It’s awards season, and so many great films released in 2023 are beginning to gather well-deserved accolades from critics, professional bodies, and other industry organizations. But while we’re looking back over the cinema year-that-was, let’s not forget the movies at the other end of the spectrum.
What 2023 movie was the worst you saw?
For me, this was School of Magical Animals, a desperately terrible Harry Potter family-fantasy knockoff that got only a nominal release in the US but was a pretty big hit in its home country of Germany. My mind is still boggling at how awkwardly inept it is — I might have to review it just to exorcise it from my brain. It’s streaming on Prime in the US if you’d like a glimpse of how painfully bad it is.
A close second is the apotheosis of everything that has gone wrong with comic-book movies: The Flash, and I should probably get all my complaints about that one down on virtual paper as well.
I watched Flamin' Hot on hulu as I made my way through oscar noms and I wish I had those two hours back. This subgenre of films about the making of a product (this, Air, Blackberry) is a bit suspect itself, but those two films were much more interesting. This was just subpar, looked cheap, and ended up leaning into Christianity way more than I knew going in or wanted. The lead actor has good energy, but nothing else about this film was salvageable for me.
I watched Flamin' Hot on hulu as I made my way through oscar noms and I wish I had those two hours back. This subgenre of films about the making of a product (this, Air, Blackberry) is a bit suspect itself, but those two films were much more interesting. This was just subpar, looked cheap, and ended up leaning into Christianity way more than I knew going in or wanted. The lead actor has good energy, but nothing else about this film was salvageable for me.