5. Cosmopolis
David Cronenberg follows up his disappointingly meek A Dangerous Method with an even more underwhelming film in Cosmopolis, a stillborn adaptation of Don DeLillo's acclaimed novel about the noxious nature of capitalism. It's a particularly frustrating film because it seems like just the ripe role to extricate Robert Pattinson from his Twilight typecasting, a vicious, introspective character far and away from the glowing vampire he has spent years playing. While Pattinson delivers a strong performance in the lead role, it's Cronenberg's infuriating script that ruins the piece, because his visual direction is also very accomplished, making much of the relative minimalism of setting a film primarily inside a limousine. It's the absurdly literary dialogue, in which all of the characters speak as though talking on a podium, that ruins it; it has no cinematic feel or rooting in naturalism, it's just a lazy exportation of the film's "best" and most important dialogue, told in overly verbose terms. Fans of the novel might be able to tolerate it, but the film is above all else proof that some books just don't adapt straight to a movie without some fine-tuning first.