When I walk into any movie, I hope it will be good.
After all, this is how I spend the majority of my time. This is what I write about and speak about and think about more than anything else, and when I see critics who seem to dislike the majority of what they cover, I am baffled. Why would you do this work if you genuinely dislike more than you like?
What disappoints me most when I'm in a theater is missed potential. There are films that didn't make it anywhere near this list that are completely horrible, movies that had no potential at all and that deliver nothing to the viewer. Those are your basic garden-variety terrible movies. For a film to end up on this list, it has to be a betrayal, a waste of real potential, because that is the single greatest sin anyone can commit against movies in my opinion.
Maybe we shouldn't call this the “worst of,” but that's shorthand for how I feel about these films overall. For a long time, I would call this list “The 20 Hours I Want Back,” but even that's not accurate. Any film I watch is part of my ever-evolving ideas about what's good and what's bad, what works and what doesn't, and you can learn volumes from watching a film where every choice was wrong.
We've got a video that our tremendous video team put together, and you can also read my list below. If you're a passionate defender of any of these films, I'd love to have that conversation with you, and I'd love to get an idea of what films you guys felt most disappointed or angered by this year.
And with that, we say goodbye to 2014. And even as we name these as the ten films we least enjoyed this year, we acknowledge that any year in film has to have both highs and lows, and don't hold a grudge. Here's hoping we are unable to make a list like this in 2015 because everything everyone makes is great.
Wouldn't that be nice?