25. Evan Almighty (Universal) & Even Money (Yari Group) & Evening (Focus) - Since this is the toughest slot to fill, we'll have three similar sounding movies, all of which should have been much better considering who was involved. I mean, c'mon, Steve Carell had such a great year on "The Office" and in Peter Hedges' dramedy Dan in Real Life, so moving him into the lead slot in this sequel to Bruce Almighty should have been an out-of-the-park home run. Instead, this was a stupid, badly-conceived comedy that turns into a faithful retelling of Noah's Ark. Then there's Even Money from Mark Rydell, the Oscar-nominated director of On Golden Pond, a "Crash" like anti-gambling movie that just fell flat on its face despite a great cast including Forest Whitaker, Ray Liotta and Kelsey Grammer, that didn't have as much depth as the movies it was trying to emulate. The adaptation of Susan Minot's Evening also had a star-studded cast, a great director and was co-adapted by Michael Cunningham of The Hours, but somehow this convoluted precursor to Focus Features' far superior adaptation of Atonement just didn't offer much of relevance, and when Meryl Streep finally shows up after 90 minutes for an awkward scene in bed with Vanessa Redgrave, it was already well beyond hope of being salvaged.

24. Broken English (Magnolia) & Hannah Takes the Stairs (IFC) - Two semi-comedies about women trying to find themselves through their relationships, the first one being this HDNet film from Zoe Cassavetes, which stars Parker Posey as a neurotic New Yorker who falls for a French guy and then runs off to Paris to try to find him. Parker has given so many strong performances and this whole movie seemed fake and forced, but at least it was was scripted, unlike Joe Swanberg's improvised film Hannah Takes the Stairs, which co-starred all his compatriots in the "mumblecore" scene (that name alone kind of pisses me off) in a movie that tried hard to be clever, cool and funny ala "Reality Bites." At least Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote this and plays Hannah, is pretty hot, but no, that does not a movie make.

23. In the Land of Women (Warner Independent) - Continuing the run of badly written and directed chick flicks and another one by the kin of a respected filmmaker, this one by John Kasdan (son of Lawrence) starred Adam Brody and Meg Ryan in a Michigan-based May-September romance. It's pretty obvious that Kasdan was trying to make a cool indie dramedy ala Zach Braff's Garden State, complete with his own personal iPod playlist and all the formula elements, as it bounced between forced humor and high drama. None of the cast really seemed to have their heart in it, especially not the past-her-prime Ryan or Kristen "I'm way too bored to be able to act other than bored" Stewart. Seeing Olympia Dukakis playing the "wacky grandmother" saddened me, knowing how excellent she was in Sarah Polley's Away From Her.

22. The Game Plan & Wild Hogs (Disney) - You can say a lot of things about Disney and the great family films they've produced and distributed over the decades, but their high concept comedies continually prove that they should find someone else at the company to decide what is funny. Both of these comedies were painfully awful, unfunny and even sad at time, as you watch a great actor like William H. Macy doing ridiculous physical comedy in Wild Hogs to pay the rent so he can do cooler indie flicks. We've seen similar crap from Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence and John Travolta, but somehow, we expect better from Macy. Similarly, when you go to see a movie starring The Rock, you can't go in expecting much, and hard as it is to type this with a straight face, he's better than the material he was given in The Game Plan, playing a football player who finds out he has a daughter, played by the annoyingly cutesy brat Madison Pettis. Of course, the killer is that both movies made a ton of money, which means that someone out there found them funny and sequels seem to be a given but hopefully these were both one-offs and Disney will just take their comedy blood money and run.

21. August Rush (Warner Bros.) - There was a time when I really liked Freddie Highmore. He was so good in Finding Neverland with Johnny Depp, and in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (again with Depp), but this year, Highmore was everywhere, and while Luc Besson's Arthur and the Invisibles just missed being included in this list, it was this New York-based musical movie about a boy who was given up for adoption by his musical parents that forever lowered this young actor in my eyes. The ludicrous premise aside, this was also one of many bad movies made by Warner Bros. in my familiar New York City neighborhoods, made worse by Robin Williams' character, a punked-out East Village Fagen known as "Wizard" who turns up and turns the movie into "Fame." Oh, and in case you're wondering, "August Rush" is the name given Highmore's character because "Wizard" thinks it's a cool name that will get people interested in his music. Seriously, folks, if you like this, you should try to find the Swiss film "Vitus," a much better movie about a musical prodigy.

20. Breaking and Entering (The Weinstein Co.) - This one's going back over a year so it might be hard to remember why I disliked it so much but it was one of the few times when Anthony Minghella (Cold Mountain) and his regular leading man Jude Law really dropped the ball. In it, Law plays a successful real estate developer who has an affair with the mother of a boy who breaks into his offices, played by Juliet Binoche. No, it doesn't make too much sense and the plot was all over the place, but all I remember is usually decent actresses like Robin Wright (Penn) and Vera Farmiga taking on these ridiculous accents to play their characters. (To refresh my memory, I went to rottentomatoes and read my quote, and even a year later, it still works: "Jude Law needs to get a new agent.")

19. September Dawn - Not necessarily a bad quality film but definitely one that really pissed me off to no end. I don't know too many Mormons, but the ones I do know seem like nice enough people, and then along comes this movie by Christopher Cain (director of Young Guns and father of Dean), which essentially attacks religious leader Brigham Young due to his involvement in the massacre of a caravan of "heathens" in 1857, comparing him to zealots like Jim Jones and Hitler. Whether Young's knowledge of the massacre is true or not is irrelevant because it seems despicable to me to attack the respected founder of a heavily-practiced religion like this film did. To me, the implications were worse than the veiled anti-Semitism in Mel Gibson's "The Passion of The Christ." It has a great cast too, including Jon Voight and Terence Stamp, but I wonder if any of them knew they were making such a hate-filled edict against a religious leader, but worst of all was that the movie tried to tie that massacre into the events of 9/11 as well. Thankfully, the movie bombed and no one was subjected to its "message."

18. Youth Without Youth (Sony Classics) - Who thought that the first movie in ten years from Francis Ford Coppola could get onto any "Worst of the Year" list, let alone ALL of them? It seems interesting at first, as we see a 70-year-old scholar, played by Tim Roth, struck by lighting and his body reverts back to his ‘40s, but then we spend the next two hours and fifteen minutes following this gloomy gus who is moping over the death of his wife until he meets a woman who looks just like her. Both of those women are played by Romanian beauty Alexandria Maria Lara, who starts phase 2 of the story by speaking in strange tongues claiming to be a "17th Century Disciple of Chandrakirti" named Rupini. (Surely there are easier ways of getting out of having sex with Tim Roth.) Besides being boring, the plot was almost impossible to follow as Roth travels around the globe trying to solve the mysteries of this woman. At one point, I had to leave the screening to read the notes to try to figure out what I was watching, which I've only had to do a few times before. The movie looks good but it's horribly painful to sit through, though it makes a bit more sense when you realize that it's based on a novella from an esoteric Romanian philosopher. Maybe my inability to understand the film is saying something more about my own lack of knowledge, but I'll gladly accept that than to ever endure this film again.

17. P.S. I Love You (Warner Bros.) - You might as well get used to seeing studio-produced romantic comedies in this list because they tend to be awful, even though at least three of the movies in my Top 25 could be deemed romantic and comedies. This late year release had so much promise, as it reteamed Hilary Swank with Richard Lagravanese who had made the terrific inspirational drama called Freedom Writers released early in the year. I remember being excited when I saw the signs in my neighborhood that they were shooting there, but no, this is another awful studio attempt at adapting a book into something that feels like an indie. This adaptation of Cecelia Ahern's novel about a woman whose dead husband sends her letters from the grave to help get over her grief seemed like a nice enough premise, but Hilary Swank uses it to spit on the generosity of AMPAS for giving her two Oscars with some of her most ludicrous behavior on film including awkward physical humor and painful to watch scenes with Lisa Kudrow and Gina Gershon as her annoying friends, Harry Connick Jr. as a loser who's smitten with her but falls into the friend zone, and Kathy Bates as her pushy mother. Sure, women probably will drool over semi-clad appearances by Gerard Butler and Jeffrey Dean Morgan from "Grey's Anatomy" as her love interests, but this is another bad attempt by men trying to create women-friendly movies that feel completely false and dumbed-down for those who refuse to think when they go see movies. Speaking of which…

16. Epic Movie (20th Century Fox) - Had to catch this one on DVD because Fox wouldn't screen it for critics and after seeing it, it was immediately evident why. Essentially a low-brow spoof of some of the bigger fantasy movies of '05 and '06 including Narnia, X-Men and others, with most of the jokes involving recent pop culture references or physical humor, further putting a nail in the coffin of the spoof genre. And the worst part is there's another one of these coming out in less than a month called Meet the Spartans. Maybe this time, those who wasted money on Epic Movie will be smart enough to avoid this one. Yeah, probably not.

15. Romance and Cigarettes - Shelved for years by Sony buying MGM and the film's original distributor United Artists, John Turturro's directorial debut finally saw the light of day--self-released--and all I could think while watching it was "What was anyone involved with this thinking?" James Gandolfini was in the middle of the final season of "The Sopranos," getting accolades when this movie was finally released, following him as he sang along (badly) to ‘50s pop tunes and dealt with his dysfunctional family, including Susan Sarandon as his wife and John's sister Aida and Mary Louise-Parker playing Gandolfini's teen daughters, which involved more than a bit of suspending disbelief. Kate Winslet is the only member of the ensemble cast who comes out slightly unscathed playing a foul-mouthed hussy that could have been a precursor for her appearance on "Extras." Only mildly entertaining based on its camp factor, this movie probably should never have been released.

14. Self-Medicated (THINKFilm) - When you look at the press notes for this indie film, written and directed by 23-year-old Monty Lapica (who also stars), you immediately see all the awards its won at film festivals in random places and you immediately think it must be somewhat good. But no, coming across like a rejected episode of "The O.C.," this movie based on Lapica's own experiences, follows a teen reprobate in Las Vegas who is sent away for reprogramming to a psychiatric hospital run by a corrupt warden, but it's mostly notable for the fact that Lapica is an absolutely incompetent filmmaker and actor, making you wonder how bad the other movies at those festivals must have been for this to have been selected a winner.

13. Blood and Chocolate (Screen Gems) - This awful werewolf movie set in Romania was probably a giveaway from when the title came on the screen, but obviously, the fine folks at Lakeshore and Screen Gems were trying to replicate the success of their "Underworld" franchise. They certainly found a fine actress to star in it with Agnes Bruckner as a young girl whose family is all werewolves, a secret she has to keep from her new boyfriend, played by Hugh Dancy. You think werewolves, you immediately think blood and gore and cool transformations but with ridiculous smoke effects that changes the actors into wolves and a PG-13 rating, there just wasn't a chance for any of that, instead being a teen romance movie that fails on every level.

12. Code Name: The Cleaner (New Line) - This one goes all the way back to the beginning of 2007, a deliberately buried high concept comedy starring Cedric the Entertainer, Lucy Liu and Nicollette Sheridan--yes, that's three actors from hit television shows for those counting. The premise involves Cedric being a secret agent who thinks he's a janitor or vice versa. I have a serious crush on Lucy Liu and I've forgiven her a lot of bad movies--Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever comes to mind--but this movie was just completely inept and rarely even remotely funny. I can't remember if I included this line in my review but in my notes I have written, "Somewhere, John Candy and Chris Farley are high fiving each other that they died before taking this role." THAT's how bad this movie was, and yet, it wasn't the worst movie released by New Line in 2007. (That's below.)

11. Fay Grim (Magnolia) - How can this be? My beloved Parker Posey in two bad movies in one year? I've seen Hal Hartley's Henry Fool a half dozen times and yet this attempt to create a sequel that's more of an espionage thriller following Posey's character Fay Grim as she tries to find the title character from the previous movie was so silly, ridiculous and convoluted that I could barely get through it. Hartley entered Ed Wood territory with the terrible production values that made the film nearly unwatchable, and it was a real shame because the same year, Hartley regular Adrienne Shelley, who was murdered at the end of '06, came into her own with Waitress, while Hartley delivered an awful film that showed that his best days as a filmmaker are behind him.

10. Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (Fox Walden) - It kills me to include this one because I really like Zach Helm, screenwriter of "Stranger Than Fiction" and first-time director of this dumb-as-f*ck family movie starring Dustin Hoffman in one of the most inane performances of his career--and considering Hoffman's career, that's saying something. Essentially, he spends the entire movie acting like a deranged Mr. Rogers or a creepier Willie Wonka, if he ran a toy store instead of a candy factory, talking with an impossible to endure lisp. Sure, it had ultra-cutie Natalie Portman looking suitably elfin with her newly cropped hair, but as we quickly learned, family comedy is not her strong point and this was a grueling experience to sit through, as Helm completely dumbed down his writing in hopes of charming the kids. I don't have any of the little whipper-snappers myself, but they'd be grounded for life if they convinced me to take them to see a movie like this one.

9. The Number 23 (New Line) - I actually liked this Jim Carrey thriller directed by Joel Schumacher better than my buddy who reviewed the movie for ComingSoon.net (I think he gave it a 1 out of 10) but it was a pretty awful attempt by the duo to do a David Fincher or David Lynch like thriller with no thrills and an awful twist that takes another twenty minutes to try to explain itself. It's clearly one of the worst movies Jim Carrey has ever been involved with and rumors have it that this was this movie caused Jim Carrey to fire all his agents. After seeing it, I'm not even the least bit surprised.

8. Hollywood Dreams (A Rainbow Film) - There's a point where you feel bad bashing on low-budget indie movies like this one and the next one on this list is just being a mean bully, but you know what? Bad movies are bad movies, regardless of their budget. (Let's not forget that my #1 movie of the year cost less than a million dollars.) I don't remember much about this one except that it was a vanity project of sorts by Henry Jaglom with David Proval (aka Richie Aprile from "The Sopranos") about a young woman from Iowa played by Tanna Frederick, trying to make it as an actress in Hollywood and falling for a good-looking actor. Frederick plays the part so annoyingly perky and whiny, chewing up every scene as if it were her first meal in years, that it's hard to sit through this awfully unfunny comedy. As I mentioned in my review, this one made "late night infomercials exciting by comparison."

7. Sing Now or Forever Hold Your Peace (Strand Releasing) - One of my good (straight) friends sings in a glee club and I'd consider that the gayest thing ever if not for the fact that I have a number of gay friends who play in very cool rock bands and do much cooler things with their lives. Maybe that's why I was so skeptical of what was obviously a passion project by apparent a capella enthusiast Bruce Leddy, about the reunion of a college a capella group, now all in their mid-to-late ‘30s. What shocked me was that I had been hearing about this movie for months, about it winning audience awards at various film festivals including the HBO US Comedy Arts Festival, but as we learned from Self-Medicated, film festival audiences really don't have very good taste and they'll embrace anything, even an agonizingly bad movie like this, which only gets worse as the characters get together at a beach house and start talking candidly about sex, the worst of them being Molly Shannon in another career and movie killing role. Oddly, this movie also starred Elizabeth Reaser, who I've been told is a talented actress despite her starring in two of the ten worst movies of the year. (The other one fell below this.)

6. Because I Said So (Universal) - As we get closer to the worst movie of the year, how could we leave this awful romantic comedy dog from Michael Lehman ("Heathers") off, as it continues Diane Keaton's downwards spiral--apparently Hilary Swank is following a similar career trajectory at half her age. Keaton hams it up and engages in some of the most ludicrous physical humor as the pushy mother of Mandy Moore who sets her daughter up with two very different guys. (How Moore's '07 follow-up License to Wed didn't get into this list is a shocker, believe me.) Things just get worse and worse to the point where I tried to get through this movie twice but was just mortified by what Keaton would do to try and get laughs. My heart also goes out to lovely Lauren Graham who deserves to be in better movies than this and Evan Almighty, and I'm always here if she needs a shoulder to cry on about life post-"Gilmore Girls."

5. Illegal Tender (Universal) - I met filmmaker Franc. Reyes a couple times over the course of the year, once at ShoWest and then again at the San Diego Comic-Con literally a day after I saw his awful follow-up to Empire. Frankly, he's lucky I didn't get my mitts into an actual review because I wouldn't even know where to begin tearing this piece of sh*t apart. Maybe you have to be ‘Rican to appreciate the story of a preppy suburban teen, played by Rick Gonzalez, once a promising young actor, who discovers that his father was a drug dealer when his family becomes the target for gangs. Produced by John Singleton, who has directed his share of popular urban dogs over the years, the movie was all over the map in terms of tone, settling into a way-too-serious family drama that culminated in one of the funniest scenes of the year as Gonzalez's mother, played by Wanda de Jesus, comes crashing out of the screen door of her suburban home with two guns ablazing ala Rambo. Fortunately, Ridley Scott's "American Gangster" showed up a few months later to make anyone who paid to see this forget all about it, and while this wasn't quite Damon ("State Property") Dash bad, it was pretty atrocious.

4. Gray Matters (Yari Film Group) and Puccini for Beginners - Two movies in the "coming out lesbian romantic comedy" genre by female filmmakers, a premise that was handled so well in Kissing Jessica Stein but has become ridiculous thanks to bad indie movies like these. Gray Matters, which was co-produced by Alexander Payne, was about a brother and sister (Heather Graham, Tom Kavanaugh) who fall for the same woman (Bridget Moynahan)… Granted, there's a great bathtub lingerie scene of Moynahan that'll make it more apparent why Heather Graham's sexually confused Gray might fall for her, but the rest of the movie is badly-written, self-involved crap. Maria Maggenti's Puccini for Beginniners wasn't much better, even if it stars Elizabeth Reaser, who as I mentioned above has gotten a lot of critical attention for previous movies, but here, she plays a wishy-washy lesbian who can't figure out what she wants and you spend most of the movie wondering why anyone would put up with her. It's not nearly as bad as Gray Matters but it gets paired together with it via guilt by association, because both movies made New York look bad, they made lesbians (even attractive ones) seem lame, and I'll be very happy if the failure of both movies forever puts an end to more movies like these ever being made.

3. The Condemned (Lionsgate) - When you have a movie starring "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, you really can't expect very much, but when he is the best actor in the movie--yes, you read that right--you know you're really in trouble and this was a high concept dog about a group of convicts put on an island with the edict to kill or be killed, all for the entertainment of "millions" of people watching this on the internet. Mind you, that's probably more people than who went to see this movie in theatres. The whole movie looks like complete crap and the writing could very well have been some of the worst of the year with one particularly funny (undeliberately) line by Vinnie Jones, justifying his rape and murder of a female convict that "She was a murderer… and a whore!" If you're not falling over laughing by that point in the movie, then maybe you should go back and rent Wild Hogs because you'd never understand the humor inherent in something like "Mystery Science Fiction Theatre 3000," though you might laugh your head off at…

2. Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie for Theatres (First Look) - I got a lot of flack for hating this movie from fans of the Cartoon Network show, but I just didn't get it and I could not understand even in the slightest how anyone could find any of this stuff funny. Granted, this was my very first experience with the "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" but still, the movie should have taken into account that some people might be seeing the character for the first time, which means they should have made some jokes that are funny to more than just the creators and their pot smoking fans. (It was the only explanation I could have for anything in this movie being considered "funny.") This movie pissed me off so much that it could have easily been my worst of the year and frankly, fining the distributor $2 million for their publicity stunt that had Boston calling the bomb squad just wasn't enough, because they should have paid me at least that amount for my time and the amount of brain cells that have been forever numbed by the experience of sitting through this.

And the absolutely worst movie of 2007 and one that would have been better off never seeing the light of day…

1. Southland Tales (Samuel Goldwyn) - Delayed for years after its disastrous showing at Cannes, Richard Kelly's follow-up to the excellent "Donnie Darko" showed none of the genius that went into that dark thriller. It starts off well enough as a post-apocalyptic film, but then it quickly becomes obvious that Kelly was filling this with every single hair-brained sociopolitical idea he wasn't able to fit in other movies. To make it even more confusing, a time travel element is introduced around the two-hour mark, but by then, it doesn't matter because you've just sat through two hours of some of the most embarrassing performances by the likes of Sarah Michelle Gellar and The Rock (him again!) and Seann William Scott (why couldn't the latter two have reteamed for "The Rundown 2" instead?), surrounded by an eclectic mix of second, third and fifth string actors like Justin Timberlake,Mandy Moore (her again), Miranda Richardson, John Laroquette, Lou Taylor Pucci, Amy Poehler, Cheri Oteri, Jon Lovtiz, Nora Dunn, Curtis Armstrong and Zelda Rubinstein of "Poltergeist" fame. Oh, and there's a scene where Wallace Shawn (of "The Princess Bride") boogies with Bai Ling--and just the presence of the luscious Ms. Ling should be a warning to beware in itself. It's almost like Kelly went to some Hollywood agent and said, "Which one of your clients will do anything to get into a movie?" And sure enough, most of them ham it up and do whatever it takes to make it through this grueling exercise that's more disjointed than David Lynch's "Inland Empire" and nearly as long. (Apparently, 20 minutes was cut from the Cannes screening, which bodes the question, "How did Kelly decide what parts to cut when there were so many bad moments left in the movie?") By the end, you're left wondering if there was any point to the movie except maybe to make "6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon" easier to play? Yes, Kelly has made a truly awful, awful movie but this makes a great follow-up to last year's worst movie of the year, which was by another filmmaking favorite. The only thing is that Terry Gilliam has made dozens of decent movies while Kelly has only made one, making him the most sad and pathetic "one hit wonder" ever.

That's it for this year… here's hoping that 2008 doesn't suck nearly as hard.