Benjamin Judge's judgements

Here I am, the bearer of bad news. These are the twenty-five films I enjoyed the least in 2025. If it helps, not all of them would be in my twenty-five worst films of 2025. If it helps, a lot of the people involved in making these films have done great work in the past and will do great work again. If it helps, film-making is a collaborative effort and sometimes collaborations just don’t quite come together. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just life. If it helps, I’m just some chump who watches a lot of films. My opinion is not something you need to worry about.

Anyway… here we go.

225 Here

Based on a graphic novel, you spend the whole viewing experience thinking, yes, I could see how this would work as a graphic novel. As a film? As this film? I dare anyone to sit through the whole thing. Zemeckis has always been a director fascinated with the possibilities of visual effects but i seems an age since he successfully welded them to a story. I refuse to give up on him though. Even after this. I’m convinced he has another classic in him.

224 Alien: Rubicon

The Asylum make films with similar titles to current blockbusters. Their entire business model is hoping your nan will accidentally buy you ‘The Twisters’ or ‘Road Wars: Max Fury’ for Christmas by mistake. This means their films are made on tiny budgets, with cheap locations and inexperienced actors. Fine. But why are the scripts so bad?

I watched this film out of curiosity. How bad could it be? My overriding reaction wasn’t anger, or disappointment. It was, why can’t these guys give me ten grand a picture to pep up this dialogue? I need the money and it wouldn’t hurt if their films sucked slightly less. It’s win-win. Give me a call, guys.

223: Saturday Night

The film that dares to ask the question, what if the toxic working environment of Saturday Night Live in the 1980s was actually good?

222: The Salt Path

I haven’t read the book, and maybe the lies are more convincing on the page, but my overwhelming reaction to almost every scene in this movie was, oh come on, this is bullshit, surely.

The depictions of nature in the Salt Path are so heavily reliant on the audience having never actually experienced the British countryside that it is baffling. For the record, Peregrine falcons don’t do that, rabbits don’t do that, and fuck off did you swim with a sea turtle. And that’s just the background stuff. The story itself? The new age medical he-got-better-off-the-pills stuff. The old woman on the beach telling them how great they are. How they were the only people who really understood the area like the locals. Jesus. When the news broke that the book is, perhaps, less than accurate, well, that was the first thing that rang true about The Salt Path.

Having said all that, the Staffordshire accent is an incredibly difficult one to replicate without slipping into Birmingham and/or various Black Country variants. Jason Isaacs and Gillian Anderson were both very good at the accent.

221: The Life of Chuck

Schmaltz.

220: Mountainhead

I hated every moment I spent with the characters of this film. I know that’s kind of the whole point of the movie, but still.

219: High Rollers

A cheap John Travolta action movie. It’s a bit like the The Fast and The Furious, but they aren’t very fast, and at best mildly perturbed.

218: The Amateur

Has a sad sack data analyst got the nuts to murder terrorists in cold blood? That’s the guy we’re supposed to be rooting for in this exploration of the five stages of grief – Denial, Anger, Training Montage, Torture, Wetwork.

Depending on your opinions on extrajudicial killings, Rami Malek is either brilliant or worryingly flat as the computer whizz who is practically licking his lips at the thought of taking revenge on his wife’s murderers, and whose killing spree conveniently purges the CIA of every single bad apple that has infiltrated its number. All four of them.

The CIA is cool again now. The CIA is beyond reproach. Thanks, the amateur.

217: Bride Hard

It’s Die Hard but instead of a cop at a party, Rebel Wilson is a bridesmaid at a wedding. I don’t think that is a terrible pitch for a movie. Unfortunately, instead of Die Hard’s perfectly constructed plot and great script you have chaos and a series of stale knob jokes.

216: Hurry Up Tomorrow

In one way it would be unfair to label this as a vanity project, because Abel Tesfaye/the Weeknd is playing a fictional version of himself that is heavily flawed. It’s quite a brave move. However, in the sense that everybody involved in this project has done far better stuff before and could have been doing something else instead of this, but didn’t because (presumably) the Weeknd paid them a lot of money, well…

215: Project Alarum

A charmless Scott Eastwood action movie. Sylvester Stallone phones in his half hour of screen time. Mike Colter needs a better agent.

214: Tin Soldier

There is a moment towards the end of Tin Soldier when Scott Eastwood says, ‘how could the same nightmare happen twice?’, and as somebody who had very recently watched Project Alarum, I have to say, it hit me pretty hard. I hear you, man. I hear you.

This one gets the nod over that one because Jamie Foxx is in this one and he is a man who refuses to give less than a hundred percent, even when he is given as little to work with as he is here.

213: Fountain of Youth

If you wanted to hide the location of the Fountain of Youth you could do a lot worse than having a character say its exact geographical position during this film because I can’t remember a single thing about it and I only watched it a month ago. Impressively forgettable.

212: Play Dirty

This film has a nihilistic video game logic, where all the humans beings except the leads are NPCs, expendable, balloons full of blood just waiting to be burst by Mark Wahlberg for our entertainment. I didn’t warm to it.

211: Honey Don’t!

This was infinitely better than Coen’s last film, Drive Away Dolls, but still weirdly nostalgic for that wave of films that came after Pulp Fiction, and were heavily influenced by Pulp Fiction but, importantly, were not as good as Pulp Fiction.

210: Babygirl

It seems almost churlish to have an opinion on this film as I would have swerved it totally if not for all the rave reviews it was getting and the awards it was being nominated for. I tend to avoid erotic thrillers like the plague. I don’t like them. A woman’s back arching, a glass skyscraper, a hand on a leg, an argument, a boob. Nope. Not for me.

Babygirl is clearly doing something significantly more interesting with the genre than most but it is still, at its core, just two rich people fucking. I didn’t like it.

209: Havoc

Relentlessly grim. Not even a glimmer of hope. Hard to get through.

208: The Penguin Lessons

Fresh from being ordered by the High Court to pay substantial damages to Richard Taylor for defaming him in their last film, Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope demonstrated their impeccable judgement of character by making a film about a man who was cruel to a penguin and who, upon the release of the film, was immediately accused of historic sexual abuse by a dozen men.

207: Avatar: Fire & Ash

I gave up about halfway through. The Avatar films seem to have passed fully into I-think-Tolkien-wants-to-fuck-the-elves territory now, all plunging necklines and lingering shots of blue bum cheeks poking out of tiny shorts. I can’t believe there are two more of these films to go. I’m willing to bet somebody fucks a dinosaur in the last one.

206: Breakdown: 1975

A documentary/visual essay that argues that 1975 was cinema’s peak where the auteur was king. What other year, it asks, can boast films as great as The Converstaion (1974), All The President’s Men (1976), Chinatown (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), The Godfather 2 (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Network (1976), Assault on Precinct (1976), Shaft (1971), Superfly (1972), Car Wash (1976) and Carrie (1976). It then argues Jaws killed that creativity by inventing blockbusters and merchandise.

It’s selective nostalgia. All those films are great, sure, but 1975 audiences didn’t just like gritty art films. They also flocked to The Return of the Pink Panther and Tommy and Funny Lady. Jaws was massive because it was, and remains, a great movie. Every year has good films and bad films.

205: The Brutalist

Oh brother…

In one sense, The Brutalist is a minor miracle. The ambition of such a project should be celebrated. The size of it. To produce so much on a budget of less than ten million dollars is incredible.

Still, I really really fucking hated it.

Adrien Brody plays Laszlo Toth, an architect and the epitome of the twentieth century tortured artist; a drunken, drug-riddled womaniser with an art too complicated for the common man to understand. Things happen, mostly to him, and occasionally he does something too. He designs buildings and you look at them and you think, you know what, I’m not entirely sure that is Brutalism.

204: Drop

Imagine you are on a date. Your first date since the breakdown of your marriage. He’s a photographer. He seems nice. You start to order drinks… but then!

You get a text on your phone. It is the first of a series of instructions. You have to murder your date or the person sending the messages will have your family killed. WHAT. WOULD. YOU. DO?

I can tell you for a fact that you wouldn’t stop to ask any of the following things.

1. Why would somebody who has access to a hitman that he is willing to send to your house to kill your sister and your child not just pay him to murder your date.

2. Or why, when this mysterious text sender wants to have a photographer murdered, and (it can not be overstated) he has access to a hitman, he hasn’t considered setting up a simple burglary-gone-wrong scenario.

3. Or why this criminal mastermind, who wants to use you to murder somebody so that the crime can’t be traced back to him, hasn’t considered that the dozens of hidden cameras and microphones that he has set up in the restaurant might, you know, be traced back to him.

4. Or why he thinks that a wildly ornate murder plot is a good way to hide evidence of embezzlement? Dude, you are a fan of misappropriating funds. Have you considered a bribe? 

203: Nuremberg

I think this film is trying to be an honest gaze into the eyes of the banality of evil but instead it ends up accidentally being an argument that by killing himself in his prison cell, Hermann Göring became the first person to own the libs. Oh, and Emmy Göring, the self proclaimed ‘First Lady of the Third Reich’ was just a lovely lady, apparently. Horribly mistreated by the allies. In reality she served one year in jail.

A film that is wildly muddled politically, partly because Russell Crowe, as Göring, is just so much better than anyone in else in the film that he starts to come across as the hero by default. One for the Reform voters.

202: Fackham Hall

For me, the funniest moment in this film was when the credits rolled and it was revealed that it took five people to write it. The film itself is so unfunny that at times it attains a sort of zen anti-comedy, a space beyond our reality, a void, that is, oddly, quite funny. The screening I went to was deadly silent except for one man, who really liked the bits where Jimmy Carr plays a vicar.

201: Flight Risk

So there is this film, called Carry-On. It came out last Christmas, on Netflix. It starred Taron Egerton and had a lot of good reports in a ‘it is cheesy and possibly awful but you’re going to love it’ kind of way. I was very much up for it but I didn’t find time to watch it over Christmas and then I forgot about it.

In May, when I remembered the film existed, I couldn’t remember what it was called. I knew it was about a plane but wasn’t called Plane or Flight or Airplane or Airport or Sully… 

Was it Flight-something? 

Fight Plan? 

No. 

Flight…

Which is how I came to accidentally watch Mel Gibson’s latest directorial offering, Flight Risk, a film that brought me not one iota of joy. 

As nobody else has seen it, here’s a quick plot summary: Michelle Dockery plays a US Marshall who needs to transport a fugitive (Topher Grace) from the middle of Alaska to Anchorage. Mark Wahlberg plays a hitman who poses as the pilot of the plane they charter for the trip. Obviously, they discover that he is hitman when they are mid-flight. 

Things happen but not enough things to fill ninety minutes comfortably. It is a small plane with three people in it, only two of which have any agency. There are only so many places the story can go. To spice things up, there is a subplot involving the fact that Mark Wahlberg’s character wears a wig, that seems to imply that his baldness is somehow intrinsically linked to his being a psychopath. I am one hundred percent certain this stems from a personal vendetta Mel Gibson has with somebody who has a receding hairline.

The tagline to Flight Risk is, Y’all need a pilot? During the film the answer to this question would be, “No thank you, we already have one,” right up to the point when it would be, “Yes, but we’re already in the air so your question is moot.” There is no point in the film when asking that question wouldn’t mark you out as a dipshit. And yet, there it is, in all caps on the poster, like it was the best joke in the world. Y’all need a pilot? Good grief.