Bruce Willis trades Die Hard dignity for a combover and pickled liver, stumbling through a chase movie that wraps up its gritty noir in a Hallmark ribbon.

A Maine fairy tale so cluelessly inauthentic it makes L.L.Bean tourists look like salty locals.

A Lebanese insomniac wanders Beirut for two hours, and after watching the dailies, you'll understand why he can't sleep.

The Coens build a $7 million Midwestern Jewish purgatory just to leave every question unanswered, which might be the point but is definitely maddening.

Trust-fund kids cosplay as working class for a summer at a theme park, complete with Yo La Tengo soundtrack and zero self-awareness about their privilege.

American Idol's scrappy Afghan cousin proves pop trash can be mightier than tyranny—and Lady Gaga might do more damage to extremists than a drone strike.

Ryan Gosling does creepy rich murderer convincingly, but Kirsten Dunst hasn't evolved past cheerleader and the movie can't decide if it's thriller or tearjerker.

A 17-year-old discovers that dreamy older men with jazz clubs and Paris weekends might not be the shortcut to sophistication they seem.

$130 million couldn't buy Baz Luhrmann chemistry between Kidman and Jackman, or a voiceover that doesn't make Jar-Jar Binks look dignified.

Half a billion dollars of James Cameron's hot rod ambitions produced Fern Gully with a Jarhead protagonist and a Dodge Caravan soul.

A contemptibly precious two-hour exercise where indie parents-to-be tour the country judging everyone else's parenting while coasting on trust-fund plane tickets.

D-list celebrities grovel over a fake Banksy at Joan Collins' dinner party, proving fame-hunger is embarrassing even when you already have a driver.

Jack Black and Will Ferrell play lovable doofuses saving doomed relics, delivering fair-food-level sweetness that leaves you feeling kind of empty.

The child star of IMDb's worst-rated movie tracks down his co-stars for a documentary that's somehow more balanced than a film about goblin vegetarians deserves.

Darren Aronofsky's ballerina psychodrama is the most anti-woman 'chick flick' since America's Next Top Model, beloved mostly by young men and thinspiration blogs.

The Coens' first film proves they emerged from the womb making better noir than most directors' entire careers, belted purple jumpsuit and all.

A gut-punch romance where everything happens like real life, which means the beloved family dog gets run over and the marriage slowly follows.

Estevez assembles half of Hollywood to mourn RFK in 100 subplots while essentially telling millennials 'Sorry we couldn't fix things, good luck!'

Sacha Baron Cohen's fake Kazakhstani journalist exposes American racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism so effortlessly you'll wonder why we bother with subtlety.

Guy Maddin's faux-silent film piles on effects like marmite on a Snoopy canvas, mistaking repetition and Isabella Rossellini's tremulous voice for profundity.

A diarrhea-joke smear on humanity that makes you want to become a hermit more than it makes you want to be a bridesmaid.

David Foster Wallace's darkly funny men become sitcom clichés filtered through a humorless academic who might be the most hideous character of all.

Our finest tragic love story since Romeo and Juliet, remarkable for how normal it makes two sheepherders falling hopelessly for each other seem.

Steven Soderbergh makes a 73-minute murder mystery so boring you'd rather take a long bath than watch vinyl-siding-flat actors mumble through it.

The Coens take their bungled-heist formula to DC, where a gaggle of megawatt stars play shockingly dumb people fighting over a gym-lost CD of CIA memoirs.

A 105-minute commercial for hippie self-congratulation that finally settles it: Burning Man is just Sedona with glowsticks and gluten-free burritos.

Gorgeous Depression-era Chicago footage undermined by every annoying reporter cliché that makes actual journalists want to beat someone with a pica pole.

Daniel Craig demolishes the Ken-doll Bond specter with a bloody, brilliant reboot that finally drags 007 from naughty back to noir.

Jared Leto gains 67 pounds and loses the audience somewhere in Mark David Chapman's fractured psyche—another platform for a man who deserves to be forgotten.

Anton Yelchin is so damn charming you almost forgive this prep-school Mary Sue fantasy where every problem dissolves within five minutes.

Tom Hanks turns congressional covert ops into a Bombay martini of strippers, bellydancers, and Stinger missiles—then reminds you we effed up the endgame.

Paul Giamatti has his soul extracted and discovers it's chickpea-sized, which is about the scale of this movie's cleverness once you look inside.

The Gong Show host claims he killed 33 people for the CIA, and this movie is brilliant precisely because it doesn't fit any known profile.

A cute white girl racks up $16K in shoe debt and gets rewarded with a dream career, because apparently that's what passes for aspirational cinema now.

Vanilla Ice was 19 years old wearing two pairs of striped overalls, and honestly, bashing him 30 years later is sadder than any fashion crime he committed.

The Britney road-trip movie isn't actually awful, and its plot about a girl worked ragged by handlers is more autobiographical prophecy than anyone realized.

Jonah Hill plays a 21-year-old who showers with his mom's bathroom door open, and somehow Marisa Tomei ends up the least developed character.

Carell and Fey's marriage needs a spark, but every time the movie approaches anything real about long-term relationships, it swerves into potato-skin safety.

Three friends face a reinstated draft in this unadorned time capsule that proves you only need six actors and the absence of limitations to tell the truth.

1,200 Jews hiding in a Belarussian forest should be thrilling, but Daniel Craig's energy-leeching brooding turns a survival epic into a half-baked Lifetime movie for men.

Hugh Grant and SJP hide in Wyoming and discover frozen biscuits and canned gravy aren't as terrible as coastal snobs assume—neither is this movie, shockingly.

A sweater-vest bureaucrat giggles while torching alien eggs, then slowly becomes one—proving we fear things on the outside when we are the true beasts.

Spike Lee's message movie works because it puts story first, and white suburbia refusing to rent it in 1989 was sort of the point.

Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder's noir is so hard-boiled it scorches the pan, proving insurance fraud and murder are sexier than any modern blockbuster.

Did Philip Seymour Hoffman's priest molest that boy? The movie refuses to answer, and that's exactly what makes your brain flip like a perpetual motion toy.

Vera Farmiga snorts a line before trick-or-treating with her kids, but the movie keeps pulling her back from the edge every time it gets too real.

Jennifer Hudson can belt it out, but $75 million couldn't buy a pinch of originality for this gushing ode to American Idol's first legitimate star.

Owen Wilson plays a homeless veteran bodyguard and the movie treats his Army jacket as just another ironic thrift-store accessory—embarrassing in wartime.

Furry Jeff Goldblum crashes into Geena Davis's pool in this Valley culture celebration—and don't pretend 80s America didn't want big hair and aerosol cheese too.

Emma Stone takes The Scarlet Letter and owns it with Mae West retorts and safety-pinned corsets, proving the best revenge on slut-shaming is self-aware swagger.

Julia Roberts spends a year and six figures finding herself across three continents while the rest of us wonder why divorce counts as tragedy when you have unlimited credit.

Irish suburban marital ennui that would have slapped you on stage falls flat on screen—Fleetwood Mac without the exploding sexual frustration.

A big-hearted Belgian drives a junkie across beautiful fog-choked landscapes, proving once again you should never trust a heroin addict with your road trip.

Dane Cook in a Costco calling himself a comedian is like a pole dancer calling herself a ballerina, and this bargain-basement 'Office Space' proves it.

Samantha Morton plays a meter maid dating the worst kind of parking enforcement colleague, and somehow this movie about the 192nd-worst job achieves greatness.

Mike Judge shows that even the boss in the BMW isn't doing much better than his workers, making 'Office Space' from management's perspective almost sympathetic.

Sienna Miller channels Edie Sedgwick's needle-marked junkie-dark destruction beautifully, but America's obsession with poor little rich girls remains inexplicable.

Spike Jones plays perfectly tuned firehose nozzles while Abbott and Costello wisely bail—only the Marx Brothers could have matched this zoot-suited insanity.

A 15-year-old in a tracksuit head-butts girls and dreams of hip-hop stardom while the world prepares to fling her into its filthy, churning waters.

Philip Seymour Hoffman in drag versus stroke-victim DeNiro screaming 'Fascist!' 'Republican!' at each other is Joel Schumacher's penance for ruining Batman.

Frost/Nixon rewrites history into drunk-dial confessions that never happened, while Mickey Rourke's wrestler goes out in a sequin-pantsed blaze of authentic exhaustion.

Two broke women smuggle people across a frozen river, and when one learns migrants pay $50K to get here, you see her thinking 'at least I don't have it that bad.'

Marines who risk their lives saving comrades can also spew dark filth at peace-loving schoolkids who wrote them letters—because war isn't the fiction we pretend it is.

Ricky Gervais gets to be an anti-social jerk with stumpy little arms who can see dead people, and the movie's smart enough to let him stay that way.

Adam Sandler proves that with enough money to surround yourself with sycophantic toadies, you can make any movie—even one less funny than a dead family pet.

Drew Barrymore gives her best performance as Jackie Kennedy's cousin rotting into a cat-lady recluse, in a 'love story' where love is actually the prison sentence.

Steve Coogan's time-traveling Hamlet sequel has potential, but the 90% of filler around it is pure contempt masquerading as feistiness—and they didn't even film in Tucson.

The dark, foreboding penultimate Potter film proves this franchise might be the best there ever was—and Twilight should be cast into a vanishing cabinet forever.

Kate Winslet's first role asks what happens when two 14-year-olds' fantasy world blurs with reality and they decide to slay the monster keeping them apart.

Jamie Kennedy asks Hollywood why everyone hates him after 'Son of the Mask,' and Lewis Black delivers the truth: 'It used to be you had to have a RESUME.'

Mike Leigh nails class warfare and real love with a hash-smoking couple who bonk foreheads in empathy and steal gold-plated bananas from their yuppie relatives.

Gary Cooper's marshal gets abandoned by the whole town 90 minutes after his wedding, proving the minister was right: 'we hire men to do our killing for us.'

Dakota Fanning carries deep-fried Southern cliché like an iPhone, while 'Rachel Getting Married' makes you want to slip Anne Hathaway some Percocet and car keys.

Toby Young's story of failing at Vanity Fair gets Hollywood-whitewashed into blandness, but 'Choke' stays gloriously true to Palahniuk's black heart.

Paul Newman's soul makes barbed wire look cuddly, and we spend the whole movie watching to see if his nephew and housekeeper will finally spit out his poison.

Jane Lynch glides in with a Bloody Mary in a champagne flute, face contorted with loathing and suicidal ideation, to counsel a bland couple on marriage—awesome.

Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor fall in love in prison, and Hollywood's refusal to watch their gay romance proves the movies really are 'very bland.'

Mae West seduces Cary Grant (11 years her junior) while purring 'When I'm good I'm very good, but when I'm bad I'm better'—still ahead of its time.

Joaquin Phoenix's beard-and-gut performance art is a disgusted rebuke of a culture where 'be worshipped' and 'die' are the only celebrity options.

To say that "I've Loved You So Long" is another foreign film about disappearance is like saying that "Ed Wood" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" are both just Tim Burton movies.

Anna Nicole Smith's last film is dumber than an empty Coke bottle falling to Earth, but Chyna's primal howls of joy at having a body again are must-see camp.

Demetri Martin's hipster affectations would be insufferable if he actually wanted you to be charmed—thankfully he doesn't, and 'Creedocide' rat poison is genius.

Colin Farrell hates Bruges as much as you'll love watching him hate it, in Martin McDonagh's weighty, awesome feature debut about hitmen hiding in a fairy-tale town.

Daniel Day-Lewis gets tortured into a false confession for an IRA bombing he didn't commit, in a jaw-dropping film about what happens when passion rules over evidence.

Wizard-of-Oz-level amazing, where you live lives in a five-minute nap and want to collapse in tears on everyone when you wake up—the most ambitious project in years.

Two hours of clever nicknames and Brad Pitt's questionable Apache techniques lead to the darkly satisfying spectacle of machine-gunning Hitler's face to shredded bologna.

The 2008 crash wasn't a bursting bubble—it was a piñata where big kids peeked under their blindfolds, filled their shirts, then asked for goody bags.

Colin Farrell punches women and Colm Meany pees on people, but Kelly MacDonald's deadpan monologue about her ex's brown sauce obsession almost saves this mess.

Philip Seymour Hoffman drifts through Manhattan in Walkman headphones from the '90s, making The Dude look like an action hero in this sludgy bourgeois disappointment.

Five seconds in, you'll dissolve into helpless laughter as Joan Rivers calls her daughter a three-word insult and proves she's tougher than any comedy landscape deserves.

Kate Winslet smashes a naked Jesus statue while Thomas Hardy's bleakest tragedy unfolds—you know it's going to end badly when children get involved.

Meryl Streep's Julia Child is butter-soaked perfection, but Amy Adams' whiny blogger makes you want to debone someone by the end.

Expected to hate 'Juno' and love the weird 'Tracey Fragments'—got it backwards, proving darling suspects sometimes deserve their acclaim.

Determined crackheads set up tents, hit soup lines, and clean their neighborhood after Katrina—a different kind of survivor documentary.

NBC's American remake of the Australian comedy is poor taxidermy, proving the more beloved the original, the more grotesque the corpse-propping becomes.

A Harry Potter lookalike's superhero dreams would be boring if Chloe Moretz's knife-flinging purple-wigged kid didn't steal the show with sickening violence done right.

British teenagers treat each other like violent prisoners in a world without guards, and get a day off school when they bully a classmate into suicide.

Michael Douglas plays a mental patient hunting Spanish treasure while his teenage daughter works double shifts at McDonald's—Quixote meets suburban sprawl.

A knife-thrower rescues a suicidal sexpot from a Paris bridge, and their black-and-white chemistry crackles with the kind of doom that makes you want to watch anyway.

Four men decide to eat themselves to death, dancing with cow heads and rhapsodizing over blood sausage—Anthony Bourdain meets suicide pact.

Diane Lane's teenage punk band rises and falls in this rage cinema that warms the heart better than striped cats and hot cider.

Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson find late-blooming romance in London, and somehow it's not the geriatric rom-com disaster it sounds like.

A detective falls in love with a murder victim's portrait, then she walks through the door—noir doesn't get more deliciously twisted than this.

Gerard Butler's vengeful mastermind dismembers criminals while Jamie Foxx's prosecutor learns that plea deals have consequences—then it all goes stupid.

Gratuitous horror movie tits meet pesticide-poisoned vineyard zombies in this French exploitation that's exactly what it sounds like.

Two doomed 12-year-olds fall in love—one carries a knife for bullies, the other is a vampire—in the most heartbreaking Swedish horror romance you'll ever see.

A woman's cooking transmits her emotions to everyone who eats it, which is less magical realism than it sounds when tears end up in the wedding cake.

Corey Haim plays a tiny, brilliant outsider in the rare teen movie that takes its characters seriously instead of serving up fart jokes or vampire abstinence.

Philippe Petit walks a wire between the Twin Towers, and somehow the documentary about it is as breathtaking as the act itself.

Sofia Coppola proves yet again that no one understands how hard it is to be rich, pretty, bored and misunderstood—if only beheading aristocrats were still in style.

Elizabeth Olsen escapes a cult and can't tell memory from reality, in a film as disorienting as PTSD itself—no comforting voiceover to guide you out.

A man beaten nearly to death rebuilds his psyche through an elaborate miniature WWII village with Barbie dolls—outsider art as survival mechanism.

American Beauty on Prozac—Aaron Eckhart's midlife crisis has all the suburban malaise and none of the interesting darkness.

Two troubled sisters face the actual end of the world, and the depressed one handles it better—Lars von Trier's most beautiful argument for nihilism.

Sean Penn disappears into Harvey Milk so completely you forget he's acting, in a film that makes you furious the same fights are still being fought.

A dowdy governess accidentally becomes a glamorous actress's social secretary, and the 60-year wait to film it was worth the air-raid tension they got to add.

Sam Rockwell alone on a lunar base discovers something that makes isolation the least of his problems—smart sci-fi that trusts its audience to think.

This is how you make a movie about a woman who wants to get married—not with wedding porn fantasy, but with ABBA and the messy truth about chasing happiness.

Daniel Day-Lewis plays a man with cerebral palsy who paints with his left foot, and makes you forget you ever associated feet with toe jam.

Michelle Williams channels Marilyn on a minor film set, but the real story is watching a star crumble under the weight of everyone wanting a piece of her.

The man whose lyric closed Kurt Cobain's suicide note performs at the Ryman after a brain aneurysm, proving fading away can be its own kind of fire.

Regina's a weird girl. She's mouthy and adorably, confidently casual in her job as a movie theater usher. She'd rather shoot arcade space invaders in...

Gut-wrenchingly depressing investigative journalism about Iraq that makes you furious at how thoroughly we botched it—quality misery.

What an utterly shiny piece of garbage—an inducement toward throwing crockery out a high window that wastes Natalie Portman on tired friends-with-benefits dreck.

An arrogant chemistry professor wins the Nobel Prize — and finds his son's been kidnapped. Unfortunately, the movie is a trap.

Calling a movie "immature" usually calls to mind the diarrhea-in-a-sink scene from "Bridesmaids," Ace Ventura emerging from the rear end of a Rhino or the...

New Zealander Patrick Gillies' "Offensive Behaviour" isn't stellar, but given that it was made on an $8,000 budget, it's entirely forgivable.

I love Maureen O'Hara ("Miracle on 34th Street" and the mom in "Parent Trap" — the original, good one) and I love Ally Sheedy (her portrayal of a rich girl...

David Carr chain-smokes and defends journalism against bloggers in pajamas while the newspaper industry crumbles—essential viewing for anyone who reads.

Tatum O'Neal cons her way across Depression-era Kansas with her maybe-father, proving 9-year-olds can out-act adults when given the chance.

A 1950s kid suspects his parents are cannibals, and the mystery meat at dinner confirms his fears—suburban horror with Bob Balaban's unsettling calm.

Seth Rogen enjoys weed, talk radio, and his high school girlfriend (in that order) until witnessing a murder turns a stoner comedy into an action movie.

A radio DJ narrates a zombie outbreak where the infection spreads through language itself—the smartest horror premise in years, executed in a single room.

Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson banter Shakespeare at a Tuscan villa, and their real-life chemistry makes the staged romance almost unbearably electric.

Jessica Biel strips while Ray Liotta cries near a Virgin Mary windshield sighting—L.A. interconnected-lives dreck that thinks misery equals depth.

Watching this felt like heart attack warning signs, but the days after revealed why it matters—poverty porn that earns its devastating punches.

A trans woman returns to her Montana hometown to reunite with her adopted brother who suffered brain damage—and discovers he's Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth's grandson.

Johnny Depp plays Dillinger and Michael Mann shoots it like a dream, but the romance flatlines and the history lesson never quite catches fire.

A folk comedian's song about a child molester gets him confused for an actual pedophile—deadpan comedy about the music industry's soul-crushing machinery.

Daniel Craig's second Bond can rest on Casino Royale's laurels, which is lucky because this revenge sequel is more forgettable car chase than character study.

Kevin Smith ditches dick jokes to make a horror film about fundamentalist killers, and the tonal whiplash proves he should stick to dick jokes.

Jude Law repossesses artificial organs from people who can't pay, and the dystopian premise is better than the Blade Runner knockoff execution.

Audrey Hepburn plays a princess who escapes for a day with Gregory Peck, and unlike Breakfast at Tiffany's, she's a protagonist worth rooting for.

Two rural Mexican brothers chase stardom—one in soccer, one in pop music—and the engaging tragedy of their dreams feels painfully true to life.

Simon Pegg runs a marathon to win back the woman he abandoned at the altar, directed by David Schwimmer—yes, Ross from Friends, and it shows.

This movie should never leave America, lest it be used as a terrorist training video to incite hatred against the wretchedness of American family comedies.

A Vegas movie not about Vegas, a cubicle movie not about offices, a buddy movie not about buddies—Steve Buscemi wanders through a film that's about nothing in particular.

Amanda Bynes does Twelfth Night at soccer camp, and it works if you can still tap into the part of you that forgives gender-swap comedies their logical impossibilities.

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a parolee in trash Jersey wardrobe trying to get her daughter back, and the mess she makes of it is painfully authentic.

A Mennonite man's affair unfolds in static shots so slow they make Warhol look hyperactive—hypnotic if you're patient, insufferable if you're not.

Michael Moore tries to get young people to vote in 2004 by giving away ramen and underwear—a time capsule of hope before everything went sideways.

Bogart and Hepburn build a bomb to sink a German boat, and somehow this plot to commit terrorism is one of the most romantic adventures ever filmed.

A slum kid's traumatic life conveniently prepares him for every Who Wants to Be a Millionaire question—poverty porn with a Bollywood ending.

Two Native American men road-trip to collect a dead father's ashes, making jokes that would make your white liberal guilt very uncomfortable—and that's the point.

Kevin Kline reads a teleprompter he's never seen while Sally Field plots backstage sabotage—the most accurate soap opera satire ever made.

J.J. Abrams reboots Star Trek with lens flares and space playboy energy, proving you can make Trekkies and normies happy simultaneously.

The BBC miniseries is vastly superior to the Russell Crowe movie—six hours of journalism thriller beats a rushed two-hour compression every time.

Will Ferrell plays an IRS agent who hears a narrator describing his life—a premise that sounds terrible but actually works because he plays it dead straight.

Gen-X slackers loiter outside a convenience store waiting for something to happen, and Richard Linklater makes their aimlessness feel like Greek tragedy.

Katherine Hepburn wants Elizabeth Taylor lobotomized to hide how her son really died—Tennessee Williams at his most Gothic and disturbing.

A small town decides to make a porno to save the local economy, and the premise is better than the execution—outsider comedy that doesn't quite land.

Brad Pitt transcends pretty-boy status as a weary, paranoid Jesse James, in a Western so slow and gorgeous it feels like watching a painting develop cracks.

German terrorists bomb their way through the 70s and your increasing disgust with them is exactly the point—idealism curdled into murder.

A war orphan's hair turns green as an anti-war message, in a 1948 film that got its director blacklisted—still relevant, still weirdly moving.

Kristen Stewart plays a girl with a degenerative disease pursuing sex before she dies, and she's actually good when given something real to do.

By the end you've lived another lifetime in a Pennsylvania steel town that goes to Vietnam—the Russian roulette scene will haunt you forever.

Scorsese finally wins his Oscar by remaking a Hong Kong film, and the all-star cast chews scenery like Jack Nicholson chews on everything.

Kids open a portal to hell in their backyard, and the only drinking game you need is 'take a shot every time you cringe at the 80s effects.'

The Swedish original should be titled 'Men Who Hate Pacing'—Noomi Rapace is compelling but the story meanders like it's getting paid by the minute.

The book ends in death; the movie ends in hope—Hollywood softening Steinbeck, but Henry Fonda's Tom Joad still burns with righteous fury.

John Malkovich plays a fading mentalist with delusions of grandeur, and Tom Hanks' son discovers that show business is mostly humiliation and denial.

Japanese host club boys sell the girlfriend experience to women who pay thousands for champagne and attention—loneliness monetized into something heartbreaking.

Plants decide to kill humans and M. Night Shyamalan directs Mark Wahlberg to talk to a houseplant—the twist is that someone funded this.

Jeremy Renner defuses bombs and chases the high, in the rare Iraq War film that doesn't preach—just shows you what the addiction to danger looks like.

Matt Damon plays a price-fixing whistleblower who's also a pathological liar, and the exclamation point in the title tells you exactly how absurd it gets.

Bret Easton Ellis's unlovable 80s sociopaths get an unlovable movie adaptation that's as incompetent as it is over-ambitious.

Michael Caine leads a heist with Mini Coopers through Turin, and the cliffhanger ending is literally a cliff—60s cool at its most self-aware.

A king with a stammer learns to speak with Geoffrey Rush's help, and somehow this rich-man's-problems movie earns every tear it wrings out of you.

Matthew McConaughey works out of his Lincoln and discovers his client is guilty of worse than he's charged with—solid legal thriller that marks his comeback.

Two HIV-positive gay guys road-trip through early-90s L.A. with nothing to lose—a cinematic middle finger from the hangover of the sexual revolution.

Mike Myers proves that creating Austin Powers and Wayne Campbell doesn't make you immune to making unwatchable garbage—this is the unwatchable garbage.

Frank Sinatra plays a heroin addict trying to stay clean, and someone should remake this now because we clearly haven't learned anything since 1955.

George Clooney claims he can kill goats with his mind in this Iraq War comedy that ends with a man running through a wall—which sums up the whole thing.

Ben Foster delivers death notifications to military families, and his unlikability at the start makes his gradual cracking open devastating to watch.

Steve Martin does a French accent for 90 minutes while Peter Sellers rolls in his grave—some remakes should be prosecuted as crimes against cinema.

Kate Winslet plays an illiterate Nazi war criminal who seduced a teenager, and somehow the movie wants you to feel sorry for her—Oscar bait at its most manipulative.

Rainn Wilson plays a washed-up 80s drummer who joins his nephew's band, and the 'keep churning out words' theory of writing produced this forgettable result.

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney deal with their terrible father's dementia—he paints bad words in his own poop, and it only gets darker from there.

Michael J. Fox fakes his way into a corner office in this 80s fantasy where pluck and deception are rewarded—Reagan-era capitalism as romantic comedy.

Marilyn Monroe's skirt flies up over a subway grate, and Billy Wilder turns a married man's summer temptation into something funnier than it has any right to be.

The lost pilot to 'Coach' tries for handsome scary mystique about Ivy League secret societies and lands somewhere between laughable and forgettable.

Aaron Sorkin turns Mark Zuckerberg into a fascinating asshole, and Fincher makes a movie about coding feel like a thriller—essential viewing for the internet age.

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon eat at fancy restaurants and do Michael Caine impressions at each other—if that sounds fun to you, it's perfect; if not, leave now.

A pig inseminator explains his business philosophy while Jon Cryer searches for a homeless friend—indie weirdness from the pre-mumblecore era.

Nixon tried to deport John Lennon for being too effective at anti-war activism—paranoia justified, and the documentary proves the FBI files weren't lying.

Pranksters pose as corporate spokespeople and announce things companies should actually do—satire as activism, with the targets too embarrassed to sue.

A documentary about the MPAA ratings board hires a private detective to find out who the anonymous raters are—exposing hypocrisy with a side of sleuthing.

An implanted timer counts down to the moment you meet your soulmate, and the sci-fi premise is clever enough to forgive the rom-com execution.

Jeff Bridges returns to the Grid with a de-aged CGI face that screams 'uncanny valley,' but Daft Punk's soundtrack almost justifies the entire exercise.

Robert Downey Jr. in blackface and Tom Cruise in a fat suit savage Hollywood's pretensions—the blackface works precisely because it's satirizing actors who'd do it.

The Coens remake John Wayne's Western with Hailee Steinfeld stealing every scene, until a flash-forward ending nearly ruins everything Benjamin Button-style.

Hillbillies are mistaken for murderers by college kids who keep accidentally killing themselves—the horror-comedy premise executed to gory perfection.

Kristen Stewart proves she can handle A-list territory, but the abstinence-porn vampire romance is mostly unbearable to think about.

People literally explode from suppressed emotions in a corporate dystopia whose logo looks like a middle finger—'Office Space' meets body horror.

Oliver Stone turns George W. Bush into a tragic figure seeking daddy's approval, which is either humanizing or enraging depending on your politics.

John C. Reilly parodies every music biopic ever made while Brad Pitt's early work proves he was always more than a pretty face—two films about performers faking it.

An animated documentary about repressed war memories from Lebanon pairs with a short about online dating—trauma and comedy make strange but effective bedfellows.

John Cusack plays a corporate hitman in a privatized war zone, channeling 'Grosse Pointe Blank' into Iraq War satire that swings wildly between clever and exhausting.

Robert De Niro plays a Hollywood producer dealing with Bruce Willis's beard demands and Sean Penn's dog-shooting movie—insider satire only Angelenos will fully appreciate.

Larry David plays a misanthropic genius who marries a young runaway, in Woody Allen's late-period New York comedy that's basically Curb Your Enthusiasm with more neurosis.

Dana Andrews plays a cop who accidentally kills a suspect and has to investigate his own crime—noir at its most morally compromised and beautifully shot.

Children ride freight trains alone through Mexico trying to reach the US border, and the documentary makes you feel complicit in every danger they face.

Two unemployed actors drink themselves through 1969 London in the cult comedy your pretentious film friends won't shut up about—and they're right.

A made-for-TV mob movie with half the Sopranos cast, made before the Sopranos existed—decent but utterly eclipsed by what came after.

Robin Williams covers up his awful son's autoerotic asphyxiation death and becomes famous from the fake suicide note—Bobcat Goldthwait's darkest, funniest provocation.

Australian sex workers fight off a home invasion in this exploitation throwback that knows exactly what it is and delivers the gory goods.

Jack Black and Michael Cera wander through the Old Testament making dick jokes, proving Harold Ramis can't save every comedy premise.

Woody Allen's London ensemble piece about people deluding themselves into happiness—minor Allen, but his minor work is still better than most directors' best.

A blackmailer's victims team up to murder him in this 1957 British comedy that proves some jokes about scandal and hypocrisy never get old.

Jenna Jameson plays an undead exotic dancer in a movie that's exactly what the title promises—Ionesco's Rhinocéros by way of a gentleman's club.