Truly awful films by directors you love

"Cape Fear" - Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese is an unquestionably talented filmmaker but he completely missed the mark with this one. Spinning cameras, a superhuman villain who's impervious to fire and metal poles, Juliette Lewis's 16-year-old character who has the naivety of a 6-year-old, the silly climax. This film is objectively awful, and I believe it owes its critical and financial success to cult of personality.

"The Polar Express" and "A Christmas Carol" - Robert Zemeckis
These two turkeys are from that 2000s period when Robert Zemeckis was obsessed with creepy and unconvincing CGI. "Beowulf" was pretty good, but these two movies can barely be called entertainment. After finally accepting that the universe does not want his crummy cartoons, Zemeckis went back to what he does best and delivered two brilliant live-action films in the form of "The Walk" and "Flight."

"2001: A Space Odyssey" - Stanley Kubrick
I expect to be flayed for saying it, but this movie sucks. That's pretty remarkable because I've read the Arthur C Clarke novel and it's one of the greatest works of science fiction I have read. The movie, on the other hand, suffers from excessive...excess: it starts with a 3 minute black screen of discordant screeching instruments, a harbinger of excessively long scenes of people walking through spacecraft, spacecraft landing, capped off with an extended and uttterly incomprehensible kaleidoscope of pyschedelic colours at the end. Pure garbage and a waste of two-and-a-half hours. Rather read the book.