Best and worst films of 2018

This year was a bit of a weird one for movies, in that a lot of the year’s biggest movies seemed to be movies that not everyone liked all that much. It’s always a worry when people seem to have been going to the movies out of obligation: it might be great for the studios now – they get paid no matter what your reason for going – but eventually if people start to feel like the only reason they’re going to see the latest Avengers film is because they’ve seen all the others, they might decide to cut their losses. Put another way, people liked Black Panther, but once the hype died down it felt like people admired it more for the statement it made than for the experience of watching it.
And outside of superhero movies, not a lot made much of an impact no matter how hard the marketing department went into overdrive: wasn’t there a Jurassic Park movie this year? Remember how there was that big push to make The Rock a big star when his two movies were Rampage and Skyscraper? There were plenty of decent films around, but when the big blockbusters are mostly duds – Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald was more a feature-length episode of a plodding television series than a movie – it casts a shadow over the whole year. Whether you like them or not, blockbusters are what brings people to the cinema and gets them into the habit of checking out movies on the big screen. When they have a bad year, everyone else suffers.
Best films of 2018
While this wasn’t an amazing year for films in general, I easily could have listed twice as many films here. While these are all in no particular order, just outside the top ten were a whole lot of films, including Roma, Cold War, Upgrade, Won’t You be My Neighbour, Sweet Country, A Simple Favour, Teen Titans Go! to the Movies, First Reformed, The Breaker-Upperers, Juliet Naked, and Tully. But this remains my top ten for 2018, for today at least:
*Lady Bird
*Can You Ever Forgive Me?
*Mission: Impossible: Fallout
*The Death of Stalin
*A Quiet Place
*The Boy Downstairs
*Incredibles 2
*Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
*A Prayer Before Dawn
*First Man
Worst films of 2018
There were an awful lot of firmly average films out this year, most of which I’ve already forgotten (not Skyscraper though. Or Ladies in Black. Or all those films with Boy in the title). But average isn’t the same thing as bad, otherwise there’d be a lot more superhero movies on this list. An average film just leaves you feeling not a whole lot, but all of these films felt like a waste of time. You can make a lot of bad choices and still end up with an average film; to make a film that’s actually bad you have to actively work at it.
*Truth or Dare
*Fifty Shades Freed
*That’s Not My Dog
*A Wrinkle in Time
*Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again
*The Happytime Murders
*Flipside
*Peppermint
*The Predator
*The Nutcracker and the Four Realms

Written by Anthony Morris