15 Movies That Thought They Were Smart But Totally Weren't

9. Sunset Song

Art-house films get a far worse reputation than they deserve - many of them are absolutely great - but some are very self-indulgent, pretentious and overall annoying. Sunset Song, a hit-or-miss adaptation of a classic Scottish book, is a great example of the kind of thing people are talking about when they disparage art-house movies.

The direction from British auteur Terrence Davies is terrific and so are the performances from Kevin Guthrie and Peter Mullan (as fearsome as ever), but unfortunately Sunset Song doesn't quite get off the ground. Slow, portentous and never as moving as it could've been, Sunset Song is honestly a bit of a chore to sit through.

Its pretentious tone makes it all worse; this mainly comes through in the form of the voice-overs from Chris, the film's heroine (Agyness Denn). Of course, Denn's wooden acting and terrible attempt at a Scottish accent don't exactly help, but these are generally some of the worst, most nauseatingly pretentious voice-overs in recent memory, in which Denn reads passages from the book.

These do not fit the film At All. Sunset Song is OK overall, but one can't help but wish it'd been less full of itself.