overrated

"It was Exquisite! Enchanting! Exciting! Enjoyable! And Extraordinary!"

o·ver·rate
verb (used with object), -rat·ed, -rat·ing. to rate or appraise too highly; overestimate: I think you overrate their political influence.
(The Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.)


Given the sheer number of movies now produced every year by the studios and the independents, the odds that most of them aren't very good are high. This provides something of a quandary for critics who occasionally have to find something, anything, to praise - or risk being branded (by readers and editors alike) as miserable cranks or curmudgeons deserving of their misery.

Modern film reviewing is now a relentless treadmill process, with untimely screenings and tight deadline schedules often resulting in hastily-thought-out reviews. Movies are routinely overrated (or underrated, as the case may be). The luxury of taking time to "read" a film - to think about it and savor it in a leisurely fashion - is now largely a thing of the past.

Today, I'm eshewing the usual suspects popping up on the various year-end lists to instead single out (alphabetically) those ten titles that have been seriously overrated by our overworked movie critics. I hasten to add that these are not bad or even inferior films, just wildly overrated ones. Here goes:

-"Charlie Wilson's War"

-"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"

-"Grace Is Gone"

-"I'm Not There"

-"Juno"

-"Knocked Up"

-"Lust, Caution"

-"Once"

-"Superbad"

-"La vie en rose"

Feel free to disagree.

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Anyone interested in perusing some 2060 of my film reviews, dating back to 1994, can do so by simply going to RottenTomatoes.Com