10 Terrible Movies That Tricked You Into Thinking They're Good

Christopher Nolan's Tenet certainly benefitted from being the first major Hollywood blockbuster released in months due to the pandemic, and audiences were so starved of huge-scale tentpole content that even this profoundly frustrating piece of work was generally praised.

And as much as Nolan's Inception is often regarded as a film that makes the audience feel smart, Tenet goes the opposite way - it's a movie that makes them feel dumb, or at least, that the movie's smart and they just need to watch it a few more times to totally "get" it.

Tenet is impressive as a technical achievement, but does that make it a good film? Absolutely not.

Its jumbled, exposition-heavy narrative, made worse by a frustratingly muddy sound mix, is a chore to get through, but because Nolan is a singular auteur filmmaker, we're supposed to accept his work as visionary rather than, well, an example of a director sniffing their own farts.

Nolan is a canny manipulator, for sure, but don't be fooled by the peerless practical filmmaking - Tenet is a film that paradoxically feels both overstuffed and totally empty outside of its spectacle.