The best and worst of 2018

First, some caveats: I have not yet seen Aquaman, Eighth Grade or The Favourite, some or all of which might possibly sneak into my top ten. I also haven’t seen Gotti, because it didn’t get a commercial cinema release in this country and if we’re going to let direct-to-DVD titles into this kind of list then the worst movies of the year are all going to be things sensible people have never heard of. So these are all titles I saw at a cinema in 2018, otherwise the film of the year would have been Brawl in Cell Block 99 and we could have given up on movies by the end of January.

 

Best films of 2018:

As is often the way, I easily could have listed twice as many films here. While these are 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 all of these films felt like a waste of time at some stage or another: even when they weren’t actively bad it seemed like they’d deliberately made the choice to avoid being good.

*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

- Anthony Morris

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