Top 8 Worst Movies of 2006From Marcy and Jurgen Some filmmakers want to make you suffer and call it art. If there's no agony in your own hum drum life, turn to the silver screen and experience pain beyond your wildest belief. Leave the theater with a raging headache and anger against your fellow man. Highlights of the worst in foreign and independent film include Mel Gibson's Apocalypo, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel and the Dardenne Brother's L'Enfant. Please note: we don't review popcorn movies. Inane films featuring lead performances by the Duff Sisters, for instance, don't get play here, not even a pan. 1. ApocalyptoMel Gibson's follow-up to The Passion of the Christ uses the decline of the ancient Mayan civilization as backdrop to enact another epic blood bath. Come for the solar eclipse and stay for the large-scale serial human sacrifice! Unpleasant, pointless, gruesome, and exploitative, Apocalypto is the worst movie of the year. |
2. BabelUnrelentingly, unremittingly sad, excruciatingly painful, all for no valid reason, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel is a movie to avoid at all costs. Pain for pain's sake does not impress us here. |
3. L'EnfantThe Dardenne Brothers film about a teenage hoodlum who sells his girl friend's baby for quick cash won the Palme D'Or at Cannes but that doesn't make the film good. In the unearned final scene, were suddenly asked to embrace the baby mongers unlikely redemption. This is the kind of preposterous fake-gritty hokum that gives art house film a bad namecall it the Crash of Cannes.4. Marie AntoinetteCake is the perfect metaphor for this superficial, messy confection of a movie. Director Sofia Coppola has proved that she has talent, but hopefully her next film won't gleefully embrace the indulges of the rich and immoral. 5. Friends With MoneySnarky, petty, self-indulgent, unappealing: those are some of the words I would use to describe the folks in Nicole Holofcener's mean spirited drama Friends With Money. 6. Death of a PresidentGabriel Range's mockumentary invites us to the imaginary the assassination of George W. Bush at the hands of a sniper. Once the shock value wears off, it turns out the filmmaker has absolutely nothing of value to say. 7. Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane ArbusOh, what an irritating mess. Screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson and director Steven Shainberg reteam after the enormously successful and equally risky Secretarywith the bold vision of creating a fictional period in the life of a real figure. No luck this time. Diane Arbus is played by a distractingly tremulous and terribly miscast Nicole Kidman. 8. Battle in HeavenCarlos Reygadas's sophomore film offers an audacious style, amateur actors performing real on-screen sex, and a melodramatic plot that doesn't add up.
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