1) THE SON – Technically a 2022 release, but did not get a theatrical release until 2023, so therefore I’m putting it here. Florian Zeller’s follow-up to his amazing 2020 film The Father fails for every reason that film succeeds. It’s afilm full of horrible performances by great actors. Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern and Vanessa Kirby are all wasted here and this is an incredible stain on all their resumes. Zen McGrath as the titular son presents as bargain basement Timothée Chalamet, and he’s not good at all. This film’s central problem is that it’s a film about parents trying to come to terms with their son’s mental health crisis. And they don’t know how to react to anything. It’s almost funny how inept these characters are, and how silly their behavior is. But considering what a real and present problem this film is exploring, it feels wildly inappropriate and irresponsible. It’s two hours of boomer-ish parents interrogating their mentally unwell son instead of getting him help and literally letting him shrivel up and die before their eyes. At one point Hugh Jackman literally asks him if he’s on drugs. I hated this movie.

2) LOVE AGAIN – I love a big old stupid romance movie just as much as (probably more than) the next person. And Love Again does everything spectacularly wrong. Priyanka Chopra is a horrible actress, and her chemistry with Sam Heughan is somehow even worse. Nobody in this movie speaks like a human being. The dialogue is so awkward and stilted, and that’s not just in the delivery. We kick off with Chopra’s boyfriend dying in a car crash which we do not see, we see her smiling as he walks away and then we see her face develop a faint look of discontent as we hear the sound of a car crash. And this moment is so awkwardly done, I laughed out loud. It set the tone for the next hour and a half pretty well. Something that is funny but never on purpose, and impossibly cringe inducing from beginning to end.

3) INSIDE – I love a good survivalist movie. I love a good one-location movie. I love Willem Dafoe. There is no reason I shouldn’t have loved Inside, in which an art thief is trapped inside an impossibly high tech NYC high rise apartment after a heist doesn’t go as planned. And yet, this is such a slog for many reasons, it feels like the film itself doesn’t go as planned. The central problem is probably the fact that you don’t care about this character or what happens to him. He’s an awful human being, and we know nothing about his backstory and the film isn’t interested in giving us a reason to care about him. Also, the obstacles he faces become increasingly complex and they’re almost laughable after the third time you see the same thing.

4) THE CREATOR – A film that REALLY wants you to feel something. It wants you to have such sympathy for this little AI child with a hole in the middle of her head (all of the AI people do in this world) and it wants artificial intelligence to look like something that is not actively threatening the world around it. And I don’t think there could possibly be a worse time for this movie to come out, given that AI is threatening many ways of life as we know it. The actors in this film can’t promote it at the time of its release because of a strike that happened BECAUSE of AI. A great cast giving their all was never enough to save this.

5) HAUNTED MANSION – A film that’s never funny enough nor scary enough to fully leap off the screen. The story is weak, the characterizations are uninspired, there’s an insane level of product placement in this movie. It’s very strange that a Haunted Mansion movie has more egregious product placement than a Barbie movie. An example of this is a one-two punch name drop of Yankee Candle, being the only one available to perform a seance with, because Rosario Dawson keeps forgetting to cancel her Amazon subscription.

6) AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM– James Wan’s 2018 Aquaman is a delightfully stupid movie that understands how absurd this is. And this new installment strips this franchise of all joy and excitement. Jason Momoa isn’t even fun to watch anymore, and nobody seems to be having any fun, and isn’t that the point here? Even the image of Nicole Kidman riding a giant seahorse is not enough to make me crack a smile in this one.

7) FREUD’S LAST SESSION– This is like if Frost/Nixon was boring as shit.

8) BEAU IS AFRAID – When I initially saw Ari Aster’s newest film, a 3-hour odyssey to nowhere, I was conflicted how I felt about the film. It stayed on my mind for a good while, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized how bad this movie really is. It’s a story about an unreliable narrator with no agency who things just happen to. The whole movie is Joaquin Phoenix’s character reacting to crazy people doing crazy things to him and treating him terribly. There is nothing interesting about him, and by the time we get to the third act, it becomes painfully clear how tedious his entire journey has been, and how little it has all meant. This feels like an empty exercise in style with nothing interesting to say.

9) STRAYS – The “isn’t talking dogs swearing funny?” movie is never funny enough. It’s remarkably stupid, unfunny and has little to offer beyond humor for the lowest-common-denominator audience. The voice work is lazy and uninspired. The jokes are exactly what you would expect them to be and as lame as you expect them to be. I thought this might break through to me somehow because I am an animal lover and I absolutely love director Josh Greenbaum’s previous film, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar. But this one never, ever works.

10) MAESTRO – I was a big fan of Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born, and his follow up film feels like it goes on forever and is only about two hours long. It touches on the point that Leonard Bernstein was a closeted man stifled by the conventions of the time, but it also makes his wife, played by Carey Mulligan, doing some of her best-ever work, the emotional core of this film, and sets his leading character to the sidelines where it’s easier to judge his decisions, because in this version of the story, Leonard Bernstein was never that good of a person. And as a result this film kept me at a distance and never let me connect with these characters in a profound way. It’s also got that biopic thing that I hate where it follows its subject for their entire life, and as a result no part of that story feels very important.

11) MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING 3 – Nia Vardolas returns to her roots, and the only thing she’s ever had real success with. What we have here is a film that only exists to give the cast a paid vacation. The plot is paper thin and the characters are almost non existent. It tries to follow a million different subplots that don’t really come together in the end. And it’s really a big old bummer because you leave the theater partly wanting to book a trip to Greece, but mostly thinking about your own mortality and what life will be like when everyone you love has died. Opa!

12) ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA – I’m just tired. The third Ant-Man film is full of ideas. Some are better than others. But it’s also a full on visual assault full of the ones and zeros that have exhausted me in Marvel movies for some time. So little of this feels real and the green screen of it all envelops you and exhausts you. Some of what goes on in the Quantum Realm is imaginative and fun. But so much more of it is uninspired and dull. And this film contains some of the worst visual effects I’ve ever seen in a big budget studio movie. Yes, I’m including Cats (2019) in this.

13) THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE – An obtrusively colorful and painfully energetic assault on the senses that exhausted my very soul. It’s like if someone water boarded you in a bucket full of Skittles and you had to listen to Chris Pratt talk the whole time it was happening. An empty exercise in fan service jam packed with Easter eggs for longtime fans. Which I also couldn’t appreciate because I am not well versed in this world. And the same thing applies to superhero movies and movies based on books – I shouldn’t have to do homework to enjoy a big blockbuster movie. I should just be able to come in and enjoy it, and I found very little to enjoy here. Not even appealing from a “turn your brain off and enjoy the ride” perspective. There is very little to enjoy here. This is grating and punishing filmmaking.

14) THE FLASH – a comic book film that is constantly referencing other IP and patting the audience on the back for understanding its references. It’s all Easter eggs and cameos and that takes the viewer out of a perfectly interesting narrative about grief. Troubled star Ezra Miller is a strong enough performer to mostly come out unscathed here. However, this script is a disaster and it does nobody any favors.

15) YOUR PLACE OR MINE – As a big fan of writer/director Aline Brosh McKenna’s previous work, this was a deeply unfortunate experience. A rom com with zero chemistry between its two leads. At the end, these lifelong friends realize they’ve been in love with each other the whole time and you think to yourself, ‘what?’ Like, that’s obviously where this story was going but it doesn’t feel like we’ve earned that at all. Admittedly I was playing on my phone during this Netflix movie. There are a lot of great streaming choices that deserve your full attention and your full brain. This is one you watch when you’ve had a few cocktails and you’re barely coherent, and you’re scrolling Twitter. Because this movie isn’t asking a lot of you and it doesn’t deserve more.

16) ABOUT MY FATHER – The lead screen performance debut of the very popular comedian Sebastian Maniscalco. Remember that time when people on the internet (straight white men) were tearing Amy Schumer apart for allegedly being a joke thief? I counted at least six jokes in the first 30 minutes of this film that were lifted from sitcoms I’d seen in the past. And then I got tired of counting. I assume there were more.

17) PLANE– A film I wouldn’t otherwise have seen, but it was January and I was desperate to see something – anything – and this Gerard Butler action film got better than expected reviews. I didn’t find this fun at all and I couldn’t wait to leave the theater.

18) THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER – An insult to the classic 1973 film, and a film that is somehow significantly less scary than the 50-year-old film you’re constantly comparing it to. A slap in the face to 90-year-old legend Ellen Burstyn. And yet, the real problem here is that this can’t help but feel like the crass money grab it is. Universal spent $400 million on the rights to this franchise and plans to make a TRILOGY out of this. And anyone who’s endured David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy must have been stoned when they signed a deal for him to do more of this. At least this time, he reaches peak shittiness in part one and we can avoid two and three.

19) DREAM SCENARIO – I enjoyed this one for awhile, until it becomes a big old tired allegory about cancel culture. It seems to poke fun at the idea of internet celebrity and how the right weaponizes a narrative and politicizes everything, but it is still a film about a sad old white man feels like the young people are being mean to him. He’s just a victim and has no sense of agency and he’s not the problem, it’s us. And unless I massively misunderstood the point of this film, this is unequivocally quite lame, despite Nicolas Cage’s best efforts.

20) THE MIRACLE CLUB – Not a whole lot to say about this one. Laura Linney, Kathy Bates and Maggie Smith are deserted in a cinematic wasteland of mediocrity. It’s framed to be something of a crowd-pleaser and it just…doesn’t.