Best of the Best Movies of 2018

Making the best of the "Best of" lists

I'm the kind of person who loves to optimize my life.  I love searching social media sites like Yelp to find the "best" tacos near me.  When I purchase gadgets or household appliances I always read some expert's opinion, like when I'm looking for  TV antennae.  Being a "data person", naturally I gravitate toward any kind of data-driven analysis.

Every year around this time, magazines and newspapers publish their opinions on "Best Movies of the year", which of course is the kind of thing I like to read.  "Why watch those lesser movies if I can watch the *best* ones?" is how my brain thinks.  But there are so many lists, it's impossible to know which one I will agree with.  NPR might have a hidden gem, but they ignore some of the big blockbusters i know I would like.  Rolling Stone might have more of the low-brow winners, but ignore the more high-brow entertainment that the NY Times loves.  When it comes to journalism, choosing your source is as important as which articles you choose to read.

Until one day, I found an article that analyzed which movies appeared on the most "Best of the year" lists at several major publications.   This is a brilliant way to diversify the journalistic bias away.  Just as a stock portfolio benefits from the diversity of investments, expert opinions benefit from a diversity of voices.  Unfortunately, that publication stopped doing that type of article several years ago.  Presumably the author moved on to another job.

Yet I still want that diversified media opinion!  So this year I set about making it myself.

Results and Analysis

Included here is the result of tallying the scores and fetching the supporting information (overview, genres, budget, etc).


The main analysis is the ranking by list count.  I included the percentage of lists that included the movie as well.

One stand-out result was the movie "Roma", which appeared in nearly 89% of lists and was ranked #1 in ten of those lists.  The next most frequently encountered movie was "Eighth Grade", which appeared in about 67% of lists but is never selected as the top choice.



I also did an analysis by genre.  One discovery is that Dramas have the most list appearances.  Drama is the most populous genre of movie for movies considered best of the year.  Science fiction is the least popular genre with only a single entry, an obscure independent film that only made a single list.

This could be because Drama is a pretty broad category.  If something isn't a comedy, action, or thriller then it could probably qualify as a drama.  Hamlet is drama, but so is Apollo 13.  One is about royalty in ancient Denmark and the other is about men flying through space.  To me they seem like very different movies, yet they share the same classification.  This may mean that Drama is just an overly broad category and more movies in general fall into this category.

However, the prevalence of Dramas in the best of the year lists could also indicate a bias critics have for this type of movie.  Anecdotally speaking, critics in general seem to praise slow emotional films over action oriented movies.

For example Venom, a sci-fi action movie that came out this year, only got 28% positive reviews out of 294 critic reviews.  Yet it received 84% positive reviews out of 36,008 audience (non-critic) reviews.  Meanwhile the drama The Other Side of the Wind received 82% positive reviews out of 84 critic reviews and only 57% positive audience reviews out of 253.  These two examples could be outliers, but in my experience enjoying a critically panned movie and hating a critically acclaimed movie is a fairly common occurrence.



I made another version of the Genre pivot table with the movie title and secondary genre of the movie (if available).  I think having a second genre can help if you're looking for a movie to watch, but the table gets a bit unwieldy to look at and ceases to tell a story.  For example, if you're looking for a good Action-Thriller it can direct you to the Commuter or Mission Impossible.  For an Adventure-Comedy check out Isle of Dogs or Paddington 2.

Methodology

I made a list of the 30 publications from the original "Best of the 'best of ' lists" article from 2015.  Then I googled "<publication name> best movies 2018" to see if they have a best movies of 2018 list.

Exceptions

Several of those publications didn't offer a best movie list: MTV, Publishers Weekly, and Bloomberg.

Some publications don't do a numerical ranking: TV Guide, Slate, LA Times, NPR, and the New Yorker.

In these cases I only note which movies are included in the list without regard to the order in which they appeared (usually alphabetical).

Exclusions

If publications had multiple lists I take the first one.  There was one exception to this where I included all movies and took the higher rank between the lists, but that was too much work.

Any "honorable mentions" or other mentions that are not part of the main list, e.g. not given a number in a numerical list but mentioned at the bottom, are ignored.  Slide show style lists, where you have to click to see the next movie, were cut short to ten (Entertainment Weekly) or ignored (Newsweek).

Lists that were more than 30 movies long I only took the first 15.  This was a difficult choice, but at some point I felt like publications were casting an impossibly wide net and missing the whole point of having a "best of" list: focusing on what are truly the best movies so you can ignore the rest.

Other Sources

In addition to gathering the names and rankings of the movies on the lists, I did some Javascript programming to call an API for additional movie information.  Specifically, I got the movie overview, genres, budget, and some sentiment ratings (votes cast, average vote) from The Movie DB.com

Including the movie overview I think is helpful, because if you're like me and don't watch many commercials or movie trailers then you may not know what a movie is about.

Conclusion

I learned that the approaches to creating "Best of" movie lists varies greatly by publication.  I also learned that if I selected any single critic would probably miss out on a lot of good movies, or find a list of lesser quality movies.  The diversified approach really does help to broaden the field while drawing your focus on the most important movies.

I also learned that if you're looking for a specific kind of movie, one that is not universally liked by critics, it's going to be harder to find the movie for you.  Sci-fi fans did not benefit from these best of the year lists much.  If you're a Drama fan, you benefit most from an aggregate list so you can focus on the top movies rather than sifting through hundreds of movies in the genre.

Personal Insight

Of the movies I've personally seen this year most of the good ones are represented here.  My opinions differ somewhat with the critics.  

My List

Here are the movies in this collection that I saw, ranked by how much I liked or disliked them.  

Movies I liked

1. Game Night
2. Isle of Dogs
3. Crazy Rich Asians
4. Ready Player One
5. The Commuter
6. Avengers: Infinity War
7. Black Panther
8. To all the Boys I've loved before
9. A Quiet Place
10. Death of Stalin

I noticed that all of the movies on my list were on at least one "Best of" list that I covered.  

Poor Selections

I did not agree with some of the movies that were selected by many critics.  

For example, the movie Hereditary was extremely boring. It was supposed to be a Horror movie but was not scary.  I was shocked to see it made so many lists (8).  

Missed Opportunities

On the other hand, there are other deserving films that I thought should get more attention.

For example, Venom was a great Sci-fi movie that scored low with critics but was a big hit with audiences.  I expected it to show up on more lists but didn't show up on any.