Some critics get a lot of enjoyment out of crafting their lists for the ten worst films of the year. It gives them one final chance to dunk on and quip about the films that left them irate, perplexed, flummoxed, or just plain annoyed that they wasted two hours of their lives that they’ll never get back again.
I generally don’t like coming up with these lists, but I can see the appeal, both from the perspective of the critic and the reader. The critic gets a chance to play up their inner heel and get a few shots in on something they’ve probably already unloaded on several times throughout the calendar year. And even in the days before the internet, casual and hardcore film observers froth at the mouth over the chance to agree or disagree with such lists.
Since so many people out there love themselves a good ol’ fashioned list of negativity, here’s my ten worst films from 2024. Keep in mind that this is all subjective, I certainly haven’t seen every movie to have been released this year, and that it’s very rare for a film to have been made with ill intentions by the creative people involved with it. A lot of these movies have been made by people who were genuinely trying to make something exceptional, whether or not you agree with the outcome.
10. Piece by Piece
I’m going to start with a few controversial picks just to keep this list interesting. As a huge fan of documentarian Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?), I was resolutely disappointed and even aghast by this LEGO animated look at the life and career of music superstar and entrepreneur Pharrell Williams. Not much more than a branding exercise designed to make a ubiquitous businessman look cuddlier and more relatable than he actually is, Piece by Piece has to overlook a lot of Pharrell’s career (the current rift with his one time closest collaborator in The Neptunes, the lawsuit that came from his involvement with Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” his dubious business ventures which include advocating for the use or fur and further contributing to the global housing crisis by dabbling in high end luxury condo construction) to make him appear like a great person. He might be talented musically (even though he hasn’t produced much on his own that dazzles in years), but this candy coated festival of ego stroking rubs me the wrong way. It reeks of desperation.
Although a lot of critics gravitated towards the Zellner Brothers’ surrealist dramedy about a family of grunting sasquatches coping with life’s challenges – including the likes of Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough under a ton of prosthetics and ape suiting – I couldn’t have been more bored and patience tested by this. Filled with obvious jokes and little purpose, Sasquatch Sunset isn’t a movie. It’s a stylistic exercise designed to test the breaking point of a premise. The Zellners show here that they still have a lot of stylistic talent and out there ideas, but this one just misses the mark by being monotonous and tough to sit through.
8. Nutcrackers
The opening night film at TIFF often gets criticized for being a pandering crowd pleaser or obvious awards bait, but it’s not often that it’s the worst film I saw at the festival, let alone one of the worst of the year. David Gordon Green’s latest stab at mainstream respectability (after his somehow even worse The Exorcist: Believer from last year) finds the one time indie darling and recently successful horror director taking a stab at hackneyed family comedy with teeth rotting sweetness and eye rolling insincerity. Outside of the real life Jansen siblings cast to play the wards of a sleepwalking Ben Stiller – once again playing an uptight, workaholic professional whose life is thrown out of whack – there’s little to recommend about Nutcrackers and even less to laugh or cry about. It’s shamelessly manipulative, narratively inert, and directed with all the energy of a dying battery in a remote control, all of which explains why it was quietly released onto Hulu and Disney+ without much fanfare.
7. Madame Web
In an inclusion to this list that will shock absolutely no one with a passing love of cinema (except maybe in terms of how far is is from the bottom), Madame Web takes the cake for worst superhero adjacent franchise entry this year, narrowly besting fellow Sony produced duds Kraven the Hunter and Venom: The Last Dance for this dubious honour. I’ll give Madame Web this, though: the subplot involving three young women with untapped superhuman powers was almost engaging, and certainly better than whatever movie Dakota Johnson’s lead character was trapped in. Also, I laughed! I don’t think I was supposed to laugh at the things I laughed at, but I did. Which, come to think of it, might actually make this better than Kraven the Hunter.
6. Night Swim
The first film to see wide release in 2024 that wasn’t Oscar bait from the previous year found a way to cling onto a prominent spot on the worst list. A laughably un-scary premise with only a few moments of levity to break things up, this tale of a family terrorized by the spirts in their swimming pool should’ve been dumb fun. Instead, they focused on the dumb part instead of the fun part. But it did give audiences the best possible line reading of someone saying “We have a pool” that has been delivered in some time. Possibly ever. Which might also make this better than Kraven the Hunter.
Take four acting legends, put them together in a film where they’re supposed to play best friends, give them the worst, most one dimensional material possible, and you end up with The Fabulous Four, a practically unreleasable comedy that can’t get the simplest of crowd pleasing formulas right. Dragging Bette Middler, Susan Sarandon, Megan Mullally, and Sheryl Lee Ralph down with it, The Fabulous Four mistakes having big names on board for having big laughs. Some of the best performers are capable of making something out of nothing, but no one can make much out of a mess like this that measures in negative numbers.
4. Spellbound
An animated debacle that wastes the input of many talented artists and creators, former Pixar head John Lasseter’s latest attempt to make Skydance Animation a thing is a shameless rip-off of tropes that even Disney has abandoned at this point. Colourful, but nothing else, this tale of a young princess with monsters for parents is so lazy and contemptuous of its kiddie audience that it doesn’t even bother to have a first act before droning on endlessly and boringly. This had to cost a ton of money, and none of it was well spent.
3. The Crow
A confused rebooting of a franchise that was never great to begin with outside of its stellar inaugural outing, Rupert Sanders’ The Crow can’t decide what kind of movie it wants to be. Does it want to be a brooding psychological drama? An updating of a classic for the TikTok generation? A confused horror movie? An advertisement for some unnamed luxury brand? A film that gets anything and everything wrong about its source material, it also manages to get terrible performances out of some usually reliable actors like Bill Skarsgård and Danny Huston (although FKA twigs manages to give far and away the worst performance in any film I saw this year, and nothing is fixing that). A film that exists simply to preserve the rights to a franchise and nothing else. Maybe the next people to get a crack at this will get it right, but somehow, I doubt it.
2. Borderlands
If you want to see an epic sci-fi-comedy-adventure-with-horror-elements done right, just stay home and watch the first season of Fallout on Prime instead. You’ll be watching something longer than Eli Roth’s hopelessly botched, retooled to death, and slipshod Borderlands, but it certainly won’t feel as long as sitting through whatever this is. Wasting the talents of a highly overqualified cast that includes Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, and Jamie Lee Curtis, Borderlands plays like someone shot a pitch meeting to a marketing committee and not an actual script. It scrapes the bottom of the barrel, even by the lowly standards of mainstream video game adaptations.
No film in 2024 had me running for the exit more than Renny Harlin’s The Strangers Chapter 1, not because it was terrifying, but because I couldn’t wait to be doing literally anything else. And that day I had a root canal scheduled. That was more pleasurable than anything in this idiotic, leaden paced, unimaginative reboot that captures none of the eerie and chilling aspects of the original premise. Even worse, two more of these have been shot and are awaiting release, hanging over the world like an inescapable threat. Even if those movies are somehow masterpieces, they will never be able to overcome the damage this primary entry has already done to the potential franchise. A film that I would never revisit again in my life unless someone paid me a ton of money, and I was allowed to be on my phone throughout the entire thing. I hate people being on their phone throughout a movie, but I would make an exception for something like this, as it might be the only way to retain one’s sanity and/or feel productive while ninety minutes of their lives is robbed from them.
