Best Movies of 2025 – #10 to #1 here.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n‘Nuff said. Let’s do this thing:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
5) The Phoenician Scheme<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nWes Anderson\u2019s The Phoenician Scheme<\/em> looks exactly like a Wes Anderson movie, which at this point feels less like a compliment and more like a warning label. Yes, it\u2019s impeccably designed, obsessively symmetrical, and stacked with a stellar cast gamely delivering deadpan dialogue like they\u2019re reciting it at gunpoint. There are a few fun moments, because Anderson is still technically skilled and occasionally funny. But he\u2019s 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\u2014the emotion, the sense of discovery, the human messiness buried beneath the whimsy\u2014has been sanded down into pure aesthetic affectation.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe bigger problem is that none of it matters. There are zero stakes in a story I didn\u2019t 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\u2019t. What\u2019s left is a movie that\u2019s technically immaculate and emotionally vacant, soulless to the point of terminal boredom. Like his last umpteen movies: same shit, different pile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
4) Gabby\u2019s Dollhouse: The Movie<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYes, I acknowledge up front that I\u2019m 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Look, Gabby isn\u2019t the worst of the kids\u2019 movies I\u2019ve seen<\/em>. 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<\/em>, The Lego Movie<\/em>, and, bafflingly, what felt like a faint whiff of Temple of Doom<\/em>. Who knows, five-year-olds may love it. My seven-year-old daughter thought it was average. Adults deserve mercy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n3) Glamping<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nA Tubi original, Glamping<\/em> has Hallmark Channel<\/em>\u2013level production values, and that\u2019s 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\u2019t need this much runway to crash the plane.<\/p>\n\n\n\nI can see what the movie thinks<\/em> it\u2019s saying about influencer culture, performance, and curated lives versus real danger. But I\u2019ve seen a dozen low-budget thrillers explore those ideas with more wit, tension, and purpose. The biggest miss is that the characters aren\u2019t 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\u2019s left is a movie that gestures vaguely at, \u201ckids and their social media,\u201d without actually engaging with it. I love bad movies when they\u2019re so bad they\u2019re entertaining, but this one doesn\u2019t fall into that category. It was just bad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n2) Fixed<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nI went into Fixed<\/em>, A Netflix original, genuinely excited. I\u2019m a big fan of Genndy Tartakovsky\u2019s work: Samurai Jack<\/em>, Primal<\/em>, Clone Wars<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nI love some dumb, vulgar humour, but Fixed<\/em> is juvenile in the most exhausting way, mistaking nonstop dick jokes and shock value for comedy. It\u2019s loud, sexist, and relentlessly stupid, like it was engineered in a lab to appeal to the lowest common denominator possible. There\u2019s 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\u2019s about as subtle and intelligent as a punch to the nose, and somehow less satisfying. The most disappointing part isn\u2019t even that it\u2019s so bad; it\u2019s that it comes from someone who has proven, repeatedly, that he can do so much better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n1) The Amateur<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Amateur<\/em> is, somehow, my least favourite movie of the year. And as we\u2019ve established, I\u2019ve seen worse movies, like Fixed<\/em> and Glamping<\/em>. 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nI may not be as smart as the movie insists its protagonist is, but The Amateur<\/em> 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\u2019t. No explanation, no clever misdirection, just poof<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat makes The Amateur<\/em> 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\u2019re a total moron. It\u2019s prestige incompetence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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