Everything
Nothing quite like being told that someone thinks a movie you love is in fact a terrible flop of film but that’s what Variety just did. Because they clearly love chaos.
The annual list of Worst Films is one of the few kinds of traffic-driving click bait we love to see – mostly because it’s hard not to take these things personal. What does it say about MY taste in films that a famous critic thinks its garbage?
Nothing really, because these things are fundamentally subjective and the concept of critical film analysis rarely goes beyond a concept of rarified “high art” cinematic experiences. But at the end of the day, one person’s Showgirls is another person’s The Grapes Of Wrath. To this day I am still struggling to figure out how the hell La La Land won so many awards…
But I digress. This year Variety tapped two of its writers, the respectable and talented Owen Gleiberman and Peter Debruge, who proceeded to poop on the people’s favourites with glee. And the list is hard to disagree with.
First up on Gleiberman’s list was the abjectly dull Amsterdam starring Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington and its only hilarious scene of involving Taylor Swift. It was trite, it was banal and it deserves top billing as a boring mess.
For Debruge, the worst was slightly more debatable for some. The Marilyn Monroe semi-fictional biopic Blonde by Andrew Dominik and starring Ana de Armas. Some loved it, plenty loathed it for its almost myopic focus on Monroe’s suffering.
From there, both writers delivered a mixed bag of films – a combination of art house (Bigbug) and pseudo art house (Bones and All) all picked for similar sins of being boring, too sexed up or simply too unoriginal.
Take a look at the full lists and tell us what you think?
Owen Gleiberman’s Worst Films of 2022
- Amsterdam
- Minions: The Rise of Gru
- Bones And All
- Firestarter
- Three Thousand Years Of Longing
Peter Debruge’s Worst Films of 2022
- Blonde
- Bigbug
- The Bubble
- Spiderhead
- The 355
