Here are the 2018 movies you should really see

The end of the year produces plenty of “best of ” lists, which can be helpful guides. But how many of these recommendations, highlights and endorsements are based on social pressure or pretence rather than pure feeling? Film critics are often particularly guilty of succumbing to hipness and trends.

That’s why, when perusing movie critics’ choices for what was outstanding in 2018, it’s useful to also have a list of the year’s most overrated and underrated selections from a non-film-critic (that would be me), so you can sift between the stuff the professionals think you should like, and the stuff you may truly like, before picking your own pursuits.

Most overrated in the film department this year are two constitutionally different comedies, Crazy Rich Asians (pure rom-com) and Blackkklansman (comedy/ drama), neither of which is required viewing despite what you will read in cinematic reviews of the year.

Heavily praised for its progressive screen representation (At last, Asian actors in a mainstream Hollywood film!), Crazy Rich Asians is less fun than the fabulously frothy book it is based on, and the lead actors lack the chemistry needed to make us ache for their union and reunion, even if they are pretty to look at.

I can’t claim to fully (or even mostly) understand South Korean director Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 drama/ mystery Burning, but it’s stunning and evocative — a far better choice of a 2018 film with an all-asian cast, including Steven Yeun of The Walking Dead fame.

Meanwhile, in Blackkklansman, director Spike Lee takes the fascinating and promising true story of a 1970s African-american police detective who brings down the Ku Klux Klan. But Lee turns the amazing reality into a sometimes sneering, always knowing, never subtle political fiction that is too pleased with itself to feel around for authentic emotion or character.

You can’t take a film with this dearth of compassion and expect it to advance our understanding of, let alone fight against, racism and hate.

Better candidates for this job are the 2018 films The Hate U Give and Blindspotting, which both delve into social and racial commentary without the glibness. The latter movie is especially good at maintaining the humanity of its bad guys, while not shying away from exposing the damage they do.

When a critic tells you that you must not miss Sorry to Bother You, Boots Riley’s farcical 2018 cinematic take on the evils of racism and capitalism — and a critic will tell you this before we ring in 2019 — try Blindspotting instead.

In terms of the underrated, my heart goes out to 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody, the story of the British rock band Queen.

Film critics wanted towering Sacha Baron Cohen to play Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury. They got diminutive Rami Malek.

Film critics wanted a brutally raw chronicle of Freddie Mercury’s sexual excesses and physical deterioration from AIDS. They got a softened overview of both.

Film critics wanted an accurate timeline of the Queen and Mercury stories. They got a fictionalized version of reality that fit better into two hours and a story arc than the real thing.

No wonder the critics were cranky.

But they let their crankiness get in the way of seeing that, despite all these sins, Bohemian Rhapsody is one of the more moving and enjoyable films of 2018.

Rami Malek is endearing and delicate in a way I can’t imagine Sacha Baron Cohen being, despite Cohen’s incredible talent. And Malek captures Mercury’s physicality and movements perfectly, which is mostly because he’s a fantastic actor, but also because he’s close to Mercury’s size — certainly far closer to Mercury’s height than Cohen.

I don’t know what the mean age of a film critic is, but for this 44-year-old, Bohemian Rhapsody very accurately captured the feelings a young music fan had about Live Aid and the early days of the AIDS crisis in the mid-eighties. Those curious about the details will seek out a biography of Freddie Mercury and be satisfied from that. A movie that attempted to tackle the complex musician’s entire life and the broader social context of the AIDS epidemic would have been difficult to digest in a single sitting.

The past year proved to be a good one for movies, but you can’t always rely on the critics to tell it like it is. Sometimes it takes a movie-loving opinion writer with a law degree and no access to press screenings to set the record straight.