Spanglish (2004)

Do you want to see a movie that's just going to make you mad? Then give a second glance to Spanglish, in which Tea Leoni gives a loud, shrill performance as a woman consumed by white liberal guilt. Said guilt causes her to befriend her maid and get her maid's daughter a scholarship to an expensive private school against said maid's wishes, and we are asked to invest in The Problems Of Rich White People for a staggering 131 minutes.

Three-time Oscar winner James L. Brooks may be a gifted writer and producer, but his five career directing credits require further scrutiny. All three of his Academy Awards came from his directorial debut Terms of Endearment, and he also helmed 1987's amazingly awesome Broadcast News. But then he presided over I'll Do Anything, followed by the film that supposedly cemented him as a visionary director: the execrable As Good as it Gets. And detractors of that movie already know what's wrong with Spanglish: that is, its characters are overblown caricatures who inhabit a world even more annoying than our own. Stop screaming, Tea Leoni. And I haven't even started talking about Adam Sandler.