10 "Guilty Pleasure" Movies You Shouldn't Be Ashamed To Love

3. Love, Actually (2003)

There aren't many who will actively admit to disliking Richard Curtis' near-on gag-inducingly sentimental Christmas time romance, Love Actually - but those same people probably wouldn't be all that prepared to defend it as a great film, either. Which means that, like previous Curtis works such as Four Weddings and A Funeral and Notting Hill (both of which could have made this list for their own reasons), Love Actually is one of the most universally accepted "guilty pleasures" movies, presumably because most people like at least one of its many, many storylines.

The reason Love Actually is so often poised as a movie you should force yourself to feel guilty for watching, though, stems from the simple fact that it's so intoxicatingly unrealistic - almost as if it's a... fantasy? And therein lies the inherent problem: for once, Richard Curtis has penned a romantic comedy that near enough acknowledges itself as pure hokum (the mysterious character played by Rowan Atkinson kind of seals the deal on this front). Thus, we should be enjoying Love Actually not as something to be ingested with guilt, but as a beautiful, implausible fantasy.