The 10 worst movies of 2012

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10. 'The Words' – It's been a good year for Bradley Cooper but he'll want to forget this pretentious and fatally hackneyed stab at a literary tearjerker -- a convoluted but predictable yarn involving three novelists, a lost manuscript and Jeremy Irons pruning his petunias.
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9. 'The Lucky One' – "The Paperboy" is an atrocious movie -- in part because 24-year-old Zac Efron is too old to play a virgin teen. But Efron is even less convincing as a Marine just back from three tours of Iraq in this sappy, soft-in-the-head Nicholas Sparks romance, a non-story that shies away from any potential excitement.
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8. 'Act of Valor' – A laughable and reactionary military recruitment commercial posing as an authentic slice-of-life, so real the filmmakers cast bone fide Navy SEALS to perform scenes no actor could duplicate. (Trouble being: SEALS can't act.)
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7. 'Hyde Park on the Hudson' – It's not that this is a terribly-made movie -- in fact Bill Murray is excellent as FDR -- but it's such a calculatedly tasteful piece of post "King's Speech" Oscar bait that it makes light of the president's sexual peccadilloes and a terrible hash of the King eating a hotdog.
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6. 'People Like Us' – Alex Kurtzman is famous for his scripts for "Star Trek," "Transformers" and "Cowboys & Aliens." His first feature as writer-director is a "personal film" about a cynical salesman (Chris Pine) sorting out his daddy issues and discovering a half-sister he never knew about. Nice message, shame about the tone-deaf movie.
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5. 'This Means War' – Sorry Chris Pine! Here he's one of the two CIA agents -- the other a miscast and palpably uncomfortable Tom Hardy -- romancing the double-timing Reese Witherspoon in a mercenary anti-romantic action-comedy directed with maximum energy and zero feeling by McG.
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4. 'W.E.' – Andrea Riseborough gives a fine performance as American divorcee Wallis Simpson in Madonna's misconceived, but probably sincere vanity project. It's the modern day story, with Abbie Cornish as a neglected doctor's wife who haunts Sotheby's exhibition rooms where this flimsy, trite effort falls apart.
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3. 'The Sitter' – Technically a late 2011 release, David Gordon Green continues his downward spiral in this R-rated stab at a John Hughes comedy, a kind of mis-Adventures in Babysitting starring Jonah Hill and a bunch of whiny obnoxious kids -- including an adoptee who wishes he was back home in El Salvador. Twenty minutes into this mirthless crock you will know just how he feels.
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2. 'Total Recall' – Paul Verhoeven and Arnold Schwarzenegger already did this movie right -- so it's especially aggravating to see how Len Wiseman has taken a smart post-modern sci-fi thriller and turned into an inane and muddle-headed action flick. Rubbing salt in the wound, the movie blatantly rips off the design elements of sister-Philip K. Dick movies "Blade Runner" and "Minority Report."
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1. 'The Hobbit' – Whatever you think of the film itself (and with at least one-third of the running time given over to padding, it's pretty indefensible), hands-down the worst experience at the movies this year was suffering the plastic high-definition 48 frames-per-second 3-D version of Peter Jackson's box-office smash. The technology made one of the most expensive movies ever made look like a PS3 game. Check out the 10 best movies of the year here.
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