The Worst Movies Of 2023

The world is still trying to make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the purposes of art is to unpack the emotions, lessons, and impact of shared human experiences like this. It's unsurprising, then, that a curious sub-genre of pandemic movies has developed in recent years. By and large, these somber, anxious, and surreal movies have been met with savage critical assessments. Perhaps not enough time has passed to gain interesting artistic perspective, or maybe nobody wants to relive the most painful days of 2020. Either way, movies like "Locked Down" and "The Bubble" have sunk to the bottom, and in 2023, "Life Upside Down" joined them.

"Life Upside Down" consists of intertwining stories about a few hard-to-root-for Los Angeles couples. Art gallery owner Jonathan (Bob Odenkirk) is stuck quarantining with his wife, but he misses his mistress, Clarissa (Radha Mitchell), who lives solo and interacts with the world at a distance. Sheltering at home makes everyone sad, mad, and upset — feelings that audiences will certainly remember experiencing themselves not that long ago. This doesn't land well. "The characters are shallow and tiresomely needy," wrote Nell Minow of RogerEbert.com, "not to make any point or learn any lessons, just due to a lack of imagination." Minow was far from alone in this opinion: Critics absolutely lambasted the film.

Reinventing the romantic comedy is a noble and ambitious effort. Attempting to explore a love story through the lens of modern technology is even more enticing. Millions of people spend their whole lives on sophisticated smartphones these days — but it's hard to make people smiling at their handheld glowing boxes into something cinematic. That's the trouble with "Your Place or Mine," a Netflix original starring the usually charming Reese Witherspoon and Aston Kutcher, both of whom have extensive rom-com experience. Their characters, Debbie and Peter, had a fling 20 years ago. They're now best friends who live on opposite coasts. After they get a taste of each other's lives by switching houses — she goes to Los Angeles, he regroups in New York — they wind up falling in love. Almost the entirety of their relationship unfolds via phone calls.

"Your Place or Mine" couldn't quite overcome its own restrictions, earning a critical shellacking. "About as romantic and funny as a root canal," Rex Reed of Observer wrote. Other agreed, calling the movie a flat exercise in rom-com tropes cutting-edge technology can't save. 

A daringly sinister slaughter of a sacred cow, "Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey" boasts a simple premise: It's a horror version of A.A. Milne's classic stories of the Hundred Acre Wood, famously populated by Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore, and their human friend Christopher Robin. The work entered the public domain in 2022, so it's fair game for interpretation and exploitation. 

"Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey" doesn't do much to analyze or satirize its well-known source material, however. This movie is a by-the-numbers slasher dressed in Pooh's clothing, and that novelty wears off quickly. The plot involves little more than monstrous incarnations of Pooh and Piglet attacking Christopher Robin and several young women staying in a nearby cabin. "It's not funny enough to have anything clever to say about its gag, and it's not exciting enough to be a competent horror movie," said Kyle Turner of The New York Times. He was far from alone in this opinion.

To compete in a crowded marketplace of special effects-laden, intricately-plotted, would-be blockbusters, action and sci-fi filmmakers have to lay out as many new ideas as possible. But "65," written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the team responsible for the screenplay for "A Quiet Place," went simple, assembling recognizable tropes from well-known sci-fi properties. 

The action begins on the futuristic planet of Somaris a long time ago in a galaxy far away (just like "Star Wars," of which "65" lead Adam Driver is an alum). A pilot named Mills volunteers for a two-year space mission to get the money for the miracle cure for his daughter's illness. But then he gets lost in space and crash-lands on an unfamiliar planet, along with a child named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt). It's no big surprise to the audience when the planet turns out to be Earth, but like in a 19th century sci-fi novel, it's in prehistoric times (probably 65 million years in the past, hence the generic title of the movie). Do the two run for their lives from giant dinosaurs and then also falling space rocks? Of course they do.

Unfortunately, the end result just isn't any fun, and it doesn't feel particularly inspired. You've seen this movie before with different names and different characters. On Rotten Tomatoes, "65" cobbled together a mediocre 35% critical score. "'65' is a gruesome thing to watch, even for dinosaur lovers — and not much fun, either," savaged Rex Reed of the Observer.

"Love Again" is a movie out of its own time, an earnest but ultimately dull and dated throwback to '90s romantic comedy movies. But it's got a little something extra in the form of grief and sadness, which the film can't quite ever overcome. 

That makes for a tonally weird movie, flitting from Mira (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) mourning the death of her fiancé to Mira going on a wacky date with a doofus (played by Chopra Jonas' husband, Nick Jonas, a prolonged wink to the presumably in-the-know audience). The plot kicks off with a heartbreaker of an inciting incident — Mira sends lovey-dovey text messages to her deceased fiancé's old phone number, unaware it's been given out to Rob (Sam Heughan), a journalist who just so happens to be an attractive man roughly Mira's age. At the moment, he's spending an inordinately long period of time profiling Celine Dion, presented as a contemporary mega-star. As you might guess based on that bit of info, "Love Again" leans hard into the '90s vibes. Celine believes in love, and so she plays cupid for Rob and Mira.

A 24% score makes "Love Again" a Rotten Tomatoes dud, with critics decidedly not charmed by the movie. "Most of the laugh lines in 'Love Again' are stale enough that even just hearing them kind of hurts your teeth," said David Ehrlich of IndieWire. At least two critics had pretty much the some complaint, with Marah Eakin of the Chicago Reader saying she didn't enjoy the movie's "Hallmark-level plot" and Rex Reed of The Observer negatively comparing the whole thing to "a Hallmark card."

Raymond Chandler's character Philip Marlowe is a major influence on all detective fiction. He's the original no-nonsense detective who gets in too deep on a case involving a femme fatale. The character was so popular that he endured on the page after Marlowe's death, with Jon Banville giving the detective a new mystery in "The Black-Eyed Blonde." Unfortunately, that book inspired the cliche-heavy "Marlowe," a mediocre movie that feels like a parody of old detective films, even though it's made with the involvement of people who are usually exceptional — Oscar-winning "The Departed" screenwriter William Monahan, "The Crying Game" director Neil Jordan, and A-list actor Liam Neeson.

Set in a sleek and smoky Los Angeles in the late 1930s, Neeson plays private detective Marlowe, hired by heiress Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger) to locate Nico Peterson (Francois Arnaud), her lover and prop master at a big Hollywood movie studio. On the surface, it would seem that Nico got drunk and was hit by a car outside of a nightclub. But unsurprisingly and predictably, there's more to it than that — there's a cover up and conspiracy that reaches far up and into the cutthroat world of L.A.'s power players.

Neeson usually makes action movies that bring in the box office, but he messed it up with "Marlowe," a $4.3 million earner — one of the biggest flops in years for the star. Critics didn't like the film either, as it earned a measly 25% on Rotten Tomatoes. "It lurches along, scene by perfunctory scene, with the narrative fluency of treacle," wrote Kevin Maher of The Times, and Chris Wasser of the Sunday Independent called the movie "stilted, sluggish, and largely suspenseless."

In the summer of 2021, Hulu released "Vacation Friends," a zany, episodic comedy about a reserved couple on vacation who befriend a hilariously unhinged duo (who just won't ever go away). While it wasn't exactly critically beloved, the breezy film managed to mine a few laughs, especially thanks to its likable cast full of expert comic actors — John Cena, Yvonne Orji, Lil Hey Howery, and Meredith Hagner.

Of course, it would be tough to repeat that concept without it seeming contrived, but 2023's "Vacation Friends 2" gives it a shot. This time, all four principal characters are cool with each other, and the dramatic tension and wacky hijinks arrive courtesy of untrustworthy Reese (Steve Buscemi), father of Kyla (Hagner), who's just out of prison and invites himself along on the couples' Caribbean work trip.

Unfortunately, critics found "Vacation Friends 2" to be bland and dull, as well as just not very good. "As inspired as its title," said Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter. "Now we have something that's even worse and more testing than 'Vacation Friends,'" wrote Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com.

Bill Burr wrote, directed, and stars in "Old Dads," which applies his popular and well-executed stand-up act to one of the movie's characters. Sadly, Burr's rapid-fire, raging delivery of pointed opinions works best in short bursts — "Old Dads" is just a vehicle for rants about how the world is too politically correct and men have gotten too soft. Operating under the constraints of two framing devices, "Old Dads" follows three 50-ish friends, Jack (Burr), Connor (Bobby Cannavale), and Mike (Bokeem Woodbine) who are all raising children at their purportedly advanced age and bristle at new fatherhood norms. They also all work together at a company they used to own, but sold to a passive-aggressive millennial. The men feel like the world they grew up in is slipping away, and rather than keep up, they just complain. Well, Connor tries to stay young and hip, but he gets all the slang wrong and comes across as ridiculous.

"Old Dads" amassed a lowly score on Rotten Tomatoes, thanks to critics who disdain Burr's translation of his own act. "A boorish and obnoxiously vulgar comedy that, since it can't claim any other great distinction, might well have been expressly written to break the all-time record for use of the f-word in the major studio movie," Todd McCarthy of Deadline wrote.

Hopes were high for "The Exorcist: Believer," a franchise reboot of "The Exorcist." Regarded as one of the best horror movies ever made, the original film is a critically acclaimed blockbuster that produced many sequels of varying quality. Universal paid $400 million for the rights, and teamed up with innovative horror studio Blumhouse to bring "The Exorcist: Believer" to the screen. But the finished film wound up feeling like a generic demonic possession film with only tangential and arbitrary connections to the storied classic.

Widower Victor Fielding is a doting dad to his teenage daughter, Angela. But then she and her best friend Katherine go missing in the woods, only to resurface days later with no memory of what occurred. The teens' condition quickly deteriorates because they have, of course, fallen into demonic clutches. One of the girls experiences frighteningly violent seizures, while the other invades a church, ominously screaming lines from the Catholic mass. Fielding recruits Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn, reprising her role from the 1973 "Exorcist") to lead an exorcism, which includes all kinds of familiar jump-scares and gross demon stuff.

"It requires a rare ineptitude to take what is famously one of the most terrifying movies ever made, recycle pretty much everything (including Tubular Bells on the score) but neglect to include the scares," wrote Wendy Ide of The Observer. David Nusair of Reel Film Reviews called the reboot "a half-baked sequel that squanders its massive potential."

Over the last few years, Hollywood has tried to make sense of the devastating and ongoing opioid epidemic. Films and TV projects have squarely placed the blame on the pharmaceutical industry that aggressively markets extremely strong painkillers to the masses. Netflix's "Painkiller" and Hulu's "Dopesick" both earned acclaim for sensitively and astutely tackling such complicated and controversial subject matter. But Netflix original movie "Pain Hustlers" seems to have missed the mark.

At times a playful, sexy business thriller about the rise and fall of people who got wealthy off of prescription drugs, "Pain Hustlers" feels like a spiritual successor to the wild and zany "The Wolf of Wall Street." Based on the true story of a fentanyl manufacturer and its employees, "Pain Hustlers" is told from the point of view of Liza (Emily Blunt), a nearly broke single mother who connects with a drug rep (Chris Evans) who involves her in a reckless sales scheme that ruins lives. "'Pain Hustlers' feels like a retreading of the same ground covered in other recent works, bringing nothing especially new to the table," writes the AP's Jocelyn Noveck, "and, in splitting the stylistic difference between slick/breezy and poignant/authentic, succeeding fully at neither."

Filmmakers have gone to the "idyllic locale where the heroes are being hunted for sport by mysterious and evil individuals" well many times, and "Black Noise" might make for one trip too many. The plot is standard issue for this kind of blood-soaked, would-be satirical action-horror movie. A group of security experts are sent to a beautiful island to save an important businessman. But when they get there, the place is creepily empty, except for masked attackers who wish them dead. There's also the matter of the relentless, ear-piercing siren that drives the protagonists mad.

"Black Noise" ranks among the worst-reviewed movies of 2023 — or any other year — scoring a double 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. This means there is universal agreement as to its terribleness among professional film writers and audience members. "This otherwise lackluster low-budget thriller ... is hampered by wooden dialogue, incoherent storytelling, and threadbare effects," summarized Todd Jorgenson of Cinemalogue, while Brian Orndorf of Blu-ray.com dismissed "Black Noise" as "stunningly dull filmmaking."

Arriving five years after the first "Aquaman" movie brought in more than $1.1 billion worldwide, follow-up "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom" underwent so much retooling and reshooting that it's now the last entry in the halted DC Extended Universe. It's also a soggy mess that cost Warner Bros. $205 million to realize. The plot is convoluted for what's supposed to be a fun superhero movie, and also cribs from the Infinity Stones-centric flicks of the rival Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Working with archaeologist Stephen Shin (Randall Park), David Kane, aka Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), comes into possession of an enchanted Black Trident. This will provide him with the dark powers necessary to kill Aquaman (Jason Momoa, who has a story credit on the script) and lay waste to Atlantis, fulfilling his plan to avenge his father's death. In order to save his kingdom, Aquaman must construct an uncomfortable alliance with Orm Marius (Patrick Wilson), his power-hungry half-brother, and the villain from the first movie.

"Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom" earned a substantial amount of critical vitriol. "Yet more evidence that the superhero movie industry is foundering comes from this shoddy, scraped-from-the-bottom-of-an-ocean-trench sequel," wrote Wendy Ide of The Observer. "I laughed quite a bit," opined Esther Zuckerman of Bloomberg News. "Does it matter that the funniest parts weren't supposed to be humorous? Not really."