10 Classic Movies People Wrongly Call Overrated

1. Citizen Kane

Consistently hailed as one of the best films in cinema history, it’s all too easy to dismiss Citizen Kane as overrated amidst all that fervent puffery, but just because a film is rated so highly it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s overhyped – sometimes it just is a really good movie.

Part of the reason Citizen Kane is so often tarred as overrated is because the trailblazing techniques – deep focus, mise en scène, flashback, split editing – used by Orson Welles, the then wunderkind of Hollywood, are so influential and ingrained in modern cinema that it’s easy to miss how truly ground-breaking they were the first time around over 70 years ago.

It’s important to acknowledge just how ballsy Citizen Kane was for its time too. A thinly veiled and unflattering biography of one of America’s most powerful men, William Randolph Hearst, the film so outraged the newspaper tycoon that he banned any mention of it in his publications. It’s a ‘f*ck you’ move cinemagoers might be more accustomed to today, but a bold move for its time.

Which other films belong on this list of wrongly castigated classics? Share your picks below in the comments thread.