Top 10 Most Surprising Films Of 2018

For a few years now, I’ve been making it a point to highlight the most surprising films of the year; the ones I went into not expecting anything worthwhile, yet walked away impressed in one way or another. I usually take the time to list the most disappointing films as well, but in a showing of just good 2018 was for films, the disappointments were honestly few and far between. As for the surprises, they’re not just surprisingly good; most of them came from filmmakers I never would have expected to be capable of anything as watchable as the films I’m about to get into. Here are my picks for the 10 most surprising films of 2018.

Top 11 Biggest Surprises (2017)

2017 will likely be remembered for a lot of things: First full year of the Human Jaffa as the U.S. President, a series of sexual abuse allegations that made us all question our “heroes”, some of the worst box office returns in the history of Hollywood, Andrew Tate being an absolute fuck-knuckle, and that's just for starters. However, at least in the context of what I do on this blog, 2017 came to mean something a little different: Namely, it was one of the most consistently surprising years since I starting doing this. Never before have my expectations been so efficiently worked around, resulting in a lot of films during the year that I never would have guessed would be as good (or as bad) as they were. Which films genuinely turned out better than I suspected going in? Let’s find out. Here’s quite possibly the most apt year to do this for: It’s the Top 11 Biggest Surprises of 2017.

Top 11 Biggest Surprises (2016)

2016 was a pretty depressing year. Whether you believe in a higher power or not, the incredibly high mortality rate for childhood icons and life-long heroes was enough to make us at least question if someone on-high was trying to mess with us. However, I wouldn’t exactly call this a bad year overall because while the real world may have been rather uninviting, the more creatively inclined definitely got their shit together. Aside from seeing industry titans in the realms of music like Metallica, A Tribe Called Quest and Nick Cave release some of their best material in years, this has also been an astoundingly good year for movies. Not only that, this has been a surprisingly good year in that regard with a lot of films being a lot better than I think anyone could have expected them to be. So, in light of wanting to show 2016 as being far more entertaining than the world seems to have given it credit for, here are my picks for the Top 11 films of 2016 that were far more entertaining than they had any right to be… and in keeping with my last list, chances are that you’re not going to like our first entry.