The Worst Movies of 2025 | Screen

It can sometimes be just as fun to trash talk movies you loathe as it is to praise those you love. With that in mind, what follows are some of our critics’ most reviled major motion pictures of 2025. 

The fun twist this year is among the writers’ choices here are widely acclaimed films, some of which are locks to be nominated for Academy Awards. Are we being haters or the sane voices in the room? Watch them (if you dare) to determine who you think is correct.

DIE MY LOVE

With the obvious caveat that I cannot fully relate to certain points of such films, my least favorite cinematic subgenre might be “Pure Acting Showcases Where the Audience Watches a Woman Suffer for Two Hours” (recent examples include Her Smell and The United States vs. Billie Holiday). Those films can be done artfully, like 2025’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, but Die My Love fails to reach that bar. While Lynne Ramsay has made some stellar films, this Jennifer Lawrence-led endurance test belabors its message to an agonizing degree. It’s not that Lawrence doesn’t deliver a strong performance as a woman losing her mind to severe postpartum depression, but any viewer would fully get all the points if this were a 30-minute short. Instead, it’s a bloated two-hour slog that beats every obvious theme into submission to the point where it ultimately undercuts its own empathy. (SETH SOMMERFELD)

EDDINGTON

Eddington is a movie for people who think the highest forms of comedy and philosophy are found on bumper stickers. Writer/director Ari Aster’s black comedy attempts to be a searing commentary on the cultural divides tearing apart our country via a contentious small town mayoral election (with candidates played by Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal) during the height of COVID-19 lockdowns. There’s not a moment of original insight or humor to be found over two-and-a-half turgid hours, made more maddening by the air of importance Aster tries to painfully squeeze out of each of his hollow observations. It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect committed to celluloid. If you want to watch a 2025 film commenting on all these issues (one that also features Emma Stone), Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia is 1,000 times more grounded and realistic despite being about possible aliens from another planet. (SS)

THE ELECTRIC STATE

In 2018, the artist Simon Stålenhag made a haunting illustrated sci-fi novel that, among many things, pondered what the future holds when life is reduced to consuming mindless slop that rots our brains. In 2025, directors Anthony and Joe Russo made the abysmal adaptation The Electric State that only succeeded at embodying this idea of mindless slop. A lifeless and empty husk of “content” in the worst sense of the word, it’s as if the Russos took Stålenhag’s striking illustrations, put them into a shredder and half-heartedly assembled what it spat out. The book remains a beautiful work of art. The movie is one of the worst, ugliest adaptations of not just last year, but of the decade thus far. What a piece of junk.

(CHASE HUTCHINSON)

THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS

Unencumbered by the constraints of an increasingly labyrinthine Marvel Cinematic Universe continuity, this retro-future family adventure should have been a slam dunk of sci-fi shenanigans. Instead First Steps stumbles. There’s a sense of scale lacking in the movie, with many scenes confined to their swanky, midcentury modern apartment or a few blocks of New York City. It’s also hampered by unenlivened performances from typically dependable performers like Pedro Pascal (bizarrely miscast as the arrogant super-scientist Reed Richards) and Julia Garner (who made a meal out of a complex role in Weapons but hardly makes an impression here as the Silver Surfer). Unfortunately, this fourth attempt at a live-action Fantastic Four feels less like a first step and more like a half measure. (JASON BAXTER)

FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S 2

As a non-gamer, I acknowledge that this movie is full of references I don’t understand, which mean something to longtime fans. But you can’t construct a movie out of references alone, and this sequel to the horror hit about killer animatronic animals is possibly the most poorly constructed movie of 2025. The story limps along from one confusing plot point to another, the character motivations make no sense, and the surefire premise is squandered in numerous inept, suspense-free sequences. I would’ve rather spent time attempting to play a game I know nothing about. (JOSH BELL)

FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH

If someone fed the script for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade into one of the bullshit plagiarism chatbots that are laughably being called “AI” and asked it to spit out an imitation, you might get this charmless, humorless misadventure. Guy Ritchie’s cringeworthy treasure hunt is ultimately nonsensical, even grading it on its own fantastical curve, and feels honed by corporate focus groups and cinematic SEO. Hollywood has, depressingly, lost the ability to buckle swash. (MARYANN JOHNANSON)

FRANKENSTEIN

Megalopolis. Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Sometimes when a director’s long dreamt-of passion project comes to fruition it feels like it spent too long marinating in their imagination, and maybe should never have even been realized at all. Those familiar with Guillermo del Toro will not be surprised that his sympathies in this new Frankenstein adaptation lie with the monster and not with the titular doctor. Maybe this favoritism was not lost on the actors, as Oscar Isaac delivers a hammy, histrionic performance — in a dreadfully unconvincing English accent — as if playing to unseen rafters with all the subtlety of a high school drama student. Conversely, the “modern prometheus” is soulfully embodied by Jacob Elordi, who dominates the second, superior half of this pretentious and overly long film. As transfixing as Elordi is… it’s still not enough to save the film from its hubristic excesses. Perhaps this project should have remained in the graveyard. (JBax)

JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH

Gareth Edwards tries to squeeze a little more life out of a tired franchise via a shameless remix of high points from previous installments with a few tidbits from E.T. and Aliens tossed in. The flat, cartoonish visual FX can’t measure up to those of the original movie — despite their hitting big screens over 30 years ago — and utterly fail to create any sense of wonder. Oh, and the movie is less interested in authentic dinosaurs than mad-scienced mutant crossbreeds that look more like fantasy Star Wars creatures than the magnificent actual animals who once roamed the Earth and sparked our collective cultural imagination. (MJ)

KARATE KID: LEGENDS

There is so little to this movie that it barely exists at all. It’s edited like it’s part of the movie-theater pre-show package (with multiple scenes that just end randomly), and constant split screens that make it look like a soda commercial. The ostensibly crucial final karate tournament flies by so quickly that it almost doesn’t even register. Both Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan make perfunctory appearances as their previous franchise characters, lazily justifying the existence of yet another cash-in legacy sequel. (JB)

MATERIALISTS

Materialists was so putrid that it made me retroactively ashamed that I often recommended that my pals should watch writer/director Celine Song’s brilliant 2023 debut feature Past Lives. Everything that that film gets right about aching longing and the quiet tenderness of unrealized love, Materialists completely botches. Not a moment of this rom-com rings true or funny, as we’re supposed to care about Dakota Johnson’s flat and unlikeable New York City matchmaker as she’s torn between her hunky struggling actor ex (Chris Evans) and a hunky but less interesting millionaire (Pedro Pascal). It’s passion-free and misses the class commentary mark every step of the way… but, hey, at least it doesn’t use a minor side character’s rape multiple times as a plot device! OH WAIT, IT DOES?!? Lifeless exploitative trash. (SS)

SUPERMAN

James “Guardians of the Galaxy” Gunn tries to combine the Man of Steel’s innate earnestness with the snide snark that has become the last refuge of our dying superhero-movie cycle, and the results are disastrous. The attempts at sincere drama would be laughable on their own even if they weren’t constantly being undercut by cynical jabs at comic-book pulpiness itself. Is this serious or silly? Even the movie can’t decide. (MJ)

WAR OF THE WORLDS

If you’ve ever wanted to watch Ice Cube shout at a computer for just under 90 minutes, War of the Worlds is the film for you. Unfortunately, this is not nearly as fun as it sounds, as this shallow adaptation of the iconic H.G. Wells novel is a bizarrely constructed misfire that only made a splash for its moments of unintentional humor. However, this is not a “so bad, it’s good” movie, as, outside the clips that went viral online, it’s a poorly paced slog. Where other films built around screens like Searching and Missing were able to make what could be a bit of gimmick work, War of the Worlds is just a dull disaster from start to finish. (CH)

WICKED: FOR GOOD

What do you get if you take The Wizard of Oz, strip it of all its vibrant color, and then pretend this is something that actually makes it feel “grounded” in reality? Well, you’ve got the woefully wearisome Wicked: For Good. A shockingly terrible film, it makes any and all other obligatory sequels look like masterpieces by comparison. Where the first Wicked was genuinely engaging and ended on a high note with the show-stopping “Defying Gravity,” this tepid sequel immediately comes crashing down. Over the course of its overstretched runtime, it never once justifies its existence beyond a need to split what should have been a single film into two for the sake of money. The characters may be changed for good, but all else has changed for the worse. (CH) ν