23 of the Most Pretentious Movies Ever Made
There are three kinds of movies: good ones, bad ones and bad ones that think they’re good ones. (There’s also romantic comedies, which operate outside a linear good-bad continuum, but that’s a different article.) The latter can be even more insufferable than your run-of-the-mill stinker. A bad movie might have awful acting, unhinged pacing and plot holes big enough for Michael Bay’s hard-on for dynamite, but a pretentious movie will have all that while also bending over to smell its own farts the whole time.
Over in r/Movies, Redditor Ornery-Mode992 was pondering just such butt-sniffing. “For me, (it’s) a movie that tries to be something it’s not and possibly fails, but it could also be a movie that’s trying to be smarter than what really is,” they said. After which, they asked, “What do you think is a pretentious movie?”
Reddit, of course, was more than ready with countless tales of Oscar bait, missed opportunities and a whole lot of Hollywood circle-jerkery.
Garden State
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Joker
Tenet
Prometheus
American Beauty
Downsizing
Don’t Look Up
The Blind Side
Cloud Atlas
Boyhood
Antichrist
Rubber
La La Land
Birdman
Argo
Crash
The English Patient
Eat Pray Love
The Shape of Water
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
Oppenheimer
Now You See Me
