Over the weekend, premium entertainment title Variety released its annual list of the worst movies of 2022.
Lord of the Rings icon Elijah Wood swiftly slammed the article on Twitter, writing: “When a film doesn’t appear on Best Of list, it’s logical to assume it wasn’t as beloved. This is an unnecessary and gross practice.”
This opened up a floodgate which prompted a bunch of punters to blast the critics for being “mean-spirited and cruel” in the article.
when a film doesn’t appear on Best Of list, it’s logical to assume it wasn’t as beloved. this is an unnecessary and gross practice.
— Elijah Wood (@elijahwood) December 16, 2022
Making a movie is hard work. It requires time and heart from so many people.
Worst lists are mean spirited and cruel.@Variety, there’s no need for this. Please stop.— Dan Slott (@DanSlott) December 16, 2022
“Worst of” lists are inherently mean-spirited and unnecessary. Much like the film critics who create and contribute to them. This adds nothing of value to the discourse and serves only as a petty insult to the hundreds of creatives who worked hard to bring these films to life.
— PATRICK PITTIS IS ON STRIKE (@StumbleJohnson) December 17, 2022
putting indie films on this list is really lame 🥵
— hannah may cumming 💐 (@hannahmayfilm) December 16, 2022
What I’m seeing is writers who have never made a film in their life and don’t know how hard it is to make one. What I think they meant was “Here are some films that came out this year but these weren’t my taste, however congrats filmmakers”
— Jolene Marie (@JoMarieDesigns) December 16, 2022
I think it’s fine for critics to take pleasure in film analysis, whatever their take is. But the “worst” is ridiculous. That’s subjective. I loved a lot of these films. I don’t think this is needs to be a part of how we view or partake in art. It’s cheap and unnecessary
— Mrs McG (@mrsmcglover) December 17, 2022
The list included the likes of the recently released Amsterdam, the viral movie Minions: The Rise of Gru, freaky flick Bones and All, Zac Efron‘s Firestarter, Three Thousand Years of Longing (directed by George Miller) along with Netflix’s Blonde and Spiderhead.
Film critic Owen Gleiberman said Amsterdam (Margot Robbie, Christian Bale, Anya Taylor-Joy, Rami Malek, Robert De Niro, Taylor Swift) was a “boring, paralysing, head-scratchingly WTF incoherent, bizarre fiasco.”
He described the Minions flick as a “weirdly lifeless affair.”
He was more focused on Timothée Chalamet‘s ripped jeans in Bones and All than on the actual story.
Meanwhile his colleague Peter Debruge chimed in, tearing shreds off a selection of other 2022 movies.
Debruge wrote that Blonde director Andrew Dominik‘s take on Marilyn Monroe was “one-dimensional” and said Ana de Armas had a sucky American accent but “manages better than most.”
And finally, he said James Cameron was a “terrible match” to bring George Saunders’ medical experimentation satire to life in Netflix’s Spiderhead, which starred Chris Hemsworth and Miles Teller and was filmed Down Under.
The article includes something of a disclaimer in its intro — it’s unclear if it was always worded this way or if it was edited following the backlash.
“When film critics hand out negative judgments, we’re often called ‘mean’,” it began.
“And if that were actually the case, our list of the year’s worst movies would be the meanest thing we do. Yet where the word mean suggests an element of malice, we like to think that this particular occasion for insult and invective isn’t really about us.
“It’s about movies that were, in fact, so bad that they almost challenged us to describe all the ways they went so wrong. If you think we’re mean, then so be it. We’d like to think we’re just accurate.”
Now onto something more positive, feel free to browse Variety’s list of the best movies of 2022.
