this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2025
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Movies & TV

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Here's a list of tons of leftist movies.

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My pick: The Silence of the Lambs

Literally never got the hype, it's an aggressively mid movie. Not scary. No deeper message. Just a snoozefest of a movie.

Bonus Pick: The Godfather

Although I did like the movie, I didn't think it was top tier like its commonly placed. There's a ton of pro-AmeriKKKan propaganda and undertones in it as well.

Bonus bonus pick: The Matrix

I can see why people enjoyed it, the themes are interesting first time around. I just found the action scenes and Keanu Reeves character incredibly cringy. Kind of ruined it for me.

Alright Hexbear what are the most overrated movies in your opinion? Feel free to call me an uncultured pleb in the comments too.

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[–] ElChapoDeChapo@hexbear.net 54 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Forest Gump, final answer

I could write a whole fucking novel about what an overrated piece of reactionary trash this sad excuse for a movie it is but I really don't feel like wasting any more time even thinking about it because that's just how much I hate Forest Gump

[–] WrongOnTheInternet@hexbear.net 14 points 1 week ago

I would like to hear more

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[–] PKMKII@hexbear.net 41 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Based off the IMDB list and the AFI list:

Forrest Gump. Just a nostalgia montage, and the “mentally handicapped guy ends up being ridiculously rich by chance” plot in retrospect feels less heartwarming, more emblematic of how much the boomers got life handed to them on a silver platter. Plus it’s the poster child for the “you never go full r****d” problem with dramatic acting.

Wife’s choice: Gladiator. Overrated acting, overwroughtly manly man schtick. Like, fine as an action film but not Oscar-caliber. Plus, I knew someone who was deep into ren faire and historical recreation and she was so annoyed it won the best costume Oscar despite there being costume elements involving metal working techniques that didn’t come along until the middle ages.

[–] InevitableSwing@hexbear.net 26 points 1 week ago (3 children)

It won the best costume Oscar despite there being costume elements involving metal working techniques that didn’t come along until the middle ages.

That's hilarious. I had no idea.

[–] Belly_Beanis@hexbear.net 28 points 1 week ago (6 children)

There's a bunch. Rome wasn't white marble, they painted the shit out of everything (also dicks graffiti'd everywhere). Over millennia, the paint wore off and people in the Renaissance didn't have the technology to scan the marble, so they thought it was plain white. All the fascination with Greece and Rome during that era resulted in depictions of Rome as a white marble city. The show, Rome, has a more accurate representation of what the city would have looked like.

In the opening scene, the "catapults" are trebuchets, something invented hundreds of years later for destroying castle walls, not launching fireballs. It's like if you had a movie about the American Civil War and the Union calls in a drone strike using flag signals. Also, flaming arrows were never a thing (a lot of movies do this).

The forest isn't right, either. It's a monoculture forest, which wasn't something that existed until early industrialization when Europe had cut down too many trees. To make up for overharvesting, they planted as many trees as they could, using whatever they had available. Germania during the Roman Empire would have forests that were incredibly diverse, even during winter. There would have been dozens of species.

You don't slash/cut with a Gladius. You can because it's still a sharp sword. But the primary method of using it was stabbing. They were meant to expend as little energy as possible while fighting in tight formations. The blade could easily slip between two shields while the shields were held up to block. Opponents with other weapons would have trouble staying in packed formations like the Romans could while wearing themselves out. Gladiator isn't the only movie guilty of this, though.

Those are some of the main ones. It's still one of my favorite movies, but it's about as accurate as Enemy at the Gates.

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[–] barrbaric@hexbear.net 26 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Ridley Scott is a deeply incurious man who prefers telling a "good story" to any sort of historical accuracy. See also: the whole Napoleon shooting the Sphinx, and this rather interesting video on orientalism in music about using Armenian instruments in scenes depicting Morocco.

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[–] Kefla@hexbear.net 15 points 1 week ago

Any "historical media" that isn't run by a complete history nerd with absolute control over every decision is going to have tons of shit like this. It's almost all terrible for anyone who has a clue about the time periods being represented.

[–] upmysleeves@hexbear.net 34 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

the deer hunter. ultimate lib movie about how we waged the vietnam war but we feel bad about it and didn't they deserve it just a little bit? really gross.

I like young christopher walken's performance quite a bit but it also ends on a scene where all the characters gather round a table and sing 'god bless america'

yuck

[–] Belly_Beanis@hexbear.net 35 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It also does the thing where it depicts crimes done by the US as being done by the US's enemies. The NVA did not slaughter entire villages (including children) and definitely not just because. There were extrajudicial mass killings of reactionaries, spies, and collaborators, but never My Lai type shit the US and its allies were doing.

[–] upmysleeves@hexbear.net 21 points 1 week ago

yes!!! it's real atrocity propaganda bullshit

[–] blunder@hexbear.net 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's interesting bc I always saw this movie as a depiction of how the US imperialist war machine destroyed young men and American communities. I thought the singing scene was bitterly ironic. Been a long time since I saw it now but I recall it as an anti war movie

[–] upmysleeves@hexbear.net 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I think your read on it was right...which is part of why the movie makes me so mad. It does put a lot of effort to depict how fighting in Vietnam destroyed these men, but it also validates the supposed reasons americans were there in the first place by depicting the viet cong as murdering civilians for actually no reason at all. The obsession with death instilled in these men throughout the movie are shown to originate from the vietnamese(seen through the famous russian roulette scenes)...not the American military

The singing scene has a quality of liberalism dissent after everything that came before it imo

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Wtf. Just an hour ago my brother said the two most overrated movies are the godfather and the matrix.

Are you .....?

The Venn diagram of "dudebros who loved The Matrix for the shootout scene" and "people who know that the red pill is ethinyl estradiol" looks like the taillights on an early 1980s Corvette.

[–] BodyBySisyphus@hexbear.net 26 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I don't know if it's the most overrated, but there's a special spot in my spleen for Arrival. It establishes a universe with hard determinism and then totally fails to engage with it. The plot is resolved by a Chinese general convincing himself not to Launch the Missiles via a time paradox that, again, the movie makes no attempt to engage with. It's a perfect artifact of its time (2016) because it's a pure distillation of American liberalism, a broody, pseudointellectual exercise so convinced of its own inevitability that it no longer needs to justify itself.

[–] mendiCAN@hexbear.net 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

didn't they lift the whole time travel mechanic from slaughterhouse 5?

[–] BodyBySisyphus@hexbear.net 11 points 1 week ago

It's apparently based on a Ted Chiang short story that's allegedly better, but I haven't gotten around to reading it.

[–] SootySootySoot@hexbear.net 26 points 1 week ago (3 children)

The Matrix is my favourite film of all time, it's a commentary on the human condition and one's purpose in life, but it's not a timeless film. It's almost explicitly about cultural stagnation and the veiling of authoritarianism as enabled by the context of a newly encroaching digital age. I would personally call the fight scenes fantastic, but I see them through the lens of 20 odd years ago when I had quite literally never seen anything like it before.

I think it struggles now with something that Halo 1 struggles with - It pushed its medium beyond the limits and borderline invented a new genre. But now that people have experienced the thousands of films(/games) that took that and built on it, people don't get the hype and will say it looks tired and overdone, in the context of today.

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[–] tricerotops@hexbear.net 23 points 1 week ago (6 children)

i think to really get the matrix you had to have been a teenager in 1999.

[–] kleeon@hexbear.net 21 points 1 week ago

a lot of the matrix just feels corny now due it being memed and copied to death

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[–] mendiCAN@hexbear.net 21 points 1 week ago

Feel free to call me an uncultured pleb in the comments too.

i think SotL is an excellent story with Jodie Foster facing down both rampant workplacce sexism and Anthony Hopkins at his creepiest (he only had 16 minutes of screentime). watching them play mind games with each other is like Light vs L ... Buffalo Bill tho

[–] Le_Wokisme@hexbear.net 16 points 1 week ago (3 children)
[–] LeninWeave@hexbear.net 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Legally, you are allowed to have this incredibly incorrect opinion.

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[–] Arahnya@hexbear.net 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

When I first watched the matrix it was 1999 and we watched it three times in a row, back to back. The final movie is mid but the first one was a sweeping phenomenon, given the subtext and the closeted nature of 1999

My wife says Scarface "or every western ever"

My pick : Lawrence of Arabia

Radically underrated movie of all time : Waterworld 😏

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[–] largerfather@hexbear.net 15 points 1 week ago (5 children)

You’re wrong about all three.

Top of my head, I’ll say

  • Swingers
  • Dirty Work
  • Mother!
  • Taken
  • Heat
[–] SnokenKeekaGuard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Oh yeah heat. Fucking heat is the one I couldn't find the name of. Michael Mann, alpacino, deniro movie didn't have quite the same ring to it.

100% the objectively correct answer.

Not only is of overrated I can't even find it within myself to appreciate it.

Mother! is very widely disliked and arronofsky I would bet has cried in his bed about this.

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[–] Belly_Beanis@hexbear.net 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)
  • Quentin Tarantino movies are all mid. His only good ones were Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction. Everything else he ever does is just copying Akira Kurowsawa scenes, adding everyday conversations to the mix, then killing everyone at the end because he doesn't know how else to end the movie because he hasn't actually written anything.

  • Requiem for a Dream

  • I feel like I should like David Lynch, but I don't. I've enjoyed a lot of films described as Lynchian, just actual Lynch movies feel really boring with this feeling of IDK how to describe it...like it has a gross plastic coat your aunt covers her furniture with but never cleans?

  • Adam Sandler sucks.

  • Chris Pratt sucks.

  • Sean Penn sucks.

  • Johnny Depp hasn't done anything worth seeing in decades at this point.

[–] BelieveRevolt@hexbear.net 14 points 1 week ago

Also Tarantino lives in fucking Israel.

I can't believe Requiem for a Dream is seriously considered to be some masterpiece, it's so corny it could be shown in schools as anti-drug propaganda.

[–] SnokenKeekaGuard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Final destination bloodlines has a 6.7 on IMDb and 73 on metacritic. I'd give it a fat fucking 0. Thats as overrated as you get.

In a similar vein if those 2 ratings vs mine. The biggest differences would be.

  • Ted
  • MiB 2
  • the green mile and the whole genre.
  • american sniper and the whole genre.

Better but still overrated: I'm sorry these are cult classics I know

  • Collateral
  • knocked up
  • cabin in the woods
  • snatch
  • baby driver
  • Schindlers list (and genre)
  • gladiator
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[–] BelieveRevolt@hexbear.net 15 points 1 week ago (3 children)

The Dark Knight. I guess it's not exactly Godfather or anything, but it seems to be held in greater esteem than most comic book slop, probably because the dialog is I'm 14 and this is deep. It has horrible Bush-era politics in it too (we have to give all our data to cops or the terrorists win), which makes it incredibly dated, although the sequel outdoes it in that regard. I won't even mention that the plot makes no sense, because that usually doesn't matter that much in movies like this.

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[–] Vingst@hexbear.net 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] wideopenarms@hexbear.net 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] Dort_Owl@hexbear.net 15 points 1 week ago
[–] Flyberius@hexbear.net 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] blunder@hexbear.net 23 points 1 week ago

My 2yo niece would be extremely pissed at this comment if she could read

[–] Weedian@hexbear.net 13 points 1 week ago

in bruges. I dont know why everyone on the internet loves this one I thought it was really boring and I dont think i laughed once

[–] nothx@hexbear.net 13 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I appreciate you calling out the godfather. That movie never hit the way people talked about it.

[–] upmysleeves@hexbear.net 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I honestly think the godfather movies are just so incredibly influential that it's very hard to appreciate them for their own merits if you're under the age of 40. The Exorcist is like this too- I like that movie but so much of it has been baked into the culture more broadly that it's hard to grasp what made it compelling originally.

edit: not to say I'd defend the godfather from this though. I'm not crazy about it either, but that's my perspective on the movie

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[–] kleeon@hexbear.net 12 points 1 week ago

It insists upon itself, Lois

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[–] CyborgMarx@hexbear.net 12 points 1 week ago

The obvious answers are the big four; Gladiator, the Dark Knight, Saving Private Ryan and Titanic

Bonus: Every single Marvel movie

The first 45 mins of the Matrix are just too interesting and fun for it to be called overrated, especially when you consider the year it came out

[–] IncensedCedar@hexbear.net 11 points 1 week ago (7 children)

Airplane, because it was hyped up to me to such an absurd degree. "The funniest movie of all time" etc. Nah. Not really

[–] Le_Wokisme@hexbear.net 11 points 1 week ago

if you're under the age of 50 you probably also didn't get all the jokes

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[–] comrade_pibb@hexbear.net 11 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Office Space is such a BS movie

[–] Le_Wokisme@hexbear.net 27 points 1 week ago

sounds like someone has a case of the mondays

[–] SootySootySoot@hexbear.net 14 points 1 week ago

Working in IT, the Printer scene alone has made me feel more validation than any other video in history. And for that alone I am strictly honourbound to disagree.

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[–] gramxi@hexbear.net 11 points 1 week ago

scorese hasn't made anything I liked since casino and the departed felt like a sloppier infernal affairs

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