The Oscar nominations arrived yesterday, and with them comes my own timed-release survey of the best the recently closed cinematic year had to offer. I begin with my customary caveat: Much as I’d like to be comprehensive and timely in my viewings of releases that officially log time on domestic screens, I am humbled by gaps that pain me, or at least chip away at any authority I might have in my proclamations. No matter how definitive my positioning might be in the plain phrasing “Top Ten,” what follows will be a highly personal list. There were many, many films I saw that qualify as 2018 releases that spoke to me in some deep way. With gratitude and admiration, there are ten in particular that I’ll extol in detail in the days between now and the Academy Awards ceremony.

If there’s any through line to my selections, it’s perhaps the pleasing notion that great moviemaking can come from just about anywhere. There are debuts aplenty on my list, as well as distinctive leaps forward in prominence for previously obscure creators. There’s a reasonable spread in both geography and genre, as well as a diversity to the theoretical target audiences these films might reach first.

And I think it’s notable that these titles reached me — or, I suppose, I found them — through an array of means that I would have found startling just a few years ago. Back in when I co-hosted a weekly movie review program on a college radio station, in the early nineteen-nineties, and we struggled to scrape together show lineups because the molasses-like turnover of features at our local theaters, the arrival of smaller, artier features through a streaming services at roughly the same time they opened in New York City would have been a godsend. Frankly, it still is. Churlish purists can wail about the loss of the communal, big-screen experience, but I’m simply glad I get to see these movies that would otherwise be highly elusive in my current Midwestern environs.

Anyway, the process begins tomorrow, with number ten, of course. Fair warning: It’s going to be a little gruesome at the beginning.