Without fail, the final moments of every 12 months are now riddled with ‘best movies of 20XX’ lists from every war-criminal and his dog. But each year the recommendations are riddled with things I’d rather avoid. Let’s get ahead of the game for 2026…
Don’t get me wrong, if you are earnestly trying to share culture that touched you, with distant loved ones over whatever digital means you use to stay in contact with them, that’s great. Go for it. But beyond that, it feels increasingly like these lists are a way for some of society’s most grotesquely privileged people to laud their access to cultural capital over the rest of us.
I haven’t had the time or money to see the films on many of the rankings concocted by various celebrities – and to an extent that feels like the point. But even if this were my day-job (for some reason it seems to surprise people that Indy Film Library doesn’t pay my bills), these lists are usually packed with things you couldn’t pay me to see.
I have enough to be watching with the reviews from independent filmmakers, without adding another Fantastic 4 reboot, or an ‘insightful’ explanation of why George Orwell’s work is still relevant… Frankly, life is too short.
2026 will be the same – so pre-emptively, here are five films which I won’t have seen, and will not be seeing, no matter how many lists they end up on at the end of the year.
The Social Reckoning
It’s a close call between Artificial and this, in terms of cinematic content which grossly overstates the capabilities of our tech-overlords. But Artificial at least promises to have been written as a comedy, so might do a better job of capturing their true essence: not so much a bunch of scheming supervillains, as a bunch of privileged, preening, glassy-jawed babies, whose wealth (either accrued through luck, fraud or inheritance) means they will be treated as visionaries however many times their newest ridiculous ideas eat shit.
The Social Reckoning, meanwhile, comes from one of the most overrated writers of his generation: Aaron Sorkin – a man whose alleged genius has been greatly exaggerated repeatedly, thanks to the way his opinions happen to overlap with the establishment wing of the Democratic Party – whose mealy-mouthed fumbling of two administrations in the last 20 years have enabled the consolidation of power of precisely the kind of vacantly staring buffoons that The Social Network and its sequel assure us are in fact playing 4D chess. If you really want to suffer through something of Sorkin’s this year, revisit The West Wing with fresh eyes. It’s worth seeing just how much he clearly hates women, political activists, and trade unionists; compared to just how much he loves bipartisan work with Republicans. And then wonder if people like him should still be afforded the space to wonder what went wrong over the last two decades.
Wuthering Heights
Saltburn was possibly the inspiration for this article. In 2023 it was riding high in an awful lot of end-of-year lists, but I didn’t get round to seeing it until 2025. And after all the playful chiding, the assertive nagging that this was a film I really had to see, did it live up to that billing? No. It only succeeded in making me mildly resentful to anyone who recommended it to me.
Now, everyone’s favourite Oxbridge auteur Emerald Fennell (who I have explicitly checked to make sure was not in fact a Harry Enfield and Chums character from the early 90s) is back with an adaptation of Wuthering Heights. The non-horror equivalent of Frankenstein or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – the kind of work someone who has run short on ideas takes on as a ‘passion project’, but without needing very much passion to see it over the line. Speculation around the production as to a ‘shocking twist’ is rife – but we’ve heard this before about Fennell. Drinking bathwater mixed with cum, or humping the earth above the grave of someone you recently murdered, were both things painted as shocking – as opposed to cynically childish meme-fodder – in Saltburn. I don’t expect any better here.
Avengers: Doomsday
The Marvel Universe is insufferable. The longer it has gone on for, the more obvious and obnoxious its formula for milking customers has been. Introduce ‘quippy’ characters who feign praise for audience members for buying/knowing the merchandise through endless references; have them shoot laser-beams at a big, grey CGI blob of some kind; tease an ‘iconic’ character in the end credits to pre-sell your next identikit movie; wash, rinse, and repeat. Always repeat.
The formula is prone to collapse, however, because a fact of life is that they will eventually need new fans, when the old ones shuffle off this mortal coil. At this point, you need to reckon with the fact that none of these movies work as a standalone product anymore, because they have long since become an impossible maze of in jokes and references which their best writer/director actively mocked before he jumped ship.
Avengers: Doomsday hints at a soft-reboot to try and open the franchise up for fresh viewing, by recasting one of its most popular stars, Robert Downey Jr (formerly Iron Man) as new villain Doctor Doom. This might essentially say “forget all that old shit, we can’t hint to any of it now, as you’ll blatantly see this is the same guy for no reason”. Or it might just be a desperate ploy to consolidate ticket sales with some baffling fan-service. Either way, even if you all fall for it this next time, I’ll be ignoring your annual recommendations. It is inevitable that this new shit eventually fall into the same formula, hostile to new viewership, and one which I am too old and tired to can’t muster the energy to connect with on even a basic level.
The Adventures of Cliff Booth
This could arguably be interchangeable with literally anything Netflix releases next year. But I hold a special resentment in my heart for this project, given Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood was, to paraphrase its creator, “weak sauce”. Sloppily written, with a tedious, meandering story and an uncharacteristic lack of spark in Quentin Tarantino’s dialogue, the film leans heavily on a grotesquely overplayed reverence to a historic studio system dominated by wealthy abusers was a cynical substitute for any of the substance or wit his previous projects exhibited. Completely unsurprisingly, however, this played very well with the current batch of alleged abusers dominating the modern studio system.
Cliff Booth (played for laughs by an alleged abuser) is a character who is implied to have murdered his wife at sea, but thanks to his connections, continues to pick up work in Hollywood. The character is ‘redeemed’ by slaughtering a bunch of teenage girls who were about to commit a real-life murder, which the writer detached from its horrific realities to use as a clumsy metaphor for attacks on the classic era of Hollywood itself. Now, continuing the reputational rehabilitation of the alleged abuser (who won an Oscar for this role), Netflix will release a Tarantino-scripted, David Fincher directed equivalent of a straight-to-VHS sequel. I don’t care if this turns out to be the most technically accomplished film of the year (it won’t), it’s not worth engaging with.
Michael
Speaking of reputational restoration…
Over the last year, we have been bombarded with messaging from Hollywood’s pet reporters that the musical biopic is back. Forget Walk Hard having skewered the genre so effectively that it essentially disappeared from studio productions overnight – and that many of the beats that wonderful pastiche hit remain in place in this brave new generation of slop – A Complete Unknown has re-opened the door.
Sensing the opportunity for currying favour with a new generation of viewers too young to remember the allegations, the estate of Michael Jackson is going to test this apparent new golden age of biopics to the maximum. Whatever you make of this kind of story, its limitations are going to be laid bare here. A lifetime never makes for a neat narrative arc, so complicating aspects are often going to fall by the wayside – as was the case in Walk the Line, Ray, Elvis, and A Complete Unknown. But the things which are reportedly set to be left out of Michael are particularly troubling here – because they arguably should define Jackson’s ‘story’, his life, more than anything in his musical catalogue.
Michael promises/threatens to follow the story of Michael Jackson, from his time with the Jackson 5, to becoming a global pop icon in the 1980s – conspicuously ending before the 1990s. I wonder why that might be… His surviving legal team has also allegedly cast a long shadow over this production – with some reports suggesting scenes had been reshot to sidestep later aspects of Jackson’s life (though Lionsgate has denied this). So, yeah… however much you enjoy the singing, dancing and showmanship of what remains, I don’t want to hear it.
What do you reckon? Am I out of line to write these films off before I’ve seen them? Will I come crawling back in 12 months to apologise to anyone? What films won’t you be touching with a 10ft pole? Let me know in the comments. And have a happy new year.