10 Classic Movies People Wrongly Call Overrated

4. A Clockwork Orange

Casual drug abuse and bludgeoning people with a giant ornamental dick may be par for the course today in film, but when A Clockwork Orange was released back in the early 70s such immorality and violence was still relatively shocking, at least if the reaction from certain corners of British society – including, ironically, death threats aimed at director Stanley Kubrick and his wife – are anything to go by.

Such reactions, and the fact that is was pulled from British cinemas in 1973 at Kubrick’s own request and not re-released in the UK until 2000, have likely prompted people to see A Clockwork Orange as overhyped. Yet it’s not so much the controversial sex and violence, comparably tame by today’s standards, that ever made the film great.

Rather more, it’s how it manipulates its audience into feeling both repulsed and sympathetic towards antihero Alex DeLarge, a character as sociopathic as he is charming, and how it poses big questions about criminality, free will, justice and rehabilitation – questions as relevant today as they were back then – without providing any solid solutions. It’s a brilliantly ambiguous foray into morality and ethics that doesn’t pretend to know the answer and for that is fully deserving of its place in classic cinema.