To truly review a film, you should go in accepting its basic existence. Specifically, you should debate with the concept, make peace with it, and develop your critical faculties to move beyond criticisms of a film’s idea and toward criticism of the execution to fulfill that idea. You should go in accepting everything you could know about the movie simply by seeing the trailer or the poster, or else your criticism should be taken with a most sodium-infused grain of salt.
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Worst or “Worst”: Night of the Lepus
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George Miller really wanted Mad Max: Fury Road. The back-story, the thirty year gap between Fury Road and its predecessor Mad Mad: Beyond Thunderdome, and the troubled, stop-start production for Fury Road itself all conspire to tell us this much. The beauty of the resulting film is that this back-story is both instantly extraneous and essential to unlocking its mysteries. All the hurt, all the torment, all the passion to release that which had been denied to Miller; all are instantly identifiable on the screen, but the film speaks for itself. Right before it blows your head off, but that is the Miller way. After releasing two extraordinary vehicles for tactile, sand-encrusted action under the Mad Max name, he went Hollywood and lost his edge with the third feature, the one whose biggest addition was Tina Turner. He spent the ensuing thirty years intermittently pursuing his craft in often stellar family films to recuperate, but his heart was elsewhere. 
What a strange, messy phenomenon the Pink Panther franchise is. When it began in 1963 as a slight, indifferently pleasant movie about a jewel thief (played by the ever-smarmy David Niven, who was given the lion’s share of the run-time) and an inept side-character vaguely pretending to hunt him down , expectations for a sequel, let alone a cottage pop culture phenomenon, were little. Now, the first film, The Pink Panther, did not exactly set the world on fire, nor does it truly qualify as a phenomenon. But relative to what it might have been – a throwaway ’60s fluffy star piece with some entirely game actors in the distinctly ’60s laconic-swinging mode so ubiquitous in 1963 – something caught fire.
From Russia with Love is a curious beast. It does not “work” according to the distinct rhymes and reasons of what would become the “Bond film” archetype. It does not establish its own vision of what cinema ought to be, as so many other Bond films went on to do, starting with the very next film in the series, Goldfinger. It lacks the pop art, it lacks the pizzaz, it lacks the chutzpah of those other glammy, punchy Bond films that established a certain modern cool-chic lifestyle porn take on watching movies simply because they could give you visions of things that life in its mundane reality never could. On most of the basic “rules” by which Bond films are generally judged, it doesn’t even attempt to pass muster. In fact, it is, excepting its predecessor Dr. No, a work that could charitably be described as “mundane”.
America did pop proud in the 1960s, but pop didn’t always imply a bulging budget or grandiose popular success. The lingering vestiges of that most ’50s of all genres, the atomic underground horror, still clung to the beginning of the decade like a wandering specter. Admittedly, the low-brow, even-lower-budget works suffered a little about how to re-invent themselves; Hammer Horror in the UK certainly hit a few home runs, but flooding the markets ran them red with bloody boredom sooner than not. In the US, where “underground fare” similarly served as a safe, parental euphemism for horror, things were likewise stuck in a liminal space between the pre-Bay of Pigs interest in fooling around with atomic supermen and nuclear fall-out monsters, and the genuine “exploitation” of exploitation cinema came to fruition in the very late 1960s. In between, in the early 1960s, what was underground horror to do?
It is a go-to pocket complaint of modern Disney that, at some point, they lost interest in the mythic and left the magical by the wayside. From the dark days of the 1960s until darn near the embryonic stages of the 1990s, their films were marked by increasingly poor animation quality and a loss of exploration and heart to match. One Hundred and One Dalmatians holds the unfortunate distinction of being definitively the locus of this three decade dalliance with ground-level storytelling, the period where Disney turned its back on the skies. All of this circles around one point: One Hundred and One Dalmatians is a crying shame, and one of the most disappointing Disney features every released. 
Another relatively short new feature to round out the month, this one about so-called “entertainment” films for the masses in the 1960s. Even when they weren’t doing much of anything else, films from this decade, the golden-age of gee-shucks entertainment, sure knew how to pop!
The most enticing moment in Avengers: Age of Ultron is successful because it is so elusive, and it may very well be the worst moment as well. When it begins, we are informed that the titular superhero smack-down squadron and consummate bickerers are off to Africa. We know we are going to Africa because the characters essentially say “we are going to Africa”. Smash-cut to a helicopter shot of a derelict shipyard. We know this is a shipyard because there are ships. It is also, one would assume, on a coast line, for that is where ships tend to reside. At this point, everyone’s favorite quasi-military font appears in lower screen with text that informs us, in as many words, “Shipyard, Off the Coast of Africa”, in case we were wondering if the ships were, in fact, airplanes, or whether they were docked in Nebraska.
Nature gone amok was not a new fixation in film by 1977; it was merely, and suddenly, a now respectable one after the release of Jaws. From the heyday of the early 1970s, with infamous concoctions such as Frogs and the dumbfounding, absolutely beguiling Night of the Lepus, environmentalism and scientific experimentation on animals were on the mind, and like any good red blooded progressive concerned about their country without forgetting its make-a-buck capitalist origins as a nation, every huckster in the business wanted in on the trend.
Calling a film one of the“worst films’ ever is a loaded statement, usually because it comes from the mouth of someone who most assuredly has not seen the large majority of the library in the gods’ hall of bad cinema. In some cases though, or perhaps only this one case, the descriptor of “worst film” is a misnomer for a very different reason. When you have a puzzle piece like Hercules in New York, you cannot merely append descriptors to the word “film” to describe its unholiness, for that itself relies on the false given that the descriptor of “film” applies to everything that is released under the moniker. Case in point, Arnold Schwarzenegger running around New York, flexing muscles and fighting bears, and a work that almost exists outside of descriptors entirely. Certainly, we should be cautious to use the word “film” to articulate its unaccountable, freakish milieu, and we should be even more cautious of implying that anyone “worked” toward it at all. 
The Long Take 