25 Movies With Surprising Letterboxd Scores

There’s something fascinating about the human need to quantify subjective opinions. We rate movies with stars (and even half-stars), we give them thumbs up or down, we aggregate their reviews until we determine if they are “certified fresh.” (What could be more authoritative than certified freshness? Who could argue with that?!?)

These numbers sometimes fly in the face of our own personal opinions — and occasionally seem to defy what we understand to be the wider consensus based on our conversations with other movie lovers, or from reading reviews, looking at box-office charts, and following what movies win at the Academy Awards each year. While I look at the great film-based social-media website Letterboxd, I always glance at a movie’s average score based on users’ zero-to-five star ratings. Sometimes I find myself downright flabbergasted by those numbers.

After keeping a running list of surprising scores on my computer for a while, I’m now sharing it publicly. It’s sorted by average Letterboxd score from lowest to highest, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the first couple movies are underrated and the later ones are overrated. Each entry is included for different reasons. One may routinely get treated as a punchline by cinephiles, but you wouldn’t know that from its Letterboxd score. Another is a hugely influential and commercially successful horror film, yet its score is shockingly low. And so on.

What does all of this mean? For me, it’s a reminder that everyone has an opinion, and sometimes ours colors what we believe is true of others. See how your own opinions mesh with these 25 movies that (at least to me) have very surprising Letterboxd scores.