You can walk out of a movie in a huff, or recognise that you’re making a boss move.

Is it OK to walk out on a film that you’re not enjoying?

It might happen during the opening scene or credits. Realisation may dawn halfway through a movie or five minutes from the end.

Knowledge could crystalise gradually, or be achieved in a dazzling epiphany. You have come to understand that the movie unfolding before you in the cinema is not up to scratch. It’s short of the mark. It might be lacking in some essential component – a plot perhaps – or possibly surfeited in undesirable aspects, say poor dialogue or annoying mannerisms from the actors involved.

Or perhaps the movie you have paid to see is offensive, puerile, excessively esoteric, self-indulgent, or worse still, boring. Some films are “sickening, utterly worthless, shameless trash”.*

What then to do? Do you sit it out, patiently and stoically, a bit like remaining at a game your football team is destined to lose ignominiously? Or do you simply grin and bear it, gnashing your teeth all the while?

There are two schools of thought that might be applied here.

One posits that all cultural objects, having been started must then be concluded, whatever the cost. The author/director/maker put a lot of time and effort into the book, film or sculpture, and you’re going to enjoy it, dammit. Sometimes art can be difficult or challenging, and you might not fully appreciate it until much later. Should you leave early, this understanding may never be achieved.

Another approach, and the one to which I am more inclined to adhere the older I get, says otherwise. Realising that our time here is limited, it’s OK to apply a reasonable standard of quality to the films we’re viewing – regardless or perhaps even because of the ticket price.

I haven’t always been an early departer. Part of the reasoning that might have kept me stuck to a seat in the past is the hope a film will improve. It may not have shown much in the time you have given it, but it’s still possible for it to get better.

This, or course, flies in the face of the maxim that past performance in the best indicator of future form.

Lately I have begun to fully embrace the early departure when confronted with an ordinary film. There is power in this move, and boldness too. It says to the saps watching poor films through to the end that you will not embrace their groupthink, regardless of what a particular reviewer says.

Hey, you can think for yourself, and what your thinking is that a particular movie does not deserve your time. And that’s OK. You made a mistake. We all do it.

Is it acceptable to walk out on a movie, leaving behind those who accompanied you to the cinema? Well, this is the definitive statement, actually. It says that putting up with whatever your friends say afterwards is better than remaining for even a single minute more. My partner Lucy up and left Wes Anderson’s The French Despatch before it even reached the one-third mark. And this at a premier opening-night screening, with a bunch of chi chi gourmet snacks and a special magazine tie-in issued.

But I wasn’t disappointed with Lucy, because I could see she was finally getting on board with the leave-early concept.

During previous cinema forays we’d stayed the course with such eminently departable fare as The Lobster, Dog Man and Murder on the Orient Express.

The first was a disastrously self-indulgent opus from critical darling Yorgos Lanthimos, and as humourless as it was unpleasant.

The second was an unremittingly grim neo-realistic slice of Neapolitan life, and the third a somnolence-inducing whodunnit, the best thing about which could be said was that Kenneth Branagh’s moustache deserved its own credit.

It’s been said that The French Despatch is the most “Wes Anderson” of Wes Anderson’s films, replete with the minutiae and tropes that have made The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and
The Royal Tenenbaums the enjoyably quirky films they are.

But when I Googled “Films that have been most walked out on”, The French Despatch was right up there, so a lot of people obviously share Lucy’s disdain and impatience.

There is an inclination to think that those of us who can’t sit through unpleasurable (I won’t say “bad” because opinions are always provisional, and some bad films can be terribly good fun to watch. Classic example: Dante’s Peak) lack forbearance in other areas of our lives. With this I can’t concur. Disappointment is the prevailing sensation at play here. We expect a modicum of quality in the art we experience, and hope for the best.

Sitting in a cinema allowing sound and images to float over you may be one of the great simple pleasures in life, so an incidence that doesn’t allow this to proceed is going to be jarring.

Here are 10 films that had that effect.

Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (2023)
It’s possible that this Guy Richie/Jason Statham actioner is passable. I have enjoyed Richie’s recent offerings such as The Gentleman, and Wrath of Man, in which Statham was impressive.
But the sound levels at the labyrinthine Lido cinema where I saw (some of ) this film were so ear-drum-splittingly loud that I will likely never know.
Yes, I could probably check this one out via streaming, but Statham did appear to be phoning it in, Hugh Grant and his egregious mockney accent were grating, and the whole thing had a by-the-numbers feel to it. It was good to see Josh Hartnett back on the big screen (albeit somewhat briefly given the early exit). Mr Hartnett delivers a very solid performance as part of the ensemble cast in Oppenheimer – and that is one film for which it is worth staying the distance.
This one, not so much.

The Solitude of Prime Numbers (2010)
If the title of this movie sounds a touch pretentious, that’s because this Italian art film, screening as part of the MIFF a few years back, was pretentious, and not just a touch.
My memory is a bit hazy on the plot, but I can recall an 80s setting, a thumpingly insistent (possibly incongruous) techno soundtrack, and a sense of foreboding around an ill-advised skiing sortie down a challenging-to-the-point-of foolhardy ski run.
Disfiguring injuries may have been involved.
Were integers divisible only by themselves and one critical to the plot? This has escaped in the mists of time. Speaking of which, there was a lot of mist, fog and other assorted atmospheric vapour floating about.
It took my friend Liz a bit of convincing to up and leave early. But once we observed the film’s stars and director vamoose about halfway through, all bets were off.

Julien Donkey-Boy (1999)
Again, my memories of this one are sketchy. This tends to happen when you make a habit of not staying until the very end. Anyway, I can recall dragging my friend Dave along to a screening at what must have been one of the early iterations of The Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF).
Dave suffers from a form of sleep apnoea, nodding off at the drop of a hat, and he was snoring within minutes of the opening title sequence. A good thing for Dave, that.
Though my memories lack clarity, a quick internet search tells me the plot concerns Julien, “a disturbed young man”, and his efforts to deal with his “nightmarish family life”.
Teutonic titan Werner Herzog plays an emotionally abusive father. A younger brother spends most of his time practising wrestling moves against rubbish bins. A pregnant (to Julien?) sister (Chloë Sevigny) logs considerable screen time looking at baby outfits.
Spoiler alert: The baby, as yet unborn, dies in an ill-advised ice-skating episode (Alpine sports accidents being a recurring theme of my early departures from films, it would seem).
I can recall being drawn to this one because it was part of the much-hyped Dogme 95 manifesto, which had self-imposed rules about lighting, editing, budgets and such.
This film involved murder and tragedy. Yet it was a figurative bullet that was dodged – by me, and Dave. I feel only relief and smug self-satisfaction, even a quarter of century later.
Director Harmony Korrine is renowned for his edgy and experimental approach, but at least one of his films has been described as “an unintelligible mess”.
This was a solid “no-brainer” walkout.

Promising Young Woman (2020)
Cary Mulligan in the lead role and an Oscar win for Best Original Screenplay had me thinking this might be worth a look. But it turned out that Mulligan was not quite right in the lead despite her considerable talent and versatility, and the script was nothing special, involving a baroque revenge plot. Clancy Brown (hard to believe he was the villain in Highlander all those years ago) plays Mulligan’s dad.
Some jarring set and production design is distracting, possibly on purpose.
Eventually it became impossible to suspend disbelief. At that point, the exit sign beckoned.

Downtown Abbey (2019)
Now, having never watched even a single minute of the historical TV drama that inspired this film, you may well ask what prompted a visit to the cinema to check out Downton Abbey the movie? It’s a very good question. The answer is a combination of a drizzly evening, a desire to go to the cinema more than to see a particular film, and the uber-optimistic notion that a genteel British historical drama set in a country manor early last century might very well translate to the big screen. Alas it did not, apart from being an effective soporific.

Main Street (2010)
Colin Firth makes a rare misstep, his attempt at executing a US Southern accent poor at best. That said, I probably would have made it to the end had I not been seated in the very front row of the theatre, representing an excruciating assault on comfort in which Cinema Nova specialises, or at least used to. From memory there wasn’t much of a gap between the screen and the front row of seats, so unfortunately, I did disturb a few patrons at this RRR subscriber screening on the way out.

Tabu (2012)
The word that pops into my head at the memory of this movie is “vague”. Black and white cinematography, African vistas, some sort of post-colonial plot … that’s it really.
At a certain point in this messy, leisurely paced, perhaps artfully edited filmic excursion, I looked across to my friend Rachel and asked, “Wanna leave?”
“Definitely,” was the reply. And we were gone.
You never like to waste money in this way, but it’s even worse to wait it out, I think. In those circumstances you can consider the experience to be about paying to be confused, bored, or (as in this case) both. One need not pay for this. It is freely available outside the cinema.

Antman and the Wasp: Quantumania (2022)
There are times when it seems like a good idea to see an undemanding film predicated on special effects rather than on its script, plot, scenery or acting.
A small – though no doubt profitable – component of the Marvel Cinematic  Universe, the original instalment in the series was an unexpected delight and commercial success. The eponymous character (Paul Rudd) is a likeable down-on-his-luck single dad – an accidental hero whose powers are supplied by a special suit and a large dose of pluck.
Unfortunately, in this instalment, the whole gestalt has an “accidental” feel to it.
The green screen component is as expected, but the plot meanders. It dilly-dallies and falters. In fact, it has the feel of being written in someone’s trailer before each day’s shooting.
There are, of course, many references to the multiverse, which has surely had a good go of it by now.
This was an easy walkout decision, for sure, but an expensive one, having made an impulsive decision to see the film at IMAX.

The Witch (2016)
In the manner of Lars Von Trier (who, incidentally, added the “Von” for effect) Darren Aronofsky or John Waters, director Robert Eggers likes to provoke and/or disgust.
His films such as The Lighthouse are frequently associated with the phrase “a harrowing experience”.
You could say that the tone is set in this, Eggers’ first directorial outing.
Set in the frontiers of the US on an isolated farm, this is one creepy and disturbing film I saw no need to endure through to the end.
But hey, perhaps watching scenes of baby-snatching and eating is your thing.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
The plot in this meandering actioner focused on something called the Entity, an AI-type scenario. Yawn. As usual, Tom Cruise in his guise as Ethan Hunt gets to run and squint a lot.
Jeez, they really have run out of ideas in this franchise, which apart from the noticeable misstep on the set-in-Sydney second outing, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed.
Post departure at the two-hour mark, I read a review that suggests the final third makes up for what came before. But there’s a lot to compensate for there.

So, there you have it: my top 10 films worth skipping out on before the final credits roll. Indeed, the earlier the better.

Did I use well the time I saved by not sitting in the dark experiencing these movies all the way through? It’s an irrelevant question. The benefit is more in the vein of “addition by subtraction”.

Because you are no longer captive to a terrible film, your life is immeasurably better.

This is the ethos behind a new organisation I’m forming: Cinephiles Inclined Not to Endure Movies that are Appalling, or C.I.N.E.M.A.

Join me in C.I.N.E.M.A as we rise as one and take leave of underperforming or unenjoyable films!

Now I realise that as one half of a childless couple, I’m in a different position to many others.

For a start, some people rarely get an opportunity to see a film in the cinema, the optimal way to experience it.

And consider the Antman fiasco. Now if Ms Lucy and I had a couple of teenagers in tow, I doubt that we could have convinced them to up and leave with us. We would have to come back for them later.

Going to the cinema to check out a film is one of life’s affordable luxuries. Leaving early is another.

*Apparently these were the words that renowned film critic Roger Ebert used to describe Caligula.