10 Groundbreaking Films That Are Actually Terrible

TCCOBB (as all the groovy kids are calling it) is a film that succeeds in its vaulting technical ambitions and fails absolutely everywhere else.

TCCOBB received thirteen Oscar nominations, including the nod for all the top awards except Best Lead Actress - yet all it won was make-up, visual effects and art direction. Damned with faint praise - you have to rate David Fincher’s accomplishment, but dear god you don’t want to ever have to sit through it again.

It’s certainly something to hold up as an example of what can be done - but it’s a terrible film, meaningless and callow. Fincher is not the man to direct a slow-moving drama about epoch-defining love: his best movies are merciless, highly crafted slices of high-concept cinema, arch and cold, and unfortunately so is this.

Nearly three hours long, TCCOBB moves like treacle, as though every moment was designed to be weighty - but because it’s so inconsequential, going for sentimentality or artifice over depth every time, that slowness becomes torpor, pompous and self-indulgent.

You don’t ever get the impression that Fincher is as interested in the story or the people in it as he is the cunning way he’s telling it, which would be fine for a thriller or a horror movie, but not at all for the ethereal drama he’s aiming for. There are no grace notes despite the technical beauty of the visuals, no breathless moments that might make you want to come back. What a waste of time.