Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and nominees and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies of all time.  This month, we’re tumbling down the hill with Jack and Jill, nominee for every single Razzie and winner of…every single Razzie. We tackle some controversial issues here at Raspberry Picking.  War, Nazis, feminism, Lindsay Lohan, Joe Eszterhas, […]

CODA is unbearably cloying and contains barely a single narrative beat that isn’t an ossified cliché. Naturally, it has been greeted with rave reviews and a spirited bidding war in the wake of its opening-night premiere at the Sundance Film Festival; elevating sentimental schlock made with little more than the most functional artistry has been one of the main functions of Sundance for decades, and CODA has the added benefit […]

There is simply no reason for a live-action adaptation of the interactive children’s cartoon Dora the Explorer to be good. And when we add in the ugly wrinkled that the beaming seven-year-old of the show has been aged up to an improbably innocent teenager forced to go to public school for the first time, I should say that there’s simply no reason for it to be tolerable at all. But […]

It’s not really accurate to suggest that The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is the latest example of Disney’s irritatingly robust program of remaking its animated features in shrieking, shiny CGI and “live-action”. But it’s not really inaccurate, either: the feature makes more than its share of glancing nods back towards 1940’s Fantasia, mostly (though not exclusively!) its “Nutcracker Suite” sequence, enough to blur the line between “in-joke” and “oppressive […]

It is, I think, close to being an outright objective truth that insofar as the 1987 cult object Overboard works, it works entirely because Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell have off-the-charts adorable chemistry together, owing in large part to their being a real-life couple. It certainly does not work because of the scenario, which is actively unpleasant, or because of what is done with that scenario which is middling romantic […]

The shockingly – one might fairly say unprecedentedly – successful Mexican import Instructions Not Included possesses a title and the skeleton of a plot (womanizer has an illegitimate child dropped on his doorstep, must take care of her) that makes it absolutely obvious what kind of film it is: a warm and cuddly two hours in which a shitty, self-absorbed bachelor learns to love other beings because of his darling […]