Society & Culture & Entertainment Movies

Top 8 Worst Movies of 2006

By Society & Culture & Entertainment Last updated Sunday, May/26/2024

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. Apocalypto

Mel 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. Babel

Unrelentingly, 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'Enfant

The 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, we’re suddenly asked to embrace the baby monger’s unlikely redemption. This is the kind of preposterous fake-gritty hokum that gives art house film a bad name–call it the Crash of Cannes.

4. Marie Antoinette

Cake 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 Money

Snarky, 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 President

Gabriel 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 Arbus

Oh, 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 Heaven

Carlos Reygadas's sophomore film offers an audacious style, amateur actors performing real on-screen sex, and a melodramatic plot that doesn't add up.

World Film Forum

What's the worst movie you've seen all year? Post feedback on this list in the forum.

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