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The 10 Worst Films of 2015

In selecting the worst films of the year, we dove into ourselves and not the percentage pool.

The 10 Worst Films of 2015
Photo: Universal Pictures

When Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens in just a few days, audiences will inevitably notice a fervor sweeping through auditoriums, generated from enthusiasm over past Star Wars iterations, that some may instantly categorize as positive or fun in spirit. But reflect on these energies for a moment longer and you might recognize this visible exuberance as a mask for something lacking, something missing within the collective consciousness of a culture that wants its thrills signed, sealed, delivered in the form of franchise guarantees. Taste, especially, should be about finding art that helps resolve the void and not merely fills it. Accordingly, our list of the worst films we saw in 2015 isn’t meant to be comprehensive in any consensus sense, but to highlight titles that made us want to flee the dark, sacred space of the movie theater by making the void feel deeper than it had prior. Audiences and critics have largely championed some of these films, for various reasons, but what are movies if not an avenue to weigh personal values, whether political or aesthetic, against what’s on the screen? In selecting the worst, we dove into ourselves and not the percentage pool. Clayton Dillard


The 10 Worst Films of 2015

10. The Cobbler

The Cobbler blends callousness with the condescending magical sentimentality that’s insistent on the hidden dimensions of “the common man.” It’s a toxic combination that’s occasionally enlivened by lunacy, as this is one of those films that’s so bad that one’s driven to keep watching to see how much worse it can get. That answer arrives in a scene in which a financially struggling white man disguises himself as a black criminal and steals a rich white man’s shoes, so that he can make off with the rich man’s car. Amazingly, director Thomas McCarthy doesn’t appear to be aware of the loaded racial stereotypes with which he’s playing. It might be useful for elucidating the contempt that lurks underneath most “issues” films, including most of McCarthy’s more acclaimed work. Chuck Bowen


The 10 Worst Films of 2015

9. Trainwreck

Mark Twain once said, “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.” Judd Apatow seems to have both in spades with Trainwreck, whose greatest offense isn’t even wasting the formidable creative energies of Amy Schumer, but its successive functioning as a head-up-its-own-ass, feature-length advertisement for the NBA and other pop-culture banalities. No other film in 2015 squandered so much talent and opportunity. The film’s worst scene epitomizes this, as LeBron James, Matthew Broderick, Chris Evert, and Marv Albert (all playing themselves) stage an intervention for Bill Hader’s softhearted doctor, whose name might as well be Kindly Kind. Albert evaluates the scenario like he’s calling a basketball game, Broderick and Hader exchange in-jokes about Broderick’s marriage to “the star of Sex and the City,” and Evert calls James “a cock-blocker,” all while Apatow haplessly cuts the scene, like the entire film, into smithereens. Dillard


The 10 Worst Films of 2015

8. The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence)

Reuniting with actor Dieter Laser, director Tom Six achieved the impossible: He made a film less watchable than The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence). The Human Centipede sequels are Six’s collective tantrum, which he appears to have thrown in response to the first film’s unexpectedly warm reception. The sequels aren’t merely deliberately bad, but claustrophobically contemptuous of their audience, daring us to somehow not hate them and the smorgasbord of jokey racism, sexism, castration, rape, dismemberment, and, of course, the now de rigueur ass-to-mouth shenanigans they offer up for our anti-delectation. And, weirdly, one strives to enjoy the sequels, out of spite, so as to somehow avoid playing into Six’s infantile hand, but the filmmaker, and Laser, his primary co-conspirator, aren’t to be trumped. Bowen


The 10 Worst Films of 2015

7. Ted 2

With Ted 2, Seth MacFarlane cements his status as Hollywood’s ultimate purveyor of consumerist gruel by shamelessly corpse-fucking every orifice of our pop-cultural past. Simply cashing in on what MacFarlane ironically perceives to be a mindless present, the film uses a cameo by Liam Neeson, one-liners about the Kardashians, and a plot involving Ted’s bid to be recognized as “a person” as disingenuous pleas for immediacy and relevance. MacFarlane’s ultimate problem is that he fashions himself a progressive on issues of gender and equality, but his perpetual obsession with homosocial ritual and persistent relegation of characters to stereotypes contradictorily suggest otherwise. Even if MacFarlane’s personal politics have conviction, in terms of film form and humanist gall, Ted 2 is positively craven. Dillard

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The 10 Worst Films of 2015

6. The End of the Tour

Underneath The End of the Tour’s affected, cuddly benevolence lurks an insidious kind of anti-intellectual screed. Director James Ponsoldt and actor Jason Segel endlessly tell the audience: Don’t worry, author David Foster Wallace was just like you, a shaggy, lumbering man-child who ate too much junk food and loved Die Hard! That’s an obviously fraudulent assertion, unless everyone in the audience also happens to have published a novel as daring as Infinite Jest. The film doesn’t invite us to get to know Wallace, or challenge us to attempt to function at his level artistically or intellectually. It numbs us, fetishizing only the (highly disputed) everyman aspect of the author’s personality. Wallace’s prickly brilliance is scrubbed away for the sake of offering a patronizing manifesto on complacency. Bowen


The 10 Worst Films of 2015

5. Vice

Bruce Willis gave perhaps the worst two performances of his career this year in Rock the Kasbah and Vice, the latter of which also marks the most wasted use of Thomas Jane in any film to date. Both men are lifelessly planted inside of a sci-fi plot that plays like it was written by a life form less intelligent than the “artificials” comprising the film’s narrative of governmental corruption and rogue cop antics. Director Brian A. Miller prefers his film to speak its brain-numbing aims, concluding with the unintended-to-be ironic statement “Welcome to the real world,” a greeting that can only be actualized once one is eons removed from this film’s soulless debasements. Dillard


The 10 Worst Films of 2015

4. Jason and Shirley

Dramatizing the filming of Shirley Clarke’s classic Portrait of Jason, director Stephen Winter and actors and co-writers Sarah Schulman and Jack Waters rarely directly recreate scenes from the documentary. Instead, they imagine the filler that Clarke presumably discarded when shaping her cut of the film, treating us to a fantasy of unused detritus, which is meant to tell us how fraudulent these artists were in their real lives. Winter doesn’t display the confidence that the real Clarke did when she kept her camera solely on Jason Holliday. Alternatively, the director stages a variety of limp, confessional fantasy sequences—call them Fosse-lite. It’s all so impossibly banal and garish, so insultingly broad and meaningless. Jason and Shirley doesn’t earn the gall it evinces by pissing on a masterpiece. Bowen


The 10 Worst Films of 2015

3. 7 Minutes

In 7 Minutes, writer-director Jay Martin depicts human interaction with an extraterrestrial’s sensibilities, as if the ways people actually move, function, gesture, and touch are wholly foreign to either his pen or lens. Aggressively foul, the film follows a trio of boneheads who commit a robbery to pay back a drug debt. Martin introduces each of the three through a narrative that shuttles back and forth between the ongoing stickup and the prior events that set the heist in motion. Genre work tends to thrive on rhythm, specificity, and a playful maneuvering and repackaging of convention, but Martin is out to blankly rehearse the thriller template (guns, masks, kidnapping, double-crossings, drug dealers), not make meaningful, or even comprehensible, revisions to it. Dillard

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The 10 Worst Films of 2015

2. Accidental Love

One can see what director David O. Russell, who shot this long-delayed film years before his ascension as a reliable purveyor of misleadingly hip pap, was after in Accidental Love. It’s supposed to be a stylized farce of escalating satiric absurdity—a mix of Legally Blonde with the hostile metaphoric comedy that Matt Stone and Trey Parker have mastered on South Park. But Accidental Love is so flimsily constructed and badly acted that it resembles a middle-school play that’s been hastily filmed on an antique camcorder. Spatially incoherent group shots (a liability for which Russell’s films are now routinely praised) govern the aesthetics, while the White House is geographically defined as a series of anonymous hallways that could just as easily belong to an OfficeMax. Bowen


The 10 Worst Films of 2015

1. Beasts of No Nation

Beasts of No Nation is the logical next step for Cary Fukunaga’s dedication to intensity at all costs. After his long-take shimmy received raves on True Detective, he decides to up the ante by adapting Uzodinma Iweala’s novel about “an unnamed West African country” and turning every single frame into a hyper-saturated, sadistic exercise, perversely dangling nascent, graphic postcolonial conflicts over the heads of impressionable viewers like the bloodied bait that it is. If you bite, you lose, because endorsing Fukunaga’s self-aggrandizing aesthetics further condones the deadening of African experience by literally bashing its brains in, with blood splattered on the camera lens for good measure. There’s no space for breathing, felt life here. Even an early scene of a family playfully burping around a dinner table is merely a reverse-engineered moment of levity to make the impending carnage feel all the more brutal. Fukunaga has said, “I think if more people saw how gruesome war is…there would be a lot more global action to prevent it,” but Beasts of No Nation only establishes further distance between its subjects and any audience being called to action by incessantly meat-grinding African bodies during the magic hour rather than offering clear-headed, thoughtful drama. Dillard

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