5. Raise The Red Lantern
Aside from the horribly generic composition, the DVD cover for Raise the Red Lantern - nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar, and therefore deserving a whole lot better - is distractingly awful because of some over-enthusiastic touching up on actress Li Gong's face. Countless covers are guilty of this, though few more so than here; by smoothing out the face and attempting to airbrush out anything resembling a blemish, the skin all ends up having a single tone which looks ridiculously unrealistic. I think it's safe to say that Ms. Gong is an attractive enough woman on her own merits that she doesn't need to be airbrushed; the result above instead makes her look like some sort of creepy android replicant that's
almost a convincing human being, but not quite there. Placing her in the most generically, stereotypically Chinese locale possible doesn't help either, and basically, this cover gives us
zero context or information about the film.