10 great movies we never want to see again (and why)

Sometimes a movie is so bad that we wouldn’t want to hear from it again even if there was money involved. In other, more exceptional cases, we find good or great stories that put us to the limit as viewers.. We had such a bad time that we never want to hear from them again, even though they may be some of the best movies in the history of cinema.

It is not the case of all the films that make up this list, but there is something that they undoubtedly have in common: they left us shattered and we will think twice before diving into them again. Movies like ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ showed us that animated movies aren’t always for younger eyes, with a look at the devastation of WWII continuing to give us goosebumps. So did ‘City of Life and Death’ and more recent films like the French horror film ‘Inside’. Some are films that caused controversy at their premiere, and how could they not. You just have to give them a chance to know that it will be difficult to live that experience again. From Oscar-winning films to the most controversial films of the 80s, you never know when the cinema is going to leave you glued to the armchair or the sofa at home.

‘inside’

A pregnant woman, whose boyfriend has recently died in a traffic accident, waits at home, languid and alone, for the arrival of her baby… but not everyone is willing to wait for that special moment. Suddenly on a cold winter night a stranger knocks on the door with a goal in mind: tear the child from its strangers, without waiting for it to come out by natural methods.

The French Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury test the limit of the audience in a horror film so graphic that in each of the festivals in which the film was shown there were mass escapes (It is also among the films that caused fainting in the movie theater). Fast-paced and shocking, ‘Inside’ will leave fans of the genre as satisfied as traumatized. It is not exactly a happy place to return to again and again. Years later the ‘Martyrs’ also tried to repeat the coup, with uneven results. We do not know if it is one of the best horror movies of the 21st century, but it is certainly one of the most infamous.

‘revolutionary road’

If someone doesn’t know anything about this Sam Mendes movie, one can face it hoping to find the sequel to ‘Titanic’ that we never had because of a table that Jack Dawson didn’t fit in. Nothing is further from reality. The film adaptation of the prestigious novel by Richard Yates is a story about a marriage doomed to fail by the respective frustrations of its members, a deeply unhappy executive and a housewife. Each in their own way.

Kate Winslet should have won the Oscar for best actress in 2008 for this film, instead of ‘The reader’. We are looking forward to the Englishwoman and Leonardo DiCaprio shooting a movie again to get rid of this bad taste in our mouths. And if not, we will always have the possibility of getting on the Titanic again. Still, it’s one of Leonardo DiCaprio’s best movies and also one of Kate Winslet’s best movies.

‘City of life and death’

No one understood how ‘The Secret in Their Eyes’ could leave the 2009 San Sebastian Festival without the Golden Shell under the arm of its director, Juan José Campanella. Nobody who had not seen ‘City of life and death’, of course. Lu Chuan’s masterpiece takes us back to the 1930s, when the war between China and Japan faces its most savage atrocities, in one of the most violent films in cinema history.

Despite the Notable Steven Spielberg influences (which has challenged us not to return to its cinema with masterpieces such as ‘Saving Private Ryan’, one of the best war films in the history of cinema, and its harrowing Normandy landings, or the more than three hours of ‘ Schindler’s List’) in his eyes, it is hard to imagine the American filmmaker shooting a scene like that in which the corpses of several Chinese prostitutes are wheeled out after being raped to death by the Japanese army.

‘precious’

Lee Daniels arrived at the Oscars with a kind of film adaptation of the phrase: “Nothing happens, it’s better than dying”. This story about an illiterate black teenager, an overweight teen mom, and an abusive mother who throws frying pans at her and whose only source of light in her life is the daydreams that come to her mind when watching black and white movies is a succession of misfortunes each one worse than the previous one.

The excess of the film version of Sapphire’s novel ‘Push’ is about to jettison the extraordinary performances of newcomer Gabourey Sidibe and Oscar-winning comedian Mo’Nique. Something tells us that it is better not to go back to it so that it does not fall completely.

‘A monster is coming to see me’

The music of Fernando Velazquez. The impressive voice of Liam Neeson. The directing of actors by JA Bayona, who had already taken gold from a young Tom Holland in ‘The Impossible’. All the details of the tearful final act of ‘A monster comes to see me’ are designed to the limit to leave KO (and without tears) the viewer with a revelation straight from the pages of the book of the same name by Patrick Ness.

It took Conor three stories to understand what was going on with his dying mother. It was enough for us to see the movie once, cry everything weepy (it’s one of the best movies to cry your eyes out for a reason) and choose not to return to it so as not to get caught up in the eternal debate: is it also pretty or just sad?

‘The fireflies’s grave’

Isao Takahata’s classic represents an eloquent case of “if you’ve seen it you know why I don’t want to see it again and if you haven’t seen it, who am I to ruin your day?”. Studio Ghibli is behind this story starring two brothers from World War II Japan. Whoever said that animated films were only for children must not have seen ‘Grave of the Fireflies’.

Curiously, the Japanese studio released ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ in a double session with Hayao Miyazaki’s ‘My Neighbor Totoro’ in 1988, and we can only imagine the utter desolation after leaving the theater. Even so, It is undeniable that this is one of the best Studio Ghibli films and, by the way, one of the best animated films in the history of cinema..

United 93

Paul Greengrass was justly nominated for an Oscar for directing ‘United 93’, a chilling recreation of what happened inside one of the four hijacked flights during the 9/11 attacks. Three of them hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. This is the story of the passengers and crew who managed to prevent a fourth attack.

The documentary format, the use of semi-professional actors unknown to the general public and the absence of music are some of the tools used by the director of ‘Captain Phillips’ to provoke desolation and pain among the public. He got it, and how.

‘Shared custody’

Myriam and Antoine divorce and she requests sole custody of her son. He wants to protect him from his allegedly violent father. Xavier Legrand’s film could be a drama about a real and debatable fact: men have a harder time gaining custody of their children after family separation. However, it is not.

One of the best European films of the 21st century, ‘Shared Custody’ speaks, indeed, of a family destroyed by gender violence despite the fact that, for much of the footage, Legrand brilliantly plays with the characters and the expectations of the viewers when stating that in reality we could be facing a case of discrimination against the father. The last twenty minutes of the French film are probably the best horror film released in the last decade. At least it is the most realistic and plausible of all…. and one we wouldn’t want to go back to.

‘Requiem for a Dream’

Darren Aronofsky established himself as one of the most promising directors of his generation with the best anti-drug ad ever shot. Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto and Jennifer Connelly represent different types and degrees of addictions in a fascinating, demanding and extremely hard proposal released in the year 2000, when anti-drug campaigns were a constant on Spanish television.

The protagonist of ‘The Exorcist’ signs one of the most impressive interpretations of the turn of the century but even that is not enough to come close to a physically brutal and emotionally shattering experience again. Nor the suffocating staging of the director or the much imitated soundtrack by Clint Mansell, then in the first steps of his career as a composer. Nothing makes up for putting yourself under Aronofsky’s relentless scalpel again.

‘Dance in the dark’

Danish director Lars Von Trier won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000 with a musical melodrama starring Selma, a Czech immigrant and single mother who gives up her sight (literally) in order to save enough money so that her son, who also has vision problems, does not end up going blind like her.

If it sounds unbearable and hard, it’s because it is.. This is one of the most uncomfortable movies in the history of cinema. And we haven’t even gotten into the bleak ending of the film or the cruelest scene ever shot for this writer, an unnecessary robbery of Selma’s savings with an unhappy ending. Nor can we be surprised by the desolation left by the film: we are talking about the director of ‘Melancolía’, ‘Dogville’, ‘Breaking the waves’. ‘Dancing in the Dark’ is a masterpiece… that I have no interest in going back to despite Björk’s incredible performance or the overwhelming musical numbers. It’s too painful.