10 Movies You Only Like Because Everybody Else Does

8. Argo (2012)

Argo is a serviceable thriller movie - entertaining for the most part, a little dull in others. Somehow Ben Affleck's weakest film as a director (that's right: Gone Baby Gone and The Town are far superior flicks) ended up taking home the biggest prize in Hollywood, winning Best Picture back in 2013. Surely Amour and Zero Dark Thirty were much worthier?

Argo is a grand example of a motion picture that one person deems to be masterpiece, followed by another, and another and another, until - all of a sudden - the world has no choice but to acknowledge it as such. Sitting down to Argo, though, freed from the context of its runaway success, it's hard to see what the big deal is. Surely there was a mistake?

Because Argo, based on a true story that occurred in the 1970s, is a glum affair from start to finish; Ben Affleck gives a painfully dull performance in the lead role of a CIA operative tasked with mounting a fake movie production in order to get American hostages out of Iran. But reading the account of this amazing event is just as thrilling as actually watching Affleck's movie, which - for the most part - feels tepid and indifferent and unconcerned.

Worst of all, there's a sense that audiences were duped but Argo's faux-intellectual pretensions; that the collective were kind of pushed into thinking this was a great film.

And yet when was the last time you actually heard somebody talk about it?