Times when critics' ideologies affected a film's reception?

A few years ago, I saw a production of The Taming of the Shrew in Washington D.C., and it was one of my favorite theater experiences ever. With the gimmick of being performed by an all male cast (and a musical to boot! - more on that in a second), it seemed like the sort of thing the gullible theater critics of D.C. - who will praise anything and everything unless they come from the Washington Post - would eat up, as it was a bold and fresh approach. But my experience (as well as the experience my mother, who also loved it) and the critical consensus was very different. The play was *savaged.*

Some context of the show: our manuscript of Shrew seems to be pieced together from various versions of the play - there are inconsistencies in plot and character, a framing device that starts things off and is never mentioned again, etc. To mitigate this issue, director Ed Sylvander Iskandar made the choice to add songs to the narrative in an effort to bridge the gap of things that he felt were not developed properly in the text we currently have available. Many of these songs were used in the relationship of Petruchio and Kate, our romantic protagonists.

There is a monologue given towards the end of the play by Kate, in which she extols the virtues of true love and her affection for her husband Petruchio - a husband who has been verbally and physically abusive towards her through much of the script. Traditionally, this speech is delivered ironically, such as showing Kate being forced into praising her husband or in one way or another girlbossing her way into being the dominant party and winking to the audience that she is in control now.

In the program, Iskandar mentioned this speech in particular: to paraphrase (I don't have my program in front of me), he stated that this monologue is one of the most beautiful things Shakespeare ever wrote, and that he could not in see how such beautiful language could be played ironically. In his production, the play builds up to this finale monologue in which Kate tells us of the power of love in complete sincerity (by the way, I have to give major props to Kate's actor, who NAILED this). But how does one square this away with a script that more or less allows it to happen suddenly after a great deal of abuse directed towards her?

The answer was in the use of music. Those songs were mainly used to push forward the relationship between the two, showing Petruchio faltering and realizing that he is wrong, and both Kate and Petruchio changing over the course of the story to treat each other as equals (the play begins with Kate as a misandrist harpy and Petruchio as a dudebro douchebag who bets he can "tame" her). They both "grow up" over the course of the production to the point that Kate can give that speech with no irony whatsoever. For my money, it worked 100%.

But critical reception was almost entirely negative, and nearly every review pointed to that speech. The critics did not accept that Petruchio's actions could ever be forgiven. Nearly without exception, they all stated that it should have ended with an ironic delivery. They had a vision of what is right and wrong that did not match up with the director's views. And it seemed to me that they all pointed to this as a major flaw with little discussion of Iskandar's methods of reaching that conclusion. You can say that the songs don't work - they certainly were not memorable or catchy in any way - or that the production did not go far enough in showing our lovebirds softening towards each other, but there was little discussion of technique that I remembered seeing. They disagreed with the ideology of the director.

Which is all a longwinded way of asking what movies have had this sort of reception, recently or in the more distant past. Movies that critics seemed to dogpile against simply because they could not fully embrace the film's messaging or moral approach. Regardless of the film's quality, what movies have been attacked primarily for ideological reasons?