The Worst Movies By 20 Great Directors

It’s like one of Billy Wilder’s characters said in the final scene of one of his best movies: Nobody’s perfect.

Nobody is. And sure enough, Billy Wilder wasn’t either. As great a director as Wilder was — and he made more stone-cold masterpieces than almost any Hollywood filmmaker in history — he wasn’t immune to a creative or commercial failure here or there. It happens to the best of us.

That was surely frustrating for Wilder, not to mention for the people who funded his occasional flop. But for the rest of us non-geniuses, a great director’s missteps can be humanizing, even refreshing. It’s comforting to know that the greatest artists are imperfect as well. And so we now turn our attentions to a list of imperfections from brilliant filmmakers — 20 bad movies from 20 exceptional directors.

These choices are not ranked; the picks are listed alphabetically by filmmaker. (Then again the #1 film may well be the worst movie by a Hall of Fame caliber movie talent; it is a real stinker.) No one whose name appears on this list should take it personally. In fact, take it as a compliment. To appear in this article at all, you had to make some darn good movies through the years. Just not in these very specific and isolated cases...