![\""Eden,"](\"https:\/\/variety.com\/wp-content\/themes\/pmc-variety-2020\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo: Jasin Boland\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tBad movies are no fun, but they\u2019re fun to talk about. And, in a way, they\u2019re important to talk about. There\u2019s a school of thought that says a best of the year list is something hallowed and meaningful, while a worst of the year list is something trivial and mean \u2014 a gratuitous nasty swipe at the movies that didn\u2019t measure up. At Variety, we don\u2019t agree with that. Our chief film critics, Owen Gleiberman and Peter Debruge, saw and reviewed plenty of inferior movies in 2025, but sifting through them to find the very worst \u2014 panning for fool\u2019s gold, as it were \u2014 is, in our eyes, an exercise of value. Every godawful movie carries with it a kind of lesson, a litany of cinematic sins to be avoided. Here, for your reading (if not viewing) pleasure, is this year\u2019s cr\u00e8me de la crap.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\tOwen Gleiberman\u2019s 5 Worst Movies<\/p>\n
\t1. Eden<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo: Jasin Boland\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tRon Howard\u2019s chaotic, dyspeptic mess of a historical drama plops us down on one of the Gal\u00e1pag\u00f3s Islands in 1929, where we get to hang with a quintet of characters who evolve from eccentric to dislikable to unbearable. As a physician who has rejected European society and is designing a new world order to take its place, Jude Law descends into hambone Teutonic surliness, like a warped 1960s monomaniac. The weirdest thing about the movie is that it somehow expects us to find him relatable. A surrealist \u201cRobinson Crusoe\u201d meets a sitcom \u201cWho\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,\u201d with deranged footnotes by Friedrich Nietzsche, the movie is entitled \u201cEden,\u201d but it should have been called \u201cEndless Meandering Hellscape.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t2. Five Nights at Freddy\u2019s 2<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy of Ryan Green\/Universal Pictures\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tVideo games don\u2019t have to make sense. Movies, on the other hand, sort of do, and the second installment of the bizarrely slapdash franchise knockoff of the massively popular horror-kitsch video game is even worse than the first one. It\u2019s a slasher film without blood, scares or tension. It\u2019s a tale of the ghosts of murdered children who live in the animatronic mascots of Freddy Fazbear\u2019s Pizza, but there\u2019s so much convoluted backstory that the ghosts get left on the back burner. Mostly, it gives gamers the chance to gawk at 10-foot-tall heavy-metal versions of those mascots, which the movie showcases like Macy\u2019s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons, as if simply showing them was enough. It was enough, at least, to sell a lot of tickets, meaning that the torture of a third big-screen helping now awaits us.<\/p>\n
\t3. The Testament of Ann Lee<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy of Searchlight\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tYou may have heard that it\u2019s visionary, spellbinding, fervid, tumultuous, and fierce. But you can\u2019t always believe what you hear. The word that best describes Mona Fastvold\u2019s 18th-century fever-dream musical about the founder of the Shaker sect is stultifying. It\u2019s a movie that tries to be boldly austere, but it\u2019s so plodding and scattershot that sitting through all 137 minutes of it is a ritual of penance. Ann Lee, the messianic religious leader played by Amanda Seyfried, grows up in Manchester, England, where she\u2019s so traumatized by catching glimpses of her parents fornicating that she evolves an entire worldview out of it. (The worldview is: Sex \u2014 bad!) As she grows up to found a religion that\u2019s like \u201cThe Handmaid\u2019s Tale\u201d mistaken for a feminist utopia, Fastvold leans on the writhing solemnity of group dynamics, which kind of shortchanges that thing called drama. Ah, but the musical numbers! Surely they must the lift the film to a place of transporting audacity? Actually, the numbers play like something out of \u201cThe Crucible\u201d as staged by Corky St. Clair. They emerge from, but don\u2019t interrupt, the flow of reverent monotony.<\/p>\n
\t4. Hurry Up Tomorrow<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Lions Gate\/Courtesy Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tIf, for some reason, you\u2019ve been yearning to see a portrait of a pop star who makes Jeremy Allen White\u2019s gloomy, earnest-home-studio Bruce Springsteen seem like the life of the party, look no further than this maddeningly pretentious vanity-project drama about a navel-gazing pop idol who\u2019s in the middle of a nervous breakdown. He\u2019s played by The Weeknd, who preens and shadowboxes but mostly mopes, cries, stares into the void, snorts cocaine off his manager\u2019s knuckles, and nails himself to the cross of his angsty turmoil. \u201cYou\u2019re not a normal human, bro,\u201d says the manager (Barry Keoghan). No, he\u2019s not; he\u2019s a posing tear-stained minimalist narcissist. The director, Trey Edward Shults, stages this adjunct to The Weeknd\u2019s 2025 album by orchestrating a \u201cShining\u201d\/\u201dBarton Fink\u201d nightmare of paranoid vagueness, bathing the whole thing in heavy synthesizer strains, so that it sounds like Enya is collaborating with Gy\u00f6rgy Ligeti in the belly of a whale. The result may be the most tinpot grandiose pop-star psychodrama since \u201cUnder the Cherry Moon.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\t5. Anemone<\/p>\n
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\n\tWhat finally coaxed Daniel Day-Lewis out of his self-imposed retirement from acting? The desire and opportunity to help his 27-old-year son, Ronan Day-Lewis, by lending a lustrous high profile to Ronan\u2019s feature directing debut. As an act of fatherly devotion, that\u2019s an unassailable thing to do. Unfortunately, what the elder Day-Lewis wound up calling attention to was a deadly backwoods two-hander in which he plays a grizzled hermit, and Sean Bean is the estranged sibling who arrives at his brother\u2019s cabin to take him back to civilization. The movie is a sodden piece of art-house inertia about fractured family bonds, the IRA, child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, the trouble with the Troubles, the meaning of the anemone (it\u2019s a flower)\u2026enough \u201cthemes,\u201d in other words, to make you think that in a past life, Day-Lewis\u2019s character was at the center of a snail-paced \u201990s dud produced by Miramax.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\tPeter Debruge\u2019s 5 Worst Movies<\/p>\n
\t1. The Life of Chuck<\/p>\n
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\n\tIt\u2019s the end of the world as we know it and \u2026 director Mike Flanagan feels fine serving up contrived, fortune-cookie aphorisms about how even the most one-dimensional among us \u201ccontain multitudes.\u201d Leaving no room for audiences to draw their own conclusions, the emotional manipulation starts with the Newton Brothers\u2019 heavy-handed piano-and-strings score, which punctuates every faux-profound moment with a plunk. Nick Offerman\u2019s folksy narration further obliterates any semblance of realism, layering treacle on top of sap. And that\u2019s before we meet a schmuck named Chuck (Tom Hiddleston), whose phony-baloney \u201clife\u201d is supposedly rendered meaningful by that random afternoon he spontaneously, unselfconsciously decided to soft-shoe in public. Your mileage may vary (the film won the audience prize at the 2024 Toronto Film Festival, after all, and is based on a well-liked Stephen King novella), but I didn\u2019t buy a second of it \u2014 and considering Chiwetel Ejiofor\u2019s grating lecture on the significance of time, I want back the precious 6,643 seconds this movie wasted.<\/p>\n
\t2. The Electric State<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Netflix\/Courtesy Everett Colle\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tAn impressive feat for a lone artist, Simon St\u00e5lenhag\u2019s sci-fi picture book assembles striking paintings of a retro-futuristic America, in which massive droids loom over deserted landscapes \u2014 visuals that are every bit as cinematic as that last shot of \u201cThe Planet of the Apes,\u201d in which the characters stumble upon a half-submerged Statue of Liberty. So why do they make for such soulless tableaux when translated to CG by the Russo brothers? The seemingly unstoppable siblings dilute St\u00e5lenhag\u2019s post-apocalyptic vision with a preposterous plot in which the brain of a comatose child inexplicably serves to power the entire grid. On the page, the robots don\u2019t speak, whereas the Russo-ruined movie version imbues them with obnoxious voices and \u201cquirky\u201d catchphrases. The human characters prove even more annoying, whether it\u2019s lazy-casting-choice Chris Pratt, wisecracking like some kind of low-rent Snake Plissken, or Stanley Tucci\u2019s not-even-remotely-menacing turn as a Steve Jobs-like villain. Here\u2019s some Apple-sanctioned advice for the budget-burning siblings, whose post-\u201cAvengers\u201d junk keeps clogging the Netflix pipeline: Think different.<\/p>\n
\t3. War of the Worlds<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy of Prime Video\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tJust as producer Jason Blum has cornered the low-budget horror space, churning out schlock that surely belongs on this list (\u201cBlack Phone 2\u201d was terrific, \u201cMegan 2.0\u201d not so much), Russian vfx whiz Timur Bekmambetov basically owns the screenlife format \u2014 thrillers that unfold almost entirely on smartphone or PC screens. Some are clever, like SXSW discovery \u201cLifeHack,\u201d while others feel like cheap, low-budget solutions to more elaborate movie ideas. The worst offender is the sub-Prime, straight-to-Amazon version of \u201cWar of the Worlds,\u201d in which Ice Cube plays the U.S. government\u2019s least convincing security expert (which is saying something at a time when former Fox hosts are running government). Rather than saving the country, the rapper uses his hack-any-screen skills to babysit his teenage son and pregnant daughter. In what amounts to a shameless Amazon advert, he winds up deploying Prime features to deliver the world-saving virus.<\/p>\n
\t4. The Actor<\/p>\n
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\n\tIt should have been a cause for celebration: Ten years after co-directing the soul-searching stop-motion movie \u201cAnomalisa\u201d with Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson finally made his live-action filmmaking debut: an inscrutable existential mystery about an actor with amnesia (that most convenient of narrative contrivances) struggling to piece together his lost identity. Does Andr\u00e9 Holland\u2019s character even have a personality beyond the roles he\u2019s inhabited? None of it makes sense, and it doesn\u2019t help that the film\u2019s cast play everything in such an archly Brechtian register that the whole exercise feels like peering into a cloudy snow globe, shot like one of those Frank Miller movies composed entirely on greenscreen soundstages. The off-putting project was drawn from a Donald E. Westlake novel (\u201cMemory\u201d), but you\u2019d be much better off watching \u201cNo Other Choice,\u201d Korean director Park Chan-wook\u2019s adaptation of Westlake\u2019s \u201cThe Ax.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t5. Presence<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo by Peter Andrews\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tI\u2019m glad Steven Soderbergh wasn\u2019t serious about retiring, and I suppose he\u2019s entitled to doodle however he sees fit. The indie superhero had two new movies this year that I truly adored: \u201cBlack Bag\u201d very nearly made my top 10 list, while \u201cThe Christophers\u201d (which features a delectable late-career turn from Ian McKellen) gives sophisticated audiences something to look forward to in 2026. But I have nothing good to say about \u201cPresence,\u201d which I walked out of at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and found no pleasure in having to rewatch this past January. Under the pseudonym of DP Peter Andrews, Soderbergh shot this dizzy-making haunted house movie from the POV of the ghost \u2014 or so goes the hook for a dull and downright clunky horror yawn in which the camera feels more robotic than possessed, trading tension for tedium.<\/p>\n
\tDishonorable Mention: \u201cSnow White\u201d<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures \/ Courtesy Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tWhile not exactly awful, Disney\u2019s \u201clive-action\u201d retelling of the studio\u2019s very first animated feature sucks all the wonder out of the \u201cproperty\u201d (the Mouse House seems to view everything in terms of IP these days, doesn\u2019t it?), reducing what felt like pure magic to a block of cinematic Velveeta. Whose idea were CG dwarfs? I take no beef with the casting of Rachel Zegler, beyond the total blandness she brings to the role, while Gal Gadot\u2019s camp energy would have been better served in a film with more personality. Odd that the bloated running time couldn\u2019t find room for \u201cSomeday My Prince Will Come.\u201d You tell me: Between this and a public-domain-exploiting prank like \u201cScreamboat,\u201d which is a worse desecration of the Disney legacy?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bad movies are no fun, but they\u2019re fun to talk about. And, in a way, they\u2019re important to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":362218,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75,46275,155740,62311],"class_list":["post-362217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-snow-white","tag-the-electric-state","tag-the-testament-of-ann-lee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=362217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362217\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/362218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=362217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=362217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=362217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}