And so dawns Christmas week and arrives an end-of-year feature we dread, oddly (you can check out all our Best of 2014 coverage here). It’s where The Playlist team members loses a bunch of respect for certain other teammates when we discover the films that we individually regard as the most over- and underrated of the year.
The whole notion of “overrated” and “underrated” (particularly the former) is problematic: it implies two value judgements about a film —its quality and the perception of its quality/reputation. It’s difficult enough to agree on the first aspect, but trying to gauge the second adds another layer of subjectivity. But let’s say in the broadest terms that how we determine how a film is “rated” has little to do with box office (“Maleficent” and “Transformers: Age of Extinction” may have made way, way more money than we preferred, but that doesn’t mean anyone’s gonna call them “overrated”) and more to do with a generalized idea of how it has been received by...
