The Worst Films of 2024

Some people talk about how worst lists are detrimental to the artistic medium. They want to only encourage artistic positivity, look for a better way, not go to endless bland Hollywood movies that aren't bad enough to actually be on a list but get engagement clicks. And most worst lists by default don't include underground movies or foreign movies, so they lack the range to fulfill their own criteria.

Me personally, my trouble with writing a worst-of list this year was more for the fact that I actively avoided going to movies that looked bad (that weren’t at festivals). I didn’t go see Borderlands, or Argylle, or Madame Web, because I felt like buying a nutritionally barren 3-storey kebab would be healthier for me than Sony’s latest parade of corporate custard. And plenty of the movies that I had many non-positive thoughts weren’t that bad. Like, Love Lies Bleeding (yeah, I didn’t like it) was an alright thriller with really bad writing, The Substance was too long but not outrageously interesting enough to make an impression, Next Goal Wins was like eating Kiwi cardboard, but it wasn’t as grotesquely spicy as the Euro cardboard I had to chew through for MIFF.

After a bit of thought, I decided that I couldn’t just leave my best list on its own. It needs its dark compliment, its evil twin, and while my hunchbacked 15-film worst list without any dishonourable mentions may not be as long as the list of films I liked, it must exist for the sake of universal balance. So let's get straight into it.

 15.           Wicked: Part One

Director: Jon M. Chu

Writer: Winnie Holzman, Dana Fox

Cast: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande-Butera, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Bowen Yang, Peter Dinklage, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum

Runtime: 160 minutes

Country: United States/English

I was flipping up between this, Longlegs or MaXXXine as the bloated, overhyped studio horror going on my worst-of list. And before you tell me Wicked isn’t a horror film, imagine your overeager partner dragging you to a 5-hour edit of this and its sequel back-to-back and then asking you minute questions about every single thing in it. Shudder.

Honestly, I feel kind of sympathetic for the crew behind Wicked, as they had to make something presentable about Broadway’s most overrated musical. Wicked is a loaded property, full of bland songs, poorly written characters and two separate dumb racism metaphors which you can’t alter in the film adaptation without getting letter bombs. Sure, some of Broadway’s magic can’t really be replicated in a cinema where everyone in the row behind you is filming the “Defying Gravity” scene with the flash on, but said magic is then buried under the Wicked musical’s bad qualities, and the crew couldn’t worm their way out.

Then again, they could have re-done the cinematography to make things not murky and given depth-of-field to all of the flat-looking shots. Or given us any reason to actually relate to Elphaba despite her character’s active unlikability. Or cut like 80 minutes of filler material. Or cast someone who didn’t look 47 as the handsome teenage prince. Or not end the movie in a jarring explosion-filled setpiece for some reason. Or actually have resonant themes that go beyond two sentences on a Tumblr post. Or make Ariana Grande the main character (actually an inspired casting choice). A lot of things, y’know.

14. Hood Witch

Director: Saïd Belktibia

Writer: Saïd Belktibia, Louis Penicaut

Cast: Golshifteh Farahani, Amine Zariouhi, Jérémy Ferrari, Denis Lavant, Issaka Sawadogo

Runtime: 95 mintues

Country: France/French

For the country that practically invented science-fiction, France has had serious struggles with genre films in the last few years. Many of its horror and action filmmakers have succumbed to the “elevated horror” craze that’s about 5 years past its expiration date or the Quentin Dupieux “post-post-ironic” style where they roll their eyes for every uninspired, lazy setpiece as though that makes it humorous. And then there’s stuff like Hood Witch which defies those tropes because it has nothing in it that would actually correspond to a trope. Or a good film, for that matter.

Extraction’s Golshifteh Farahani tries her darndest to make sense out of Saïd Belktibia’s terrible directorial debut, which consists of a bunch of scenes that seem to think a thriller is taking place but hasn’t actually set up any stakes, characters, plot or whether magic is even real in the context of the story. The film limps from scene to scene without proper context and completely leaves the audience cold when they desperately need any sort of investment, more focused on pulling off “cool director” shots that look good on a resume but never fit the film’s tone. It tries so hard for social commentary about the French banlieues, but without any context on whether magic is real, it just comes off as shallow and weirdly Islamophobic (the plot concerns a jilted husband who kidnaps his son and gives him a torturous exorcism in a mosque).

At least Denis Lavant is in it, though, Denis Lavant is awesome. The rest isn’t.

13. One Percenter

Director/Writer: Yûdai Yamaguchi     

Cast: Tak Sakaguchi, Shogo Miyakita, Itsuji Itao, Shô Aoyagi 

Runtime: 85 minutes

Country: Japan/Japanese

Yeah, I don’t think the Japanese filmmakers quite got the context of the term “one-percenter”. The movie seems to think it means “the only people who can understand good martial arts” and makes scenes where a man screams “I am the one-percenter!” while covered in gore somewhat unintentionally funny.

And I used the word “unintentionally” very deliberately, because One Percenter gave me one of the worst feelings you can have while watching a movie; the sudden realisation half an hour in that the movie thought you were taking it seriously. I thought for a solid thirty minutes that all the footage of this character talking about how he’s the truest of action movie stars because he beats stuntmen for real and acts like an aggressive dudebro with over-the-top music was intended as satire. But then the movie kept rolling with it into lots of grey industrial environments against anonymous bad guys and ending with the annoying twist that nothing really happened, and I realised the movie thought that I had been hooked on something really cool. It’s almost hilarious, and kind of pathetic.

As for the “one-percenter” action, it’s not the most interesting sort – what we learned from the deluge of bad 80’s Golden Harvest movies was that fights merely consisting of slaps and kicks look stupid and are unsatisfying to watch because there’s no real way to read them as an audience member. The bit at the start showing a behind-the-scenes of a “modern” wire-work film which the main character sniffed at looked way cooler than whatever this weak stuff is. Go figure.

12. From Hilde with Love

Director: Andreas Dresen

Writer: Laila Stieler

Cast: Liv Lisa Fries, Johannes Hegemann, Gabriela Maria Schmeide, Emma Bading, Sina Martens

Runtime: 124 minutes

Country: Germany/German

C’mon, European filmmakers, please stop trying to copy Broken Circle Breakdown. I know you think it’s cool, but non-linearity shouldn’t be forced onto every single romance movie out there. And Broken Circle Breakdown isn’t even that good, fight me.

Anyway, here’s yet another European romance told through weird Memento-style editing that completely ruins the linear story progression and where the only narrative purpose is juxtaposing scenes of “ooh, look how happy we are!” and “ooh, we’re sad and horrible now!”. Maybe in another context that would make it just another throwaway German film that clogs up the festivals without any interesting aspects, but unfortunately, From Hilde With Love sets this romance in Nazi Germany. And when your only narrative tools involve smash cutting between twee happiness and twee brutality, setting it in Nazi Germany is…not the best move.

From Hilde With Love will jump cut between rolling happily around a field to getting guillotined with absolutely no rhyme or reason beyond being manipulative as possible. Its tone, much like its linear story, is all over the place and it boggles the mind how blatantly manipulative it is. It’s so jarring that it overwhelms the basically-okay quality of everything else in the film and renders it a weird, unlikeable, trend-chasing piece of Eurotrash.

Go see Every You Every Me instead, that’s how you do non-linear German romances.

11. Rumours

Director/Writer: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson

Cast: Cate Blanchett, Roy Dupuis, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rolando Ravello, Takehiro Hira, Zlatko Burić, Alicia Vikander

Runtime: 104 minutes

Country: Canada/English

“Outsider filmmaking” and “YouTube shitpost” are two terms that seem more and more uncomfortably intertwined these days. Movies made to be transgressive and shocking feel more on the same level as something thrown together without much care in the world to get cheap laughs on YouTube. Speaking of which, Rumours, made by the Guy who invented midnight movies in Canada, feels like a bunch of over-talented people sitting in the woods drunkenly improvising at each other with some weak sauce sci-fi thrown over it.

Sporting haircuts and accents more horrifying than the zombies they encounter, these overqualified actors wander about the Canadian wilderness for 90 minutes ad-libbing easy shots at politicians, the end of the world and the inefficacy of world government. Not once does it feel atmospheric, transportive, interesting or even remotely amusing as the repetitiveness and ease of the movie grinds at your brain. It does makes a lot of jokes about sex. SEX! Oh my lord, call the censorship board, we mustn’t allow this filth oh hang on it’s not even as explicit as an episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

I guess the only real quality of Rumours that gives it an underground feel is how cheap and ugly it looks. Pay no attention to all the production companies and the A24 logo in the credits. Please, we are the most transgressive filmmakers of all time! Please give us money and acclaim for our easy shots!

10. Janet Planet

Director/Writer: Annie Baker

Cast: Julianne Nicholson, Zoe Ziegler, Elias Koteas, Will Patton, Sophie Okonedo

Runtime: 113 minutes

Country: United States/English

“Inauthentic”. What a word. A word that is perfect for describing most of the crop of recent Sundance-bait movies I’ve seen, which like to take indie movie cliches and forcefully smoosh them into a package to convince you that their film is the most touching, all-American, non-attention seeking film of all time. And oh dammit, Janet Planet is a gamut of these clichés.

Do you want lots of really unnatural dialogue pauses and blank facial expressions to try and convince you there’s subtext? Check. Do you want yellow-tinged 35mm cinematography to pretend the movie’s from the 90’s even though it’s set in 2003? Check. Do you want about two seconds of lesbian inference (not even subtext, just inference) to get the Sundance crowd all excited? You betcha. Do you want tons of references to random literature that covers for the film not actually developing any concepts and relying on your foreknowledge of something else? Got plenty of that. Do you want 5 random cameos from 90’s movie stars to really get the nerds in the audience going, even though they’re just distracting and not related to the main plot? Here ya go! Do you want lots of really bad shot framing and editing? Okay, that’s not an indie movie cliché, but it’s there.

Look, for a supposedly heartfelt autobiographical directorial debut, this just feels like corporate A24 shit that exists in a parodic void. It feels like the fake video games you put in the background of a movie when you can’t afford to pay the license to show a real video game.

9. Club Zero

Director: Jessica Hausner

Writer: Jessica Hausner, Geraldine Bajard

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Mathieu Demy, Elsa Zylberstein, Amir El-Masry, Sidse Babett Knudsen

Runtime: 110 minutes

Country: Austria, Sweden/English

Oh, mainland Europeans, it’s funny watching you guys attempt satire when you all live in parodic white-picket fence neighbourhoods and buried your deep systemic issues in Belarus’s back garden. Funny in the conceptual sense, I should say. Because actually watching a two-hour attempted satire by some Austrians about cult behaviour and eating disorders is like having very slow dental surgery – painful, but not nearly enough to justify waiting an hour for the dentist to pull the first tooth.

Following the antics of an abnormally terrible pack of teenage actors as they join some cultish teacher’s “conscious eating” class, Jessica Hausner’s latest film suffers from the typical Euro-drama problem of having lots of functional Wikipedia text instead of actual dialogue, preventing there from being any actual character or commentary that the audience can invest in. There’s no real stakes, no implications, no good protagonist, barely an antagonist, and in concordance with the European filmmaker’s constitution it has to end on an ambiguous note that doesn’t actually tie up anything. It is a drag with no laughs, horror or intrigue, and no matter how many fancy shot framings and weird bongos you throw in the soundtrack, Club Zero has zero staying power.

And please come back to cool American films, Mia Wasikowska, are they holding you hostage over in Europe?

8. Langue étrangère

Director: Claire Burger

Writer: Lea Mysius, Claire Burger

Cast: Lilith Grasmug, Josefa Heinsius, Nina Hoss, Chiara Mastroianni, Jalal Altawil

Runtime: 105 minutes

Country: Germany, France/French, German

On reflection, I did not have a good time with lesbian movies this year. I didn’t like Love Lies Bleeding, which everyone seemed to rave over, and I quite liked Emelia Perez, which everyone hates now. Initially, I thought “Maybe I need to broaden my horizons on the subject”, but then I realised I loved 2015’s drug-trip ultra-lesbian The Duke of Burgundy, and took that as permission to unqualifiedly dismiss lesbian films if I didn’t like them. And oh boy, did I not like this one!

Beyond looking so airbrushed and over-exposed that it feels as if the celluloid was dipped in transparent gruel, Langue étrangère (translated at Foreign Language, and yes, it’s annoying to search for “foreign language film” on Google) is a classic example of a really bad 2000’s romance film. The coupling is inevitable not out of chemistry (because all European films are required to remove 90% of their dialogue from scripts now), but because there are two lesbians and they must attract somehow. Neither character has any sort of relatable or likable quality for the audience, and they exist as opposites but not in a way that would actually attract anyone. There’s some social commentary that’s been thrown in to justify it playing at festivals that feels so out of place and that not even the movie can muster the effort to actually develop at all. And worst off, there’s a huge 40-minute subplot in the movie that, in a late-game plot twist, turns out to have not existed at all. Because the key to good screenwriting is “if I just say that nothing actually happened, then people will think I’m super deep!”. Yeah, no it isn’t. Please stop.

7. I Saw the TV Glow

Director/Writer: Jane Schoenbrun

Cast: Justice Smith, Bridgette Lundy-Paine

Runtime: 100 minutes

Country: United States/English

Shock and horror, I hated one of the most acclaimed films of the year, one that crossed boundaries and has been hailed as a genuine ground breaker? Yeah, I usually get one of these a year, some film that everyone unconditionally gives five stars and then not only fails to live up to that but actively annoys me. Anatomy of a Fall was last year’s version, I Saw the TV Glow is this year’s. And if it were actually competing in the main Oscar race, I would probably move it even closer to the top of this list.

There are so many things I hate about this movie, like its droning fly-buzz of a musical score, its blurry colour palette, the terribly written and delivered dialogue, the many awful original songs on the soundtrack (whoever wrote that “Claw Machine” song can stick a claw machine up something precious, base-first), but most prominently, I hate its mix-and-match attitude to storytelling. This is a film that doesn’t write and set a scenario so much as it steals imagery and ideas from a menagerie of other films (most prominently Blue Velvet) and forces them at you in a broad package as the illusion of a narrative. There’s no interesting lead characters, no actual sympathy, no real themes that you could infer from the movie without reading the endless Tumblr posts about it, no attention to detail – it is a nothing movie that a millennial built from the corpses of hundreds of better movies and still got bored halfway through making it.

And Justice Smith is the worst Hollywood actor of the past decade. I’ve lost count of the half-decent films he’s ruined, and now I’m losing track of the shit ones he just enhances.

6. Mufasa: The Lion King

Director: Barry Jenkins

Writer: Jeff Nathanson

Cast: Aaron Pierre, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Seth Rogen, Billy Eichner, Tiffany Boone, Donald Glover, Mads Mikkelsen, Thandiwe Newton, Lennie James, Anika Noni Rose

Runtime: 118 minutes

Country: United States/English

Here’s damning with faint praise: Mufasa is the fourth-best live-action Disney remake and is much better than most of its contemporaries. Got that? Moving on.

Basically imagine the most basic, boring kids adventure film you’ve ever seen, like a text-to-speech version of Stand By Me. Then remove all of the humans and replace them with realistic-looking lions. Ignore all of the human elements that you would actually need to make a story like this compelling, like charismatic and expressive character models, genuine character conflict, or anything that a child could actually read from these CGI lions. For example, when the love interest comes in, realistic lions don’t have badass attractive attitudes, low-hanging jeans, honey-smooth voices or giant tits outside of anime, so don’t give any real reason for a relationship to occur. Since this is a kids movie, there can’t be any violent action with these realistic lions, so cut away every time something fun happens. Give your eponymous character absolutely no flaws or personality. Set them off on a standard hero’s journey running from a (probably literally) phoned-in Mads Mikkelsen. Occasionally interrupt with songs so bland they’ll turn you white as well as hot gay sex from Timon and Pumbaa. That’s how you make Mufasa.

Oh well, at least Barry Jenkins probably got the money to finance three more Aftersun’s from this, so it’s a neat long-term investment.

5. IF

Director/Writer: John Krasinski

Cast: Cailey Fleming, Ryan Reynolds, John Krasinski, Fiona Shaw, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Louis Gossett Jr., Steve Carell

Runtime: 104 minutes

Country: United States/English

John, I know that you have kids and you want to make films to watch with them and Emily Blunt, but you already made a really good film about the power of family that your kids could legally watch in all states. It was called A Quiet Place, and while I may be the only person who still likes that, it’s objectively much less horrifying than the actual kids movie you attempted to make.

Resembling an LSD-dream from the deep-buried memories of films like Jersey Girl and Imagine That, John Krasinski’s out-and-out shockingly bad attempt at a kids film is beset by uncanny CGI, acting where Ryan Reynolds is the only redeeming performer, and writing straight out of a teenager’s diary (the main arc of the film is the girl going from saying “I’m NOT a kid!” to “I AM a kid!”). It is also a wildly confusing film in many regards, feeling as though it was yanked out of an oven and shoved onto a plate undercooked and still covered in blood and glass shards. The abandoned attempts at being a musical, the complete lack of a third-act, the truly horrendous dialogue (“your grandad thought I looked very fetching in that” says a woman about a photo of her as an 8-year-old), the fact that it never even specifies what the main girl’s dad’s disease is to the point I thought it was a mental illness – this is a glorious mess almost worth investigating if you love your junk 2000’s cinema.

Best Brad Pitt role in years too, actually.

4. Drive-Away Dolls

Director: Ethan Coen

Writer: Ethan Coen, Tricia Cooke

Cast: Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Beanie Feldstein, Colman Domingo, Pedro Pascal, Bill Camp, Matt Damon

Runtime: 84 minutes

Country: United States/English

Speaking of 2000’s junk cinema, I was wondering what would happen if someone who had grown up watching nothing but the 2005 remake of The Dukes of Hazzard tried to make a lesbian road-trip drama. Okay, I wasn’t wondering that, but clearly God was, because we got Drive-Away Dolls and then he decided to put four-time Academy Award winner Ethan Coen in charge. It didn’t go very well.

With brother Joel off to do his really boring Shakespeare stuff and with a random female stand-in to help write (just like that Terrance and Phillip episode of South Park), Ethan’s attempts at a fun road movie are jarring, ugly and straight-up confusing. With a runtime of only 80 minutes (around 65 if you cut all of the very long PowerPoint transitions between scenes), Ethan concocts a ramshackle road movie with no personality, setting or pacing, where nothing matters  and he clearly gave up halfway through. It looks ugly, it’s not remotely clever considering all of its gay twists are just standard movie McGuffins but gay, the central romance makes no sense and has no chemistry, and the movie ends halfway through a scene with a CGI shot that I think was made blindfolded. Just such a waste.

Man, I really didn’t have a good time with lesbian movies this year. Hopefully it gets better and we can finally get lesbian Past Lives or something.

3. Green Night

Director/Writer: Han Shuai

Cast: Fan Bingbing, Lee Joo-young, Kim Young-Ho

Runtime: 92 minutes

Country: China, South Korea/Mandarin

Man, I REALLY did not have a good time with lesbian movies this year! Although according to IMDb and Letterboxd and the general sullen attitude of my screening, no one else had a good time with this either, so I feel a little more justified in including this.

For everyone ruthlessly tearing at Emelia Peréz because they think it’s a straight man’s fantasy, I dare you to go watch this piece of crap and come back with the same fervour. Not only is it a relentlessly dour and ugly film that more often than not feels like watching security camera footage, it is also a fetishistic and needlessly cruel portrayal of a lesbian relationship that starts with a sexual assault, ends with an unrelated human trafficking incident and fails to have a single credible stretch of humanity in it. Fan Bingbing, in a performance that clearly conveys her desire to pay off her extensive tax evasion charges, is a Chinese woman in South Korea who goes on the run with some random woman for less than a night and it ends in tragedy.

I have nothing more to say other than this movie kind of rotted me, and I would have put this higher if the other two films ahead somehow weren’t way worse. Do I go with the other terrible indie movie no-one’s heard of next or the one that’s topping everyone else’s worst-of lists? Well, I like to be different, so not in first place is…

2. Megalopolis

Director/Writer: Francis Ford Coppola

Cast: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman

Runtime: 138 minutes

Country: United States/English

A movie like Megalopolis may only come around once a decade, but when it comes, it is magical. A true folly, featuring many of the biggest names in cinema both behind and in front of the camera, costing over $100 million dollars, being stuck in production hell, and releasing in such a state that audiences just sit there without any idea of how to process it. Your Heaven’s Gate, your Movie 43’s, your At Long Last Love’s , and now we can add Megalopolis to that unfortunate prestige.

Coloured like piss, smooth as vomit and sounding like twelve different anuses farting non-stop over a mike without a pop-guard for 138 minutes, Francis Ford Coppola’s magnum dope-us is glorious in its complete lack of quality. The allegory of the fall of the Roman Empire that feels as long as the actual fall, it feels like something made by a college student that you would have to read 12 different Latin texts to understand, and even then he didn’t translate his versions properly. The acting is mesmerizing, the effects staggering, the themes complex, all in the wrong ways, and throw in a bunch of drug visions, 40 years-out-of-date green screen and 60 years-out-of-date gender roles to make one of the truest monuments to filmmaking ego that could possibly be conceived. I hope Francis enjoys the fact that he actually released this, because I can’t say under any circumstances how people would enjoy this film.

So this was the second-worst film of the year…

1.    Paradise is Burning

Director: Mika Gustafson

Writer: Mika Gustafson, Alexander Öhrstrand

Cast: Bianca Delbravo, Dilvin Asaad, Safira Mossberg, Ida Engvoll, Mitja Siren, Marta Oldenburg, Alexander Öhrstrand

Runtime: 108 minutes

Country: Sweden/Swedish

Man, I REALLY did not have a good time with lesbian movies this year! And before you egg me for putting an obscure Swedish lesbian film at the top of my worst list, I’ll remind you that Fucking Åmål is one of the most acclaimed films of the 90’s and it too needs its dark and evil twin. And I put a film by an Indigenous Australian as the number one worst spot last year, so this isn’t even the evillest thing I’ve done.

Anyway, Paradise is Burning is a wild combination of everything I hate in modern cinema presented with the most annoying, dislikable, uninteresting and completely alienating trio of protagonists I’ve ever had the misfortune of encountering. The camera is so shaky that “handheld” is too generous a word, the editing is YouTube-tier, the lack of any music and sound design kills the mood, the acting and dialogue is atrocious and the story is nothing but relentless poverty porn in the most jarring, fetishistic and obvious way. What’s worse, the movie not only takes a fetishistic approach to lesbian paedophilia (still paedophilia guys, don’t make it sexy), but then immediately cuts from that to a scene of straight paedophilia and immediately tries to turn itself into a horror film. This is a regressive, infuriating, hateful and cynical piece of shit film and I am impressed at how it escaped all the way out of Europe and made it down here when it’s so radioactive its limbs should have fallen off.

Never again. Let’s hope 2025 isn’t as bad!