10 Recent Movies Nobody Saw Coming

10. Guy Ritchie's The Covenant

Guy Ritchie has certainly proven himself to be a jack-of-all-trades filmmaker over the years, yet whether he's making a blokey crime romp, classy spy joint, action-fantasy flick, or mega-budget Disney movie, there's been a consistent playfulness to his works that make them distinctly Guy Ritchie movies.

Yet Ritchie's most recent film, The Covenant, is like nothing else he's produced before, enough that you'd probably never believe he made it were his name not attached to the title.

The war drama, focused on a U.S. Army sergeant (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his Afghan interpreter (Dar Salim) fighting the Taliban, is a totally straight-faced war movie entirely devoid of the wink-wink cheek that defines Ritchie's filmography.

It's a terrific film that's at once stylish, affecting, and brilliantly acted by Gyllenhaal and Salim, and all the more surprising given that Ritchie co-wrote it.

His trademark flippancy - so perfectly suited to his crime comedies - is nowhere to be seen, replaced with an earnestness and solemnity you'd never really expect from the guy who started his career with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

This isn't to say that The Covenant is a grim, miserable slog, because it isn't at all, but it's pretty much the last thing anybody would've expected from Ritchie - a restrained, serious entry into a genre he's never touched before.

Better yet, it ended up being the best-reviewed film of Ritchie's entire career to date. Who could've seen that coming?