23 Movies That Sound Stupid But Actually Rule

Some of the best movies are necessarily hard to describe. They’re dense and complicated, so trying to boil them down to a sentence produces a really dumb one. Try explaining to people that the most recent Best Picture winner was about a family-run laundromat but also a multiverse where people sometimes have hot dog hands or how one of the most acclaimed movies of all time is a day in the life of a group of people variably involved in organized crime who are all connected by a gangster whose briefcase was stolen. You’ll sound like an asshole.

This was on Redditor redlorryyellowlorry9’s mind recently because “I was talking to someone at work about films the other day and I mentioned I’d recently seen The Prestige,” they wrote. “He somehow had never even heard of it, yet when I described it as a film about ‘two rival magicians trying to discover each other’s secrets,’ he laughed at me and said that sounded awful.”

To be fair, he’s not wrong. And so, redlorryyellowlorry9 proceeded to ask r/Movies, “What great film has a premise that makes it sound like it’ll be terrible?” and Reddit commiserated about blow-up dolls, sexually transmitted demons and sports math.

23 The Social Network

22 Fargo

21 Barbie

20 Lars and the Real Girl

19 12 Angry Men

18 Moneyball

17 Groundhog Day

16 In Bruges

15 Her

14 Mulholland Drive

13 Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

12 It Follows

11 Jojo Rabbit

10 Arrival

9 Spirited Away

8 There Will Be Blood

7 The Lego Movie

6 Swiss Army Man

5 What We Do in the Shadows

4 Glengarry Glen Ross

3 Green Room

2 Fight Club

1 Adaptation

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