10 Recent Movies Nobody Saw Coming

Though movie studios traditionally spend tens of millions - hundreds of millions, even - promoting their biggest releases, sometimes films just feel like they come out of nowhere, being kicked into cinemas at a mere moment's notice.

More to the point, every so often a movie will end up being anything but what we anticipated, delivering something totally different - whether for better or worse.

That's absolutely the case with these 10 recent films, each of which rocked up and turned in the furthest thing from expected.

Perhaps they deviated sharply from the genre or the filmmaker's previous work, or even ensured we all saw the cast in a whole new light.

Other movies arrived with minimal marketing and blew everyone away regardless, while some were unquestionably dud projects being unceremoniously dumped in cinemas with only the most perfunctory advertising.

While the majority of movies released every year don't offer too much in the way of surprises - because as surveys consistently show, mainstream audiences hate being surprised - these films dared, in ways both good and bad, to carve their own path...

Guy Ritchie has certainly proven himself to be a jack-of-all-trades filmmaker over the years, yet whether he's making a blokey crime romp, classy spy joint, action-fantasy flick, or mega-budget Disney movie, there's been a consistent playfulness to his works that make them distinctly Guy Ritchie movies.

Yet Ritchie's most recent film, The Covenant, is like nothing else he's produced before, enough that you'd probably never believe he made it were his name not attached to the title.

The war drama, focused on a U.S. Army sergeant (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his Afghan interpreter (Dar Salim) fighting the Taliban, is a totally straight-faced war movie entirely devoid of the wink-wink cheek that defines Ritchie's filmography.

It's a terrific film that's at once stylish, affecting, and brilliantly acted by Gyllenhaal and Salim, and all the more surprising given that Ritchie co-wrote it.

His trademark flippancy - so perfectly suited to his crime comedies - is nowhere to be seen, replaced with an earnestness and solemnity you'd never really expect from the guy who started his career with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

This isn't to say that The Covenant is a grim, miserable slog, because it isn't at all, but it's pretty much the last thing anybody would've expected from Ritchie - a restrained, serious entry into a genre he's never touched before.

Better yet, it ended up being the best-reviewed film of Ritchie's entire career to date. Who could've seen that coming?