I've read through most of this thread...interesting, some of the diverse viewpoints here about what movies are good and what are trash. I guess I'd raise the question: What makes a movie good or bad for you?
My kind of question.
I wrote in my first post that a good story well told is the prime requirement. Some genres I generally don't care for - horror and crime thrillers, for instance, although many of those are actually really well made movies - Hitchcock's films are along those lines and they are classics. But a movie needs to be like a good novel or short story in that it leads you through it, foreshadows events that actually happen and wraps up most everything at the end or at least if it's an ambiguous ending the different possibilities have to be realistic. It doesn't have to be big budget, some of the biggest budget movies in recent memory spent all of their money on CGI or actors' salaries and forgot to tell the story.
Aliens was a really entertaining movie, it had a beginning, a middle and ended with the redemption of the main character. Logan was a good recent superhero movie that explored the humanity of the character, not all glitz and ultra-destruction although it certainly had some good action scenes in it. Juno was an oddball little movie about a pregnant teenager, I don't think a lot of people here would like the story line but I like these small indie type movies - that had a great ensemble cast of B level actors who worked together perfectly, plus a great performance by the main character.
In contrast, a bad movie has none of those. The three I mentioned had confusing stories that went nowhere and had few or no redeeming qualities in any of the characters.
Oh, and it never hurts to have nekkid wimmen in it...
