10 Ridiculously Overhated Recent Movies

It's a Wonderful Life. A Clockwork Orange. The Thing. Vertigo. Fight Club. Home Alone.

All six of those beloved films originally opened to mixed or even outright negative reviews; a fact that is sure to bewilder today's audiences.

Let's not forget, one of those films, Vertigo, was voted as the greatest movie ever made by Sight & Sound in 2012, and there are countless other examples of films where their reputation grew and grew over time.

Sometimes, critics and audiences are a little too eager to bash a recently-released film which really wasn't all that bad, and the following 10 films are great examples of that.

Now, are any of these movies destined to be renowned as cinematic masterpieces on par with Vertigo or It's a Wonderful Life? No, almost certainly not, but are they the bad movies many critics and audience members accused them of being? Far from it. They really deserve to be given another chance and appreciated for the solid films that they genuinely are...

Remember American Hustle? That based-on-a-true-story dark comedy from David O. Russell which was alright, but somehow snagged a staggering ten Oscar nominations?

If you don't remember it, that's not exactly surprising as, once it rather satisfyingly won absolutely nothing at the Oscars, it was usually only brought up in conversations about overrated recent movies. But if you do, then David O. Russell's latest movie Amsterdam feels very similar to American Hustle in many ways.

Just like that movie, Amsterdam's a dark comedy based loosely on fact, and just like American Hustle, it's a perfectly OK movie with great acting and assured directing compensating for a wildly hit-or-miss screenplay. Therefore, it's pretty puzzling that American Hustle received such acclaim (at the time, anyhow) while Amsterdam received largely negative reviews from critics.

It really isn't that bad at all, and mixed reviews would've reflected the quality of the movie so much better. Amsterdam is deeply flawed and uneven, while John David Washington is a little weak in one of the main roles, but David O. Russell - repugnant human being by all accounts, but undeniably talented - does a typically good job as director, and the rest of the ridiculously stacked cast do solid work as well.

It's a decently entertaining, often enjoyably twisty affair that deserves to be remembered as a decent effort and a mixed bag of a film, rather than as the outright failure many accused it of being.