Not every film can be a La La Land or a Moonlight. Here, in alphabetical order, are some of the stinkers that made us keep looking at our watches – and the exit sign.
Absolutely Anything
Director Terry Jones recruited his Monty Python pals to voice the CG aliens who bestow a London schoolteacher (Simon Pegg) with unlimited cosmic power. That’s the only reason anyone will remember this plodding Bruce Almighty knockoff. NW
Alice Through The Looking Glass
The cast of Tim Burton’s 2010 blockbuster – which was pointless but kind of pretty – reunites for a sequel in which Mia Wasikowska’s Alice must unpack the mopey personal history of Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter. Who thought anybody wanted to see that? Can we fire him? NW
American Pastoral
Scot Ewan McGregor is a talented actor, but his decision to direct this adaptation of Philip Roth’s tragic novel – and to play its salt-of-the-earth all-American Jewish hero – was knuckleheaded. GS
Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice
Zack Snyder’s tone-deaf superhero smackdown was even worse than I’d feared, a grinding two and a half hours that terminally misunderstands its source material and reduces potentially interesting actors to clenched action figures. Here’s hoping next year’s Wonder Woman brings some light back into the DC Comics cinematic universe. NW
The Boy
William Brent Bell’s sluggish thriller stars The Walking Dead’s Lauren Cohan as a young woman stuck in a remote house with a life-sized doll. There’s a twist. It’s really stupid. NW
The Brothers Grimsby
A movie that stars Sacha Baron Cohen as a boneheaded football fan roped into helping his secret-agent brother (Mark Strong) save the world should have at least one laugh, right? Wrong. NW
Collateral Beauty
In its attempt to be a frothy and harmless frolic through parental grieving, this batshit crazy seasonal tearjerker may actually offend those who have experienced loss. RS
The 5th Wave
Just in case Divergent and Maze Runner didn’t finish the job, Chloë Grace Moretz puts the nail in the coffin of the YA trend. RS
Gods Of Egypt
It was the subject of a whitewashing controversy for casting Caucasians as Egyptians, but perhaps people of colour didn’t care to go near a spectacle so stupid, gaudy and cheap. RS
The Handmaiden
It’s okay for Chan-wook Park to transform the tone of his source material (Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith is superbly restrained, sexually speaking), but it’s another to turn it into a soft-core paean to the male gaze, and the sadistic final scenes are ridiculous. SGC
Gerard Butler shoots blanks in London Has Fallen.
London Has Fallen
Gerard Butler and Aaron Eckhart reprise their Olympus Has Fallen roles as a dogged Secret Service agent and the abduction-prone U.S. president for a sequel that’s bloodier, dumber and a lot more racist. They’re already working on the next one. I’m so sorry. NW
Morgan
This sci-fi thriller about an artificially created being (The Witch’s Anya Taylor-Joy) has little sci and no thrills. GS
Mother’s Day
A hate crime against white mothers. RS
Ride Along 2
#OscarsSoWhite and #BlackLivesMatter on the streets, Kevin Hart and Ice Cube pratfalling and yucking it up as the heat. RS
Rules Don’t Apply
There are papers to be written about a famously private perfectionist writing, directing, producing and starring in a movie about a famously private perfectionist and not being aware of the irony in doing so. And they’ll all be more interesting than Warren Beatty’s weird, atonal comedy about two ingénues (Alden Ehrenreich, Lily Collins) whose budding romance is derailed by the fact that they both work for Howard Hughes. NW
Shut In, starring Naomi Watts and Jacob Tremblay, should have just Shut Up.
Shut In
Farren Blackburn’s sluggish thriller stars Naomi Watts as a child psychologist stuck in a remote house with her non-responsive son. There’s a twist. It’s even stupider than the one in The Boy. NW
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out Of The Shadows
From the people who brought you the Transformers movies, here’s the latest instalment in bitch-slapping the personality out of your favourite toy line. RS
Zoolander 2
Ben Stiller attempts humour about being too old for the fashion world, but even those gags feel dated. RS
