Twas the night before Christmas
And the tree was a-wobblin’
What’s that beneath it?
Behold! a Screen Goblin!

She sits by the hearth
With her fingers so green
And tells a sweet tale
Of a year on the screen

Ready Player One
Set in a computer
Was still better than
Liam Neeson’s Commuter

The Florida Project
Was one we liked most
Followed by Meryl
And Tom in The Post

At that time came one
Of our favourite stories:
Three Billboards Outside
Ebbing, Missouri

Then Lady Bird
About a mother and daughter
Lost out to Del Toro’s
The Shape of Water

Gary Oldman as Churchill
In his Darkest Hour
Plus Mary and the
Witch’s Flower

Feb’s Early Man
Was rather silly
A Fantastic Woman
The best film from Chile

In the month of April
Among the best films we saw
Was The Avengers
Infinity War

But aside from the good
It’s been a year of slogs:
Halloween, Yardie
And Isle of Dogs

Also not good
Was Matt Damon’s Downsizing
And the equally poor
Pacific Rim: Uprising

In June Hereditary
Was ever-so gory
Yet less-so than Solo:
A Star Wars Story

But while Solo was bad
Happytime Murders was worse
We preferred seeing Spidey
In the Spider-Verse

In July Tom Cruise proved
He can still go all out
With the stunts in Mission
Impossible: Fallout

Sometimes the good films
Came in tandem
Like Cold War and Spike Lee’s
Klan film Black Klansman

In August Slender Man
Failed to inspire
As did Roman J
Israel Esquire

For much of the year
The Rock was centre stage
Tall buildings, gorillas
Skyscraper, Rampage

In First Man Ryan Gosling
Went to space, cold and dark
And then in The Meg
Statham battled a shark

The wonderful Breadwinner
Was a real surprise-a
Great film unlike the
Second Equalizer

And then we went back
To the dinosaur zoo
In the comically bad
Jurassic World 2

When it got to July
Then we went to see a
Cher-laced sequel
To ABBA’s Mamma Mia!

Lady Gaga shone
In A Star is Born
Religious piety abound
In First Reformed

The long Peterloo
Needed an editor
But it was still better
Than September’s The Predator

October brought us
Very much crap to see
But we greatly enjoyed
Bohemian Rhapsody

November had one of the
Best films we’ve seen
Viola in Widows
By Steve McQueen

In American Animals
Books were robbed, not read
Day Lewis bowed out
In Phantom Thread

A drama about
A marriage of convenience
Rachaels Weisz and McAdams
In the great Disobedience

Many LGBT
Films found fame
Love, Simon and Call Me
By Your Name

It was an excellent year
For one Michael B Jordan
Black Panther and Creed 2
Won’t soon be forgotten

December brought us
An early look
At Viggo and Mahershala
In the fantastic Green Book

In the Christmas season
The time to be jolly
See Coogan and Reilly
As the great Stan and Ollie

Old Man and the Gun
Awards surely a pinch
Which is more we can say
For the lousy The Grinch

So now we say bye
To 2018
And all the delights
That we saw on the screen

To all of our readers
Who we love and hold dear
A very Merry Christmas
And a Happy New Year.