The Most Controversial Movies Ever

For my money, there’s no better site for film lovers than Letterboxd, the app and social media hub where users can log everything they watch, keep tabs on their friends’ viewing habits, create lists, and rank hundreds of thousands of films on a zero to five star scale.

You can also see the results of those rankings, and here at ScreenCrush, we already have pieces where you can browse through Letterboxd’s best and worst movies at a glance. But there are millions of users on Letterboxd, and they don’t always agree on what constitutes the best and what constitutes the worst, and that brings us to the topic of today’s piece.

These are the movies that drew the most disparate reactions from Letterboxd voters, the ones that drew half-star reviews (the lowest-possible score) and five-star reviews (the top score) in equal measure. Are they brilliant or horrible? Ingenious or maddening? You know what they say about how one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Whether you call these movies controversial or polarizing or divisive, they are the ones that some Letterboxd users had the widest range of responses.

The 25 movies below are drawn from a “Most Controversial Films on Letterboxd” list by user thisisdrew — with any and all short films, television series, and documentaries stripped out. (That last one especially seems like a subject worthy of its own list at some point down the line.) When you filter out all those other things, here are the most controversial films you are left with, ranked in ascending order…