50 Terrible Movies by Great Directors

In the period between 1988 and 1992, Penny Marshall gifted the world with Big, Awakenings, and A League of Their Own. She could have followed that trio up with virtually any movie she wanted since they were all enormous critical and commercial hits. Sadly, Marshall’s next project was Renaissance Man. It’s a dim-witted comedy about an unemployed ad executive (Danny DeVito) who finds himself teaching cadets on a military training base. They don’t know much about Shakespeare. He doesn’t know much about the military. They learn from each other in an endless series of sitcom cliches. A young Mark Wahlberg raps about Hamlet. All of this is as horrible as you can imagine. “Watching it, I felt embarrassed for the actors, who are asked to inhabit scenes so contrived and artificial that no possible skill could bring them to life,” Roger Ebert wrote. “It’s hard to believe that this is the work of Penny Marshall, whose films like Big and A League of Their Own seemed filled with a breezy confidence.” 

It’s slightly unfair to trash The Fountain since the final version is so wildly far off from what director Darren Aronofsky had in mind when work on the film began. The original plan was to place Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in the lead roles of a $70 million film. When the budget was sliced down to $35 million with Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz as the stars, Aronofsky had to make some drastic cuts that severely compromised his vision. But we can only judge what wound up on the screen, and that’s a film where Jackman plays a Spanish conquistador searching for an eternal life elixir, a modern-day scientist trying to cure his wife’s brain disease, and a 26th-century man traveling through space with a tree. Critics were polarized by the film, but most viewers were simply baffled and bored. “I will concede the film is not a great success,” wrote Roger Ebert. “And yet I believe we have not seen the real film. When a $75 million production goes into turnaround and is made for $35 million, elements get eliminated. When a film telling three stories and spanning thousands of years has a running time of 96 minutes, scenes must have been cut out. There will someday be a director’s cut of this movie, and that’s the cut I want to see.”

James L. Brooks spent so much time in television working on shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, and The Simpsons that he’s only directed six movies. The best of the bunch (Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, As Good As It Gets) are master classes in storytelling. The middling ones (I’ll Do Anything, Spanglish) reveal his limitations as a writer-director, but they’re still worth watching if you come across them on basic cable. And then there’s his 2010 romantic comedy How Do You Know. It has a wonderful cast led by Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Owen Wilson, and Jack Nicholson in his final film role to date. Witherspoon plays a softball player torn between a cocky baseball player (Wilson) and a charming businessman (Rudd). “Nothing heats up,” Roger Ebert wrote. “The movie doesn’t lead us, it simply stays in step.” It’s a real bummer that Nicholson ended his career on this deeply forgettable rom-com. For a long time, it seemed like it might be the last Brooks movie as well. But he’s assembled Jamie Lee Curtis, Woody Harrelson, Ayo Edebiri, Albert Brooks, Kumail Nanjiani, and Spike Fearn for an upcoming movie he’s calling Ella McCay. Let’s hope it closer in spirit to Terms of Endearment and As Good As It Gets than How Do You Know. That one almost single handedly killed the rom-com. 

Remaking a classic movie is always a very risky proposition. There’s always the chance you’ll pull off a miracle like The Birdcage, A Star Is Born, True Grit, or Oceans 11. But odds are much greater you’ll fall way short of the original and get filleted by the critics. The Truth About Charlie is an excellent example. The 2002 Jonthan Demme mystery is a remake of the 1963 Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn film Charade. It centers around a woman who discovers her husband is dead, millions of dollars are missing, and all sorts of unsavory characters are after her for it. Demme cast Mark Walhberg in the thankless position of replacing Grant. (This is just one year after Wahlberg’s Planet of the Apes fiasco). Thandie Newton did a much better job with the Hepburn part, but there’s no earthly reason for this movie to exist. The original is better in every conceivable way. It earned a paltry $7.1 million on a $60 million budget, and it was the second bomb in a row for Demme after Beloved. But Beloved was a noble failure. The Truth About Charlie was just a regular failure. Demme soldiered on by remaking The Manchurian Candidate as his next movie. But by casting Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep — and not Marky Mark — he actually pulled it off. 

The original Look Who’s Talking isn’t a bad movie. And when you compare it with every other movie about a talking baby in Hollywood history, it’s basically Citizen Kane. The third movie in the series, Look Who’s Talking Now, frequently appears on lists of the worst movies ever made. That’s the one where the dogs talk. But original Look Who’s Talking director Amy Heckerling didn’t have any involvement with that one. Sadly, she co-wrote and directed 1990’s Look Who’s Talking Too. This quickie sequel came just one year after the original, and it reunites Kirstie Alley, John Travolta, and Bruce Willis as the voice of baby Mikey. Roseanne Barr joined the team this time as the voice of his new baby sister. (Mikey can talk at this point like any toddler, but he somehow still has very adult thoughts. Will the Willis voice ever leave his head? Was he haunted by it forever? Is he in a mental asylum somewhere now?) The original movie was about a single woman trying to keep her job and deal with the responsibilities of motherhood. The sequel is nothing but dumb sitcom hijinks. Five years later, Hecklering wrote and directed Clueless. All was forgiven. 

Christopher Columbus has an incredible ability to create comedies that bring tears at unexpected moments. This is true for Mrs. Doubtfire, Stepmom, and even the first two Home Alone movies. (There’s a reason the original reduces George Costanza to a sobbing mess on Seinfeld.) But the formula didn’t work on 1999’s Bicentennial Man, where Robin Williams plays a robot that lives for over 200 years. It’s based on the 1976 Isaac Asimov novelette The Bicentennial Man, but it’s a painfully sappy adaptation where Williams is forced to confront the fact that everyone he loves will eventually die. Much has been written about the brilliant movies of 1999, but nobody cites this one as an example. Fortunately, the fiasco had little impact on Columbus’ career. His next movie was an adaptation of a children’s book about a British boy who learns he’s a wizard on his 11th birthday. That one worked quite well. 

John McTiernan may not be as well known as many other directors on this list, but he’s the man behind Predator, The Hunt for Red October, Die Hard, and the criminally underrated Die Hard With a Vengeance. In other words, he made the two good Die Hards. He had no involvement with the three shitty ones. (And yes, Die Hard 2 is better than four and five. It still sucks.) If he just made the original Die Hard, he’d deserve a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars. His career took a hit in 1993 when he directed Last Action Hero (which isn’t as bad as legend suggests), and nosedived in 1999 when The 13th Warrior bombed hard. But he bottomed out in 2003 with Basic, an action thriller that reunited the Pulp Fiction team of John Travolta and Samuel J. Jackson. The convoluted plot centers around a DEA agent trying to figure out why an Army Ranger drill sergeant disappeared during a training exercise. There’s a twist ending that’s as stupid as it is implausible. Simply put, it’s the least enjoyable Pulp Fiction reunion you could possibly imagine. It’s been over 20 years since Basic tanked, and McTiernan has yet to direct another movie. (This is largely due to his involvement in the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping scandal, which ultimately sent him to prison for a year in 2013. But that’s a whole other story.)

As the movies have shown us over and over again, it’s not easy to retire when you’re a professional assassin. There’s always some nefarious force from your past that strong-arms you into taking one last job. That’s the cliched plot of Richard Donner’s 1995 movie Assassins, starring Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas. This was a few years past the point where Stallone’s name on a poster meant any movie would be an automatic hit, and a few years past the point where Donner churned out stunning movies like The Goonies, Scrooged, Superman, and Lethal Weapon 2 (it’s better than the first) at a remarkable clip. Assassins doesn’t have any of that Lethal Weapon magic. It’s just a turgid action flick that felt like a relic of an earlier time. It was also a huge commercial and critical disappointment that Donner never quite recovered from despite finding moderate success a couple of years later with Mel Gibson’s Conspiracy Theory. 

Spike Lee wrote the first eight movies he directed, including Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, Crooklyn, and Malcolm X. But in 1996, he decided to adapt a screenplay by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks for the screen. Girl 6 is about a struggling actress who finds work as a phone-sex operator. The work takes a toll on her personal life and mental health before she walks away from it. It’s an interesting premise for a movie, but virtually nothing about it works. “Girl 6 is Spike Lee’s least successful film,” Roger Ebert wrote, “and the problem is twofold: He doesn’t really know and understand Girl 6, and he has no clear idea of the film’s structure and purpose. If he’d been able to fix the second problem, he might have been able to paper over the first one. Strongly told stories have a way of carrying their characters along with them. But here we have an undefined character in an aimless story. Too bad.”

Steven Soderbergh has made just about every kind of movie imaginable. The only thing Solaris, Magic Mike, Erin Brockovich, Oceans 11, Kafka, and Contagion have in common is that he directed them. But he proved that film noir wasn’t his thing in 2006 when he adapted Joseph Kanon’s spy novel The Good German for the big screen. George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, and Tobey Maguire were given lead roles, and Soderbergh made every effort to make this look like an actual film noir from the Forties, down to black-and-white film stock and a poster that paid homage to Casablanca, but the retro play just didn’t work. He spent so much time on the look and feel that the story suffered. “There isn’t a moment in this self-conscious, uninvolving movie when you aren’t aware you are watching an experiment,” Rene Rodriguez wrote in the Miami Herald, “which might make a good lesson for film school students on what not to do.”

When Harrison Ford agreed to star in a 1995 remake of Sabrina with Tootsie and Three Days of the Condor director Sydney Pollack, it was a rare misfire for the Hollywood superstar. Ford bounced back in 1997 with Air Force One. But he returned to Pollack two years later for Random Hearts, an adaptation of a 1984 Warren Adler novel about a love affair between a congresswoman and a police officer. They meet when their spouses die in a plane crash. It’s a good book, but a deeply boring movie. “It takes forever for this portentous drama to get to the inevitable moment when the chilly congresswoman melts in the dogged cop’s arms,” wrote Newsweek’s David Ansen, “and when it does, the heat generated by these two attractive stars barely rises above room temperature.”

The incredible success of The Matrix and the two sequels gave the Wachowskis a license to basically make whatever movies they wanted. They used it to take on fantastically ambitious movies like Speed Racer, Cloud Atlas, and Jupiter Ascending. When they all failed to achieve anything remotely comparable to Matrix-level dollars, their “do whatever the fuck you want” license was revoked. But Speed Racer and Cloud Atlas have genuine cult followings. They are flawed, but interesting. Jupiter Ascending is just a friggin’ mess. It’s a Mila Kunis/Channing Tatum space opera about a cleaning lady on a futuristic Earth who finds herself on an interplanetary adventure alongside a genetically engineered soldier. Nearly everyone involved in the movie said they knew they were making a turkey the whole time, especially since the budget got chopped in half at the last minute. “It was a nightmare from the jump,” Tatum said in 2022. “It was a sideways movie. All of us were there for seven months, busting our hump. It was just tough.” It was also the last movie the Wachowskis made as a duo. Lana Wachowski followed it up by directing The Matrix Resurrections by herself. It was not a great movie, especially when compared to the original, but it’s better than Jupiter Ascending by absurd degrees. 

As Alexander Payne proved yet again with 2023’s The Holdovers, he’s a master when it comes to mixing comedy with drama. For more evidence of this, look back to Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, and Nebraska. In 2017, though, his instincts failed him when he made Downsizing. In the strong likelihood you forget Downsizing exists, it’s a Matt Damon movie about a man who shrinks his body down to five-inches tall to live in an experimental community with other tiny people. It’s supposed to be a land of bliss, but things go awry very quickly. “It’s the rare movie that seems to execute every part of its concept absolutely wrong,” wrote NPR’s Andrew Lapin, “a narrative, tonal, visual and sociopolitical fiasco the likes of which haven’t been seen in many moons.”

Sidney Lumet made his directorial debut in 1957 with 12 Angry Men. Fifty years later, he wrapped up his career with Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. It was a stunning finale, but he had a handful of misfires along the way. The low point was 1984’s Garbo Talks starring Carrie Fisher, Ann Bancroft, and Ron Silver. It’s about a terminally ill woman who tries to meet reclusive silent-film star Greta Garbo before she dies, drawing a paparazzo and her daughter-in-law into the quest. It’s an intriguing premise, though the payoff is absurdly disappointing. “With a buildup like this, Garbo’s entrance had better be spectacular,” Roger Ebert wrote in a one-star pan. “Unfortu­nately, it’s not. It’s such an anticli­max that it would have been more effective for the woman to die with­out ever meeting Garbo.”

It’s not hard to pick out John Carpenter’s greatest triumphs as a director. They are clearly the original Halloween in 1978, Escape From New York in 1981, and The Thing in 1982. Many detractors point to the 1992 Chevy Chase bomb Memoirs of an Invisible Man or the 2001 sci-fi Western horror mashup Ghosts of Mars as his worst moments, but those fail in ways that are semi-interesting and occasionally somewhat novel. A small cult has grown around Ghosts of Mars since it’s so damn odd. But there’s no cult around the 2010 Amber Heard horror film The Ward. It’s just a rote, drab flick about a woman stuck in a haunted mental ward. “[It] continues the painful decline of a director who seems more nostalgic for past glories than excited about new ideas,” The New York Times’ Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in a pan. “Quaintly old-fashioned in style, plot and special effects, this familiar tale of female derangement and institutional abuse is too tame to scare and too shallow to engage.”

Frank Oz is best known as the puppetmaster behind Yoda, Miss Piggy, Cookie Monster, and Grover. But he’s also a gifted filmmaker who directed The Muppets Take Manhattan, Little Shop of Horrors, and What About Bob? (That last film is the single funniest movie in Hollywood history. We don’t care how crazy that sounds. We stand by it.) But in 2004, he had the misfortune of directing a remake of the 1975 cult thriller The Stepford Wives. The project was a fiasco before filming even started since John and Joan Cusack dropped out at the last minute to take care of their ailing mother. Nicole Kidman, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler, Christopher Walken, and Glenn Close wound up with the lead roles, and they simply didn’t click onscreen or off. Test audiences hated the first cut, and last-second edits did nothing to improve the end result. “I had too much money,” Oz admitted in 2007, “and I was too responsible and concerned for Paramount. I was too concerned for the producers. And I didn’t follow my instincts.”

Ang Lee is a remarkably versatile director who has given the world everything from The Ice Storm and Brokeback Mountain to Life of Pi, Hulk, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. These movies have nothing in common besides Lee’s deft touch. But that failed him in 2019 when he directed Gemini Man, where an assassin played by Will Smith battles a younger clone of himself thanks to deaging effects. This made for a very cool movie poster, an interesting trailer, and a horrid movie. “Gemini Man doesn’t know what it wants,” wrote Adam Graham of the Detroit News. “One on hand it’s an action extravaganza pushing the boundaries of special effects, on the other it’s a science-fiction experiment exploring the edges of humanity. Like the character at its center, it’s at war with itself.”

There were very few filmmakers in the 1940s and 1950s sharper than Billy Wilder. This was the period when he directed Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Sabrina, The Seven Year Itch, and Some Like It Hot. But Hollywood went through a major stylistic shift in the Sixties when a new generation of talent rose up, and Wilder’s brand of filmmaking was suddenly passé. He continued working through the Seventies, but nothing seemed to connect. His low point was 1981’s Buddy Buddy, which wound up being his final film even though he lived another two decades. It’s a Walter Matthau/Jack Lemmon remake of a French comedy about a Mafia hitman at a hotel who runs into a depressed husband that just learned his wife is having an affair. Wilder does his best to revive Lemmon and Mathau’s Odd Couple energy, but the laughs simply don’t come. “I hadn’t been working enough, and I was anxious to get back on the horse and do what I do — write, direct,” Wilder said years later. “This wasn’t a picture I would have chosen.”

Milos Forman picked his projects very carefully, which is why The People vs. Larry Flynt and Man on the Moon are the only movies he created in the Nineties. And even though he lived until 2018, the only movie he created after the Nineties was the 2007 Javier Bardem/Natalie Portman/Stellan Skarsgård historical drama Goya’s Ghosts. It’s the story of Spanish painter Francisco Goya living through the Spanish Inquisition and trying to free his young muse from captivity. “In spite of all the vivid little details, the big picture never comes into focus,” wrote the AV Club’s Tasha Robinson. “The film lacks a center, and the obvious one — Goya’s art — is dismissed as irrelevant in the first scene. If Forman is trying to communicate that art isn’t an effective way to change American society, he’s proved his point neatly with this muddled, wandering dud.”

Tremendous buzz swirled around Sphere prior to the initial critic screening in 1998. The story of an ancient alien spacecraft discovered on the ocean floor is one of Micheal Crichton’s greatest books. Director Barry Levinson — the man behind Diner, Rain Man, and Sleepers — was hired to direct an adaptation with Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, and Samuel L. Jackson in lead roles. It seemed like we were going to get another Jurassic Park. But then critics saw the thing. “The more the plot reveals, the more we realize how little there is to reveal,” Roger Ebert wrote, “until finally the movie disintegrates into flaccid scenes where the surviving characters sit around talking about their puzzlements.” The public agreed, and the movie didn’t even make back its budget. Maybe another director will be brave enough one day to try and make a better Sphere movie. In the meantime, the one we have really sucks. 

In the final months of his life, F. Scott Fitzgerald worked on an epic novel about an Irving Thalberg-like movie studio chief during the golden age of Hollywood. He died before he could finish it, but it was released posthumously as The Last Tycoon. A big-screen adaptation wound up being the final film for director Elia Kazan, and he assembled an amazing cast that included Robert De Niro, Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, Jeanne Moreau, and Jack Nicholson. But Kazan was decades past his On the Waterfront prime, and he failed to capture anything close to the magic of his source material. “Kazan’s work seems to be a reaction against the shrill energy he has sometimes used to keep a picture going,” Pauline Kael wrote in the New Yorker. “He’s trying something quiet and revelatory, but he seems to have disowned too much of his temperament.”

Two years after James Franco delivered a woefully low-energy performance as the co-host of the Academy Awards, he delivered a woefully low-energy performance as the star of Sam Raimi’s Wizard of Oz prequel Oz the Great and Powerful. Franco stars as a younger version of Frank Morgan’s Wizard character from the 1939 classic, but he possesses none of his impish charm or sense of humor. We learn how the Wizard left Kansas for Oz via hot-air balloon many years before Dorothy, battled evil witches, and established himself as the ruler of the land. But it all feels like a pointless retread, and it’s wildly unimaginative. The man who gave us Evil Dead, A Simple Plan, and the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy is capable of so much more. 

For his 1987 romantic comedy Beyond Therapy, Robert Altman assembled an amazing cast, including Christopher Guest, Jeff Goldblum, Julie Hagerty, and Glenda Jackson. He even had a novel idea for a movie about two loopy New Yorkers looking for love, and their equally insane psychiatrists. The execution is just abysmal, and not just because Altman set the movie in New York and filmed it in Paris. The jokes don’t land, scenes smash together without any sense of logic or pacing, and it’s impossible to care about the fate of any of the characters. It’s very hard to believe the same director gave us Nashville, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and The Long Goodbye. 

Frank Capra’s 1961 film Pocketful of Miracles came at a major turning point for Hollywood. Old-guard figures like Capra were being cast aside for a new generation of talent. And this would indeed mark his final film, and the first one for young starlet Ann-Margret, who appears in the movie alongside Bette Davis and Glenn Ford. It was also a remake of a film Capra directed in 1933, showing that new ideas were in short supply for the old-timers. It’s a Taming of the Shrew-type story of a wealthy bootlegger who attempts to turn a homeless apple salesman into a member of high society. Davis would revive her career the following year thanks to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, and Ann-Margret was on the verge of superstardom thanks to Bye Bye Birdie and Viva Las Vegas. But it was a painfully dated commercial disappointment that left Capra in movie jail for the remainder of his life. 

Will Smith committed one of the greatest blunders in Hollywood history when he turned down a lead role in The Matrix so he could star in Wild, Wild West, a stunningly inept adaptation of a forgotten Sixties television show. But his logic isn’t hard to understand. The Wachowskis didn’t have much of a track record when they shopped around The Matrix, and Smith and Wild Wild West director Barry Sonnenfeld had just teamed up for Men in Black. That was an enormous hit, based around an equally obscure IP, that Smith promoted with a rap song where he basically explained the plot. The (terrible) song somehow hit Number One on the Billboard Hot 100, but nothing else about the movie connected on any level. “Wild Wild West is a comedy dead zone,” Roger Ebert wrote in a one-star review. “You stare in disbelief as scenes flop and die. The movie is all concept and no content; the elaborate special effects are like watching money burn on the screen.” It’s so bad that we’re calling it Sonnenfeld’s worst movie even though he gave us Nine Lives. That’s the movie about Kevin Spacey trapped in the body of a cat. It’s an unbearably awful movie. But Wild Wild West is even worse. 

John Huston was one of the few great directors of the 1940s and 1950s still churning out movies in the 1980s. And even though 1982’s Annie was hardly on the same level as The African Queen, Key Largo, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, it was a genuine hit that families still watch today. The same can’t be said for 1980’s Phobia. The ham-fisted horror movie is about a radical therapist who forces his patients to confront their biggest fears in extreme ways. A murderer comes after them one by one. The whole thing is as predictable and schlocky as this sounds. It was also a colossal bomb that grossed just under $60,000. 

John Ford started directing movies so early in Hollywood history that many of them were silent films of the 1910s that have literally been lost. His hot streak lasted for decades and gave us Stagecoach (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Searchers (1956), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). He followed up The Searchers, quite possibly his greatest film, with another John Wayne epic, The Wings of Eagles. It’s a loose biopic of Naval aviator Frank Wead, stretching from the immediate aftermath of World War I to his career in Hollywood and return to the armed services in World War II. The movie is just an hour and 50 minutes, but feels much, much longer. It’s hard to believe it was created by the same team that made The Searchers just one year earlier.

In 2016, Clint Eastwood took the real-life story of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger — who famously landed a commercial airline on the Hudson River after the engines blew out — and made an acclaimed hit movie out of it, even though the central drama took place over just a few minutes. For his follow-up project two years later, The 15:17 to Paris, he made a similar movie about three Americans who foiled a terrorist attack on a train traveling from Amsterdam to Paris. Tom Hanks played the lead role in Sully, but Eastwood decided to cast the real-life heroes in The 15:17 to Paris. It was a huge mistake since they simply weren’t professional actors. Their big moment of heroism, like Sully’s, lasted just a few moments. That forced Eastwood to pad the story out in monumentally boring ways by showing their life before the incident, and the aftermath of it. Almost none of it was compelling. “[Eastwood] almost seems to be testing the limits of minimalism, seeing how much artifice he can strip away and still achieve some kind of dramatic impact,” The New York Times wrote. “There is not a lot of suspense, and not much psychological exploration, either.” His 2014 movie Jersey Boys was arguably slightly worse, but we’re going to stick with The 15:17 to Paris as the worst movie Eastwood made throughout a very, very long career. 

It’s almost inarguable that no director in cinematic history had a better year than Victor Fleming in 1939 when directed both The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind, the two films that embody the golden age of Hollywood. He was handed both projects since MGM considered him their resident genius who could handle the grandest of grand productions. His final film wasn’t an MGM production, though it was quite ambitious: Joan of Arc starring Ingrid Bergman. At 33 years old, she was way too old to play the part of the teenage martyr. But that’s the least of the problems with the movie, which is mind-numbingly dull and plodding. By the end, you’re rooting for the title character to finally die just so it can end. According to Hollywood lore, Fleming had an affair with Bergman during the production, which may have thrown off his judgment. Shortly after it came out, Fleming died of a heart attack.

Alfred Hitchcock first made a name for himself in the Twenties as the director of acclaimed silent films, most notably the 1927 thriller The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. But when talkies entered the scene in the early Thirties, he briefly had trouble adjusting to the innovation. This is most evident in 1930’s Juno and the Paycock, where he takes a successful Sean O’Casey play about a family living through the Irish Civil War and merely films it on a soundstage. There are long stretches where the camera doesn’t move an inch, and it feels like a tripod is directing the film. “A fairly deadly case of canned theater,” Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in the Chicago Reader, “that’s pretty close to what Hitchcock many years later would refer to as ‘photographs of people talking.’” Just four years later, Hitchcock released The Man Who Knew Too Much. It’s a brilliant, innovative movie that grabs your attention in the opening scene and never lets go. In other words, it’s the complete opposite of Juno and the Paycock. 

On paper, the 2000 Mike Nichols-directed movie What Planet Are You From? feels like something that couldn’t possibly fail. The science-fiction comedy was co-written by Ed Solomon, who has a stellar track record in this very specific genre thanks to Men in Black and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and it stars a dream team of Garry Shandling, Annette Bening, John Goodman, and Ben Kingsley. Things start to look a bit worse when you realize that Shandling plays an asexual alien that travels to Earth with the goal of impregnating a woman. His penis makes a loud noise whenever he gets aroused. If you think that sounds unfunny, you’re quite correct. Nothing about the movie is even remotely amusing, and it was a massive flop. It’s hard to imagine the film came from the same visionary director who made The Birdcage just four years earlier. There are laughs every 30 seconds in that movie. There are none in What Planet Are You From? Every second of it is agony. 

Back to the Future kicked off a remarkable string of movies for director Robert Zemeckis that continued with Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future II, Back to the Future III, Forrest Gump, Contact, What Lies Beneath, and Castaway. These were all big hits that still get a lot of play and love all these years later. But there’s one movie in the middle of that run we didn’t mention, and it’s one Zemeckis probably wishes never happened. We’re talking about 1992’s Death Becomes Her. The supposed comedy stars Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, and Bruce Willis, and centers around two self-centered women who drink an eternal-youth potion with disastrous results. The laughs never came, the special effects were cheesy even by 1992 standards, and the reviews were dismal. The major players in this movie all bounced back fairly quickly, leaving this movie as little more than a half-forgotten footnote in their careers.  

Ridley Scott is at his best when he tries to make something really big, whether that’s a horror movie about a killer extraterrestrial on a spaceship (Alien), an historical epic about a Roman warrior (Gladiator), or a dystopian sci-fi flick about an android hunter (Blade Runner). In 2006, however, he aimed oddly low when he reunited with Gladiator star Russell Crowe for a romantic comedy about a British investment banker who renovates a French estate he inherits from his uncle. It’s incredibly boring and not even remotely funny. “A Good Year is the movie equivalent of poring over a glossy brochure for a luxury vacation you could never afford while a roughneck salesman (Mr. Crowe) who imagines he has class harangues you to hurry up and make a decision about taking the tour,” Stephen Holden wrote in a New York Times review. “My advice is to resist the pitch.” 

David Fincher had a very difficult task in front of him when he signed on to make the third Alien movie. The 28-year-old director had spent the past few years creating ambitious music videos for superstars like Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Aerosmith. But he’d never made a movie, and this one had to follow Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking Alien — and James Cameron’s brilliant Aliens. The project had already been through several script rewrites when Fincher was hired, and the studio second-guessed his every move during the agonizing shoot and editing process. The final product is an absolute mess that nullifies the events of Aliens and ends with Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley character dying, but it’s tough to blame Fincher for it. He was in way over his head, and the studio didn’t have any faith in him. “A lot of people hated Alien 3,” Fincher said in 2009, “but no one hated it more than I did.” Three years after the Alien 3 fiasco, Fincher directed Seven. It turned him into one of the biggest directors in Hollywood, leaving Alien 3 as little more than a tough lesson from his past. “I learned then just to be a belligerent asshole,” he said in 2009, “which was really, ‘You have to get what you need to get out of it.’ You have to fight for things you believe in, and you have to be smart about how you position it so that you don’t just become white noise.”

After Basic Instinct raked in over $350 million in 1992, Hollywood started cranking out erotic thrillers at a furious clip. Most of them were dismal bombs (Body of Evidence, Color of Night, Sliver), and the lowest of the low was Jade, which centers around an assistant district attorney investigating a gruesome murder. It’s remembered today mainly as the movie that forever killed David Caruso’s big-screen career just one year after his disastrous decision to quit NYPD Blue. What fewer people remember today is that the man behind The Exorcist and The French Connection, William Friedkin, was the director. He continued to make disappointing movies after this, including the unfortunate 2000 Tommy Lee Jones/Samuel L Jackson misfire Rules of Engagement, but none of them sunk to the lows of Jade.

It’s tempting to name latter-day Harold Ramis movies like Year One, The Ice Harvest, or Bedazzled as the low point of his incredible career, and it wouldn’t be completely wrong. He had a real cold streak in the final decade of his life. But at the pinnacle of his Eighties success, directly after Caddyshack and National Lampoon’s Vacation, he directed and co-wrote a little film called Club Paradise starring Robin Williams, Jimmy Cliff, Peter O’Toole, Rick Moranis, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, and Brian Doyle-Murray. It’s about a Chicago fireman and a reggae singer who attempt to turn a rundown Carribean vacation spot into a luxury resort. This is two years after he played Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters, a movie he co-wrote. But all of his skills somehow escaped him for Club Paradise. It’s painfully unfunny. If you weren’t an active moviegoer in the mid-Eighties, you probably haven’t even heard of it since it’s been largely erased from the historical record. Ramis took a long break from directing after Club Paradise, but he came back with Groundhog Day. It’s hard to believe the same man wrote and directed both movies since Groundhog Day is a work of profound genius that grows in stature with each passing year. In other words, it’s the complete and total opposite of Club Paradise. 

Arnold Schwarzenegger showcased surprising comic chops in 1988’s Twins, where he was teamed with Danny DeVito and director Ivan Reitman. Six years later, the trio reunited for Junior. Much like Twins, it’s the story of an unlikely genetic experiment. In Twins, Schwarzenegger and DeVito learn they are siblings who share six different fathers. In Junior, they play doctors who create a fertility drug capable of getting a man pregnant. Twins is very funny and oddly poignant. Junior is extremely unfunny and oddly stupid. It made half as much money as Twins. It was also the end of a very hot streak for Reitman that included Meatballs, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Twins, Kindergarten Cop, and Dave. He had some real turkeys after Junior, including Evolution and My Super Ex-Girlfriend, but none have aged quite as bad as Junior. 

Martin Scorsese was a young director still trying to make a name for himself when he agreed to shoot this sexxed-up Bonnie and Clyde knockoff for Roger Corman on a shoestring budget. It stars Barbara Hershey as an orphan at the height of the Great Depression who teams up with a union boss and starts robbing trains. Like every Corman exploitation movie of this time, it’s packed with sex and violence. Scorsese does everything he can to rise above the budget and source material, but it’s ultimately hopeless. His follow-up project, however, was Mean Streets. It meant he’d never have to take on a work-for-hire project like Boxcar Bertha ever again. 

In the late 1970s and all through the 1980s, directors John Landis gave the world classic comedies like Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Trading Places, Coming to America, and the criminally underrated Spies Like Us. But like a hair metal band, he had a really tough time adjusting to the Nineties. After delivering the back-to-back bombs Oscar and Innocent Blood, and underwhelming with Beverly Hills Cop III, he reached a low point when he agreed to adapt the popular children’s book series The Stupids into a movie starring Tom Arnold. (This was shortly after True Lies when “Tom Arnold Movie Star” briefly seemed like it might be a thing.) There’s no reason a movie about morons can’t be great fun. Dumb and Dumber proved that two years earlier. But The Stupids ain’t Dumb and Dumber. It’s just an endless series of groan-inducing gags and a ridiculous plot about a terrorist attack uncovered by The Stupids. It was also such a colossal bomb that it nearly ended Landis’ directing career. 

In 1955, Alec Guiness starred in the superb black comedy The Ladykillers, which is about an elaborate train heist foiled by an old lady. In 2004, it was remade by the Coen brothers with Tom Hanks in the lead. The Coen brothers are very good at writing their own movies. And a perfect Ladykillers already exists. If they found a clever spin on the original movie, perhaps they could have justified this endeavor. But this is just a pointless rehash that moves to action from London to Mississippi and has them robbing a riverboat instead of a train. In a crucial misstep, they forgot to make it funny. The film racked up a respectable $77 million at the box office, way more than The Big Lebowski earned. But there’s never been any Ladykillers resurgence of any sort. It’s largely just been forgotten. 

Theodor Seuss Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) left an astounding amount of money on the table during his long life by refusing to allow Hollywood to turn his children’s books into live-action movies. He knew that any attempt to turn flesh-and-blood actors into surreal cartoon characters like The Cat in the Hat or The Grinch wouldn’t work, and would likely damage his brand. We all have vivid memories of these works from childhood. Why distort something so pure? When he died, however, his wife, Audrey Geisel, essentially auctioned the books off to the highest Hollywood bidders. The first result is Ron Howard’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, starring a nearly unrecognizable Jim Carrey in the lead role. It’s an aggressively ugly movie that drains all the warmth and joy out of the source material. When a similarly deranged Mike Myers Cat in the Hat movie crapped out three years later, Hollywood’s misguided experiment with live-action Dr. Seuss movies ended. Ron Howard, meanwhile, had many misfires this century, including The Dilemma, Hillbilly Elegy, and Angels and Demons, but none of them miss the mark quite like How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Every remaining copy of this film should be banished from the Earth. This character should exist only on the page or in animated form. Dr. Seuss was right. 

Unlike many great directors on this list, John Hughes walked away from his career long before he became an old man chasing past glories. He was a mere 41 when his final film, Curly Sue, hit theaters in 1991. And although Curly Sue is not a great film by any means, he made a worse one at the height of his creativity in 1988, sandwiched between Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and Uncle Buck. We’re referring to the Kevin Bacon/Elizabeth McGovern romantic comedy She’s Having a Baby. As the title suggests, it’s about a young married couple struggling with impending parenthood. But the two leads had little chemistry, and the film is remarkably bland, especially when compared with every other film Hughes made in the Eighties. The movie’s only redeeming quality is that it makes the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game quite easy since about 85 percent of Hollywood has lighting-fast cameos during the credit sequence. 

When news of David O. Russell’s Amsterdam hit the trades, there was a real sense of excitement in the cinephile community. O. Russell has a largely impeccable filmography thanks to Flirting With Disaster, Three Kings, The Fighter, and Silving Linings Playbook. And for Amsterdam, he assembled an absolutely enormous cast of A-listers that included Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Zoe Saldaña, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Rami Malek, and Robert De Niro. (He also created a role for Taylor Swift, which should have been a red flag considering her other movies are Cats, The Giver, and Valentine’s Day.) It’s a convoluted mystery film that takes place largely in the 1930s, centered around three friends trying to figure out who killed a prominent general. “It takes well over an hour before Amsterdam decides what it wants to be,” wrote James Berardinelli of ReelViews, “and, by that time, viewers may be exasperated by the film’s quirkiness and exhausted by its meandering, unfocused storyline.”

The first Star Wars prequel poses many questions: Did we really need to meet Darth Vader as a nine-year-old? Did they really think moviegoers would be charmed by the antics of Jar Jar Binks? Why is Anakin’s slave master a flying insect with an Israeli accent and a nose straight out of Nazi propaganda cartoons? What’s this midi-chlorian bullshit? We waited 16 endless years for this? To be clear, the prequels got better as they went along. The third one is actually pretty great. And the sequel trilogy is so abysmal, especially the most recent movie, that this one is actually somewhat solid by comparison. But George Lucas didn’t direct the newer ones. He did direct Phantom Menace.

It’s not exactly fair to blame James Cameron for the unholy mess that is 1982’s Piranha II: The Spawning. It was his first motion picture. The budget was miniscule. He had nothing to do with the ridiculous screenplay about flying piranhas. And most importantly, he wasn’t the one calling the shots. Italian producer Ovidio G. Assonitis had final say over every decision, and only credited Cameron as the director for contractual reasons. Cameron also had little to do with the final edit. But he was on set the entire time and is credited as the sole director, so we’re going to count it. (He followed it up with a little movie called The Terminator. He was fully in charge of that one. The results speak for themselves.) 

The original Planet of the Apes from 1968 is a masterpiece of science fiction. The franchise of films reimagining the original that starting in 2011 was shockingly great. But there was another Planet of the Apes movie back in 2001 directed by Tim Burton that most people would love to forget. It stars Mark Wahlberg in the Charlton Heston role as an astronaut who finds himself marooned on a planet ruled by humanoid apes. Expectations were very high for the project because Burton was in the director’s chair, and he was coming off a very successful run of films in the Nineties, including Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, and Ed Wood. Those were amazing movies. Planet of the Apes, sadly, was an incomprehensible mess. The only thing most people remember about it is the insane ending where Wahlberg comes back to present-day America and finds that it’s ruled by apes, complete with an ape Abraham Lincoln statue in the Lincoln Memorial. A sequel was supposed to explain this, but it never got made. To be clear, Burton made many terrible movies after Planet of the Apes, including Dark Shadows and Dumbo, but none of them fail on a level nearly as grandiose as Planet of the Apes.

After Good Will Hunting, Gus Van Sant could have directed anything he wanted. Nobody was saying no to him at this point. For reasons that remain impossible to understand, he took this invaluable Hollywood chip and cashed it in to create a shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho starring Vince Vaughan as Norman Bates. And we mean “shot for shot” in the most literal way possible. He re-created every single camera angle and line of dialogue from the 1960 horror classic in the most precise way possible. Why on Earth did he think there was demand for such a thing? The original exists. It’s perfect. You can repaint Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” for fun. But no art museum is going to display it. It’s just an interesting novelty. This new version of Psycho is no different. 

At a key moment in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldbum’s character explains why the dinosaur theme park isn’t a very good idea. “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could,” he said, “they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Spielberg should have applied this lesson to himself when he succumbed to years of pressure in 2008 and made a fourth Indiana Jones movie. The third one ended beautifully with Indiana Jones and his father literally riding off together into the sunset. When the story resumes two decades later, it’s 1957 and Jones discovers he has a teenage son, played by Shia LaBeouf. They travel to Peru, trailed by Soviet spies, and eventually come across ancient aliens in a temple. Once the thrill of seeing our old friend Indy after all these years washes away, it becomes clear this just isn’t a very compelling story. (We didn’t even mention the moment where Indy survives a nuclear blast in a refrigerator.) The fifth movie was arguably even worse, but Spielberg had the good sense to pass the directing baton to James Mangold for that one. In a better world, only the first three movies would exist. 

Roger Ebert wrote thousands of reviews during his long career as a film critic. But in an odd twist of fate, the one quoted most often these days is a review of the wretched 1995 Rob Reiner/Elijah Wood movie North, which is about a young boy traveling across the country to meet prospective parents. “I hated this movie,” he wrote. “Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it … ‘North’ is a bad film — one of the worst movies ever made. But it is not by a bad filmmaker, and must represent some sort of lapse from which Reiner will recover — possibly sooner than I will.” Rob Reiner did briefly bounce back in 1995 with The American President, but he hasn’t made many great movies over the past three decades. But even the crappiest of the crappy — like Being Charlie, The Magic of Belle Isle, or And So It Goes — can’t compare to the sheer shittiness of North. At least it inspired the name of an Ebert collection of bad reviews titled I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Seventies run of The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather II, and Apocalypse Now is probably the greatest four-movie streak in the history of Hollywood. But things took a major turn in the Eighties and Nineties due to high-profile fiascos like The Cotton Club and The Godfather III. By 1996, he was reduced to taking work-for-hire directing jobs like Jack. That’s the unfortunate movie where Robin Williams plays a child whose body grows at four times the normal rate. It’s a decent premise for a serious drama, but this is actually a comedy. He has water-balloon fights with his middle school buddies, buys them porn, and waits for the day he’ll die tragically young. It ends seven years in the future with an elderly Jack delivering a graduation speech, clearly on the verge of death. The movie was a modest box-office hit, but the critics roasted it. It’s only grown worse with age, especially since Bill Cosby plays Jack’s tutor. And whatever one thinks about the movie today, it was certainly beneath the talents of a titan like Coppola.