The bad batch: My least favourite films of 2017

Thumb's up? Nope, it's a definite thumb's down for Assassin's Creed

I wasn't going to bother with a "worst of the year" list this time, as I'd somehow avoided seeing most of those films already widely acknowledged to be 2017's most rotten. I'd avoided The Book Of Henry, gave The Emoji Movie a swerve, and paid no attention whatsoever to the likes of Baywatch and Transformers: The Last Knight. Having given it a bit of thought, though, it turned out there were still a great many absolute stinkers worth naming and shaming. A surprising number of them were 'Netflix Originals' and, oddly, some starred actors of whom I am very fond (including Juliette Binoche, Marion Cotillard, and Javier Bardem). Only films released in the UK on any format between January 1 and December 31 2017 qualified for inclusion...

10. Assassin's Creed

Director: Justin Kurzel  UK release date: January 1
Despite starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, and boasting a budget of some $125million, the Macbeth director's video game adaptation is a howling mess. The storyline is confused and confusing, and there is so much exposition you could stick a flag in it and declare it an independent nation. It's all topped off with iffy CG and a grungy colour palette that goes all the way from turd-brown to corpse-grey. See my full review here.

9. To The Bone
Director: Marti Noxon  UK release date: July 14
Soppy and unconvincing drama about anorexia, written and directed by Buffy The Vampire Slayer alum Noxon. Lily Collins is Ellen, a young woman battling the disease, who seeks treatment under Keanu Reeves' unconventional doctor at a live-in rehab clinic. Alex Sharp's Luke – a weird and wacky Brit – is so annoying you wish the reassuringly wooden Reeves would turn into John Wick and put a bullet between his eyes. 

8. Naked
Director: Michael Tiddes  UK release date: August 11
Shameless rip-off of Groundhog Day that steals everything from Harold Ramis's 1993 comedy classic, apart from its great jokes and infinite charm. This 'Netflix Original', directed by Fifty Shades Of Black's Tiddes, sees Marlon Wayans cursed to relive the hour before his wedding over and over again, until he shapes up and gives his wife-to-be (Regina Hall) the ceremony and husband she deserves. Insufferably predictable and laughter free.

Bare-faced cheek: Naked rips off Groundhog Day... it doesn't go well

7. Death Note
Director: Adam Wingard  UK release date: August 25

Po-faced live-action Netflix adaptation of the Japanese manga that fails to make good use of its USP – namely, Ryuk, an eight-foot tall demonic death god, voiced here by Willem Dafoe. The CG creature turns up quite a bit at the start, then only appears intermittently for the rest of the film, actually doing very little. If you have a massive demon as your film's visual centrepiece, might it not have been an idea to keep him gainfully employed?

6. From The Land Of The Moon
Director: Nicole Garcia  UK release date: June 9
The year's worst plot twist goes to this dreary romantic melodrama. In 1950s France, Marion Cotillard's Gabrielle is stuck in a loveless marriage but falls in love with another man when, ill, she is sent away to a clinic in the Alps for treatment. It isn't predictable but only because the twist is so ludicrous (not to mention unoriginal) you spend the film's final moments trying to decide whether to laugh or throw things at the screen.

5. Slack Bay

Director: Bruno Dumont  UK release date: June 16
Obnoxious French black comedy from director Dumont. Set in 1910, it sees an affluent family arrive at their lavish holiday home for the summer, only to find themselves embroiled in a police investigation into a series of mysterious disappearances. People fall over a lot, the two lead cops look like Laurel and Hardy for some reason, and there's even a family of cannibals. A masterclass in overacting, especially from Juliette Binoche in a career low.

Kiss of death: Slack Bay does little for Anglo-French relations

4. The Circle
Director: James Ponsoldt  UK release date: June 30
Leaden Emma Watson lands her dream job at the titular Facebook-style company in Silicon Valley, but quickly finds her life subsumed into its corporate strictures and demands. Shockingly, it turns out these tech companies are robbing us all of our privacy and identity, something I'd certainly never considered before (sarcasm). In fact, Ponsoldt's film is so bad not even Tom Hanks, as a creepy Steve Jobs-esque CEO, can save it.

3. Little Evil
Director: Eli Craig  UK release date: September 1
Adam Scott marries Evangeline Lilly's single mum and becomes convinced her six-year-old son is the Antichrist in this supposed comedy/horror from Netflix. The idea to use the set-up of The Omen as a way into exploring the difficulties of being a step-parent is a solid one, but writer/director Craig fails to take it anywhere remotely interesting. The jokes aren't funny, the horror isn't scary, and the "power of love" ending made me want to sacrifice a virgin.

2. The Last Face
Director: Sean Penn  UK release date: May 12

This well-intentioned clunker sees Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem's crusading doctors conducting a fraught romance amidst the mayhem of Liberia's second civil war in 2003. It's horribly clumsy and cloyingly earnest, with none of its black African characters granted any agency whatsoever. They are little more than extras in what should, after all, be their story. Worst of all, though, is its dialogue – "she's leaking urine, but she's dancing" being perhaps the most ill-advised line in any film I've seen all year.

1. Tomboy

Director: Walter Hill  UK release date: March 13
In his heyday, veteran Hill directed the likes of The Driver, 48 Hours and The Warriors. This monstrosity, however, is such a fall from grace it seems likely he made it for a bet (i.e. "I bet you can't make one of the worst movies of all time"). Michelle Rodriguez is Frank Kitchen, a macho hitman transitioned into a woman against his will in an act of revenge by Sigourney Weaver's mad scientist. The premise is beyond stupid and the film lives down to it at every available opportunity. A turgid, misogynistic, transphobic shambles. Read my full review here.

Just shoot me! Tomboy is the worst film I've seen all year

Coming next: The third annual 'Resties'. Watch this space...

The Sense Of An Ending, Tom Of Finland, and Souvenir: Your Week In Film (August 14-20)

Sing it on: Isabelle Huppert stages a pop star comeback in Souvenir

The week's best and worst in UK home entertainment on DVD, Blu-ray and VOD. All films are available to buy, rent, download or stream now, unless otherwise stated.

Ratings guide:  WWWW - Wonderful  WWW - Worthwhile  WW - Watchable  W - Woeful

The Sense Of An Ending (DVD, Blu-ray and VOD) W½ is a British film with impeccable credentials. It's adapted from a Julian Barnes novel, directed by Ritesh Batra, whose 2013 film The Lunchbox was a delight, and stars Jim Broadbent and Charlotte Rampling. Sadly, it somehow still manages to be duller than a vegan's lunchbox.

Broadbent is Tony, a grumpy divorcee who reconnects with old flame Veronica (Rampling), when her mother passes away and leaves him a mysterious document in her will. There is unsavoury history between Tony and Veronica, as she started seeing his best friend Adrian (Joe Alwyn) after their affair ended. Angry and bitter, Tony wrote the pair a poisonously-worded letter but, soon after, was made to regret it when his former friend committed suicide. It's an interesting premise and its tangled web only gets more tangled as the story unfolds. Despite that, Batra's film is so slow it makes your average episode of the Antiques Roadshow look like Atomic Blonde.

Bits of it do work quite well (especially an expertly delivered twist) but, apart from its pace, the film's main problem is that Tony is such an awful old git. Often, a curmudgeon can be a fun character to have around, whether to prick the pomposity of others or by simply saying the unsayable. Tony, though, is just plain unpleasant – rude, abrupt, entitled – the sort of unseemly oaf who won't even exchange pleasantries with his postman. It is therefore rather difficult to give much of a stuff about him, his silly camera shop or his affairs of the heart. The Sense Of An Ending is also cloyingly middle class – everyone's white, went to a good university and ponces about in leafy north London like their farts smell of lavender. It gave me a sudden urge to shop at Poundland and cultivate an interest in dog fighting.

Stop making Sense: Impeccable credentials, dull film

There's a scene in Tom Of Finland (VOD and cinemas) WWW which reminds me of that Doctor Who episode where Vincent van Gogh is transported through time and space to 21st-Century London, there to witness first-hand his work's iconic place in modern culture. It's a wonderful, emotional, lump-in-the-throat twist as this poor, beleaguered artist realises just how beloved he has become in the 120-odd years since his death. Tom's 'Vincent moment' isn't quite so dramatic as he is whisked from oppressive 1970s Finland to laidback, shag-happy Los Angeles and New York. In those cities' bars and clubs, however, he sees the extraordinary impact his erotic drawings of musclebound, leather-clad men have had on gay culture. Just like Van Gogh, he is taken aback, humbled and empowered all at once; it's like he's died and gone to heaven (or, indeed, Heaven). It's perhaps the best bit in an intriguing biopic of an artist who the mainstream seems to have shunned – or at least sidelined – whilst being indisputably influenced by his aesthetic.

Pekka Strang is the titular Tom, aka Touko Laaksonen, a Finnish officer in WWII who returns to his home country after the war disturbed and marginalised. He has killed a Russian soldier, a savage act which hangs heavily upon him, and is struggling to keep his sexuality a secret from both his sister (Jessica Grabowsky) and the authorities who demonstrate their displeasure with homosexuals by beating them half to death. An artist, he commences employment at an ad agency, while working on a series of erotic drawings that he submits with some success to an American magazine, the editor of which – looking for an interesting angle to hook his readership – christens him 'Tom Of Finland'. And so a gay icon is born...

In the last few years, we've become used to biopics that take genuine risks with their subject matter – I'm particularly thinking of Pablo Larrain pair Jackie and Neruda, as well as Don Cheadle's madcap Miles Ahead. Dome Karukoski's film is therefore surprisingly straightforward and, bearing in mind its subject matter, oddly chaste. The director, I suspect, was more interested in the kind of man Tom was than the amount of sex he had, but surely that was quite a large part of his identity? And, yes, taking him and his work seriously is important and refreshing, but the whole thing could have been a little more celebratory, a little lighter. There's a real playfulness and humour to Tom's pictures that doesn't often come through here. That said, Strang is terrific as the titular character – reserved, tortured, frustrated and brave, genuinely multi-faceted, while Karukoski's intention to document and comment upon the evolution of gay rights and culture in Finland via Tom's life and career is an intriguing idea, for the most part compellingly realised. 

Where the art is: Tom Of Finland's life and work is celebrated

Despite critics falling over themselves to praise/dissect Elle and Things To Come (both excellent), Isabelle Huppert's most recent film Souvenir (DVD and VOD) WW½ crept into a small number of British cinemas back in June, before quickly disappearing. Its home entertainment release is similarly low-key with no Blu-ray available and little in the way of hype. That's rather a shame because whilst it is certainly one of the French actresses' more minor works, and not a patch on those recent films with Paul Verhoeven and Mia Hansen-Løve, Souvenir is very charming and effortlessly romantic.

Hard-working Huppert, who seems to make films with the regularity the rest of us reserve for eating and sleeping, is Liliane, aka Laura, a washed-up former pop star who, as France's entry, came second to Abba at the "European" Song Contest in 1974 ("The Swedes cheated," a supportive colleague tells her at one point). She now lives in seeming anonymity, working in a pâté factory by day and drinking too much by night, her career highlight as a singer not even recalled by a contestant on one of the TV quiz shows she watches in lieu of a real life. Enter Jean (Les Combattants' Kévin Azaïs), an aspiring young boxer working as a temp at the factory whose dad happens to be Laura's No.1 fan. He recognises her, persuades her to make a comeback and the seemingly mismatched pair – with at least 40 years between them – commence a relationship. As she bids for a phoenix-like return to the European Song Contest, what can possibly go wrong? 

Souvenir (named after Laura's surprisingly listenable 1974 song) is all about second chances, learning to live with failure, and how love can conquer pretty much anything, including alcoholism and a relationship that isn't so much May to December but February to New Year's Eve. Huppert is utterly convincing as Liliane and her chanteuse alter-ego Laura, exuding a fragility – on and off-stage – that we perhaps aren't used to seeing from her (it's certainly a hell of a contrast to her role in Elle). She's a mess, someone who isn't desperate for attention but who certainly craves affection. You almost get the impression she's only going along with the comeback so she can spend more time with Jean (who she clearly adores) and to escape the twin prisons of the factory and her apartment. Impressively, Huppert also handles all the singing herself, and not for the first time. There are times, though, when the storytelling in Bavo Defurne's film is rather clunky, and certain elements don't really make much sense (her ex, Tony (Johan Leysen), the guy who writes the number she sings on her comeback, is also on the judging panel for the 'search for a song' contest, which is surely cheating?). It's an odd and uneven film, then, but one that Huppert – as well as the promising Azaïs – certainly make watchable.

A star is reborn: Bavo Defurne's movie is clunky but charming

Finally, there's Naked (Netflix) W, a shameless rip-off of Groundhog Day that steals everything from Harold Ramis's 1993 comedy classic, apart from its great jokes and infinite charm. This latest 'Netflix Original', directed by Fifty Shades Of Black's Michael Tiddes, stars Marlon Wayans (yes, he of White Chicks and Littleman infamy) as Rob Anderson, a feckless, half-arsed substitute teacher marrying into a well-to-do family headed up by Dennis Haysbert's stern patriarch. When his bachelor party goes horribly wrong, Anderson wakes up naked in a lift and is then cursed to relive the hour before his wedding over and over again, until he shapes up and gives his wife-to-be (Regina Hall) the ceremony and husband she deserves.

The gags, such as they are, succeed or fail on how hilarious you find Wayans' bare bottom and other characters mentioning the fact they can see both it and his, ahem, 'junk'. Elsewhere, it's as insufferably predictable as you'd expect – mean dad Haysbert doesn't approve of 'loser' Rob, Hall's horrible but successful ex-boyfriend is still on the scene and there's even a moment when Rob realises he's lost the wedding ring (yes, that old comedy staple gets yet another airing). Movies with predominantly black casts are still all too rare so it's a shame this one is pretty much bereft of laughs and originality.

Barely watchable: Marlon Wayans in Naked

What I shall be watching this week: I'm going to try and find somewhere showing A Ghost Story. I suspect a journey into London will be required...