It’s easy to get caught up in the moment and let your emotions run away with you. Just ask anyone who paid £600 for Oasis tickets only to realise they were sick of hearing “Wonderwall” and that it was going to be impossible to get a babysitter anyway. Belated buyer’s remorse is just as much a feature of the big screen, where mediocre films are often heralded as masterpieces in the moment. It’s only afterwards, when the hype has died and critical faculties have returned, that we can admit to ourselves that a supposed 24-carat classic is actually a tin-plate clunker. Here are 15 movies praised to the skies over the past 25 years, but which time has arguably revealed to be cinematic dross. This baffling parallel universe caper stars Michelle Yeoh as a disillusioned laundry worker who dreams of the many glamorous lives she might have led had things panned out differently. But nowhere in these alternate existences does anything resembling a serviceable storyline emerge. One scene follows another, with little evidence of a unifying plot or satisfying arc. Despite these flaws, the film mopped up at the Academy Awards. Among its seven Oscars were gongs for Best Actor (Ke Huy Quan), Actress (Yeoh) and Director (the duo of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who annoyingly refer to themselves as “the Daniels”). But don’t despair. There is surely another dimension out there where the Academy resisted its quirky hipster charms. Daniel Day-Lewis and his moustache spend three hours roving Gilded Age California, menacing homesteaders and growing robber-baron rich in the process. Such was the premise of Paul Thomas Anderson’s ponderous epic – a film rendered in the image of Lewis’s monolithic method acting style, which, as ever, functions as a black hole sucking every trace of joy out of the movie. The genuinely compelling story of how eccentric boffin Robert J Oppenheimer ushered in the atomic age and then immediately regretted it is flattened out into a portentous biopic by Christopher Nolan, the grandmaster of plot twists that nobody understands (Interstellar) or make less sense the more you think about them (The Dark Knight Rises). Despite Cillian Murphy’s best efforts to breathe life into Nolan’s two-dimensional take on Oppenheimer, the movie never achieves liftoff. Typically for Nolan, it instead mistakes hokey indulgence for cutting-edge filmmaking – as demonstrated by the re-staging of the first nuclear blast at Los Alamos, which, by Nolan’s telling, resembles an outtake from an early Star Trek sequel. Having previously inflicted several stodgy Bonds on us, Sam Mendes next set himself the challenge of reimagining Forrest Gump as a World War I epic. Because that is what his Oscar-garlanded 1917 boils down to: George MacKay’s heroic Lance Corporal running, Tom Hanks-style, across a series of epic backdrops in a pretty, vacant movie that unfurls like the world’s priciest screen-saver. Nolan’s second entry on the list and a film that turned a key moment in the Second World War into a glum evening on a beach in France. In this age of super-powered CGI, recreating the vast sweep of Dunkirk should have been a breeze – yet Nolan substantially reduced the headcount of soldiers trapped by the German encirclement in Northern France to hundreds rather than tens of thousands, thus diminishing its historical significance. Further detracting from the impact was the baffling decision to cast a random assortment of It boys, including Harry Styles and Fionn Whitehead. They looked like a bunch of male models on a gap year gone wrong rather than battle-hardened infantry menaced by a German pincer movement and fighting for their lives. Meanwhile, Tom Hardy is gifted his own timeline, only hazily connected to the action elsewhere and puttering around on a Spitfire to underwhelming effect. The horrors of the Second World War are subjected to the 1990s hipster sensibilities of the man behind Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Tarantino coaxes career-best performances from Christoph Waltz (as a preening SS commander) and Michael Fassbender (as a British commando who affects a questionable German accent behind enemy lines). But the film’s aura of self-satisfied clowning around is ultimately its undoing. It makes for a typically over-the-top Tarantino rollercoaster ride – but, given the subject matter, the ironic sensibility is a queasy fit. Ask most people what they recall about the Oscar-winning Coen Brothers adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel, and they will invariably mention one of two scenes. The one where Javier Bardem’s curtain-haired sociopath Anton Chigurh forces one of his victims to toss a coin, thus deciding whether he lives or dies (he dies). Or the speech at the end where Tommy Lee Jones’s character recalls a dream in which he reunites with his late father – a monologue widely interpreted as the character realising he is a man whose time has passed and that he will soon be joining his dad in the afterlife. The sequences are indeed stunning. Sadly, the rest of the film is B-grade noir, while the off-screen exit of Josh Brolin’s character (at the hands of a random gang of bandits) is an anticlimax almost as stunning as Bardem’s fringe. Russell Crowe huffs and puffs his way through the clichéd story of an imprisoned soldier who rises to greatness, while Joaquin Phoenix’s hissing, unhinged performance as an evil emperor foreshadowed the distracting indulgences of his later career. By the time Gladiator came around, director Ridley Scott’s reputation as a master of beautiful and haunting imagery was assured. Yet the genius who had painted such stunning portraits of the future with Alien and Blade Runner was in workmanlike form throughout Gladiator, a film as lumpen in appearance as it is predictable in plot. Marvel had already descended into a hellscape of laugh-free “banter” by the time sometime B-movie horror director James Gunn got his hand on the franchise’s most unlikely heroes (including a sentient tree voiced by Vin Diesel). He was never going to play it straight. But did he have to play it so quirkily by crowbarring in references to Seventies rock’n’roll and cramming the script with so many jokes the characters never had a chance to breathe? Three Guardians films later, the answer is depressingly in the affirmative. James Cameron could have spent the latter half of his career making thoughtful, trigger-happy sci-fi in the tradition of his early masterpieces Terminator and Aliens. He instead vanished into the blue yonder with a glorified makeover of Dances with Wolves set amid the cerulean-skinned Na’vi inhabitants of Pandora. Worse yet, he rested the whole affair on the charmless shoulders of Sam Worthington, playing a human who, ahem, “goes native” with the Na’vi. Upon its release, Avatar received widespread praise for its innovative 3D technology. So it’s a shame that Worthington’s performance was so two-dimensional in both the first film and its bafflingly successful 2022 sequel Avatar: Way of Water, a film millions flocked to see – and have never once thought about since leaving the cinema. Did you know Kate Winslet was in it? Does Kate Winslet know she was in it? Harry Potter, only a bit more arthouse – such was the widespread response to the Hogwarts hero’s third outing, directed as it was by cineaste darling Alfonso Cuarón. Prisoner of Azkaban is certainly less clunky than its predecessors, brought to the screen by journeyman Chris Columbus. But 21 years on, Azkaban has the feel of a passionless exercise in box-ticking by a filmmaker who quietly thinks he’s too good for this nonsense. Fair enough, there are bright points: the ghoulishly absurdist “Knight Bus” that features early on, a bizarre cameo by once-and-future Stone Roses singer Ian Brown. Still, it’s ultimately hard to detect much enthusiasm for the Potterverse either from Cuarón or the film’s anti-hero Gary Oldman. Fuelled by oodles of smugness and some forgettable pastiches of Steven Sondheim showtunes, Damien Chazelle’s love letter to the City of Angels is hellishly pleased with itself. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling are not without charm as star-crossed lovers trying to make it big in southern California. The problem is that Chazelle, still coasting on the boy wonder status bestowed by his debut Whiplash, doesn’t know when to stop. If it were made of marzipan, this vapid valentine to the golden age of Hollywood musicals would have eaten itself in a single sitting. Daniel Craig was credited with dragging Bond into the 21st century with his debut as 007. Actually, he sucked all the fun out of the supposedly dashing super-agent. Yes, as played by Sean Connery and Roger Moore, Bond was always a ruthless killer. But he was also a suave one-liner merchant for whom heaven is a martini at the roulette wheel. It was an aspect of Bond that Craig chucked overboard – leaving nothing in its place but a dour hitman with more pecs than personality. This Darren Aronofsky misery-fest confronted audiences with the bombshell revelation that taking loads of drugs might potentially negatively impact your lifestyle and generally be bad for you. This shocking message was unpacked via the story of four ordinary individuals in the grip of addiction – played by the frowning foursome of Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly and Marlon Wayans, each of whom finishes the tale in the foetal position. Adapted from the Hubert Selby Jr novel of the same name, the film’s message is, of course, both urgent and timeless. Drugs have always destroyed lives and, sadly, always will. But in Aronofsky’s subtlety-free hands, the project gets high on its own self-satisfied anguish. There will always be an appetite, in the United States especially, for the insufferable Oirish-isms of London-born and raised director Martin McDonagh. Fully aware of his target audience, he trowels on the Darby O’Gill nonsense in this toxically twee tale of a fictional island brimming with village idiots off the coast of Galway in the early 1920s. Fair enough, McDonagh can only make one kind of film (unless he is caricaturing inhabitants of the American South rather than Irish people, as he did with Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri). But why are actors of the calibre of Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell and Kerry Condon so keen to pander to the global audience’s idea of Ireland as perpetually trapped in the 19th century? Answers on a giant bar of Irish Spring soap.