Five-Star Reviews of Infamously Bad Movies

We all see movies for our own reasons, and we all like and dislike them for our own reasons. It doesn’t matter what others think. If we laughed, we cried, we saw the film with someone we loved and had a special connection with the screen and the people around us, that’s all that matters.

In other words, moviegoing is personal and so is movie criticism. That’s the best reason to read a review. Not to learn the “right” or “wrong” opinion about something, but to glimpse a film through an entirely different person’s perspective. Just because someone thinks a movie about an Olympic gymnast who becomes a spy for the U.S. government who goes to a fictional Eastern European country to compete in a bizarre competition in order to win the right to launch a spy satellite is an all-out masterpiece doesn’t mean others will. But if they write passionately enough, they might just convince us to rethink things a little bit. (This is just one entirely hypothetical example that I spontaneously made up.)

That’s why I love reviews like the 30 that follow. They are five-star raves on Letterboxd — most of them completely unironic, some genuinely deranged, all of them totally inspired — for some of the most infamous and notorious cinematic disasters of all time. These are the movies that have won Razzies, bombed at the box office, and appear on lists of the worst films ever made. But you wouldn’t know it from these reviews.

I have blacked out the names of these writers to dissuade you from finding these people and harassing them about their taste. (If you want to track them down and thank them for the amazing review of The Love Guru, that I have no problem with.) This is about celebrating the love of movies in whatever form that takes. There may even be one of my five-star reviews in there. See if you can find it…