Critically acclaimed films that you didn't enjoy

"I was trying to keep someone from being hurt. I ended up making sure she was hurt"

Jake Gittes is my favorite Nicholson performance right after Jack Torrence. I really hated Chinatown when I first saw it. The detective/mystery angle of it, is probably the weakest part of it, but what I understood later is that the movie is hardly about Gittes getting to the bottom of the case. Rather a tragic romance and character study.
As far as wit and truthfulness go in a screenplay, there's not many who can contend with Chinatown.

Every time I watch it, the characters and the actors sweep me away. I can get some general idea of who they are, but I'm always puzzled as to what's really going on in their mind. I think that's one of the most enduring qualities of a great film. We understand that Jack Gittes is hurt, inside he's bitter and disillusioned.

[an anonymous caller has telephoned Gittes]
Ida Sessions: Are you alone?
Jake Gittes: Isn't everybody?

And yet, he's wildly charismatic, charming, funny. He still faintly believes he can make a difference. Even after the depressing finale, in a week or two Gittes will be cracking jokes and back to his familiar self on the outside.

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I saw The Departed recently and turned it off after an hour and a half.

tinker tailor soldier spy

Source code was critically acclaimed?? I found it to be barely average.

And come on, Gump, Shawshank, Rocky, Gladiator?? These are great movies!!!

FOr me, it's Unforgiven. No matter how many times I watch that movie, I just don't understand all the hub-bub!?

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Want to know if it's worth seeing a movie at a theater? Check out www.filmigos.com

American Psycho wasn't critically acclaimed but a lot of my friends and family enjoyed it, I found it to be a mediocre film, flawed and brutalized by its own story, although, I can't hate the performances.

Bringing Up Baby is a movie I cannot say I enjoy. There were some parts I liked and I love Katherine Hepburn, but I hate the rocky romance movies like Meet the Parents where everything that can go wrong will go wrong and yet they fall in love and or remain in love still. And leopards do not come from South America! Jaguars do! BAD MOVIE!

At least your favorite movies are famous in your society and so widely watched by many people. So there are many that love and many that hate these films, which make then interesting.

I like reading flame reviews of the movies I love. Because I understand that the reasons why I love those movies are exactly the same reasons that people hate those movies.

I really didn't enjoy Citizen Kane. I just found it boring.

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You are no Vader. You are just a child in a mask.

I didn't really enjoy No Country For Old Men, Million Dollar Baby or A Beautiful Mind to name a few recent ones.

The Artist
The Descendants
Lincoln
Les Miserables

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Last Films Seen (out of 4)
The Thin Red Line (3rd) 4/4---Notes On A Scandal=3/4
GRAVITY- 4/4--- Star Trek Into Darkness- 3.5/4

Shakespeare in Love

Oo yes, just incredibly cringeworthy, for me anyway. Apart from some of the Hathaway scenes, found this to be one of the worst musicals I've seen.

It's impossible to criticize anyone's choices here. This is about films we didn't enjoy even though they were critically acclaimed.

If people don't enjoy a film, they simply don't. There's no accounting for taste.

But can it serve a purpose to constructively criticize a person's taste without being a douche? It's a tough call, but it's probably best when someone reflects about it and makes an effort to change their own taste, at least as being more open to different types of movies goes.

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

Me too! The performances were great but the whole movie felt like a very very long documentary and a boring one at that. Lincoln's presidency was highlighted by the American Civil war yet there wasn't a single battle scene. Including at least once would not only have upped the excitement but shown us the horrors of what many Americans were going through at the time and the plight of the "Buffalo Soldier".

The very first scene was a battle involving black soldiers. "Buffalo soldiers" fought after the Civill War, not during it.

A lot of people would say that Lincoln's presidency was highlighted by his Emancipation Proclamation and his overall effort to abolish slavery. If you read various histories about this, some reasons behind this decision about slavery might not have been as altruistic as is generally led to believe.

Nonetheless, the final years of Lincoln's life were marked by Lincoln's conviction that outlawing slavery was the right thing to do. And the movie Lincoln focuses on the political wrangling that led to him achieving his goal.

For me, this was a much more interesting and relevant focus than a bunch of battle scenes would have been. The Civil War was a product of Lincoln's decisions about slavery, but Lincoln wasn't a general. If the movie had been about Ulysees S. Grant, Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson, then battle scenes would have fit just fine.

For all those who said Bladerunner

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Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
Buddha

One thing about old movies is that they tend to be slower paced than modern ones and also they tend to use a different cinematic language, which means it takes some effort to learn how to watch those movies.

If one only watches Hollywood movies made over the last 10 years, such a person will have only learned the cinematic language used in these movies and thus will have difficulty watching older movies or movies made with other cinematic traditions.