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When it came to cinema, there were plenty of great movies to celebrate in 2025.
But just like every other year, there were movies that bored, repulsed and just made you wince.
So what were the duds that haunted our cinema screens and smart TVs this year?
Here's our view on the ten worst films of 2025, with a few dishonourable mentions thrown in.
10. THE ALTO KNIGHTS (Barry Levinson)
Take a good director like Barry Levinson.
Get Robert de Niro to play two legendary gangsters and throw in rising star Cosmo Jarvis for good measure.
What could possibly go wrong?
A lot, it seems because while de Niro wasn't terrible, this gangster movie was just dull.
An idea that had been in gestation for some time, Nicolas Pileggi's screenplay felt stale and formulaic.
The film also felt like the dual roles came way too late in de Niro's career.
9. AFTER THE HUNT (Luca Guadagnino)
There are some filmmakers who just frustrate.
Luca Guadagnino is a case in point. His work often oscillates between absorbing dramas and pretentious twaddle.
This movie about a #MeToo scandal at Yale unfortunately fell into the latter camp.
Ayo Edebiri played a student at the centre of sexual allegations against Andrew Garfield's academic, while his friend and married lover played by Julia Roberts' career was also put at risk.
Unconvincing dialogue and a tendency to revert to attention seeking flights of visual fancy made this an irritating watch, with a storyline that was handled so much better by David Mamet in his movie of his acclaimed play 'Oleanna'.
8. JAY KELLY (Noah Baumbach)
George Clooney went all meta in this self absorbed drama about a glamorous movie star reassessing his life.
Playing the Jay Kelly of the title, his character rambled through Italy with Adam Sandler and Laura Dern's characters in tow in a slog of a film.
The problem was it was all a bit smug, with Baumbach serving up a really disappointing comedy drama.
Wanting us to give Clooney a pat on the back for taking on a role that sent up his own star persona, scenes of him trying to impress his on-screen daughters just felt tired and tiresome.
Weirdly for an actor essentially playing himself, Clooney made it seem such a chore.
7. ICE ROAD: VENGEANCE (Jonathan Hensleigh)
The first of two entries featuring Liam Neeson, Hensleigh gave us a preposterous sequel that nobody asked for.
This meant Neeson was back scowling and growling his way through a tired action adventure as truck driver Mike McCann who travelled to the Himalayas to scatter his brother Gurty's ashes.
But wouldn't you know it? Mike made the mistake of boarding a bus with pesky terrorists.
Cue plenty of growling, scowling, punching, shooting and stabbing.
There was plenty of toe curling, pedestrian dialogue too in this action film including Mike's take on what it's like to be a lapsed Catholic and a Buddhist.
6. THURSDAY MURDER CLUB (Chris Columbus)
There was loads of excitement at the prospect of the first of Richard Osman's series of amateur detective novels hitting the small screen.
So why did it misfire?
Chris Columbus' film certainly wasn't helped by acting that was more hammy than a bacon factory.
It also wasn't helped by a screenplay from Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcoate that relied on English stereotypes of cream cakes, cups of tea and posh people knocking about with football loving Cockneys.
As for Pierce Brosnan's "Lahndan accent".. the less said about that the better.
Remaking a comedy classic like 'The Naked Gun' was always going to be a risky venture.
But with Liam Neeson boldly taking on the Leslie Nielsen role with Seth McFarlane involved, you felt it had a fighting chance.
Previous appearances in Ricky Gervais' 'Extras' and 'Ted 2' showed Neeson could do deadpan comedy.
However he ended up being upstaged by Pamela Anderson in a movie that ended up being a parade of crude toilet and sex gags.
It says a lot about the movie when speculation about an off screen romance between Neeson and Anderson on the publicity tour dominated all the chat about it.
4. WAR OF THE WORLDS (Rich Lee)
After Steven Spielberg's superb rendering of the HG Wells' classic in 2005 with Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning, the pressure was on Lee to justify another remake.
Unfortunately, Lee wasn't up to the task with an irritating movie that seemed to consist of Ice Cube's Department of Homeland Security official shouting at family and colleagues on a computer screen.
An attempt to spice the movie up with a subplot about a hacker known as the Disruptor was ill judged.
Possibly aimed at a generation used to watching YouTube videos, if this is the future of movie storytelling we could well be in trouble.
3. BACK IN ACTION (Seth Gordon)
Cameron Diaz made her big movie comeback in January in Seth Gordon's Netflix spy action caper with Jamie Foxx.
Unfortunately it wasn't so much 'Mission Impossible' as Mission Insufferable, thanks to Brendan O'Brien's terrible script.
With quips clearly discarded from the Ryan Reynolds factory of lame jokes, Gordon tried to concoct a globe trotting adventure that borrowed heavily from 'Mr and Mrs Smith,' the Jason Bourne movies, Bond, Indiana Jones and 'Mission Impossible'.
It misfired on all fronts, with Kyle Chandler, Glenn Close and Jamie Demetriou joining Foxx and Diaz in a movie that you suspect might have quickly died in cinemas if it had been given a proper release.
2. THE UNHOLYLANDS (Paddy Duffy)
This "caper" movie by first time filmmaker Paddy Duffy is probably what it would be like.
Set in Belfast's infamous Holylands area where some students live in cheap housing and pursue a hedonistic lifestyle, this tale of two undergraduates, played by Ciaran McCourt and Peter Jeffries, bringing disgrace to the family law firm had aspirations to be like 'The Young Offenders'.
Poorly written, woefully acted, dreadfully paced and brutally directed, it was just offensive.
In fact, it felt like a half baked student film stretched over 99 minutes.
Duffy's film was so weak in every aspect, it's a wonder how this film managed to secure a cinema release in Northern Ireland and a broadcast slot on BBC1 NI.
Although, it's an even greater wonder how Duffy managed to persuade James Nesbitt to make several cameos alongside country singer Nathan Carter.
1. THE ELECTRIC STATE (Joe and Anthony Russo)
If Paddy Duffy's inexperience was a kind of an excuse for his monstrosity of a movie, how do you account for this dispiriting Netflix film by the Russo brothers?
With a reported $320 million budget, this was a staggeringly poor CGI driven exercise in rehashed ideas from other blockbusters and relentless product placement.
Cocky and soulless, Netflix audiences were subjected to an alternate reality where the Planters' mascot Mr Peanut led a revolution against their human masters in the 1990s.
While Millie Bobby Brown gurned and Chris Pratt indulged his Han Solo fantasy, the Russos wanted us to care about the tyranny imposed by Stanley Tucci's tech mogul after quashing the robot rebels.
What we got, though, was a mish mash of bits of 'The Wizard of Oz,' 'Pinocchio,' 'Wall-E,' 'Star Wars,' 'ET,' 'Avatar,' 'Minority Report' and 'Edge of Tomorrow' in a tiresome plot which felt like it had been concocted by AI.
But perhaps the biggest crime of all was the lack of self awareness by the directorial duo and their screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely who just didn't seem to get the irony of making a movie that decried the placation of people with digital escapism while releasing a film on a platform that trades in digital escapism.
DISHONOURABLE MENTIONS: HAPPY GILMORE 2 (Kyle Newacheck); THE MOUNTAINHEAD (Jesse Armstrong): GET AWAY (Steffen Haars): GOODRICH (Hallie Myers-Shyler); BONO: STORIES OF SURRENDER (Andrew Dominik); OPUS (Mark Anthony Green)
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