Bad movies are no fun, but they’re fun to talk about. And, in a way, they’re important to talk about. There’s a school of thought that says a best of the year list is hallowed and meaningful, while a worst of the year list is trivial and mean — a gratuitous nasty slap at the movies that didn’t measure up. At Variety, we don’t 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 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’s crème de la crap.
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Owen Gleiberman’s 5 Worst Movies
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1. Eden
Image Credit: Photo: Jasin Boland
Ron Howard’s chaotic, dyspeptic mess of a historical drama plops us down on one of the Galápagós Islands in 1929, where we get to hang out 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 “Robinson Crusoe” meets a sitcom “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” with deranged footnotes by Friedrich Nietzsche, the movie is entitled “Eden,” but it should have been called “Endless Meandering Hellscape.”
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2. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2
Image Credit: Courtesy of Ryan Green/Universal Pictures
Video games don’t 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. It’s a slasher film without blood, scares or tension. It’s a tale of the ghosts of murdered children who live in the animatronic mascots of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, but there’s 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’s 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 outing at Freddy’s now awaits us.
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3. The Testament of Ann Lee
Image Credit: Courtesy of Searchlight
You may have heard that it’s visionary, spellbinding, fervid, tumultuous, and fierce. But you can’t always believe what you hear. The word that best describes Mona Fastvold’s 18th-century fever-dream musical about the founder of the Shaker sect is stultifying. It’s a movie that tries to be boldly austere, but it’s 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’s so traumatized by catching glimpses of her parents fornicating that she evolves an entire worldview out of it. (The worldview is: Sex — bad!) As she grows up to found a religion that’s like “The Handmaid’s Tale” 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 “The Crucible” as staged by Corky St. Clair. They emerge from, but don’t interrupt, the flow of reverent monotony.
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4. Hurry Up Tomorrow
Image Credit: ©Lions Gate/Courtesy Everett Collection
If, for some reason, you’ve been yearning to see a portrait of a pop star who makes Jeremy Allen White’s gloomy, earnest-home-studio Bruce Springsteen seem the life of the party, look no further than this maddeningly pretentious vanity-project drama about a navel-gazing pop idol who’s in the middle of a nervous breakdown. He’s played by The Weeknd, who preens and shadowboxes but mostly mopes, cries, stares into the void, snorts cocaine off his manager’s knuckles, and nails himself to the cross of his angsty turmoil. “You’re not a normal human, bro,” says the manager (Barry Keoghan). No, he’s not; he’s a posing tear-stained minimalist narcissist. The director, Trey Edward Shults, stages this adjunct to The Weeknd’s 2025 album by orchestrating a “Shining”/”Barton Fink” nightmare of paranoid vagueness, bathing the whole thing in heavy synthesizer strains, so that it sounds like Enya is collaborating with György Ligeti in the belly of a whale. The result may be the most tinpot grandiose pop-star psychodrama since “Under the Cherry Moon.”
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5. Anemone
What finally coaxed Daniel Day-Lewis out of his self-imposed retirement from acting? The chance to help his 27-old-year son, Ronan Day-Lewis, by lending a lustrous high profile to Ronan’s feature directing debut. As an act of fatherly devotion, that’s 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 overplays the role of a grizzled hermit, with Sean Bean as the estranged sibling who arrives 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’s a flower)…enough “themes” to make you think that in a past life, Day-Lewis’s character was at the center of some snail-paced ’90s dud produced by Miramax.
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Peter Debruge’s 5 Worst Movies
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1. The Life of Chuck
It’s the end of the world as we know it and … director Mike Flanagan feels fine serving up contrived, fortune-cookie aphorisms about how even the most one-dimensional among us “contain multitudes.” Leaving no room for audiences to draw their own conclusions, the emotional manipulation starts with the Newton Brothers’ heavy-handed piano-and-strings score, which punctuates every faux-profound moment with a plunk. Nick Offerman’s folksy narration further obliterates any semblance of realism, layering treacle on top of sap. And that’s before we meet a schmuck named Chuck (Tom Hiddleston), whose phony-baloney “life” 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’t buy a second of it — and considering Chiwetel Ejiofor’s grating lecture on the significance of time, I want back the precious 6,643 seconds this movie wasted.
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2. The Electric State
Image Credit: ©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Colle
An impressive feat for a lone artist, Simon Stålenhag’s sci-fi picture book assembles striking paintings of a retro-futuristic America, in which massive droids loom over deserted landscapes — visuals that are every bit as cinematic as that last shot of “The Planet of the Apes,” 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 Stålenhag’s 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’t speak, whereas the Russo-ruined movie version imbues them with obnoxious voices and “quirky” catchphrases. The human characters prove even more annoying, whether it’s lazy-casting-choice Chris Pratt, wisecracking like some kind of low-rent Snake Plissken, or Stanley Tucci’s not-even-remotely-menacing turn as a Steve Jobs-like villain. Here’s some Apple-sanctioned advice for the budget-burning siblings, whose post-“Avengers” junk keeps clogging the Netflix pipeline: Think different.
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3. War of the Worlds
Image Credit: Courtesy of Prime Video
Just as producer Jason Blum has cornered the low-budget horror space, churning out schlock that surely belongs on this list (“Black Phone 2” was terrific, “Megan 2.0” not so much), Russian vfx whiz Timur Bekmambetov basically owns the screenlife format — thrillers that unfold almost entirely on smartphone or PC screens. Some are clever, like SXSW discovery “LifeHack,” 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 “War of the Worlds,” in which Ice Cube plays the U.S. government’s 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.
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4. The Actor
It should have been a cause for celebration: Ten years after co-directing the soul-searching stop-motion movie “Anomalisa” 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 André Holland’s character even have a personality beyond the roles he’s inhabited? None of it makes sense, and it doesn’t help that the film’s 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 (“Memory”), but you’d be much better off watching “No Other Choice,” Korean director Park Chan-wook’s adaptation of Westlake’s “The Ax.”
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5. Presence
Image Credit: Photo by Peter Andrews
I’m glad Steven Soderbergh wasn’t serious about retiring, and I suppose he’s entitled to doodle however he sees fit. The indie superhero had two new movies this year that I truly adored: “Black Bag” very nearly made my top 10 list, while “The Christophers” (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 “Presence,” 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 — 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.
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Dishonorable Mention: “Snow White”
Image Credit: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection
While not exactly awful, Disney’s “live-action” retelling of the studio’s very first animated feature sucks all the wonder out of the “property” (the Mouse House seems to view everything in terms of IP these days, doesn’t 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’s camp energy would have been better served in a film with more personality. Odd that the bloated running time couldn’t find room for “Someday My Prince Will Come.” You tell me: Between this and a public-domain-exploiting prank like “Screamboat,” which is a worse desecration of the Disney legacy?
