February 2025: least favourite film from your favourite director

This month's prompt was "your least favourite film from one of your favourite directors". Check the Crash/Cut main page for the current collaborative list to get your submission published next month, and let us know in the comments what you would've picked for this topic!

RoboCop (1987) | directed by Paul Verhoeven | reviewed by Lucy Schwindt

Writing about this movie as my least favourite Verhoeven hurts a little bit, especially when I love all his work. It was really hard to pick a least favourite. RoboCop is an amazing, fun, and wildly enjoyable watch. Like every 80’s action movie you have cheesy explosions and great one liners. This movie has fascinating biblical parallels (this deserves an article in itself) that is made even more interesting by incredible performances by the actors.
Despite all these reasons that make it so good, and one movie that I hold so near and dear to my heart. In comparison to the rest of Verhoeven's filmography, it doesn’t shine nearly as strongly as RoboCop’s exterior does (haha). I think it is on a similar level to any other great 80’s action movie, right up there next to Top Gun, Indiana Jones, and Big Trouble in Little China. One of the features I appreciate most about Verhoeven’s work though is how distinctive and visually creative his choices are. Looking at Showgirls or Starship Troopers, it is hard to get the images these movies conjure up out of your mind. Whether you liked Showgirls or not, it is difficult to get the neon lights of the Las Vegas strip out of your mind. It stays with you. I believe RoboCop came right before Verhoeven started to fully embrace being loud and out there in his films. I will never not recommend this movie to someone, but it was just a start to Verhoeven’s vibrant and creative career. 

Tenet (2020) | directed by Christopher Nolan | reviewed by Hunter Demers

Ah yes, another month, another opportunity for me to talk about how much I love Christopher Nolan. As one of the last directors who can constantly pull in large budgets for "original" (Oppenheimer and his Batman trilogy were adapted) large scale filmmaking, he really does his best to ensure that each of his films feel unique from one another, while simultaneously perfecting his signature style. You can obviously tell when a film is Nolan's, given away by his notoriously overbearing sound mixing, beautiful, crisp cinematography, and a deep infatuation with time within his films' narrative structures, but instead of all of his films feeling samey or redundant, Nolan has managed to imbue each of his works with a sense of unique individuality, films that no other director could pull off. As well, I would be amiss to not mention his love for working on ACTUAL film, both shooting and editing on the large-scale IMAX 70mm format. This is a feat in its own right, but when considering how few theatres are actually able to show the format properly, his deep, intricate workings in the analogue format are even more commendable. One of my favourite films from him, Interstellar (2014), demonstrates the transformative power of working in this format, taking us on a divine exploration of our humanity through the lens of science fiction's vast and alien landscapes. It's a film that feels SO big and large-scale, especially when viewed in IMAX (or any theatre for that matter!), that still manages to feel deeply intimate and connected to what binds and connects us as a people. Even within one of his less well regarded films, and what I personally consider to be his worst, Tenet (2020), Nolan is still able to generate a sense of excitement and intrigue, despite its intentional lacking of intelligible dialogue, asking us to "feel" the film, rather than "read" it. Not every director is perfect, many have misfires like Tenet, but few come close to the utter consistency in both quality and style that Nolan has been able to achieve throughout his career thus far.

​Reservoir Dogs (1992) | directed by Quentin Tarantino | reviewed by Jason Lepine

As I walk through the directorial filmography of Quentin Tarantino, I find it easy to point to my favourite. I love all his films, but Jackie Brown stands as that perfect storm of Tarantino-ness. But least favourite? Now that is a challenge for me, and one that at times has felt clear, but as years pass and multiple viewings take place, always leads me to appreciate Tarantino’s work even more; there is an appreciating return with his body of work. All his films continue to engage long after release, and although he is undeniably popular, I truly feel his body of work won’t be fully appreciated until he hangs up his camera for good. Least favourite film? An impossible task, but at the end of the day (a surely controversial choice) I would say that Reservoir Dogs (1992) crosses the finish line last. Granted, we are talking about a film that in my opinion is better than 90% of films that have I have seen. I love Reservoir Dogs, and it clearly inspired all of Tarantino's films that followed; its DNA is in each of them. Despite the classic banter of the opening diner scene, the infamous gas can / ear scene, and the final deadlocked stand-off, there are sections of this film between those iconic moments that drag, and yes, all pivotal moments from a film require development, but these build-ups lack the Tarantino-ness that carries throughout his subsequent work. This the one film that, at least for me, has the most forgettable moments between the iconic moments it is famous for. This is his first true release, and I am more than happy to say that it is his least shiny diamond. After all, wouldn’t it be more tragic if the opposite were true, and he peaked right away?

Faces (1968) | directed by John Cassavetes | reviewed by Hazel Cochrane

Cassavetes is known for his improvisatory style, and often represents imperfect, very narcissistic characters, but that is all he seems to do with his 1968 film Faces. It is the earliest film I’ve seen of his, but there is a considerable difference in the watchability as well as emotional impact between Faces and his film Husbands which followed it. Nothing in this film is very memorable, whereas even his most hated film, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, gets stuck in your head. Not even the beautiful, melancholic Gena Rowlands makes a lasting impression in Faces–she isn’t given very much screen time, either. The most memorable scene is one where Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes argue over their opinions on peoples’ weight. Cassavetes’ films are usually all-over-the-place, and there is hardly ever a focus on plot development, but conversations in Faces really lack significance in terms of plot and feeling. The film is overall quite drab, and characters are unrelateable and given no other kind of significance.
While I absolutely would never recommend this particular film, I would encourage whoever’s interested to watch Husbands, Opening Night, and A Woman Under the Influence!