It Was Fifty Years Ago Today! The Beatles: Sgt Pepper and Beyond
A documentary about the making of the Sgt. Pepper album that features no interviews with any of The Beatles or any of their music but does feature insights from a few people who were in the room at the time or something. My advice would be to leave this one on iTunes and watch the documentary It was Twenty Years Ago Today from thirty years ago instead.
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Justice League
The fifth DC shared universe movie took all the good work done with the last one, Wonder Woman, and flushed it down the toilet. Terrible story, awful bad guy, lazy plotting, stupid characters motivations, cliched action and worst of all; poor gender politics. Not even Wonder Woman could save it.
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Death Note
A very lacklustre adaptation of a much loved manga series. So poor it made Ghost in the Shell look like Bladerunner (although actually Ghost in the Shell already looked a lot like Bladerunner).
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Mindhorn
There are few things more painful to watch than a painfully unfunny comedy. Still, they say the best comedies would still work without the jokes but unfortunately this had a terrible story too.
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Cars 3
It’s hard to put my finger on why Cars 3 was so bad but it was just so boring. Pixar have gone from being the most consistently incredible animation studio to the most incredibly inconsistent.
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The Boss Baby
This film is built round the assertion that the babies are jealous because people love puppies more? What? That’s just dumb! You are telling me most people look at their darling precious offspring and think ‘I wish we’d got a pug instead’? It’s like saying Hawaii is jealous because people like Margate more. In fact no, it’s like saying The Sistine Chapel is jealous because Michelangelo preferred a nice bit of Artex. In fact no, it’s not like saying anything because there is nothing that dumb. Maybe I’m just saying that because I’m a cat person.
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Despicable Me 3
Everything that was good about the first Despicable Me film has been totally abandoned but that’s okay because the kids won’t care. Sadly it seems they didn’t because this deeply inferior, obvious and dull family film is the 8th highest grossing film of the year.
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The Bad Batch
Along with Justice League this is Jason Momoa’s second film on this list so he’s had an interesting year. In this one he plays a brutal cannibal who we are apparently supposed to sympathise with but that’s a little tricky because he’s a brutal cannibal.
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Assassin’s Creed
Oh my God, what a boring film! It went absolutely nowhere and ruined all of its action scenes with an odd special effect that simultaneously showed the hero in the real world and the fantasy world at the same time.
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Baywatch
Baywatch aimed to challenge conventional ideas of humour and gender politics and ended up being humourless and sexist, and really really annoying. So misguided were they on how funny they thought it was they didn’t even make the effort to provide any narrative reason to support those predictable cameos.
Oh wow, I considered Cars 3 to be a really good film with a good message. But, that’s my opinion.
As I say, I can’t easily put my finger on what I thought was wrong with it but it didn’t seem to be doing anything original or surprising and I found it a real slog. I have a very low tolerance of inferior kids films as it makes me cross that studios will fob children off with weak plotting and obvious gags because they think they are undemanding. Hence there being 3 animations in my bottom ten. A really great kids film like Kubo or Inside Out genuinely inspires me. I don’t think this has been a great year for animation but you are the expert on that. I didn’t see My Life as a Courgette and The Red Turtle did not wow me as much as it did others.
I haven’t seen all the mainstream animated films this year myself, but yeah, the general consensus is that this has been a weak year for animation.
You might be interested in this piece I wrote four years ago. I’m not sure I agree with everything I said back then but it still nicely covers my thoughts on this topic.
https://notlefthandedfilmguide.co.uk/2013/08/04/the-jungle-book-and-the-sparsity-of-great-animated-films-in-modern-cinema/