A Completely Subjective List

While there were plenty of entertaining movies in 2024, these five were the worst the year had to offer, which is particularly sad since I saw 50 movies last year…

#5 – Kraven the Hunter

(Action / Adventure / Thriller, directed by J.C. Chandor)

Premise:
Kraven Kravinoff’s complex relationship with his ruthless gangster father, Nikolai, starts him down a path of vengeance with brutal consequences, motivating him to become not only the greatest hunter in the world, but also one of its most feared.

Why I Hated It:
My previous knowledge of the Kraven character from Spider Man did not help me at all with context in this movie, since they decided to go full “Cruella” and just make an entirely different non-villain version of this character. Kraven always gave me major Clayton vibes, but this version is much more Tarzan. Don’t get me wrong, Aaron Taylor-Johnson was looking fineeeee all throughout this movie, but the whole thing was just odd and didn’t make sense. I do respect the writer’s confidence though, that after writing this entire pile of nonsense, they decided to make a super obnoxious “potential sequel” reference at the end, as if people would be clamoring for more of this content.

#4 – Monkey Man

(Action / Thriller, directed by Dev Patel)

Premise:
After years of suppressed rage, Kid discovers a way to infiltrate the enclave of the city’s sinister elite. As his childhood trauma boils over, his mysteriously scarred hands unleash an explosive campaign of retribution to settle the score with the men who took everything from him.

Why I Hated It:
I am completely baffled by all of the praise this movie has received. I found the entire movie to be repetitive and shallow. There were times where I honestly thought I had somehow had a little mini blackout during the movie because it seemed like explanations and plot points were missing. The action sequences were pretty cool (warning: they’re definitely extremely violent), and I did appreciate that Dev Patel looked delicious, but other than that I just felt confused by the time the movie ended, as if entire characters and sub-plots were just edited out of the finale.

#3 – Memoir of a Snail

(Animation / Drama, directed by Adam Elliot)

Premise:
A woman obsessed with snails recounts the story of her life, which has been full of tragedy.

Why I Hated It:
I would have enjoyed this movie if they cut around 90+% of the redundant, repetitive narrations. The whole story is told via “narration”, which is really just the main character reminiscing and laying exposition out for an hour and a half. It would be one thing if they used the narrations to add some humor or stylism (shout out to Ron Howard, the world-famous narrator for Arrested Development), but instead they just have the narration describe what’s happening on the screen. Spoiler-free example: there are at least 5 times when the main character is gazing at a photo of her brother, looking sad and lonely, and every time her narrating voice says “I missed my brother so much”. We get it! Let this great animation style speak for itself, it’s doing a perfectly lovely job of communicating that loneliness! By the end, I wanted to punch the main character in her stupid over-expository face (or voice).

#2 – I Saw the TV Glow

(Drama / Horror, directed by Jane Schoenbrun)

Premise:
Teenager Owen is just trying to make it through life in the suburbs when his classmate introduces him to a mysterious late-night TV show — a vision of a supernatural world beneath their own. In the pale glow of the television, Owen’s view of reality begins to crack.

Why I Hated It:
If you read the plot summary, the movie sounds really interesting, but the issue I have here is that none of this actually happened in the movie. The two main characters don’t seem to actually be friends (or even friendly with each other), and any actual psychological intrigue seemed to be reserved for the last 10 minutes of the movie. Just 90 minutes of dull, empty nonsense, followed by 10 minutes of what should have been a “twist”, but by that point, I was not at all invested enough to care at all about these characters and their realities.

#1 – Megalopolis

(Science Fiction / Drama, directed by Francis Ford Coppola)

Premise:
I honestly could not even copy / paste it because it was too long, Google it.

Why I Hated It:
This movie felt more like a parody of a sci-fi movie than what its grandiose vision may have originally suggested, and like Madame Web, I just do not understand how this movie managed to get made. There are so many steps to making a movie, and each step they must have kept saying “yeah this will work”. IT DID NOT WORK. None of it worked, none of it made sense. Even taking the nonsensical plot out of it, the acting and dialog was just comically overdone. The audience was laughing out loud at multiple points in this movie, and it was clearly not meant to be a comedy. Those who know me might be surprised that I ranked this movie so low considering that I usually love trash movies. Don’t worry, I still do! This movie doesn’t get to be quite as “accidentally fun” in my book because it just took itself way too seriously every single minute. 

CONCLUSION

Congrats to the worst of the worst in 2024, you all definitely deserved this! Concerned that I missed something? You can find my full 2024 rankings here!