Apropos Star Wars ROTS, which he enjoyed but didn’t respect, a reader asks if there are bad movies that are still enjoyable and good movies that are boring. George Orwell once coined a term for popular novels that are pleasing even though they are intellectually indefensible. He called them “good bad books.” Most good movies are actually “good bad” in Orwell’s terms, but there is certainly a whole subgenre of movies that are, according to any reasonable standard, awful but still extremely enjoyable. My favorite “good bad” movie is The Best of Everything, an unintentionally hilarious but still engrossing pre-feminist melodrama about three pretty girl graduates of good colleges sharing an apartment in 1959 New York. There’s Road House, the movie in which Patrick Swayze plays a Harvard-educated, philosophy-spouting bouncer whose fame has spread to every dive bar west of the Pecos. And a billion others.

As for “good but boring” movies, there are plenty of those as well, I think — though maybe “worthy” would be a better term than “good.” In this category I would highlight Tender Mercies, the brilliant drama about personal salvation that won Robert Duvall a deserved Oscar and is moving and powerful and understated and also makes you want to take a long nap about 45 minutes through.