6. Breathless
Here's a case of critics making the fatal assumption that just because something dares to go against the grain, it is worthy. Jean-Luc Godard's "seminal" entry into the French New-Wave is famed for its jarring aesthetic, which employs spurious jump-cuts to disorientate the viewer, alongside largely handheld camerawork to give it the now-famous "verite" faux-doc look. The problem is that while Godard's handheld work is immersive, the seemingly random use of jump-cutting pulls us out of the picture rather than pull us in; it reminds us that we're watching a film, and feels like a petulant protest against the seamless technical plaudits of Hollywood. Still, critics at the time - particularly French ones - were so taken with the film's rejection of contemporary Hollywood that they jumped on it like a tiger on a T-bone steak, hailing it as visionary and original. Still, the most original thing about it is its anti-hero, unsentimental and an evolution of the considerably safer Humphrey Bogart-type characters he models himself on.