A season in hell

When the movies are bad, they can be teeth-grindingly, watch-checkingly, butt-numbingly bad. This year, the bad stuff was so bad we had to turn our Worst Ten list up to eleven.

HAND JOB Anthony Hopkins never could get the hand of that "Here is the church" game.

Best excuse for banishing Anthony Hopkins to a private island. You can’t fault actors expressing a personal vision, but Hopkins’s jaw-droppingly self-indulgent fantasy Slipstream resembles what might have happened if David Lynch’s gaffer had chewed some peyote, filmed a Golden Globes after-party, thrown the footage to a wind machine and handed it to Michael Bay to re-edit.

THE JOY OF PECS Somewhere, Fabio is seething with jealousy.

Worst use of technology. There are proclamations of the Death of Cinema every year, but 300—which, from a formal perspective, is essentially two hours of guys in Speedos running around in front of a blue screen shouting—may be the surest sign yet of an impending apocalypse. Glad Slavoj Zizek liked it, at least.

Worst movie involving aging backward (intentionally or not). Not Youth Without Youth, in which aging backward was part of the plot, but La Vie en Rose, which indulges in some of the most pointless chronological scrambling in memory. Thanks to erratic makeup work, Piaf indeed appears to get younger as the late ’40s progress. And somehow World War II is forgotten entirely.

Worst movie in which Lindsay Lohan plays separated identical twins who suffer from matching stigmata as one of them is systematically mutilated by a serial killer who looks like a member of Blue Man Group. Um, I Know Who Killed Me?

MISS DIRECTION Halle Berry logs on to IMDB to boost Catwoman's average user rating.

Pssst! She’s an unreliable narrator, you putz! It was almost worth it for the scene where Bruce Willis beat up the rival company spy, but both he and guilty-seeming Giovanni Ribisi are red herrings in the Halle Berry vehicle Perfect Stranger, which lays out clues for four possible endings and somehow settles for the most Donald Kaufmanesque.

Best excuse for barring Tom Cruise from public office. Actually, why bar him? His performance in Lions for Lambs would provide a rival with a hilarious attack ad.

Worst attempt to update a 70s comedy classic: To borrow a line from Ernst Lubitsch, Who’s Your Caddy did to Caddyshack what Hitler did to Poland.

RUFF STUFF Make fun if you want, but Peter Dinklage is thinking about the house this movie just bought him.

Most annoying jump from cartoon source to live-action movie: Underdog took the occasionally witty source material of a 60s cartoon and made live-action kids’ movie glop notable for making the usually charming Peter Dinklage look like a bad actor.

Lamest attempt to make a sequel with none of the original cast: Daddy Day Camp was a demoralizing 93 minutes that proved conclusively that Cuba Gooding Jr. is not the working man’s Eddie Murphy.

Proof that Jacques Tati was even more of a genius than we thought: Mr. Bean’s Holiday–with Rowan Atkinson’s incredibly annoying Mr. Bean character traveling across France with a boy just on the brink of puberty–tried for the visual whimsy and childlike humor of Tati or Chaplin, but was by turns annoying and creepy.

WHEN THE PAWN BREAKS If he loses this game, Andre 3000 agrees to go back to making Outkast records.

Most craptacular action movie: Smokin’ Aces and Shoot ’Em Up were in the running this year, but Revolver wins out due to the pure batshit merger of post-Tarantino gunplay porn and an attempt at a tricky intellectual plot twist that brings Freud, Machiavelli and Julius Caesar to the table. Guy Ritchie should not be allowed to read books; they aren’t making him smarter.

It wasn't all bad news. See "Reeling in the year" for our take on our favorite screen scenes of 2007 and check out the TOC blog for the five best things to happen to the Chicago film scene this year.