10 Certified Fresh 2014 Movies That Nobody Saw

Certified bombs that film fans need to track down.

Palo Alto Emma Roberts
Tribeca Film

Ask any film buff, and they'll tell you what a tragedy it is that, while so many average movies bring in the big audiences, many more truly great films don't get the recognition they deserve at the cinema. For one, the most commercially successful film of last year, Transformers: Age Of Extinction, made over $1 billion in cinemas, while many critically acclaimed smaller projects failed to break even.

To give an idea of what financial failure in the film world means, one of 2014's best, Anton Corbijn's A Most Wanted Man, grossed $31.6 million over its entire worldwide run. That would be considered a poor take, and that's without even taking into account the fact that Age Of Extinction made more in the US alone in just a single day.

And yet, A Most Wanted Man's box office figure would be considered a relative triumph to the films listed here. A Most Wanted Man was one of many well-regarded 2014 films that deserved to do better - but it at least made its budget back. The films in this list, meanwhile, barely reached seven figures at the box office, or didn't even manage that.

Even for independent movie productions, scraping around less than $1 million in a world of 7 billion people isn't just disappointing, it's a disaster. Here are ten films Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes that nobody (or next-to-nobody, anyway) went to see.

10. Joe

Palo Alto Emma Roberts
Worldview/Entertainment Lionsgate

At first, you have to wonder what an actor like Nicolas Cage is doing in a film like Joe - the film's a low-key, naturalistic character study, the actor's an OTT self-paordy with a face that launched a thousand memes. Then you realise what this is: an intervention, by director David Gordon Green, to show the world again just what Nic Cage can do.

It helps that Joe is built as a platform for the actor to climb back upon, but Cage gives his most subtle, most affecting performance in years in Joe. Not that the film is just about one man; it's a film about thousands of men, all of them tired of living in a part of the world that's been forgotten.

Joe seeks to give life to one of those areas - an atmospheric somewhere in backwoods Texas - and make sense of the men living in it. Green's bright idea is to leave Cage and Tye Sheridan - one of the best young actors around - to it, creating a supremely affecting cinematic father-(surrogate) son drama in the process.

Contributor
Contributor

Lover of film, writer of words, pretentious beyond belief. Thinks Scorsese and Kubrick are the kings of cinema, but PT Anderson and David Fincher are the dashing young princes. Follow Brogan on twitter if you can take shameless self-promotion: @BroganMorris1