‘Baby Driver’ (Edgar Wright, 2017)

If you were to take the title of this movie literally, then not only would it be utter chaos, but you’d have a whole new premise for a film. For one thing, babies have tiny legs, so they’d barely be able to reach the pedals of a car, and secondly, they have very undeveloped motor skills (literally), so they would probably immediately crash, and that would be that.

To give Edgar Wright his dues however, this excellent heist movie is indeed about a driver, a very good one at that, played by Ansel Elgort, and his nickname in the film is indeed ‘Baby’, so we can see where he got it from. But he is more than capable of feeding and changing himself and doesn’t need a nap every few hours.

‘The Secret Agent’ (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025)

One of the most egregious examples of a recent movie misnomer has to be this inexplicably acclaimed film from last year starring Wagner Moura, which has a very straight-down-the-line title that will draw you in expecting some kind of James Bond affair, but instead delivers almost three torturous hours of almost nothing happening whatsoever.

A film made and enjoyed by people who like to tell other people that they like films (but not ‘popular’ ones), The Secret Agent is not about a secret agent but is in fact about needless two-headed cats, dense politics in 1970s Brazil and about 15 minutes of exciting action which appears long after you’ve decided ‘I have absolutely no idea what this is about’.

‘Trainspotting’ (Danny Boyle, 1996)

Danny Boyle’s zeitgeist-capturing movie from 1996 caused quite a famous bit of confusion with its misleading title when Noel Gallagher was invited to contribute a song to the soundtrack at the height of Oasis’ fame, only to refuse because he thought the film was literally about trainspotters, something he said he later regretted.

Rather than rain-sodden men in cagoules clutching biros and notepads and hopping up and down with excitement on platforms, it is, of course, the darkly comic tale of a group of young friends navigating their heroin-afflicted lives in the roughest parts of Edinburgh, which made a global star of Ewan McGregor.

‘Brazil’ (Terry Gilliam, 1985)

You may well think going into this one that you’re in for a treat, all carnivals and sun-kissed volleyball and delicious grilled meats on sticks, but former Monty Python member Terry Gilliam’s film is not in fact about the South American country of Brazil, not even a little bit.

Instead, it is a deeply surreal, dystopian head-spinner featuring future Bond baddie Jonathan Pryce, who keeps dreaming about a woman, while doing a mind-numbing job and having Robert De Niro pop round to his apartment now and then to tell him his own central heating system is helping people try to kill him. Utterly bizarre. No idea if it was actually any good or not.

‘Reservoir Dogs’ (Quentin Tarantino, 1992)

Anyone with a particular love of canines or artificial lakes is probably going to be fairly disappointed with this Quentin Tarantino bloodbath, although to be fair to him, there is a German Shepherd briefly spotted at one point.

As for why Tarantino decided to call his iconic tale of a jewellery heist gone wrong Reservoir Dogs, the explanation is apparently twofold: firstly, he found the phrase being used to describe a pile of film scripts that were apparently battling to be made into production, and secondly, he says he heard someone mispronounce the film Au revoir les enfants while working at a video store. Either way, it’s an ace film.

‘Sorcerer’ (William Friedkin, 1977)

Now this last example really is a movie that was undone by being named something that had absolutely nothing to do with what transpired on screen, with audiences quite rightly expecting some kind of fantasy wizard fare but instead witnessing Jaws’ Roy Scheider trying to drive a dilapidated truck full of rotting dynamite across the jungles of South America.

It’s a shame because it’s a truly superb film, based on the equally good 1953 French movie The Wages of Fear, and while it didn’t go down too well with moviegoers at the end of the 1970s it has since been recognised as something of a masterpiece, packed with tension, a great central performance as ever from Scheider and that scene on the bridge.