The "Terrible to Okay" Movies of 2024
2024 Movie Rankings (Part 2/7 = F-tier to C-tier)
I’m trying to finish my 2024 Movie Rankings before the start of 2025 on March 3rd (because my personal calendar considers The Oscars the start/end of the year) and we still have 228 movies to rank: so we’re going to have to speed-run!
Instead of writing a TLDR dissertation on each movie; I’ll be listing the movies in their respective tiers, with a one-sentence “headline” about why I placed them in that tier, and then writing a few paragraphs about that overall tier and maybe singling out a few movies within each tier for special “Jeremy awards” (i.e. my personal Oscars!) If you’d like my more in-depth thoughts on any of these movies: click on the underlined name of the movie to read my Letterboxd review or just ask me to elaborate in the comments (because most of my Letterboxd reviews are, like most Letterboxd reviews, lazy/snarky one-liners).
So let’s get started! From the lowest to the highest tier…
F-Tier =🤬Terrible!
228. “UNICORNS” is terrible because…it’s makes you think that maybe TRUMP has a point about DEI 😭 (at least at film festivals).
F-tier movies are movies which are technically movies…but not really.
You know how when you ask someone what they thought about a movie and they’ll say “Well, it was definitely one of the movies of all time” as a sarcastic way of saying they didn’t like a movie? F-tier movies are worse than that because they’re like a chair that you can’t sit on: they’re so fundamentally incompetent on a basic level of filmmaking craft that they don’t even function as “a recording of moving images that people watch on a screen or television”1. They’ll movies with the quality of The Room, but without any of the so-bad-its-good fun. The only reason these movies aren’t 💩-tier is because they have no negative influence on anything because nobody watched them, or at least nobody remembers them. They might as well not exist.
I only have 1 F-tier movie in my rankings this year.
I’m sure there were many more F-tier movies made in 20242 but I didn’t watch them, and thus I can’t rank them, or at least if I stumbled upon them while scrolling through streaming services I’d stopped watching them after 5 minutes because F-tier movies are almost always immediately recognisable as being unwatchable.
The only reason I would finish a F-tier movie is if I was watching it in a cinema which won’t give you a refund if you walk-out in the first 10 minutes, which is usually only the case when watching a movie at a film festival3.
If you haven’t attended a film festival, you might think that they only screen great movies. Maybe that’s the case for Cannes and Sundance and Berlin, which can afford to be picky, but most local film festivals are just desperate to fill their slate that they’ll screen a lot of movies that will never be seen outside of a film festival. Whether that’s because they’re student films, or because they’re too niche or experimental for commercial distribution, or because — in the case of Unicorns — they’re just shit.
I don’t want to write too much about Unicorns because I’m trying to be a more positive person who writes more about what they love than what they hate4. TLDR: it’s basically British Emilia Perez but without the baseline competence of Jacques Audiard’s direction or the comforting familiarity of recognisable movie stars5 to make it at least barely tolerable on an aesthetic level.
D-Tier =🙄Bad
D- = this movie is bad, but it would have been terrible if not for...“KALKI 2898” is bad, but it would’ve been terrible if not for the sentient car.
“CHIEF OF STATION” is bad, but it would’ve been terrible if I didn’t simp for Aaron Eckhart.
“THE UNION” is bad, but it would’ve been terrible if it didn’t at least have a cool premise that might one day be recycled into a better movie.
“LOTR: The War of Rohirrim” is bad, but it would’ve been terrible if I didn’t simp for redheads.
“HERETIC” is bad, but if would’ve been terrible if not for the Hugh Grant memes.
“NOSFERATU” is bad, but it would’ve been terrible if not for the Lily-Rose Depp memes.
“BETTING WITH GHOST” is bad, but it would’ve been terrible if I didn’t love gambling!
“EMELIA PEREZ” is bad, but it would’ve been terrible if not for Zoe Saldana.
“THE MERRY GENTLEMEN” is bad, but it would’ve been terrible if I wasn’t raised by CW teen dramas.
“PARTHENOPE” is bad, but it would’ve been terrible if I wasn’t a horny lil perv (like the director).
“STRANGE DARLING” is bad, because “This film was shot ENTIRELY on 35mm.”
D = this movie is bad because...“A DIFFERENT MAN” is bad, because it should’ve been a half-hour Twilight Zone episode.
“GRAND TOUR” is bad, because🥱.
“KRAVEN THE HUNTER” is bad, because it ruined the 2024 Sony Spider-Verse trilogy.
“HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA — CHAPTER ONE” is bad, because it should’ve been a HBO miniseries.
D+ = this movie is bad, but it could have been okay if...“THE KILLER” is bad, but it could have been okay if…it had used squibs!
“TRIGGER WARNING” is bad, but it would’ve been terrible if not for Mark Webber’s weirdly moving supporting role?
A D-Tier movie is a bad movie.
I regret watching them and while I was watching them I was probably on my phone for at least half of their runtime.
However, a D-Tier movie has at least one thing mildly interesting — if not actually entertaining — about them that elevates them above a F-Tier movie. Even if that thing is only a half-baked and clumsily executed idea, but one which inspired me to have an interesting thought.
Half of the movies in this tier are what most people would think of as “bad movies”: i.e. straight-to-Netflix, turn-of-your-brain, B movie content sludge (e.g. Chief of Station, The Union, Kraven the Hunter). The other half are movies like Emilia Perez: critically acclaimed movies which I found either offensive or pretentious, or both. These might require more explanation for why I disliked them:
Emelia Perez = If you want to know what’s wrong with this movie, ask any trans and/or Latino person who’s watched it. It’s a shame that the first openly trans Best Actress nominee turned out to be a racist asshole, but it’s unsurprising in retrospect since that’s the only type of trans person who could make this movie without realizing (or caring) how offensive it is.
A Different Man = I should’ve loved this movie. I love body horror and glow-up transformations. As an ugly person, I’m annoyed whenever they cast a beautiful movie star as an ugly person and then win Oscars for Best Makeup & Hairstyling for dressing them in a bald cap and a prosthetic nose6. YOU NEED AN UGLY PERSON, HOLLYWOOD? JUST HIRE ME! So I loved Adam Pearsons performance in this movie, which did a better job of driving home the ironic theme of “if true beauty comes from the inside, then maybe true ugliness does too” than any handsome actor wearing an ugly-person mask…but the movie just doesn’t have anything more to say than that? It’s like a Twilight Zone episode which is built around its ironic, darkly comic, morally complex final “twist”…but then it goes on for another 1.5hrs after the twist and nothing else really happens.
Nosferatu = I agree with the common criticism of this movie that it’s themes are as regressive as its aesthetic: it’s a male auteur’s misunderstanding of feminine sexual empowerment that still ends up matyring women for her desire. What I don’t understand is how even the most negative reviews of this movie will say that it “looks haunting and has some gorgeous shot.” WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? AM I GOING BLIND? IT LOOKS LIKE SHIT! It looks fine in the night scenes, but its cinematography is designed to make the night scenes visible by making light sources glow brighter…but then it applies the same lighting design to the day scenes which makes the daylight look GLARINGLY BRIGHT that half the movie is washed in JJ Abrams lens flares!!!
I don’t have many Jeremy Awards to give to any D-Tier movies, because they’re all bad movies, except for:
🏆Best Unnecessarily Good Performance in a Bad Movie goes to…Mark Webber in “Trigger Warning”.
Trigger Warning is a bad straight-to-Netflix action movie starring Jessica Alba, which wants to be her John Wick but is more like her Rambo: Last Blood. It tries to have a vaguely pro-immigrant message but its story reads like a QANON conspiracy theory and its ickily pro-military despite all of its villains being in the military? Which would be fine for a dumb action movie if the action was any good, but it isn’t.
The only good or even memorable part of this movie is Mark Webber’s performance as Sheriff Jesse Swann: Jessica Alba’s childhood sweetheart who’s now the Sheriff of her hometown, which she returns to (after wetworking a terrorist cell in Syria7) when she learns of her father’s death…in mysterious circumstances. I know Mark Webber as Stephen Stiles in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but since then he’s starred in a lot of great indie movies (e.g. Laggies, Green Room, He Won’t Get Far On Foot) and even wrote & directed a few of them (e.g. Flesh and Blood). I like him as an actor, but I wasn’t sure why he was in this movie. Especially when it quickly became apparent that the villain of the movie was his character’s family — namely, his psychopathic arms-dealer brother Elvis (played by Jack Weary) and his corrupt senator dad (played by Anthony Michael Hall) who’ve been skimming military-grade weapons from a nearby US Army arms-depo and selling them to white nationalist domestic terrorists — and that he’d be the final boss of the movie8 : his sad-sack energy and grounded method acting makes him great for indie dramas, but he isn’t physically intimidating or even vaguely menacing that you’d think to cast him as the bad guy in an action movie…
(note: skim over the next paragraph if you don’t want any spoiler warnings for Trigger Warning, but honestly its not good enough to spoil)
…except he’s playing his character like he’s in a tense indie drama that’s going to premiere at Sundance, instead of a cheesy action movie that’s going to be dumped on Netflix in the middle of the summer. His performance has a subtlety, humanity, and complexity that’s absent from the rest of the movie. He makes us feel his character’s moral dilemma: of being torn between the woman he loves and loyalty to his family, of a compromised idealist who knows he was born complicit in a corrupt system but isn’t courageous enough to try to change or escape it. The climax of the movie is a 1v1 fight scene between him and Jessica Alba, who obviously wins because she’s a highly-trained CIA black-ops operative and he’s a the nepo-sheriff of a podunk town town. In a last-ditch move to avoid being arrested, he pulls the pin on a live-grenade: threatening to blow both of them up if she doesn’t…he doesn’t know, he hasn’t thought this through enough to have any demands or have a next move. Jessica Alba drops her weapon and slowly approaches him, trying to talk him down off the ledge, promising him that she can help him. As she takes his hand and grasps the grenade, the music swells with relief like it’s going to be okay, but then Mark Webber mutters…
“I should’ve left this town like you. This place is a black hole…IT FUCKING EATS YOU UP!”
…as he pushes her away and then lets go off the grenade, blowing himself up.
I don’t really remember anything else from that movie9 , but I remember tearing up at that scene.
It was one of my most memorable movie moments of the year because it reminded my why I love movies, in that even the worst movie can have one great performance or one beautiful scene that sticks with you. There’s almost always a silver lining.
C-Tier = 🤷Okay
C- = this movie was okay, but it would've been bad if...“FIVE BLIND DATES” was okay, but it would’ve been bad if…it weren’t only 83mins and “free” on Prime Video.
“PLAYERS” was okay, but it would’ve been bad if…I wasn’t raised by CW teen dramas.
“GRAFTED” was okay, but it would’ve been bad if…not for the cool practical effects.
“BORDERLANDS” was okay, but it would’ve been bad if…not for TINY TINA! 🐰
“HERE” was okay, but it would’ve been bad if…not for the one setup gimmick.
C = this movie is okay, because...“WE WERE DANGEROUS” was okay, because…ERANA JAMES!
“IF” was okay, because…I’m nostalgic for Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends.
“THE OUTRUN” was okay, because…SAOIRSE RONAN!
“SHADOW STRAYS” was okay, because…ninjas!
“BLINK TWICE” was okay, because…CHANNING TATUM!
“MY SPY: THE ETERNAL CITY” was okay, because…I like action-dad/precious-kid buddy action-comedies.
“BEVERLY HILLS COP: AXEL F” was okay, because…EDDIE MURPHY!
“SATURDAY NIGHT” was okay, because…I like backstage musicals and long tracking shots.
“THE DRY 2: FORCES OF NATURE” was okay, because…I like murder mysteries.
“THE MOVIE EMPEROR” was okay, because…I like movies about making movies.
C+ = this movie is okay, but it would've been pretty good if...“GO FOR BROKE” was okay, but it would’ve been pretty good…if every Chinese action movie didn’t have to be a CCP anti-drug PSA.
“THE SUBSTANCE” was okay, but it would’ve been pretty good if…it had characters instead of metaphors.
“TERRIFIER 3” was okay, but it would’ve been pretty good if…the conventionality of its story didn’t undermine the viserality of its kills.
“THE STORM” was okay, but it would’ve been pretty good if…I had any idea what was happening. BUT IT WAS VERY PRETTY!
“BACK TO BLACK” was okay, but it would’ve been pretty good if…it wasn’t executed produced by her abusers.
“IMMACULATE” was okay, but it would’ve been pretty good if…the rest of the movie was as good as its last 5 minutes.
“MEAN GIRLS” was okay, but it would’ve been pretty good if…it every role was played by Renee Rapp.
“MY OLD ASS” was okay, but it would’ve been pretty good if…it spent less time on its generic YA romance and more time on exploring the possibilities of its high concept.
A C-Tier movie is a movie of movies.
It’s okay. It’s fine.
I don’t regret watching it, but I’ll probably never rewatch it.
I wasn’t so bored that I was texting during the movie, but I took out my phone a few times to check my notifications.
These are weekday matinee movies. Or “put on in the background while doing chores” movies.
They’re straight-to-streaming genre sequels which are lazy but still fun because you get to hang out with your favourite movie stars (e.g. Players, My Spy: The Eternal City, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F), while they get to cash a paycheck for taking a vacation with their friends (e.g. most Adam Sandler Netflix movies).
Or they’re well-intentioned (i.e. socially conscious) but dully conventional failed awards-bait (e.g. The Outrun, We Were Dangerous, Saturday Night).
Or they’re ambitious ideas or interesting experiments whose filmmakers just couldn’t quite “land the plane” on (e.g. Here, Blink Twice, Shadow Strays).
🏆”Who’s That?” award for an actor whose performance made me google their IMDB page to find out what else they were in while I was still in the cinema goes to…Erana James for “We Were Dangerous”.
I watch more movies than most, so I’m familiar with most actors before what’s generally considered their “breakout performance”. So my list of a year’s breakout performances would be different from most. However, this isn’t an award for “best breakout performance”, which usually goes to a newcomer in their debut role (e.g. Clarence Macklin in Sing Sing) or an international actor crossing over to Hollywood (e.g. Yura Borisov in Anora), or a long-grinding character actor finally getting their due (e.g. June Squibb in Thelma). Instead, this is the award for the actor who makes you make this face 😮 and ask “who that?” when they walk onto the screen. In the same way that you’d ask “who’s that?” when a stunning stranger walks into a party, immediately becomes the center of attention, and everyone starting looking them up on Instagram.
Or in this case, it would be like the scene in the teen romcom where the nerdy wallflower walks into the houseparty after she’s gotten a glow-up makeover10 and her classmates who don’t recognise her ask “who’s that?” because when I checked her IMDB page it turned out I had seen Erana James in the short-lived Prime Video series The Wilds and a New Zealand movie from last year Uproar, but she hadn’t made enough of an impression on me in either for me to remember her name. But this isn’t an award for being hot or getting a glow-up: she is hot but not any hotter than usual considering she spends the entire movie in pig-tails and a 1950s Catholic schoolgirl uniform11. Nor is it even an award for acting: this is the first lead role I’ve seen her in, but the role isn’t particularly interesting or memorable. It’s an award for…aura, or X factor. For looking at a nobody and seeing a spark in their eyes that makes you know that soon they’re going to be somebody. To me, watching Erana James in We Were Dangerous felt a lot like watching Julia Roberts in Mystic Pizza.
🏆Most Disappointing Movie of 2024 goes to…“The Substance”.
I was dissapointed by My Old Ass because I’d loved Megan Park’s debut film The Fallout, which had starred Maddie Ziegler and Jenna Ortega12, and I loved its high concept which literalizes that oft-asked interview question: “What would you tell your younger self?” But instead of exploring all the possibilites of that question13: Audrey Plaza just tells her younger self14 to not date the cute boy working on her family farm over the summer, but obviously they end-up falling in love anyway and the movie devolves into a cute but slight teen romcom.
I was dissapointed by The Shadow Strays because Timo Tjahjanto’s previous martial arts gorefest The Night Comes For Us had been my 4th favorite movie of 201815 and although I hadn’t loved his previous Netflix movie The Big 4 which had tried to “expand his range” into action comedy: I hoped that he’d return to form with a return to his roots of bloodsplattering karate-chop decapitations. Unfortunately, my problem with The Shadow Strays is the same problem I had with the John Wick sequels, or even the Terrifier sequels: they sacrificed the lean meanness that made the original so refreshing for the bloated opulence of a Hollywood blockbuster, with each sequel being 30mins longer and $50 million more expensive and having a more elaborate yet conventional story as expand their cast-of-characters and expound on the details of their lore when A HOTEL FOR HITMEN WAS A COOL IDEA BUT I’M NOT WATCHING A 5HR MINISERIES ABOUT THE ORIGIN STORY OF THE CONCIERGE!16 But at least the John Wick sequels were held together narratively by the gravitational movie stardom of Keanu Reaves, whereas without Iko Uwais or Joe Taslim’s silat skills to keep The Shadow Strays grounded as a showcase of martial arts mastery the action descends into gunfights and carchases to hide how his new actors barely know how to throw a punch.
And I was dissapointed by The Outrun because Saiorse Ronan was my first age-appropriate17 movie crush from when I first saw her in Atonement when I was 12 years old and I’ve been rooting for her to win an Oscar ever since and the early reviews were raving that this was her best chance yet at a statuette after beginning the 2020s with a string of “meh” flops that I didn’t even bother to see18. When I saw The Outrun at the Sydney Film Festival, I thought her performance was great as always and her role was classic Oscar bait as a white woman who’s a recovering alcoholic…but the movie itself was still “meh”. I don’t think an actor can get an Oscar nomination just for playing an addict anymore19 because I don’t think we can make addiction movies anymore because if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. If you’re trying to realistically depict addiction in a movie, that movie will be boring and repetitive because addiction is inherently boring and repetitive. It’s literally doing the same thing over and over and over again. Now that we’re all familiar with their formula, the only thing reason we watch addiction movies are as acting showcases because we want to watch our favourite actors act drunk and high…which kinda contradicts the message of addiction movies20 because we end-up rooting for the characters to fall off the wagon so that we can see more fun drunken acting.
But my most dissapointing movie of 2024 was The Substance. I hadn’t watched Coralie Fargaet’s debut movie Revenge, but The Substance sits at the intersection of 3 of my favourite movie microgenres: plastic surgery body horror, movies about making movies, and Margaret Qualley. Any movie where Margaret Qualley dances in sparkly pink spandex should’ve been my favourite movie of the year! And I supported the hype building around the movie: the Demi Moore comeback! The emergence of a new female auteur in a male-dominated genre21! But when I watched it in the front row at the Sydney Film Festival…I struggled to make it through the last hour of the movie (it’s 2.5 hours) because although the practical effects were cool and the premise was interesting, I didn’t care about any of the characters because they weren’t characters they were metaphors. Demi Moore was playing “What Happens To Aging Actors In Hollywood”. Margaret Qualley was playing “The Narcissism of Youth/Beauty Culture”. Dennis Quaid was playing Harvey Weinstein. I would’ve eaten this shit up when I was a teenager who’d just discovered movies could have “themes” and loved dissecting extended metaphors to show off that I’M SMART I UNDERSTAND SUBTEXT…but nowadays I still like movies to have themes but I’m not as impressed by abstraction and metaphor. If your movie can’t express its themes while also telling an interesting story with characters I care about enough to remember their names: you made a bad-to-mid movie!
🏆Deus Ex Machina award for a movie saved from being shit by its ending goes to…“Immaculate”.
The runner-up for this award goes to Blink Twice, which in trying to make its point that tech billionaires are boring misogynists…made us watch 1.5hrs of boring misogynists lazing around an island being boring and misogynistic. Yes, the last half hour where we finally get to watch the girls go Rambo on Epstein Island is fun; but if I had been watching this on streaming instead of in cinemas22, I would’ve been too bored to make it to the last half hour.
For most of its runtime, Immaculate was even more boring than Blink Twice. You know what’s even more boringly cliche than the “twist” that tech billionaires are misogynist? The “twist” that the Catholic Church is misogynist and, like all horror movies set in a nunnery, this obviously creepy nunnery was…dum dum duuummm…trying to breed the anti-christ! Sydney Sweeney plays the sweet American exchange nun at this Italian convent who’s secretly artificially inseminated with the seed of Satan, when she finds out she tries to escape the nunnery, and then I figured it would end like The First Omen (which had basically the same plot as this movie and only came out a month later in a Deep Impact vs Armageddon situation) does with the nun escaping with her newly born demon-baby and deciding to raise it because nurture over nature, yaddayaddayadda, but instead <spoilers>23.
So those were all of 2024’s bad-to-mid movies that I watched, which means that I enjoyed 187 movies! This might be surprising to anyone who’s had to endure me talking about movies, because when I’m talking about movies I’m usually complaining about them — even when I’m talking about the movies I liked! But I am Chinese, so like my parents I express my love (for movies) through needling “constructive” criticism.
Tune back in tomorrow for the rankings of my B to A-Tier — or “pretty good to very good” — movies!
(note: I realize that these first two posts have been TLDR. I’m still figuring out how to write these and I promise that future posts will be succinct enough to fit within 1 email…probably! Maybe! Eventually! I’LL TRY!)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/movie
My Dad probably watched most of them on Tubi.
because the cinema itself can’t give you the refund because they’re renting out the cinema to the film festival and you would’ve bought your tickets through the film festival.
with the exception of Deadpool & Wolverine, which I wrote a lot about.
Zoe Saldana and Selena Gomez
Colin Farrell in The Batman!
she is, obviously, a highly-trained CIA black-ops operative.
technically, his dad is the main villain as the mastermind and his brother the main physical threat, but him vs Jessica Alba is the climax of the movie.
while writing this, I had to skim the Wikipedia page to remember the basic plot and the characters names.
i.e. she took off her glasses and swapped her overalls for a cute cocktail dress, because she was always played by a beautiful actress.
which might be someone’s fetish, but isn’t mine.
I was an OG fan! I stanned her before Wednesday!
I would tell my younger self to prevent 9/11, invest in BitCoin, and take ballet instead of karate as my afterschool activity — because it turns out that dancing is a much more useful skill in everyday life than fighting.
whose actress (Maisy Stella) looks nothing like Audrey Plaza! I understand the idea is that people change over time and your past/future self would be unrecognisable to you and they probably needed a quasi-movie-star like Audrey Plaza to get funding for the movie, but they don’t even try to have the same vibe or any shared mannerisms! I DON’T CARE HOW GOOD LOOPER IS I JUST DON’T BELIEVE JOSEPH GORDON LEVITT GROWS UP TO BECOME BRUCE WILLIS!
after #1. Spider-Man: Into The Spiderv-Verse / #2. Mission Impossible 6: Fall Out / #3. Roma
Seriously, did anyone watch this? Has anyone watched anything on Peacock besides the Olympics?
and non-animated.
2020’s Ammonite, 2022’s See How They Run (which I did see and liked but which has already been forgotten), 2023’s Foe.
For Leslie being the last straw on the camel’s back of that particular trend.
which is usually about rooting for our protagonists to recover from their addictions, with the notable exception of Trainspotting.
All movie genres have been male-dominated behind-the-camera, even romance, since Hollywood is Hollywood. But I find the gender gap in horror particularly ironic since horror movies usually star women (i.e. scream queens) but their audience skews male…although not as male as you’d think?
And most people will be watching this on streaming because no one went to see it in the cinemas.
SHE KILLS HER NEWBORN SATAN BABY WITH A ROCK! PRO-CHOICE!!!