By Seth Sommerfeld , Josh Bell , Chase Hutchinson and Nathan Weinbender

It's always great to share your favorite things from a given year (as we did last week with our look at the best films of 2022). Turning people on to amazing movies they might've missed can be an incredibly rewarding and invigorating experience. Wire Mesh Belt Filter Screen

But sometimes, it's also fun to wallow in the muck.

There were plenty of big screen duds in 2022, so our critics gathered together to take a few final potshots at the films they hope will be forever forgotten now that the calendar's flipped to 2023.

I mean, sure, Amsterdam is a complete mess — amateurishly directed, horribly written, awfully acted — but what can you expect from a student film of a nepotism baby? What's that? ... You're telling me this is a big budget David O. Russell film? The guy who wrote and directed Three Kings and American Hustle? ... And those actors are Margot Robbie, Christian Bale, and John David Washington? ... No, no, no. That simply can't be true. Everything about Amsterdam is embarrassing: laughably bad camera work and editing, just about every actor turning in the worst performance of their career, Taylor Swift's inclusion for... reasons?, the comedic beats that never land, a script where nobody acts or talks particularly human while also doing a slapdash commentary on facism, all of it. It's a pantheon-level example of having an amazing assemblage of talent and doing the absolute least with it. (SS)

During lockdown, most of us took up innocuous hobbies like knitting, Animal Crossing and sourdough starters. Judd Apatow spent that same time making one of the worst mainstream comedies of the century so far, a pathetic, half-assed, tone-deaf slog about some Hollywood idiots quarantining in a British estate while working on their latest franchise cash-in. The cast is stacked with comic ringers — Fred Armisen, Leslie Mann, Pedro Pascal, Peter Serafinowicz, Keegan-Michael Key, Rob Delaney, Maria Bamford — and yet there's not a single genuine laugh, unless gags about nose swabs, social distancing and TikTok dances are your cup of weak tea. Apatow course-corrected later in the year with the terrific HBO documentary George Carlin's American Dream, but the bad taste of The Bubble lingers. (NW)

This might be the most controversial inclusion on this list, but good lord was Bones and All ever an interminable slog. While the dark romantic, teenage cannibal drama is well-made film from a technical standpoint, the story is just a nothingburger (served the rarest of rare). There was never a moment over the course of its two-plus meandering hours at which I remotely cared about any of the characters, and its commentary on love and addiction seemingly had no points beyond the ultra obvious (teenage love is thrilling and messy; addiction leaves literal bodies in its wake). If director Luca Guadagnino and star Timothée Chalamet were determined to go to the trouble of making a ghastly cannibal flick, they could've at least had the decency to invite their canceled but actually cannibalistic Call Me by Your Name pal, Armie Hammer! (SS)

Despite being a person who's devoted a large portion of their writing career to music and film, I tend to loathe musical biopics and their insipid formulaic nature. Even with that said, I struggle to recall a single one that I've felt was more hollow than Baz Luhrmann's Elvis. Obviously Luhrmann was going to lean heavily on glitzy style, but there's absolutely no substance under the pizazz. It's hard to come away from this movie feeling like you know anything about the King of Rock and Roll despite an interminable 2.5-hour runtime. It also boasts the worst performance of Tom Hanks' career, trying a befuddling and inaccurate accent as Elvis' manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Elvis is a colorful splash of glittery vomit and nothing more. (SS)

This year was full of films that played around with the horror genre in exciting ways. Alas, just as there are great new works, there are those that lack any redeeming qualities. Firestarter, the second cinematic adaptation of the Stephen King story, was a film that boasted some game performances and potentially interesting alterations. Unfortunately, the film wrapped all of them in a painfully superficial story that felt more like a forgettable TV movie and smothered any hint of a spark. (CH)

Trending Our critics share their Top 10 Movies of the Year lists Babylon self-indulgently wallows in the dark side of old Hollywood Freshen up your holiday viewing options with Hong Kong romances, noirs, slashers and Batman JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION The previous Jurassic World movie ended with dinosaurs roaming the Earth, so it's baffling that this sequel focuses instead on corporate intrigue about genetically engineered locusts. Director Colin Trevorrow squanders the return of original Jurassic Park stars Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum, all of whom get bogged down in the tedious, convoluted plot. The shapeless, interminable movie meanders through meaningless action set pieces, ineffectively rehashing the same dinosaur-attack scenarios. The sense of wonder that Steven Spielberg created in the original Jurassic Park has been degraded beyond all recognition. (JB)

Our critics share their Top 10 Movies of the Year lists

Babylon self-indulgently wallows in the dark side of old Hollywood

Freshen up your holiday viewing options with Hong Kong romances, noirs, slashers and Batman

Some may call it cheating that we're including The King's Daughter, as it was technically supposed to come out nearly a decade ago, but its release this year still was a baffling one considering how little life the story had to it. An attempt at blending the magical with the historical, it had mermaids, prophecies and a luxuriously long-haired Pierce Brosnan. All of these promising assets amounted to nothing, doing a grave disservice to both the original source material and some of the talented performers caught up in this catastrophe. (CH)

Never has a film's title conveyed the opposite of what the experience of watching it is like so completely. Me Time is not something you watch to relax or to have a laugh at a few jokes. It is an endurance test, cooked up in a lab to mimic a buddy comedy. There's not even a hint of charm or mirth to be found. No matter how much it repeatedly shouts at you that it is really funny, there is the sense that not even stars Mark Wahlberg and Kevin Hart believe in what they are saying in this woeful slog. (CH)

All the memes about "morbin' time" might have made this misguided superhero movie seem like campy fun to people who never saw it, but the actual experience is so dispiriting that it's barely worth the mockery. The licensing agreement that allows Sony to make Spider-Man-free movies about Spider-Man-adjacent Marvel characters just highlights how difficult it is for these characters to stand on their own. No one bothered to find a reason for Dr. Michael Morbius — who gains vampire-like abilities thanks to a serum he creates to cure himself of a rare blood disorder — to carry his own movie. Jared Leto's intense, mannered performance is completely wrong for the character, and the disjointed story is a mess of half-formed references meant to set up sequels and spinoffs that will never be made. (JB)

Remember when Neil LaBute was a provocative indie auteur with bold new ideas (In the Company of Men)? Those days are long past, and his first feature film since 2015 is a sad reminder of where he ended up. It's a laughable pastiche of film noir, starring Diane Kruger as the femme fatale and Ray Nicholson as the sucker she convinces to kill her rich husband. It's filled with nonsensical twists, terrible acting, awkward title cards and some of the least erotic sex scenes ever filmed. (JB)

Even diehard Marvel fans will tell you that the Thor movies weren't exactly appointment viewing until Taika Waititi injected a mischievous comic spirit into 2017's Thor: Ragnarok. But the director's follow-up, Thor: Love and Thunder, is a weirdly slapdash, tonally miscalculated franchise installment that swings gracelessly between middling comedy, contrived melodrama and indifferently staged action. What's most frustrating about Love and Thunder is that it has promising individual pieces — including Christian Bale's committed performance as the tortured villain Gorr — but they simply don't click together into a coherent picture. It has been made with all the verve and panache of a contract negotiation, a fate that could befall the next phase of the MCU if the studio keeps recklessly cranking out content. (NW) ♦

The original print version of this article was headlined "The Worst Films of 2022"

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