moore is undoubtedly fearless as a filmmaker and can push his own agenda with real objectivity. In Fahrenheit 11/9, he explores just how and why Donald Trump won the 2016 US election and how that has already impacted the world. This is maybe his most humourless work yet, but it's subsequently all the more sobering, particularly when its focus shifts to an ongoing water contamination crisis in Moore's hometown of Flint, Michigan. Fahrenheit 11/9 disturbed me so much I lost sleep over it.

After his two acclaimed science fiction efforts, 2006's Children of Men and 2013's Gravity, both alienated me, Alfonso Cuaron finally won me back over - greatly - with this semi-autobiographical film which is up for ten Oscars next week, and won the Golden Lion at last year's Venice Film Festival. Set between 1970 and 1971 and filmed in thoroughly confident and suitable black and white, Roma follows the experiences of Cleo Gutierrez (non-professional actress Yalitza Aparacio), a newly-arrived immigrant Colombian maid trying to establish her position and authority in a middle-class Mexican family while also navigating the local geography and new culture. Aparicio shows natural talent and courage as Cleo, and Marina de Tavira backs her up forcefully as the matriarch Sofia; both have deservedly earned Oscar nominations. Roma has more tracking shots than Street View on Google Maps, but it ultimately becomes a strikingly beautiful, thought-provoking and emotional experience, a resonant love letter to family, and even a keen snapshot of what could be modern Mexico's origins.

After anime gems like 2009's Summer Wars and 2012's Wolf Children but then faltering with 2015's The Boy and the Beast, Mamoru Hosoda has achieved his most moving and entertaining work yet with the Best Animated Feature Oscar-nominated Mirai. It follows a little boy named Kun, who is happy at home as the only child with his parents and dog Yukko, until his baby sister, Mirai, is born. When he becomes openly jealous and hostile towards Mirai for taking all their parents' attention off him, Kun is taken into the future with a now-human Yukko and a teenaged Mirai, on a journey of realisation and acceptance. Hosoda fleshes this fantastical yet very universal story out with admirable patience, love and sincerity, and the result will speak to anybody (like me) who's ever resented a sibling. It absolutely tugged at my heartstrings - and I'm a lastborn.

Swinging with aplomb into third place we have Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, the best of 2018's animated movies and far and away its best superhero one. Instead of Peter Parker, who's just featured here as a mentor passing the torch, our hero this time is Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), an African-American/Latino teenager struggling with the expectations of his cop father who considers Miles' idol Spider-Man to be a menace. Once Miles acquires his powers, he must learn how to use them while traversing the darkest areas of New York City to solve the mystery of the shady Prowler (voice by Mahershala Ali). While the plot is is faithful to the comics but nonetheless fairly formulaic, this is so outstanding because directors Bob Perschicetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman bring such a loving and cinematically distinctive visual approach to it that watching this movie really feels like reading a postmodern comic book in motion; I've seriously never seen animation quite like it. Plus, they and screenwriter Phil Lord do still consciously try to make us connect with the human relationships and they succeed in that also. It must be said: this one is Marvel-lous. But DC still rules.

In writer-director Ari Aster's debut, Annie Graham (Toni Collette) loses her estranged, secretive elderly mother and at the funeral gives a eulogy explaining why they had such a troubled relationship. After the grave is desecrated and Annie sees what she takes as an apparition of her mother, she joins a bereavement support group where she reveals a family history of apparently fatal mental illnesses. She now naturally grows increasingly worried about her psychiatrist husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and teenage children Peter and Charlie (Alex Wolff and Milly Shapiro), and after they all witness or suffer tragic supernatural occurrences, the Grahams must uncover just who or what is doing all this to them and why. Now, maybe it's because I've become largely disenchanted with the horror genre after so many atrocious recent entries, but I was truly unprepared for how much Hereditary terrified me. But with some months after seeing it, I can identify why it worked so well for me. Aster grew up obsessed with horror flicks and he couldn't possibly have made that more obvious in what is a nearly perfect debut. He has hit upon a premise based on themes which are so effective for scares and emotional investment because they're so universal, and he tells the story inside that premise with an approach that truly takes no prisoners. He also populates it with a family of characters who are adequately authentic, and they are exceptionally well-played. Toni Collette plays these kind of troubled mothers so often but rarely in this context and characteristically, she is a powerhouse. Not to be outdone, Byrne is brilliantly nuanced and Wolff very much holds his own against those two screen veterans; he may be even more talented than his big brother Nat. Hereditary chilled my blood and blew me away, so I can't wait to see how Aster's career unfolds.

Believe you me, this year there was a fight to the death for my humble top spot. Hereditary had a few times over this one, but upon really considering it I figured since I was impressed enough to review this one here in the same week I saw it theatrically, and when that occurred to me the scales were tipped. With Bad Times at the El Royale, writer-director Drew Goddard sends a big group of very disparate characters, Pulp Fiction-style and many of them very irredeemable like in that classic, to an abandoned hotel in the Nevada-California border desert in 1969, for one night that will prove very fateful for them all. Goddard's screenplay and direction vibrate with so much detail, style, energy, wit, insightful backstory and ferociously intense action that here he takes the Tarantino/Scorsese-style narrative and visualisation and makes both look brand-spankin' new, and elicits terrific performances from his whole cast (particularly newcomer Cynthia Erivo). I can understand why it's proving so polarising with its length and neo-noir embellishments, but I respectfully don't care. Bad Times at the El Royale works for me in every way and, I think, is destined for cult classic status.