The Worst Best Movies of 2014

The most “overrated” movies of 2014, from “Nymphomaniac” to “Locke” to “The Double”.

There are critics, and then there are trolls. A troll is someone who enjoys raining on the parade, to take a beloved classic and tell you everything you thought you enjoyed about it was wrong. The troll only hates something because everyone else enjoys it, and the troll wants to define himself or herself by blazing their own path and forming an interesting, provocative opinion that challenges the status quo of their peers.

I’d hate to think that my opinion on an individual movie would completely define my own personality or my taste in film. That’s because each year, a number of highly critically acclaimed films come out, and not every critic can reasonably get behind all of them. In fact, some critics find a handful of films in this bunch downright bad, and they struggle to explain what all the fuss is about. It happens every year, with just about every movie. Yes, even “Boyhood.”

And yet each year, there are angry commenters who shun the first critic to break the 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, and there are people who aim to invalidate a critic’s entire reputation by saying, “How could you hate X and yet give a good review to Y?”

This year I found myself on the far end of a few of these critical spectrums; that doesn’t change the fact that I absolutely loved loved LOVED so many of the other critical darlings and cultural hits from 2014. Yes, that one too.

So take this list with a grain of salt. It’s not meant to be contrarian or say these movies are overrated. Just know that much as I disliked this small batch of films, they’re each admirable, ambitious and memorable in a way you could very well love. Just don’t hold it against me.

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Noah

Darren Aronofsky’s Bible adaptation is ambitious but is all over the place.

Randy “The Ram” in “The Wrestler” abused himself in the ring just so that he could feel anything. In the end he brought himself to the brink of his strength. Nina Sayers in “Black Swan” tortured her body to achieve perfection and beauty and ultimately found herself battling her psyche.

Darren Aronofsky’s protagonists are conflicted souls, testing their minds, morals and beliefs in pursuit of something nobler. The biblical story of Noah finds his faith in God pit against mankind, forced to choose between innocence, justice and love.

Or at least that’s Aronofsky’s version. “Noah” is Aronofsky’s ambitious interpretation of the Bible tale, and unlike the surreal grittiness found in his previous films, his mix of fantasy and portent is a paradoxical mess. It’s a movie about beauty in which the colors have been sapped from all traces of the Earth. It’s one of human decency in which mankind is depicted as ravenous, ugly, violent, carnivorous or worse, flavorless. It’s a morality tale in which the hero is less given a moral choice as he is driven to madness. It’s a movie about faith, miracles and spirituality, but ostensibly avoids religion or even the mention of the word “God”.

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Very Early 2014 Movie Preview

25 interesting films worth getting excited for at this very early stage.

This time last year I published a list of some of my most anticipated movies of 2013, and although I acknowledged at the time that I really had no clue of the quality of any of the films, let alone what they would even be about, it’s amazing the picks that landed and the ones that didn’t.

In the plus column, I plugged “Inside Llewyn Davis,” “Gravity,” “Prisoners,” “The Place Beyond the Pines,” “Captain Phillips,” “This is the End,” “Before Midnight” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.”  Not a bad batting average.

On the minus side however, I talked about “To the Wonder,” “Oldboy,” “Ender’s Game,” “I’m So Excited” and “A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III.”

And a handful, including “The Monuments Men,” “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby” and “Labor Day”  still have not come out. How about that for a prediction?

So which of the 25 movies I’ve picked here will we be talking about at the end of 2014? It could be all of them.

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