Sometimes a film critic’s job is to offer a nuanced assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of a given motion picture. And sometimes it’s simply to assure readers that accompanying the kids to, say, “Space Jam 2: A Legacy” won’t make those readers want to self-harm with stale concession-stand nachos. But there’s also the need that comes from suffering through a particularly boring/incompetent/offensive film: the need to bond with other survivors. And in such cases, critics can help put what you’ve endured in perspective. Still, when asking us to name the worst films of the year, there’s always a risk that doing so will boost interest in the films in question. Some can’t resist seeking out the movies that made even a seasoned professional’s blood boil. Call it the power of the dog. And don’t come crying to us if they bite.
(Click here to jump to Peter Debruge’s list.)
-
Owen Gleiberman’s 5 Worst Films
-
1. Cherry
Image Credit: Courtesy of Apple Tom Holland, the golden boy of the “Spider-Man” films, radiates a wholesome lightweight regular-dude sweetness. And that makes him the perfectly wrong actor to play an Iraq War veteran turned opioid addict turned junkie turned bank robber. But then, this spectacularly overblown debacle from Anthony and Joe Russo is less a movie than an overdirected 140-minute showreel of gritty brand extension. Based on Nico Walker’s semi-autobiographical novel, it’s supposed to demonstrate that Holland can play a character “on the edge,” and that the Russo brothers, after their Marvel exploits, can get down in the gutter of street cred along with him. But there isn’t a moment in this saga of American descent that rings true.
-
2. Music
Image Credit: Courtesy of Merrick Morton/Hanway Films Sia, the Australian recording artist, is a creator of heady entrancing champagne dance pop, and the bubbly videos in her directorial debut — they’re presented as explosions of fantasy taking place in the mind of Music, her autistic title character — can perk your mood right up. But oh, does the mood crash every time you return to the movie proper, a soporific ramble about how Music redeems the life of her barely-recovering-addict half-sister (Kate Hudson, shaved of head and of nuance) and her saintly neighbor (Leslie Odom Jr.), a former boxer fighting a lethal disease. Sia’s decision to have her video alter ago, Maddie Ziegler, portray Music caused a lot of controversy — and, indeed, the casting is intensely problematic, since it’s doubtful that anyone from the autistic community would have played her as such a cloying gawky angelic sunflower.
-
3. Benedetta
Image Credit: Courtesy of Pathé What if they threw a naughty Catholic-baiting erotic-nun party that looked like the most scandalous movie of 1982…and nobody came? To be fair, Paul Verhoeven’s historical drama about an Italian nun (Virginie Efira) who may be a miracle worker isn’t just a soft-core fantasy dressed in 17th-century habits. It’s trying to be a serious tale of religion, oppression, and salvation. But it’s on that score that the picture is ponderously dull. The wooden figure of the Virgin Mary that gets whittled into an erotic aid might be less cheesy were it not the film’s only image of divinity Verhoeven seems interested in.
-
4. C'mon C’mon
Image Credit: Courtesy of A24 I know, I know: Everyone is in love with Mike Mills’ sensitive drama starring Joaquin Phoenix as a middle-aged slacker who looks after his nephew (Woody Norman) for a few weeks, and the two become best friends. But I think it’s a jellyfish of a movie — squishy and gelatinous, without a semblance of a narrative spine. And it’s all so painfully contrived. Would Gaby Hoffman’s Viv really leave her kid with a flaky uncle…all so that she can travel to look after her icky ex-husband? Why does she react so casually after Phoenix’s shambling caretaker nearly loses the kid? And how is it that Phoenix is an NPR staff reporter who dawdles over one story for a month? The cinematography qualifies as the best imitation ever of Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” but “C’mon C’mon” is an exasperating fusion of the wan, the soft-headed, and the boho version of a high-concept buddy movie.
-
5. The Woman in the Window
Image Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon / Netflix Inc Setting a thriller in an old dark house is still a viable thing to do, but the old Hitchcock gambit where the main character learns crucial information about a criminal by staring through his window across the street? Not so much. (These days, people up to no good tend to close the blinds.) And that’s just one of the many absurdities that pile up in Joe Wright’s overstuffed suspense dud, in which Amy Adams, as a self-medicating child psychiatrist who refuses to leave her stately Harlem brownstone, somehow makes agoraphobia look like a form of entitlement.
-
Peter Debruge’s 5 Worst Films
-
1. Locked Down
Image Credit: Susie Allnutt/HBO Max As a critic, I typically celebrate examples of creativity within constraints — single-location films like “Land” or an extended, one-shot childbirth scene, à la “Pieces of a Woman.” Last year, the world could hardly have thrown a higher hurdle at filmmakers than the COVID-19 pandemic, but that doesn’t mean I want to watch a lockdown-antagonized couple prepare for a breakup I’m fairly certain won’t happen. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a pretentious bourgeois burnout who inflicts poetry readings on his neighbors every night, while Anne Hathaway grimaces through the task of firing employees for oblivious boss Ben Stiller (one of half a dozen stunt-cast Zoom cameos). I blame screenwriter Steven Knight, though director Doug Liman squanders once-in-a-lifetime access to an empty Harrod’s department store on a numbskull diamond heist.
-
2. The Man Who Sold His Skin
Image Credit: Courtesy of Tanit Films So many excellent films made the shortlist for Oscar’s international feature category last year (including Taiwan’s “A Sun” and heartbreaking French lesbian drama “Two of Us”) that the final five nominees were a letdown. None more than Kaouther Ben Hania’s shrill, insultingly pedantic satire, which criticizes the shallow superficiality of the European art world through the sour regard of a nihilistic Syrian refugee, who agrees to serve as a living canvas for a facile meta-statement. Then he’s sold at auction — yikes! — hammering home the gratingly obvious message that the world values art more than it does human life. If that’s her gripe, Ben Hania ought to have nixed this needlessly flashy film and donated her budget to a human-rights fund, sparing us the lecture.
-
3. Encounter
Image Credit: Courtesy of Amazon Studios If I ran the zoo, Riz Ahmed would’ve won an Oscar last year for “Sound of Metal.” But that doesn’t mean he can do no wrong, as this blatantly manipulative psychological thriller demonstrates. Ahmed acts up a storm as an intense ex-Marine who’s one of the only people on earth with the inside track on an alien invasion. Early on, the movie details how a viral infestation body-snatches unsuspecting victims, but even in the face of such a threat, it’s beyond crazy that our bug-eyed hero should kidnap his two boys and hit the road. I haven’t been this angry with Ahmed since bad-taste jihadi satire “Four Lions” and won’t soon forgive the child-endangerment hook he and (mis)director Michael Pearce so shamelessly exploit here.
-
4. False Positive
Image Credit: Courtesy of Hulu You can hear the tires screeching as “Broad City” collaborators Ilana Glazer (star) and John Lee (director) make a sharp turn from comedy to horror in this upsetting Hulu shocker, a delirious expectant-mama drama that cribs heavily from “Rosemary’s Baby” (as far as its demonic red herrings go, at least). Glazer’s great on her show, but doesn’t have the range for such a tricky role, while her co-stars (including Pierce Brosnan as a sleazy fertility doctor) play everything in air quotes. Glazer wears the same phony expression in every scene: a fake smile that masks what her character is really feeling. The movie uses the excuse of “mommy brain” to justify its frequent hallucinations, but never feels real enough to support such a dark (and exasperatingly ambiguous) ending.
-
5. Venom: Let There Be Carnage
Image Credit: Courtesy of Sony Pictures A sloppy sequel to one of the lousiest movies in the Marvel canon, Tom Hardy’s return as symbiote-infected Eddie Brock promised to up the ante by introducing Venom’s blood-red rival, Carnage (Woody Harrelson, back in lunatic “Natural Born Killers” mode). Rushed into production to hit a 2020 release date, then delayed a year on account of the pandemic, this blown opportunity should have taken the time to address what the earlier film got wrong, like overcaffeinated creature animation and a seriously compromised PG-13 sensibility. Ergo, what should’ve been an epic mutant showdown is undermined by incoherent direction and more cartoony CGI, racing through its 97-minute running time to deliver what looks like a wrestling match between shape-shifting strands of black and red licorice.