A small negative trend I noticed this year involves certain film productions missing their own troubling implications.
Elio, Pixar’s latest family film, doesn’t realise the ethical horrors – the duplication and destruction of self – posed by its “cloning clay” plot-device. While fun and uplifting on the surface, Wicked: For Good preserves a rotten Emerald City regime and perpetuates a harmful Othering that can only lead to more injustice.
In our modern world of conspiracy theories running rampant, Bugonia unwisely proves its conspiracist main characters right with the twist that Emma Stone’s character really is an alien with the power to end humanity (which she does).
Given how generative AI slop is swamping social media, poisoning truth on the Internet and even appearing as cheap junk in Etsy stores and local markets, it’s a terribly tone-deaf idea for Tron: Ares to treat AI constructs existing in the real world as a good thing.
Scott Chambers, director of the solid slasher movie Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, wants the sequel to reveal Neverland as a real place, not Peter’s drug-fuelled fantasy, but I don’t want the child-murderer of the title to be proven right.
In other bad movie news, while support for Emilia Pérez imploded by the time of the Oscars, it still annoys me that this rubbish film has more Oscars (two) than The Substance (one). A Minecraft Movie ended up in the middle of video game movies starring Jack Black: better than Borderlands but worse than Super Mario Bros. The Weeknd released a widely-ridiculed companion movie for his new album Hurry Up Tomorrow, and War of The Worlds made H.G. Wells spin in his grave so fast, he tunnelled down to China.
Here are my picks for the ten worst films of 2025.
10. Jurassic World: Rebirth. A dinosaur movie with no bite, the plot is awkwardly stitched together, the action holds little peril and the hybrid antagonists are wasted.
9. The Electric State. A slow, wandering adventure movie featuring flimsy characters, with awesome aesthetics but none of the sombre soul of Simon Stälenhag’s source book.
8. Bambi: The Reckoning. Really poorly-paced and contrived even for a tongue-in-cheek monster movie, and it apes Jurassic Park so closely that it lacks its own identity.
7. Fountain of Youth. Even with some fun set-pieces, Fountain of Youth is a tepid, quippy, very derivative adventure movie, with an unusually bland Domnhall Gleeson as the villain.
6. Minecraft Movie. Superbly recreates the style of the game, but is overall unfunny and annoying.
5. Hurry Up Tomorrow. I may be the world’s biggest unironic fan of Battlefield Earth who isn’t a Scientologist, and I may have written the most positive review of Hurry Up Tomorrow in the world, but still, neither film is very good.
4. In The Lost Lands. A postapocalyptic Western with witches and werewolves shouldn’t be this tedious. The performances are stilted, the pacing lurches along, the worldbuilding is almost nonexistent, and while the film has some cool art direction and action moments, the visuals look like gloomy video game cut-scenes.
3. The Old Guard 2. An unworthy sequel with poorly-composed, inferior action and a plot that spins its wheels.
2. Emilia Pérez. A slow, flat drama and a musical with bad musical numbers, Emilia Pérez also generalises and insults the people it tries to represent.
1. War of The Worlds. A tensionless slog with laughably bad performances (especially from Ice Cube), shoddy effects and disorienting presentation.
Check back next week for my countdown of the ten best films of 2025 – expect a bunch of thrillers and monsters.
– Seth Lukas Hynes
