Rolling Stone's 50 Worst Movies by Great Directors List

[BruiserBrody]

50 Terrible Movies by Great Directors

Cinematic disasters Hollywood's greatest geniuses would love to forget

www.rollingstone.com

50.Renaissance Man (Penny Marshall)

The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky)

How Do You Know (James L. Brooks)

The Truth About Charlie (Jonathan Demme)

Look Who’s Talking Too (Amy Heckerling)

Bicentennial Man (Christopher Columbus)

Basic (John McTiernan)

Assassins (Richard Donner)

Girl 6 (Spike Lee)

The Good German (Steven Soderbergh)

Random Hearts (Sydney Pollack)Jupiter Ascending (The Wachowskis)

Downsizing (Alexander Payne)

Garbo Talks (Sidney Lumet)

The Ward (John Carpenter)

The Stepford Wives (Frank Oz)

Gemini Man (Ang Lee)

Buddy Buddy (Billy Wilder)

Goya’s Ghosts (Milos Forman)

Sphere (Barry Levinson)

The Last Tycoon (Elia Kazan)

Oz The Great and Powerful (Sam Raimi)

Beyond Therapy (Robert Altman)

Pocketful of Miracles (Frank Capra)

Wild Wild West (Barry Sonnenfeld)

Phobia (John Huston)

The Wings of Eagles (John Ford)

The 15:17 to Paris (Clint Eastwood)

Joan of Arc (Victor Fleming)

Juno and the Paycock (Alfred Hitchcock)

What Planet Are You From? (Mike Nichols)

Death Becomes Her (Robert Zemeckis)

A Good Year (Ridley Scott)

Alien 3 (David Fincher)

Jade (William Friedkin)

Club Paradise (Harold Ramis)

Junior (Ivan Reitman)

Boxcar Bertha (Martin Scorsese)

The Stupids (John Landis)

The Ladykillers (The Coen Brothers)

How The Grinch Stole Christmas (Ron Howard)

She’s Having a Baby (John Hughes)

Amsterdam (David O. Russell)

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (George Lucas)

Piranha II: The Spawning (James Cameron)

Planet of the Apes (Tim Burton)

Psycho (Gus Van Sant)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Steven Spielberg)

North (Rob Reiner)

1.Jack (Francis Ford Coppola)

 

[BruiserBrody]

Believe I've watched 12 of these.
I'd have to rewatch Look Who's Talking 2 to see if it really is shitty. Probably watched that dozens of times in the early 90s.

Robin Williams getting dragged on this list

I'm extremely confused how that Clint Eastwood movie is a complete blank in my head. Like I can't recall any hype, a trailer, nil

 

[Valeyard]

Rolling Stone makes this list invalid.

 

[BruiserBrody]

Psycho pissed me off not just because of them trying to redo a classic, but I was butt hurt for some reason that Hollywood was trying to make Vince Vaughn a thing. I can't recall how he wronged me so.

 

[King Kamala]

Just another sad side effect of the eternal beef between Wisconsin and Illinois.

 

[BruiserBrody]

We went to Planet of the Apes in the theater. My buddy is a HOSS and we'd tease him with a gruff voice and he'd get butt hurt. So when he sat next to us in the theater we were whispering snide Ape jokes about him back and forth and my buddy kept looking over at us giggling like goofs, just knowing something was up.
----
I owned "What Planet are you from?" on VHS. Just reading the premise in the article "Garry Shandling plays an alien trying to breed with a earthling, but his penis makes a loud noise when he is aroused" made me chuckle. I am 41 going on 12.

 

[Lazgistics Supervisor]

Oddly, I was just thinking of What Planet Are You From? the other day, namely the scene where Shandling reaches for the remote mid-chat and Bening chastises him. Nothing else in that movie made any sort of impression on me, but it was on HBO or Cinemax for quite a while when I'd get home from school.

Renaissance Man needs to be off this list. It's pure mid-90s fun.

Death Becomes Her is in the top half of Zemeckis movies, so fuck outta here.

 

[strummer]

North and Jack are both terrible so they got those right

 

[Brocklock]

Most of those movies suck, but I still like The Fountain and Noah is a much worse movie. The Fountain is pretentious nonsense, but the visuals, soundtrack, and Hugh Jackman performance make up for it.

And yeah wtf is Death Becomes Her doing on here. I'll take that over all the Zemeckis CG movies like Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol. Hell, Death Becomes Her is a more entertaining film than Forrest Gump.

 

[HarleyQuinn]

A lot of questionable stuff in that list that feels more like we need to drop a bigger "film" to make this legit (see the Ivan Reitman entry).

HQ's Takes
- I'd take She's Having a Baby over Weird Science
- Junior is better than My Super Ex-Girlfriend
- Cast Away is the worst... screw that movie.
- I'll take The Stupids over Blues Brothers 2000 too.
- Pixels is worse than Bicentennial Man too

 

[Valeyard]

Anyone who thinks Jack is shit hasn't watched Twixt. Maybe it's the personal association (they filmed it in my hometown and Kilmer was a total asshole to everyone), but it's Coppola making a movie two hours away from his house cheaply and it's a really, really shitty horror movie with a completely annoyed Kilmer phoning it in. Jack had Robin Williams trying his best with a premise that doesn't work, and frankly I think a lot of the hate has to do with Cosby at this point. It's bad, don't get me wrong, but it isn't Twixt bad.

She's Having A Baby on this list means even people trying to find the worst John Hughes movie didn't want to watch Curly Sue.

Death Becomes Her is awesome. Who hates Death Becomes Her? I love Zemeckis but every movie after like 2003 is worse.

Club Paradise > Year One

Assassins > The Toy

Altman got off light. Dr T And The Women is worse than anything he did, and I don't care what reappraisal it's gotten in the last couple years, Popeye is still not good by Altman standards.

 

[King Kamala]

OC & Stiggs has got to be up there for bad Altman.

I'll mildly defend Jack, mostly of nostalgia since I was the right age demographic for it. If it were made by a Joel Zwick or Dennis Dugan, it'd be a deeply weird but pleasant C/C+ family movie. But since it was the work of a great director, it was considered a horrible abomination.

2000 Grinch is not good but it's not as bad as Hillbilly Elegy or the Dan Brown adaptation crap.

I told myself I wasn't going to post in this stupid listicles thread. Piss off, Rolling Stone/@BruiserBrody

 

[strummer]

Curly Sue is the worst Hughes' movie

 

[Valeyard]

I remember renting Jack and my dad hating it. I didn't mind it in the "it has a memorable cover and a familiar actor you would always see on the video store shelf" way. Twixt, meanwhile, is an Asylum-level horror movie with top tier talent.

I'd rather watch Planet of the Apes again than Dark Shadows or some shit.

Blues Brothers 2000 is the worst Landis but I'm very surprised Rolling Stone didn't take this chance to say Twilight Zone. The Stupids isn't good but damn Jessica Lundy.

Junior also gets more shit than it should despite it being awful. Like when I think of it, I think about how everyone worked hard to make that stupid movie work. Anything Reitman made after like 2000 is every bit as good as Junior.

Victor Fleming is weird choice to be on this list which makes it obvious they just went to reddit because no one thinks about Victor Fleming unless their ding dongin' a dead witch.

Wings Of Eagles is a really interesting movie that is definitely not good, but I refuse to believe it's the worst thing Ford made. It's a perfect example of everything you can do wrong when it comes to making a biopic. Worst Ford/Wayne movie, I can believe wholeheartedly.

 

[strummer]

I still remember S & E's review of Jack. They were dumbfounded that Coppola could have directed that.

It was like Highlander 2 level bad for them.

 

[treble]

Wings Of Eagles is a really interesting movie that is definitely not good, but I refuse to believe it's the worst thing Ford made. It's a perfect example of everything you can do wrong when it comes to making a biopic. Worst Ford/Wayne movie, I can believe wholeheartedly.

I've been watching a lot of John Wayne movies these past few months and this it the most recent thing on this list that I've watched. It's not particularly good (the tone in the first half or so of the movie is weird, almost like they're trying to make a slapstick movie) but its not fair to compare it to the Searchers like this author did.

Also seems harsh to put it on a list with some legitimately bad movies when its just more underwhelming than anything.

 

[Valeyard]

The biggest problem I have always had is that they present Weed as a piece of shit by accident to where it's confusing why we're supposed to have sympathy for him. I can kind of get past John Wayne playing 30 years younger because it's a movie, but with everything else it makes that stick out hard, too. O'Hara and Bond are great, though. I just don't know if I believe it's the worst Ford. It's no military educational film on VD.

You really shouldn't compare anything Ford did with the Searchers. I love Ford but that movie is everything great about movies, and I love so much of his work dearly.

 

[OldSchoolWrestling]

Curly Sue is the worst Hughes' movie

I rewatched it last month and still love it!