To be fair, there may be worse movies from 2025. I saw several hundred, but I didn’t see all of them. These are just the worst ones I personally watched.
Of course, art is subjective, so one person’s worst movie might be another person’s best. For example, the movie Sinners has been somewhat divisive. I know my friend Hank Cruise from Punch TV and Radio/@FisherCruise had it as his number one film for most of the year. Many other moviegoers and critics also rated it highly. I, however, did not. I didn’t dislike it enough for it to land on this list, but it definitely wasn’t making my Best Of list either.
You see, there was still plenty to appreciate in Sinners, even if it didn’t work for me as a whole. But the movies on this list are generally irredeemable, even when they do a few things well. This isn’t the ‘average’ or ‘just wasn’t good enough to go on the Best Of’ list. These are the despicable dredges of content trying to pretend, at best, like they’re reasonable entertainment options, or at worst, like they’re art.
You can read the Best Movies of 2025 – #11 to #30 here.
You can read the Best Movies of 2025 – #10 to #1 here.
‘Nuff said. Let’s do this thing:
5) The Phoenician Scheme
Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme looks exactly like a Wes Anderson movie, which at this point feels less like a compliment and more like a warning label. Yes, it’s impeccably designed, obsessively symmetrical, and stacked with a stellar cast gamely delivering deadpan dialogue like they’re reciting it at gunpoint. There are a few fun moments, because Anderson is still technically skilled and occasionally funny. But he’s also fully become a one-trick pony, endlessly re-arranging the same dollhouse furniture and calling it reinvention. Everything I once loved about his work—the emotion, the sense of discovery, the human messiness buried beneath the whimsy—has been sanded down into pure aesthetic affectation.
The bigger problem is that none of it matters. There are zero stakes in a story I didn’t care about, populated by characters who feel less like people and more like color-coded props. Anderson seems to believe that quirk itself is the point, that if the frames are cute enough and the line readings flat enough, engagement is optional. It isn’t. What’s left is a movie that’s technically immaculate and emotionally vacant, soulless to the point of terminal boredom. Like his last umpteen movies: same shit, different pile.
4) Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie
Yes, I acknowledge up front that I’m picking on a movie that’s squarely aimed at five-year-olds. Such is the burden of parenthood. That said, before I was a parent, as a professional critic, I watched a number of children’s movies a year and usually at least one made this Worst Of list each year. They can’t all be Pixar movies. Even Pixar movies aren’t all Pixar movies the last 10 years or so.
Look, Gabby isn’t the worst of the kids’ movies I’ve seen. But it also does absolutely nothing to justify its own existence beyond brand extension. The world is bright, busy, and competently animated, and performers like Kristen Wiig and Jason Mantzoukas clearly show up ready to work, despite being saddled with material that gives them nothing interesting to do. The problem is the story, and especially the humor, are so aggressively generic and lifeless that I found myself questioning not just why I was in the theatre, but how much of my finite time on Earth was actively evaporating. (Answer to the first question: my daughter.) Any attempt at emotional depth is a clumsy, shameless remix of better movies like Toy Story, The Lego Movie, and, bafflingly, what felt like a faint whiff of Temple of Doom. Who knows, five-year-olds may love it. My seven-year-old daughter thought it was average. Adults deserve mercy.
3) Glamping
A Tubi original, Glamping has Hallmark Channel–level production values, and that’s not a compliment. It looks cheap, sounds cheap, and is often acted at a level that suggests several of the performers are still discovering what a camera does. It takes an eternity to get to the point, which is a strange choice for a movie built around a simple, high-concept hook: influencers + isolation + masked killer. You shouldn’t need this much runway to crash the plane.
I can see what the movie thinks it’s saying about influencer culture, performance, and curated lives versus real danger. But I’ve seen a dozen low-budget thrillers explore those ideas with more wit, tension, and purpose. The biggest miss is that the characters aren’t even really posting or live-streaming once things go sideways, which feels like a massive storytelling WTF?. Without that, the influencer angle becomes window dressing, not a driving force. What’s left is a movie that gestures vaguely at, “kids and their social media,” without actually engaging with it. I love bad movies when they’re so bad they’re entertaining, but this one doesn’t fall into that category. It was just bad.
2) Fixed
I went into Fixed, A Netflix original, genuinely excited. I’m a big fan of Genndy Tartakovsky’s work: Samurai Jack, Primal, Clone Wars. These project prove he can do elegance, brutality, emotion, and visual storytelling at the highest level. So yeah, my expectations were high. Which probably explains why this felt like such a spectacular face plant.
I love some dumb, vulgar humour, but Fixed is juvenile in the most exhausting way, mistaking nonstop dick jokes and shock value for comedy. It’s loud, sexist, and relentlessly stupid, like it was engineered in a lab to appeal to the lowest common denominator possible. There’s no wit, no escalation, no real invention, just the same gag over and over, shouted louder each time, hoping volume will substitute for cleverness. It’s about as subtle and intelligent as a punch to the nose, and somehow less satisfying. The most disappointing part isn’t even that it’s so bad; it’s that it comes from someone who has proven, repeatedly, that he can do so much better.
1) The Amateur
The Amateur is, somehow, my least favourite movie of the year. And as we’ve established, I’ve seen worse movies, like Fixed and Glamping. But at least those were low budget movies just trying to make something fun. The Amateur rockets to the top of the shit pile because it’s supposed to be a real movie. A grown-up thriller. Stars like Remi Malek and Laurence Fishburne, a big budget, prestige trappings, the whole deal.
I may not be as smart as the movie insists its protagonist is, but The Amateur insulted my intelligence at every possible turn. The plotting is aggressively stupid. At one point, our supposed genius has been tailed by a small army of professionals, and then, off camera (?!), he simply isn’t. No explanation, no clever misdirection, just poof, freedom. At another point, he executes an absurdly over-complicated rooftop swimming-pool attack that unfolds so fast and is so poorly planned that he barely has time to extract the one piece of information he actually needs before killing the guy anyway. What was the point of this scene beyond delivering a splashy trailer moment? This kind of nonsense repeats endlessly in a number of sequences.
What makes The Amateur especially infuriating is its self-seriousness. It wants credit for being smart without doing any of the work. Every bad decision is waved away by the script insisting the character is brilliant. Instead of tension, you get frustration. Instead of catharsis, you get eye-rolling disbelief. This is a movie that thinks you’re a total moron. It’s prestige incompetence.
