I watch a lot of movies every year. This past year, I watched around 90 new movies, about half of which were from this year. With this incessant film watching, I also end up seeing a lot of terrible movies. Today I want to talk to you about some of them. These five films stood out to me as being the worst films I watched this year. These are not in any particular order, and two are films that predate 2025. I do not recommend these films, and, honestly, I would say shame on the directors for crafting these films. Also, the Minecraft movie is not on this list, even though it is bad, because I at least had fun watching it in the theaters. Anyway, I want to start with…
“Wicked For Good”
As I predicted last year, this film is considerably worse than the first (and I didn’t even like the first that much anyway). This film is vapid, it’s overly long and boring, and the songs aren’t very good. There’s no charm in this movie, which at least the first one had. It has all the same problems in the story as the second act of the stageplay, but they’re even worse because this film lengthens it out and makes it utterly uninteresting. The message is all over the place, and the performances, which were a highlight of the first film, were extremely lacking. I am completely unshocked that the film was not nominated for any Oscars, and I hope that Jon Chu learns in the future how to add color to his films, cause this movie feels like it’s stuck in Kansas. This movie sucked so bad I didn’t even dignify it with a full-length review. Just watch the first one, cause at least it was a little bit of fun.
“House Of Dynamite”
House of Dynamite was about 40 minutes of a good film, and then another 70 minutes of the most drawn-out filmmaking of all time. The whole conceit of the film is that we are watching 20 minutes before a missile hits Chicago, and the different responses to that attack, as we keep going back 20 minutes to see different perspectives. The first time through the 20 minutes is great; it’s tense, it’s interesting, and then after the first perspective shift, it becomes completely uninteresting. The film keeps treading over the same ideas and topics over and over again, yet does nothing new with them. It feels trapped by its own concept, which makes a somewhat interesting idea fall flat on its face. Not even a killer score and solid performances from Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson could save this film. Watch the first part of this film, then turn it off, because that’s all the good you will really get from it.
“Never Been Kissed”
This film is a 1999 romcom about a fully grown woman who pretends to be 16 to get the scoop on teenagers for her newspaper. She ends up dating a fellow student, and her English teacher falls in love with her under the pretense that she is an underage child. I feel like I don’t need to explain why I hate this movie anymore, but I will. This movie, besides having aged terribly, just isn’t funny in the slightest. Oh, I was laughing, but in disbelief at how bad and awful this film was. Also, the central romance is just bad between the main girl and the teacher. It feels like there is zero tension there, and honestly, I don’t think they should have gotten together in the end. One, because she lied to him, and that’s not good for any relationship. And two, because he was interested in her first WHEN SHE WAS PRETENDING TO BE A MINOR! Avoid this film like the plague; it’s about as rancid.
“Jurassic World Rebirth”
I have many problems with “Jurassic World Rebirth,” but I would say the biggest one is that the film never figures out what it wants to be. There are like 3o different plot lines, and none of them really come together in any meaningful way. I would say the worst part of the film was easily Scarlett Johansson. Both her performance and her character as a whole are bad, which really sucks for this film because she is the main character. The new dinosaur is pretty cool, but it’s only in the movie for like the last 20 minutes, and at that point, what is even the reason for having it? I think the film could have been a lot better if it had focused on Duncan Kincaid, played by Mahershala Ali, because he was the only good character I felt you could have actually built a movie around. Anyway, I hope they never make another one of these again, because they haven’t been any good since the first one.
“Gone With The Wind”
I know I said this was not a ranked list, but this is easily the worst film I watched last year. Would it shock you to hear that an almost four-hour-long movie was a slog to sit through? There are two things I absolutely despise about this movie. One is that it’s extremely racist. It is basically lost-cause propaganda and sets up from the first seconds of the film that the Confederate South was the last bastion of chivalry in the world, and that the Union destroyed it. Also, every single Black character is the most stereotypical racist depiction imaginable. The other thing I hated about it was that the story just wasn’t very good. It’s long, and repetitive, and the central romance is absolutely awful. Also, there were a lot of weird things that were just accepted by the story, like incest, which freaked me out. I actually laughed when the main character’s infant child died, because at least it made me feel something. I cannot believe this movie is considered a classic of cinema. The only reason people say it’s important is probably because it made a bunch of money and was the only one in color to be that long. If you are going to watch a long movie in color, watch “The Bridge over the River Kwai” or “Laurence of Arabia” because those films do things with the actual art of filmmaking that are extremely impressive and have good stories. If I have to hear about Tara ever again, I might just hurt someone. Don’t watch any of these films, but this movie in particular you should not watch. I would petition for this film to be struck from movie history and cast into the depths of cinema hell.
Anyway, those are five films I found particularly annoying last year. I do think last year was a great year for film, and the only reason I’m writing about these bad movies is because I didn’t really get to talk about movies I disliked this year that much. I hope that next year has just about as many amazing films, and I also hope that I will never have to hear about “Gone With the Wind” ever again.
