Cassandra Webb/Madame Web (Dakota Johnson) in Madame Web.Jessica Kourkounis/Sony Pictures
To paraphrase Madame Web, the closest thing that Hollywood has to a 2024 poster girl, the past 12 months at the multiplex felt a lot like a trip to the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders just before she died – confounding, grammatically incoherent and bound to leave even the most dedicated moviegoer with a nasty and possibly venomous afterbite. From creatively bankrupt sequels and soulless reboots to aggressively stupid star vehicles, the following films represent the worst of the worst.
For those who avoided the titles, consider yourself lucky. For the filmmakers and producers responsible, let this serve as a well-deserved public shaming.
10. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.Netflix/The Associated Press
A decades-later sequel so forgettably ephemeral that its direct-to-Netflix release this past summer almost seems like a half-remembered dream. Did this actually happen? I’m happy that Paul Reiser and Bronson Pinchot got paid, but Axel F. marked a new low in the Eddie Murphy sequel canon – and I’ve unfortunately seen Coming 2 America.
9. Longing
Diane Kruger and Richard Gere in Longing.Stratford Festival
A tonally bizarre and dramatically inert feature that is so detached from baseline human emotion it might as well be the fever dream of artificial intelligence, the Canadian-Israeli film Longing made an unintentionally great argument for dismantling Telefilm.
8. Argylle
From left, Henry Cavill, Dua Lipa and John Cena in Argylle.Peter Mountain/Universal Pictures, Apple Original Films, and MARV/Universal Pictures
Maximizing Matthew Vaughn’s worst habits (faux-cheeky violence set to disco-pop songs, chaotic editing, juvenile humour that gives a bad name to middle-schoolers) and jettisoning his best (the anarchic wit of Kick-Ass and the first Kingsman movie, the sharp casting and performances of Layer Cake and X-Men: First Class), the director’s spy-comedy is a marathon-length migraine. It is so aggressively mindless and artlessly hollow that it almost has to be seen to be believed. Almost.
7. Unfrosted
From left, Jim Gaffigan, Jerry Seinfeld, Fred Armisen and Melissa McCarthy in Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story.Netflix
As his old NBC sitcom pal Larry David might say, Jerry Seinfeld’s Unfrosted is pretty, pretty, pretttttyyyyyy bad. A feature-length riff on a middling Seinfeld stand-up joke about Pop-Tarts (“How did they know that there would be a need for a frosted fruit-filled heated rectangle in the same shape as the box it comes in, and with the same nutrition as the box it comes in?”), Unfrosted is so hacky that Kenny Bania wouldn’t touch it, and with pacing so slow that it rivals Elaine’s experience enduring The English Patient. It’s not about nothing, but it is also nothing special.
6. Civil War
Kirsten Dunst in Civil War.The Associated Press
Alex Garland’s frequently silly, often offensively idiotic “near future” fantasy not only gets a failing grade for likely scuttling any adaptation plans for Canadian author Omar El Akkad’s similarly themed but far sharper novel American War, but for fundamentally misunderstanding the concept of journalism, war, politics, you name it. Not even a Jesse Plemons mega-meme can save it.
5. Kinds of Kindness
Jesse Plemons in Kinds of Kindness.Atsushi Nishijima/The Associated Press
Speaking of Plemons, whom I genuinely love even when his taste is compromised, here’s Yorgos Lanthimos’s unbearable “triptych fable.” A truly torturous experience for almost everyone involved – up to and including Plemons and co-star Emma Stone, who must now surely realize they have been duped by a master cinematic con artist – the film is a relentlessly juvenile and tedious dissection of the notion of free will. Good news, then, that you can decide to turn it off at any point.
4. Borderlands
Fom left, Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu and Jamie Lee Curtis in Borderlands.Katalin Vermes/The Associated Press
Tonally messy, narratively janky and slathered with pasted-over narration that reeks of creative indecision, Eli Roth’s outer-space adventure is an embarrassing affair for even the most hardcore of gamers, who already have no shortage of indifferently produced video-game adaptations to contend with. The only good news: The movie is so instantly forgettable that it will likely linger in star Cate Blanchett’s own memory, a cautionary tale of hasty pandemic-era decision-making.
3. The Crow
Bill Skarsgård and FKA twigs in The Crow.Larry Horricks/Supplied
Sloppy and cheap, with its aesthetic sensibilities cribbed from an elevator pitch of “John Wick goes goth,” Rupert Sanders’s reboot of The Crow is a truly ugly thing to endure. The movie not only misinterprets the tragic romance of James O’Barr’s original comic book series, but does so in such a brazenly soulless manner that you wonder if anyone involved has ever actually seen a movie before. This is as much a cry for help as it is an exercise in intellectual property malpractice.
2. Am I Racist?
Screen shot from the film Am I Racist?Supplied
Progressive moviegoers who shrug off the impact of Justin Folk and Matt Walsh’s pseudo documentary shouldn’t pat themselves on the back quite so quickly. There is a reason that this film, the first theatrical release from the far-right U.S. media empire the Daily Wire, made more money than any other doc this year. Petulant, ignorant and creatively bankrupt, Am I Racist? is an invaluable window into the small-minded rot of the Make America (and Canada) Great Again crowd, where ignorance and fear trump everything else.
1. Madame Web
Dakota Johnson in Madame Web.Jessica Kourkounis/Sony Pictures
Concocted by avaricious producers desperate to cash in on any Spider-Man-adjacent intellectual property – for those who absolutely must know, “Peter Parker” in any of his familiar cinematic forms never appears here, though he definitely kinda sorta exists – Madame Web is a dirge for the Marvel cinematic era. Stupendously stupid and never remotely in control of its faculties, the film represents a kind of weaponized incompetence, hostile and assaultive. The fact that it was released into the world and not digitally incinerated feels like the cruellest kind of joke, with everyone – its makers and its audience – cast as the punchline.