As a critic I generally have the privilege of choosing which movies I see each week, so therefore there are many films reputed to be awful that I did not see this year. These include: Jack and Jill Transformers: Dark of the Moon The Human Centipede: Full Sequence The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Your Highness Zookeeper The Beaver Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star and Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked. That said, here are the ten worst films I did see: 1. Just Go With It This "comedy" from Adam Sandler kicked off with ten minutes of ugly-Jewish-girl jokes, yet somehow went all downhill from …

The Artist, one of the very best pictures of the year, debuted at the Philadelphia Film Festival in October. It is both shot in black and white and silent. Yes, that's right, silent. Directed by Michel Hazanavicius and set in the waning days of silent film in the 1920s, The Artist is a lovingly shot, beautifully realized love letter to cinema history. The leads — Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo — are both French, as is the director, but most of the supporting cast is recognizable Americans, such as James Cromwell, Penelope Ann Miller and John Goodman, who is pitch-perfect as a studio boss. …

Jason Reitman, prior to this year, had directed three films: Thank You For Smoking in 2006, Juno in 2007 and Up In the Air in 2009. Each of them was my favorite movie of their respective year. His fourth film, Young Adult? You can't win 'em all, I guess. The film reunites Reitman with Oscar-winning Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody and returns the action to Minnesota, Juno's home state (and, originally, mine.) What's missing is any semblance of a compelling story, as well as the wit and humanity that marked Reitman's first three pictures.  It's being advertised as a comedy, but I don't remember …

Here's one of the year's biggest surprises: a third sequel to a franchise whose heyday is long in the past, featuring a star who's pushing 50 and a director who's not even supposed to be able to do live action. Yet, Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol is improbably the series' best entry since its first, not to mention the most entertaining, exciting and well-made action-adventure picture of the year. The Mission: Impossible series is of course based on the 1960s TV show and first arrived on the big screen with Brian DePalma's 1996 movie, which was a huge success despite all but blowing up the…

Here's a truly odious and repugnant comedy, a semi-remake of Adventures in Babysitting that subtracts most of the laughs and replaces them with heavy doses of negligence and sociopathy. The Sitter is perhaps the worst "one crazy night" movie of all time, and almost certainly the worst movie of 2011 that doesn't feature the words "Adam Sandler" above the title. It's also the first comedy I can remember in which I spent the entire running time rooting for the hero to get arrested. The film's plot makes the miscalculation that Superbad – in which Jonah Hill's hero spends an entire night going to…

Have you ever experienced young, long-distance love? If you have, your story is probably a lot more interesting than what happens in Like Crazy, Drake Doremus' new movie on that very subject. The film, a festival darling earlier this year, tells a thin and wispy story about shallow, underdeveloped characters about whom I had a lot of trouble caring. Imagine it as (500) Days of Summer, only with considerably less-appealing characters and minus the wit, humor or creativity. It's also clearly autobiographical, although unlike in 500 Days the director resists the urge to call his former lover a "…

Hugo, which doubles as Martin Scorsese's first family film and his first project in 3D, is a beautiful picture in just about every way. It's lovingly designed and photographed and tells an engaging and wonderful story, while also sneaking in a brief for the director's pet cause of film preservation. Based on Brian Selznick's kid-oriented 2007, graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Hugo tells the story of the 12-year-old boy of that name (Asa Butterfield), living in the clock of a train station in 1930s Paris. Hugo's adventure takes him to a young girl (Chloe Grace Moritz, from Let Me In…