The Worst Films of 2024

...and wow! A lot to choose from!

Chat are movies “over,” or does the lifeblood of cinema still pump through the veins of the silver screen?¹ This year had a lot of bad movies— this isn’t unique, studio tentpole pictures have been getting worse and worse on a craft level for a decade now, but this year I couldn’t ignore the extent to which Hollywood incompetence is trickling down to the world of indie and arthouse cinema. Here are the worst films I saw in 2024.

DISHONOURABLE MENTIONS

Wicked was stupid and annoying and hideous and the marketing cycle which will seemingly last well into my grandchildren’s adulthood did a lot of psychic damage to me and also every gay guy I know, but I kinda had fun. Argylle was completely braindead and has one of the weirdest, least interesting scripts I’ve ever seen but featured mostly good filmmaking and performances and Bryce Dallas Howard with curtain bangs shows bare feet several times so I can’t get that mad at it. Anyone But You was incompetent, a total waste of two leads with chemistry, but it did net me one of the most memorable theater experiences of my life. Between The Temples wins Un Certain Retárd for having the most annoying direction in any film I saw this year, but the dynamite script and unbelievably locked in performances from every single person in the movie ultimately mostly won me over.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

I almost feel bad putting this on my list. The daring production (the film, ostensibly an excoriating, ripped-from-the-headlines indictment of the Iranian theocratic regime, was shot in secret at great personal risk to director Mohammad Rasoulof) and resulting political fallout (Rasoulof, who ‘escaped Iran on foot’ is now an exile of his home country) made for a stirring, sympathetic narrative and a killer promotional campaign. Unfortunately the film itself is muddled, exhausting, and deeply annoying, failing on every conceivable level from scripting to formal execution. I won’t get into the politics of the film itself, which are earnest, but as far as well-intentioned art being used as a political cudgel by Western powers goes, this is one of the worst, most tawdry examples in recent memory, even if it does end in a literal Scooby-Doo hallway full of doors style chase sequence.

Fighter

Hrithik Roshan has maybe the scariest plastic surgery face in cinema today— Nicole can’t even come close. Despite all the deification sequences and saffron robe patriotic dance stuff that is all the rage in a lot of MAAAAASSS Indian cinema these days, Fighter (which features none of that stuff) is the most bloodthirsty and psychotically nationalist thing I saw this year. That alone wouldn’t merit it a spot on this list, but it also had forgettable songs, really bad dancing (Roshan, at one point in his career, was an amazing dancer, but I think there is so much botox coursing through his body he literally can’t bend his joints) and basically nothing in the way of exciting elevation.

Bad Boys: Ride Or Die

Speaking of Botox ruining the career of a beloved 2000s leading man, Will Smith in 2024 is one of our most pathetic guys and watching him in this movie, which is basically a MAASSS masala film without all the things that make MAAAASSS cinema so fun to watch, is truly sickening.

Godzilla Vs. Kong: The New Empire

There is a moment about 20 minutes into this movie where Kong goes to the dentist because he has a toothache. When this happened, I thought to myself, ‘this might be an awesome movie actually,’ but it doesn’t get any stupider, it just gets worse. I haven’t seen any of the American “monster-verse” stuff since Skull Island, so I wasn’t aware of the weird Esoteric Hitlerist turn the lore had taken with the hollow earth hyperborea stuff, but man this thing is exhausting. The baby Kong from the trailer is annoying, the CGI monster fights are a blurry, uninspired mess and Bryan Tyree Henry and Rebecca Hall aren’t allowed to have fun in a movie where King Kong goes to the dentist.

Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1

I don’t know what to say about this stinky mess of shoot-and-cry gobbledygook. Do I focus on Costner’s soul patch? The completely incoherent plot? The first-pass hackjob of an edit? The well-meaning liberal crybaby racial chauvinism that flattens and delegitimizes the armed struggle of American Indians against encroaching white supremacy? That stuff is all worth talking about, as is Michael Rooker doing an Irish accent so bad it reads Jamaican, but the thing I think about the most is The Dag from Fury Road doing a Captain Jack Sparrow impression for probably one third of this films three hour runtime.

The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare

Allow me a belabored metaphor: You know when a toddler does a coloring sheet, and they don’t even try to color in the lines, or match the colors to the subject matter, and it just ends up as a bunch of scribbles atop a printed line drawing? Okay, now imagine if the coloring book was themed after Inglorious Basterds. If the government of the United Kingdom was as strongly against antisemitism as they claim to be when arresting Jewish professors and Holocaust survivors for publicly speaking out against the genocidal regime of Israel, then Guy Ritchie would’ve spent the last decade in one of those Vera Drake/Paddington 2 style jails.

I Saw The TV Glow

If at some point during the screenwriting process, you have a moment where you write out the thesis of your film in chalk and have it flash across the screen, you should go back to the drawing board and fix what’s going wrong. I really wanted to like this film, but the breathy indie rock precociousness grated on me like asphalt on the knee of a 2000’s suburban queer kid who fell off his Razor scooter while listening to… Phoebe Bridgers? This movie is stupid. This movie is racist. You should all read this really good letterbox’d review about the film’s bizarre refusal to engage with race in any capacity.

Lonely Planet

Liam Hemsworth is a private equity guy with no rizz who comes along to his girlfriend’s (played by not Daisy Edgar Jones) writers retreat in Morocco. She does molly and cheats on him with a fomer child soldier turned softboy prose poet. He revenge cheats with Laura Dern. None of this is fun, or funny, or sexy, or even admirably stupid. Laura Dern doesn’t wear a bikini or show feet. Evil movie.

Borderlands

Incompetent doesn’t even begin to describe this film, which is almost certainly pound-for-pound the worst thing I’ve ever seen in theaters. Eli Roth somehow managed to even fuck up putting Gena Gershon in this costume:

Megalopolis

I’ll admit that seeing this in a packed theater off an edible was the most fun I had in a cinema all year. Still, the amount of supposedly serious film watchers who have cucked their own minds into thinking a senile libtard pedophile-lover²³ who hasn’t made a good movie in forty years is their friend and grandpa, has been pissing me off since this film premiered at Cannes. I think we can all recognize the value in a film being bad as the result of completely unbridled capital-V Vision, but, while I’m willing to be give five stars to something like Despiser or After Last Season, which are daring and unhinged works of vision by incompetent filmmakers working with no resources or strats just fighting as hard as they can, I’m not at all charmed by someone with an endless amount of Hollywood clout spending $120,000,000 on a stupid, didactic parable about how America isn’t the greatest country on earth, but it damn sure used to be because he saw this meme

and started crying.

1. Best Of list coming soon!

2. The pedophile in question has a better post-1990 filmography than Coppola, by the way.

3. You probably have passing familiarity with the whole Victor Salva situation, but did you know that, after Salva raped a child actor on the set of Clownhouse at Coppola’s Napa Valley estate, Francis Ford sued that child actor for breach of contract because he refused to do ADR sessions to complete the film? What a lovable New Hollywood scamp!