10 Most Divisive Films Of All Time

Some filmmakers set out to make crowd-pleasing movies which entertain as broad an audience as possible. Chilean director Gaspar Noé is not one of those filmmakers. If anything, he's the anti-crowd-pleasing filmmaker par excellence, determined to ruffle as many feathers as is humanly possible.

Nowhere did he achieve this aim more successfully than with Irreversible, his 2002 psychological thriller starring Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci as a couple whose night out turns into a nightmare after a vicious rape in a Parisian subway. Structured in reverse, the film begins with a murderous act of revenge involving a fire extinguisher and a head, rolling back through a ten minute single take rape scene to earlier that day in a sunlit park.

Noé's film is deliberately grotesque and disturbing, which accounts for the audience's divided reaction. Hater either couldn't stomach the excessive violence or thought it to be pointlessly gratuitous. Fans, on the other hand, admired the confrontational seediness and Noé's technically accomplished direction, arguing that the vile imagery and audience repulsion at the violence was precisely the point.

The division was just as evident from the critics, with Roger Ebert describing it as "a movie so violent and cruel that most people will find it unwatchable". Others saw fit to vote for it as one of the greatest movies ever made.