Saoirse Ronan
The Lovely Bones (Dreamworks, Peter Jackson, 2009)
Some movies are doomed to awfulness from their inception. Some movies are doomed by the inexperience of a director whose reach exceeds his grasp. And some just don’t work. Peter Jackson, after his first epic crawl through Middle Earth, decided to return to the magic realism and true crime mix that he had executed to perfection with Heavenly Creatures. And it just didn’t work. No blame should fall on Ronan, but this is unquestionably the blemish on a solid filmography.