Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

This biopic about Freddie Mercury, the lead vocalist for the British rock band Queen, is the classic splitter. General movie audiences loved it, with a 98% rating on "Google users liked this movie." Professional movie critics unanimously panned the movie as historically inaccurate, formulaic, superficial, and melodramatic in the worst sense. I think both opinions are right. Mercury's story is inherently interesting, even if poorly told. He was born as Farrokh Bulsara into a Parsi (Zoroastrian) family in Zanzibar. His family moved to India, and then to England, where he changed his name to Freddie Mercury and helped to form Queen while working as a baggage handler at Heathrow. He was famously flamboyant on stage, bisexual, and died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1991 at the age of forty-five. The movie traces the meteoric rise of Queen, and then Mercury's decision to go solo. The band then reunites to rock the house at Wembley Stadium for a global audience of nearly two billion people in 150 countries at the 1998 Live Aid benefit concert. The title of the movie comes from Queen's 1975 song of the same name, which their producer refused to record because he considered it an incoherent mishmash that was way too long at six minutes, and which was horribly criticized when it was released, but then went on to be a wildly popular song.