10 Recent Movies That Weren't What Anyone Expected

When Kevin Smith announced that his new movie would be a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age comedy, did anyone expect it to be anything less than 90 minutes of the filmmaker's signature vulgarity combined with his ever-increasing tendency for self-referential humour?

But The 4:30 Movie is, surprisingly enough, the most wholesome thing that Smith ever has and probably ever will make - who among us would expect the writer-director of Clerks, Dogma, and Tusk to produce a genuinely sweet dramedy this late into his career?

Though some might miss the more full-throated zing of Smith's "View Askewniverse" movies, there was something enormously refreshing about the director pushing the excessive pop-culture references to the periphery and focusing on a simple dramatisation of his own youth as a budding filmmaker.

That is to say, the comparisons to Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans weren't entirely unearned, even if this is a much slight and more low-key affair. 

For Smith to be capable of something this restrained this far down the road, though, is frankly shocking.