The Best and Worst of Brad Pitt

 The "Best and Worst" series profiles the best and worst work of an actor starring in one of the week's new theatrical releases. This week I take a look at the filmography of "By the Sea" star Brad Pitt.

Films starring Brad Pitt that I've seen:
True Romance
Seven 
Fight Club
Snatch
Ocean's Eleven
Ocean's Twelve
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Ocean's Thirteen
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Burn After Reading
Inglorious Basterds
The Tree of Life
Moneyball
Killing Them Softly
World War Z
12 Years a Slave
The Counselor 
Fury

(Note: Due to time constraints and the lateness of this post, this installment will be abbreviated)
Best Performance: Inglorious Basterds (2009)
Pitt's charismatic and often hilarious performance makes Lt. Aldo Raine one of the most memorable characters to ever appear in a Quentin Tarantino film.

Worst Performance: The Tree of Life (2011)
This horrid performance (Pitt spends just about every moment he's on screen yelling at his kids) can entirely be blamed on the film's writer/director's Terrence Malick. Malick prefers employing painfully obvious symbolism and gratuitous nature shots to tell a story over actually writing a script with any substance or coherence, reducing Pitt to a thankless, woefully underwritten role in his hollow, pseudo-philosophical examination of the "true" meaning of life.

Best Film: Fight Club (1999)
Fight Club is one of those rare movies that renders you speechless after you've finished watching it. This film is an intelligent, flawlessly-acted, mind-bending, hilarious and brutal piece of satire that is easily in my top five favorite movies of all-time. 

Worst Film: The Tree of Life (2011)
Pretentious, meandering and utterly pointless, The Tree of Life is all of the worst elements of independent cinema rolled into one insufferable snoozefest of a movie. 

Thank you for reading this week's installment of "The Best and Worst of". Next week, I'll take a look at the best and worst work of "The Night Before" star Seth Rogen .