I DON'T WANT TO GO TO REHAB (ZERO TO 2.5 STARS)

Everyone's got an addiction - mine, like many people's, is Netflix. My queue is stuffed to saturation, my day revolves around making time to watch a movie and keep my queue moving, and I've become overly familiar with the pickup times at my local mailboxes – but there's a silver lining: a cornucopia of reviews.

The reviews are broken up into three sections by their starred rating: 5 stars, 3 to 4.5, and 0 to 2.5. Movies that make my Top Ten or Top Twenty are marked as such. There's also a hall of shame -– the Bottom Ten.

ZERO STARS
Two for the Road (1967)
Bottom Ten
Unendurable, faux-sophisticated tripe about a married couple (Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney) and the various stages of their marriage, from carefree youth to embittered middle age. Hepburn and Finney are two of the most charismatic of movie stars but their roles as a shrew and a bully waste their talents. Hepburn wears some astonishing outfits, but fashion shows are usually ten minutes long, not 112. The broad caricatures of Americans (William Daniels and Eleanor Bron) are symptomatic of the reflexive English snobbery this movie wallows in. The idiotic script, a cornucopia of trite dramatics and moronic ponderings on the emptiness of success, is by Frederic Raphael and was nominated for an Academy Award. Go figure.

1.5 STARS
The Fortune Cookie (1966)
A Billy Wilder misfire. After Jack Lemmon is hurt at a Cleveland Browns football game, his lawyer brother-in-law Walter Matthau steps in to make them both a fortune. Matthau is a breath of fresh air in what is otherwise a stale, sour comedy.

The Triplets of Belleville (2003)
Irritating and overlong animated film about a bicyclist, his mother and the eponymous triplets. The theme song will crawl into the corner of your brain reserved for irritants like Achy Breaky Heart and The Macarena.

What's New Pussycat? (1965)
Spoilt milk disguised as a frothy romantic comedy. The animated opening credits are the high point of the film. Paula Prentiss, who’s made far too few films, brings a goony comic punch to her scenes, but the rest is almost unendurable. Also stars Peter Sellers, Peter O’Toole, Romy Schneider and Woody Allen in his first big-screen performance. Allen also wrote the film. He’s improved since then.

TWO STARS
Funny Face (1957)
Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn star in this theoretically lighthearted musical about a photographer (Astaire) who discovers the mousy Hepburn in a bookstore, turns her into a world-famous fashion model and falls in love with her. The big problem is that Astaire, thirty years Hepburn’s senior, is simply too old to play the part of an antic genius. Their December-May romance is both unbelievable and a little disturbing; watching Astaire woo Hepburn with a song and dance act is embarrassing, and his trip to the “bohemian” side of Paris is no help. Fortunately, Kay Thompson, gonzo musical comedy performer (and author of the Eloise books), is on hand to liven things up. Her solo number “Think Pink” and her duet with Astaire are the highlights of the film. She’s a confident pro whooping it up. The film is not without some other pleasures. The satire of the fashion world is fitfully amusing, and the springtime Paris locations are beautifully shot by cinematographer Ray June. Songs by Gershwin include S’Wonderful, He Loves and She Loves and the title tune.

Muriel's Wedding (1994)
Married With Children meets Diane Arbus, Muriel’s Wedding is a queasy mixture of comedy and unpleasant family melodrama. Many viewers describe it as funny, but it’s cheap sadistic voyeurism, like laughing at tone-deaf karaoke or the dimwits of The Jerry Springer Show. Toni Collette is fearless as the matrimonially desperate Muriel and Rachel Griffiths pizzazzes things up.

A Place in the Sun (1951)
Highly praised, heavy-handed melodrama about social class based on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Place is mostly remarkable now for its shockingly beautiful co-stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. Clift has one of the great film entrances: first seen hitchhiking with his back turned to the camera, he turns to face the audience and his handsomeness is thrilling. Unfortunately that’s the high point of the movie, and there’s two more hours of predestined tragedy to grind through. Co-stars Shelley Winters as Clift’s lower-class girlfriend.

Repulsion (1965)
Roman Polanski flick, admired by many. Catherine Deneuve, young and almost impossibly beautiful, stars as a deranged young woman. That’s the plot – she’s deranged. She’s deranged in the kitchen, she’s deranged in the living room, she’s deranged in the street. The bathroom, too. In spite of Polanski’s considerable technique and inventiveness, all the derangement is really quite dull.

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Celebrated late 60s high-toned schlock. Faye Dunaway plays a beautifully dressed insurance investor on the track of gentleman bandit Steve McQueen. Dunaway is fun to watch in spite of the thin material, but the handsome McQueen brings his minimalist acting style to a new low. He’s got one facial expression and he uses it profligately. Remade with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo in 1999.

Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Oddly tension-free thriller directed by Sidney Pollack. Robert Redford plays a low-level CIA employee on the run from a cabal of rogue CIA agents, Faye Dunaway is his unwilling accomplice, Cliff Robertson is Redford’s boss, and Max Von Sydow plays an amusedly amoral killer. The first twenty minutes, during which all of Redford’s coworkers are murdered, is nerve-crackling but the rest of the movie mosies by unthrillingly. Redford makes much of the movie work through star power and physical beauty, but Dunaway is miscast as a stereotypically helpful handmaiden. She’s just not a passive presence – asking her to be a girlish victim is like hiring Bette Davis to water your houseplants. Dunaway has one good, very funny scene in which she helps Redford kidnap Robertson; you can see the relief in her eyes at having something to do other than simper. Robertson sports one of the more astonishing of cinematic hairdos, a combover so elevated it approaches Eraserhead status. The dialogue has one classic howler: Redford: “Well, at least I haven’t raped you!” Dunaway: “The night is young!”

24 Hour Party People (2002)
Steve Coogan is great as the late Tony Wilson, record producer and TV personality who spearheaded the Manchester music scene of the 1980s. The movie itself doesn’t quite come up to his level – it’s a scattershot affair, excitingly filmed but dramatically inert. The most moving part of the film is the saga of Ian Curtis, the doomed lead singer of Joy Division. Also starring Shirley Henderson.