Movies I resented having spent money on (and that were praised by critics):
Wall-E
Gladiator
The English Patient
Eyes Wide Shut
I couldn’t bring myself to see Titanic, the trailers did me in.
I just wanted to add that some of my favourite movies are other people’s disappointments. I’m a big Coen brothers and Quentin Tarentino fan.
It’s just another example of the kind of pretentious and pompous negativity that people on the internet use to satisfy their own fundamental sense of inferiority. These threads happen on the SDMB and other such places over and over and over again. It’s tiresome.
There is no work of art so admired, no piece of music so beloved, no literature so respected, no film so revered, that someone on the internet isn’t going to bash it anyway with a inflated sense of self-importance.
That sounds like a pretty self-serving (and self-congratulatory) explanation. I expect the phenomenon has more to do with an echo chamber effect among critics.
Moreover, some of the movies in this thread seem pretty trite and shallow to me, which is the very problem with them. (Gladiator and Crash, for example.) Yet rather than call these movies out for their triteness, critics fawn over them and give them awards. Which gives the lie to the explanation offered, IMO.
It’s worth remembering that Academy Award winners are selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, not by polling the nation’s film critics. The Academy is made up of professionals from various branches of the industry, including actors, directors, screenwriters, film editors, effects people, producers, and executives. While it would be unusual for a movie that had been totally slammed by all the major critics to go on to win Best Picture, the Best Picture winner is not necessarily the movie that critics would have chosen. I’m pretty sure that there have been years where the critical favorite wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture.
I’ve just been playing around with Rotten Tomatoes, and Best Picture winner Titanic actually has the lowest Top Critic “Tomatometer” score of any of the nominees that year. The other films (As Good As It Gets, Good Will Hunting, L.A. Confidential, and The Full Monty) are all rated from 90-100% fresh by the designated Top Critics, while Titanic is only 71% fresh. The “Tomatometer” isn’t a perfect tool because it considers all reviews as either positive or negative, so a movie ranked as a 3-star film by all the top critics would look as “fresh” as one ranked as a 4-star film by the same group. A critic might also give a fun comedy or action flick a great review but consider it unworthy of consideration for Best Picture. But looking at the numbers, it seems likely that if the Best Picture winner were selected by critics then it wouldn’t have gone to Titanic that year.
Children of Men - a freight train of suck.
IIRC Titanic wasn’t a critical success so much as a box office tour de force which then became an Academy Award winning box office tour de force. I distinctly remember reviews (with which I ultimately agreed) that distinguished between the first and second halves of the movie basically suggesting that the first half was a kinda dumb date movie while the second half was was breathtaking. So I think it’s a somewhat unusual movie and perhaps not the best case of the “rave reviews”/“vastly overrated” designation.
Knorf, I understand the kind of sentiment you lament. I guess I don’t associate this thread with it for a couple of reasons. First, I think people’s tastes really do vary when it comes to cultural media like movies–and perhaps that’s no bad thing. Second, I think the phenomenon of the critically overrated movie is real and reflects an actual disconnect between critics and audiences which sometimes arises.
I suspect most posting in this thread have movies they deeply revere and feel passionate about. (That’s certainly true of me, despite my readiness to go to the mat over the dreary pretentiousness of Mulholland Drive.)
Happy Thanksgiving! 
And to you!
Pretty much any movie with Mozart, or Beethoven, or a piano. Any time someone makes a shallow, clumsily-telegraphed movie about Super Art People, the art community and critics are all afraid to be seen as “the one who didn’t like the Mozart movie,” and praise ramps up and up all out of relation to the actual value of the movie. I watched both Amadeus and The Piano, and was hard pressed to avoid blurting out “What the crap?” and disturbing the other viewers. These things were pedestrian at best, but were treated like the foundation of a new art form or something by everyone anxious not to appear “lower class.” I admit to skipping Immortal Beloved, which was described on IMDB as “Not quite as dramatic as AMADEUS, to which there are obvious comparisons…”
But for relative distance of the gap between the actual value of a film and its treatment by critics and the public, nothing can beat Terence Malick’s horrific, offensive The Thin Red Line. It wasn’t horrific and offensive because of its imagery of war; it was a horrific and offensive abuse of the principles of cause and effect and any sort of understandable storytelling. A breach of the implied contract between viewer and moviemaker: “I promise to try to produce something for you to look at.” In Malick’s case, that contract seems to have been reinterpreted as “this amount of money will buy me a lot of cocaine – have the janitor sweep up the leftover filmstock in any random order and see if we can sell it to someone.” Large sections of the film make no objective sense either as a reflection of, or a criticism of, cause-and-effect-based reality. It’s like a Dadaist critique of film editing, except the Dadaists would have done it intentionally to make a point; the film looks more like nobody could coax Malick to come out of his trailer until the blow ran out.
It didn’t get especially rave reviews, but it was so bad that merely by not calling for Malick’s arrest, people were greatly overpraising it.
The fact that Malick was able to find later work in the industry indicates he received grossly disproportionate favoritism. Or maybe his dealer has good connections.
“The Departed” I had seen the original Chinese version of this movie “Infernal Affairs” which was FAR better. Scorcese did give a nod to Andrew Lau, the director of “Infernal Affairs” in his acceptance speech.
But is The Piano about Super Art People? I always took it to be about a woman’s sexual and emotional independence which the piano symbolized.
Immortal Beloved is really great by the way and not especially like Amadeus. Like many movies starring Gary Oldman it’s almost campy. It’s mainly a lot of fun.
I’m going with “The Searchers”.
Different strokes for different folks I guess- I love some of the movies listed (Brazil, 12 Monkeys, The Searchers, Pulp Fiction, Amadeus, The Godfather (all 3!), Raging Bull, The Departed and Apocalypse Now -although only the uncut version, the original thatrical cut was hacked to bits).
My choice for worst critically acclaimed movie I hated is “Driving Miss Daisy”. I just don’t get why this story of a miserable racist biddy who remains a miserable racist biddy has any attraction at all.
As a previous poster said, I kept wishing Ralph Fiennes would just die in “The Engish Patient”
I’ll through in the Twilight movies as I can’t imagine they could make a decent movie out of such a horrid book. But, I haven’t seen them (nor will I ever) so that’s not really fair.
The Twilight movies have not received rave reviews by critics. They’ve received rave reviews from 13 year old girls, but both movies have been pretty poorly reviewed by professionals.
Fair enough
I have seen many of the movies in this thread and my regard for them varies from low to very high, as did their reviews at the time. There are several I haven’t seen and wouldn’t watch if the DVD was sitting in my lounge room. The one mentioned that I have seen and was amazed by its reviews relative to it’s quality was Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation.
It has so much to hate - the start of Bill Murray’s slide into becoming a piece of wood on film; typical Sofia Coppola boring, airheaded female characters (Kelly only exists so you don’t catch on what a waste of space Charlotte is), Asian stereotype jokes and generally boring, meandering pointless storytelling.
Friends insist that I am wrong but as yet I haven’t been able to summon up the will to give it another try.
No Country For Old Men
Someone had to say it.
I enjoyed The Dark Knight, and thought that Heath Ledger did a great job playing the Joker. Too bad he died so young, and in such a tragic way. I also loved the aerial scenes of Gotham. They were cool!