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I have spent the last three years on my knees, begging and weeping, in an attempt to convince David Mumpower that we need to change the definition of “overlooked” for our Calvin award for Best Overlooked Film of the year. My throat is raw from begging, I am massively dehydrated from all the weeping, and my legs no longer know how to stay in any other position than bent at the knees. And through it all, my efforts have been fruitless. Once again we declared that any film that made less than $25 million was to be declared “overlooked” and eligible for that award.

When was the last time you overlooked anything that cost $25 million? If a new ferrari sports car costs $250,000, you could buy one-hundred of them for $25 million. If you saw a pile of a hundred ferraris, would you be able to overlook it? I find it unlikely that you would. That is why, if I had my say, we would drop the cutoff for “overlooked” status much lower. Unfortunately, I don't have my say (David keeps on telling that this site is not a BOPocracy, it is a BOPtatorship) so I have to find my own way of promoting the films that I consider to actually be overlooked. That's why, for the third year running, I bring you the Best Seriously Overlooked Films of the year. All of these films made less than $1 million at the domestic box-office and have combined for a whopping zero Oscar nominations.

It is rare for action movies to show up on this list, since most of them have big budgets and big studios pushing them down our throats, but when a foreign action film wanders onto American soil it's a reminder of just how terrible most American action flicks are. Number ten on this list is Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, an Argentinian cop drama that features some of the most exciting action sequences of the year. But it also has a powerful message about the dangers of government corruption, how people are manipulated by both politicians and the media, and how fighting against this corruption can be extremely dangerous. But if you don't care about any of that you'll still enjoy the great chase scenes and gun fights. Americans were too busy seeing Cowboys & Aliens to check out this far superior film, which didn't even crack $100,000 at the box-office.

Documentaries can often be dull and emotionless, or sacrificing story for the sake of beating the audience over the head with a political message. But possibly the most emotionally gutwrenching films of the year is the ninth best seriously overlooked film of the year, Project Nim. You could almost see this documentary as a companion piece to Rise of the Planet of the Apes, except this story is even more harrowing and depressing because it's true. Nim was a chimpanzee used in a study on animal language acquisition who spent most of his life living among humans. It's painful watching the people in charge of him acting so inhumane, treating him as part child, part pet, never really understanding him. Unfortunately, documentaries not about exciting topics like penguins and slide shows don't get a lot of attention from film goers, so Project Nim only made $411,184.

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