The 10 Least Fun Movies of All Time, Ranked

Image via Warner Bros. Pictures Published Oct 12, 2026, 6:11 AM EDT Jeremy has more than 2800 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas. Sign in to your Collider account "Girls just want to have fun," said Cyndi Lauper once, and so too do filmgoers, more often than not. Movies are often fun, and if something’s a successful crowd-pleaser, it’ll usually be heavy on entertainment value, not to mention unlikely to feel heavy in the traditional sense. See Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and even sometimes unsettling movies like Jaws which, even with the horror, is still hugely enjoyable and easy to describe as “fun.” Fun’s not a feeling that every movie wants to inspire, though, and the following titles are a testament to that. These are, more or less, the least fun movies of all time, but there’s going to be a focus on movies that intentionally don’t try to feel fun. As for the least enjoyable movies of all time that are actually trying to be entertaining… well, that’d kind of be another topic entirely. 10 'The Ascent' (1977) Image via Mosfilm The Ascent is a World War II movie that isn't as focused on combat as most war movies, with it being potentially more of a survival film that just so happens to be taking place during World War II. Two men set out on a journey through dangerous territory to try and get food, but the weather is brutally cold and there are various other obstacles that make such a trek arduous in some unanticipated ways. You feel the desperation here to a truly intense degree, and the closest you'll come to feeling entertained by anything in The Ascent is while you're marveling at some of the spectacular cinematography. Still, it being a beautiful film is a little different from it being a fun film, and The Ascent is not fun at all. It is hard to fault, though, as an anti-war movie, with films of this kind having to be miserable most of the time for hopefully obvious reasons. 9 'The Devils' (1971) Image via Warner Bros. Since it’s an exceptionally dark historical drama that also functions as a horror movie of sorts, it’s safe to call The Devils a pretty bad time overall. It’s a good movie but a bad time, taking place during the 1600s and involving a witch hunt against a priest, led by a nun, with all sorts of people going along with it and then increasingly violent and strange things happening as a result. It’s a bit hard to lay out just where it goes, and how it gets there, especially if you want to avoid getting into explicit details… hard because The Devils is so explicit and detailed, not just for a movie of its age, but by any standard, really. Like, the fully uncut version wasn’t made widely available and publicly screened until 2026, 55 years later, and it’s still filled with moments that feel shocking by 2026’s standards. You'll come away feeling awful, but also likely impressed with the acting and filmmaking on display here. 8 'Scenes from a Marriage' (1974) Image via Cinematograph AB Probably the most intense movie from the 1970s that doesn’t belong to either the thriller or horror genre, Scenes from a Marriage is instead a pure drama about the final stages of a marriage. There’s a five-hour miniseries version, and a theatrical cut that’s closer to three hours, but either way, what you're in for is a series of uncomfortably well-acted – and drawn-out – arguments, essentially. Great movie for sure, and one people should watch, but probably just the one time. That’s what most of the scenes in Scenes from a Marriage are concerned with showing. It did get a sequel of sorts (Saraband) many years later which does end the whole thing on a slightly more bittersweet note, but as for Scenes from a Marriage specifically, it’s not much else but harrowing and downbeat. Great movie for sure, and one people should watch, but probably just the one time and then never again. 7 'Digger' (2026) Image via Warner Bros. Pictures It’s hard to talk about exactly what goes down in Digger, and it’s still a recent release at the time of writing, so things are going to be vague. Basically, it’s a very in-your-face and intentionally annoying satire that isn't particularly funny, albeit for an interesting reason. You can’t get into that reason, in the fairness of not ruining things, but it is what makes the movie kind of good, in the end, rather than just annoying. Still, the frustration is there, and you feel it for much of Digger’s runtime. It’s possible to admire Tom Cruise’s acting, and some of the visuals, but you're made to feel frustrated until Digger finally starts to reveal itself, and what the “point” of it all was. It makes for a challenging and clever film, sure, albeit one that’s ultimately very hard to describe as entertaining in any sort of way. 6 'The Human Condition' (1959–1961) Released as a trilogy, but definable as one massive movie, you're put through a lot when you watch The Human Condition, right alongside the epic film’s (or epic trilogy’s) protagonist. Kaji is a pacifist trying to uphold his morals at the outbreak of World War II, and the whole sprawling narrative sees an escalation of situations that challenge those morals he holds, forcing him to do – then internally justify – a whole range of harrowing things. Owing to its length, The Human Condition manages to be a movie about entering a war, going through that same war, and then trying to survive its aftermath. It’s perhaps one of the best war films of all time while also being one of the most challenging, and it does score extra points on the misery front for being so downbeat and brutal for such a long runtime. 5 'Winter Light' (1963) Image via Svensk Filmindustri There was an Ingmar Bergman movie mentioned earlier (Scenes from a Marriage), and he made enough heavy-going movies in his time that it feels worthwhile to include one more: Winter Light. This film’s about a priest having an existential crisis, and then all the while, a bunch of people around him are also miserable for their own reasons, and no one seems able to help anyone else with anything. Even for Ingmar Bergman, it’s dark, and more tragic overall than something like The Seventh Seal, which is a downer in some ways, but also, there is a small amount of catharsis there, by the end, amongst the darkness. Winter Light, on the other hand, doesn’t really have any light at all, and watching it is a pretty much guaranteed way to feel like absolute trash for approximately 80 minutes. 4 'Angst' (1983) Image via Les Films Jacques Leitienne Like Winter Light, Angst is a very short feature film, clocking in at just 75 minutes, though you're made to feel as bad as possible for each and every second you spend watching this. Intentionally or not, it feels like a deconstruction of home invasion movies, and in a more realistic way than something like Funny Games (though that movie is worth an honorable mention, alongside just about anything directed by Michael Haneke, who consistently stays away from “fun” throughout basically all his movies). Anyway, Angst is about a serial killer infiltrating a home and then targeting the family that lives there. “I’ve seen it all before,” you might be thinking, but no, not executed quite like this, because Angst is impressively nauseating and nightmarish in its feel from start to finish, being both an incredible horror movie and one of the most unpleasant films ever made at the same time. 3 'An Elephant Sitting Still' (2018) Image via KimStim Back to long movies now, An Elephant Sitting Still is about four hours all up, but doesn’t really feel like an epic because it doesn’t cover a great deal of time, and it’s also very intimate and small in scope. The only way it gets somewhat sprawling is due to the manner in which it follows a handful of different characters, all of them going through their own personal struggles. There is a real authenticity to the sadness here, and an exacerbation of it when you go into An Elephant Sitting Still knowing about the director, Hu Bo, and how he took his own life after finishing the film, but before it was released. It would've felt haunting without that, but it becomes extra despairing because of the real-life tragedy inevitably tied to the film. It’s a masterpiece, but a deeply sad one, and then it’s further saddening to think about what else Hu Bo could've done, had he lived. 2 'Satantango' (1994) Image via Vega Film The runtime of Satantango is almost double that of An Elephant Sitting Still, meaning if you watched both these films back-to-back, you would need almost 12 hours of free time to do so. You would feel absolutely rotten at the end of it all, obviously, especially if Satantango was the second film in that honestly cursed double feature, since not only is it longer, but it’s arguably more miserable. It takes place in and around a small village where everyone is some kind of lost, usually spiritually and emotionally, and in some other ways, and then the despair compounds when someone comes to the village and starts manipulating people for his own means. Everything falls apart gradually, or maybe it’s more accurate to say everything decays, and you can feel the rot happening pretty much in real time. Don’t watch this movie. You might like it, sure, because some people do respect Satantango, but also, life is short, and you might find it to be too much for too long. Like, could the point not be made in three hours? Did it have to be seven-and-a-half? 1 'Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles' (1975) Image via Olympic Films Unlike the two previously mentioned movies, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles focuses on just one woman for its whole runtime, and that runtime is long, like the movie’s title. Granted, not as long as An Elephant Sitting Still, and definitely not as long as Satantango, but the 200-ish minutes of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles pass by about as slowly as cinematically possible. The titular Jeanne Dielman goes about her daily routine for several days, living a thankless and repetitive life, with a very slow sense of routines falling apart a little, day by day. Something happens at the end, but other than the end, nothing else really happens. And that’s the point, ensuring the film is powerful as a feminist statement, but by design, it’s about the least engaging thing one could ever watch.