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...

City Of Ghosts, Kong: Skull Island, and Scribe: Your Week In Film (July 24-30)

A time to kill: City Of Ghosts offers a horrifying account of ISIS in Raqqa 

The best and worst of this week's home entertainment releases on DVD, Blu-ray, and VOD. All films featured are available to buy/rent/stream now, unless otherwise stated.

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

If you have a long memory, you may remember me saying nice things on here a couple of years back about Cartel Land, Matthew Heineman's startling and revelatory documentary exploring Mexico's war on drugs. Now, the US filmmaker returns with another visceral, eye-opening piece of work, this time focusing on citizen journalists in the Syrian city of Raqqa, which was seized by ISIS in 2013, during the country's seemingly interminable civil war.

City Of Ghosts (VOD and cinemas) WWW½ is, by turns, horrifying and inspiring as our band of journos risk life and limb (quite literally) bringing the world news from inside Raqqa as ISIS strengthen their grip on the populace and its infrastructure, going so far as to order all TV satellite dishes to be taken down to leave the city increasingly isolated. The early minutes of Heineman's film are tough to watch, as Islamic State soldiers carry out public executions and punishments. If you're in any way squeamish, this really isn't the film for you. There's one particular image that is going to stay with me for a long time. The journalists – a collective operating under the name Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently – are eventually compromised, some members captured, tortured and executed, others publicly identified and having to flee to Turkey and Germany in fear for their lives.

The second half of the film concentrates on those who escaped and how they use their new base in Germany to help spread RBSS's information, while avoiding possible reprisals from lone-wolf ISIS nuts and trying to cope with a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment in their adopted country. In many ways, this is the most powerful and poignant part of the film as young men such as Hamoud, Hassan and Hussam can only watch what is happening in Raqqa in impotent despair and fury. There's one sequence in which the violent fate of a relative is revealed that is beyond heart-rending.

I suppose you could say, other than telling us that Assad and ISIS are bad, City Of Ghosts neglects to ask the members of RBSS what they'd ultimately like to see happen in their country and whether they, themselves, have connections to any of the country's multifarious groups or factions. Their thoughts would have been useful, I think, especially to a western audience struggling to understand what is actually going on in Syria. Still, in 90 minutes and change, Heineman does more to capture the sheer madness and malevolence of ISIS than anything I've yet seen. It's an astonishingly ugly but essential film.   

Under the gun: Citizen journalists battle Islamic State in Syria 

I'm not sure I've had as much fun in a cinema this year as I did watching Kong: Skull Island (DVD, Blu-ray, and VOD) WWW. As a kid, the original King Kong (1933) was my favourite film (well, tied with Jason And The Argonauts), and it was not only my first monster movie but also the one that taught me about injustice (how else would you describe the great ape's fate at the end?). There's a hint of that here too, as bitter Vietnam vet Samuel L Jackson and his gung-ho helicopter squadron drop bombs all over Kong's home, Skull Island, then launch further assaults against the mighty gorilla when he hits back hard.

It's 1973, Richard Nixon is in the White House and the Vietnam War has just ended. Bill Randa (John Goodman) and Houston Brooks (Corey Hawkins) – representatives of a top-secret organisation called Monarch – persuade the US government to fund an expedition to Skull Island, a mysterious, uncharted land mass in the Pacific Ocean. Accompanied by Lieutenant Colonel Preston Packard (Jackson), former SAS tracker James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston), pacifist photojournalist Mason Weaver (Brie Larson), and battalions of soldiers and scientists, they hope to secretly flush out something 'interesting'. However, they get rather more than they bargained for – Kong, a 100-foot ape, who is very pissed off.

There's a definite and deliberate Apocalypse Now vibe to Jordan Vogt-Roberts' movie and that, plus some very fine action set-pieces, comfortably make it one of 2017's best blockbusters. This monster-movie-meets-war-film is certainly a big step up from Gareth Edwards' Godzilla (2014), the first instalment in the new 'Monsterverse', with far better enemies (the nightmarish skullcrawlers) and a couple of compelling characters, of which Jackson's Colonel Kurtz-esque soldier is one, and John C Reilly's loveable, long-lost pilot is another. If there's a criticism, though, it's that the cast is rather too large and some of them either get lost in the crowd (Brooks' monster hunter and Tian Jing's biologist) or drawn too thinly to be truly memorable (Hiddleston's SAS tracker and Larson's photojournalist). 

Gorilla warfare: Kong channels Apocalypse Now 

French conspiracy thriller Scribe (VOD and cinemas) WW is two-thirds impressive but ultimately undermined by a rushed and muddled final act. Clocking in at barely an hour and a half, this is that rare modern film; one that could have actually done with an extra 10 or 15 minutes to let its various twists and turns breathe a bit.

François Cluzet (The Intouchables) is Duval, an unemployed former accountant and recovering alcoholic who, out of the blue, is offered a mysterious new job. He is instructed to go to a room every day and transcribe conversations gleaned from telephone taps. Striving to get back on his feet, Duval looks this particular gift horse in the mouth and soon regrets it. What initially seems innocuous, takes on a darker tone, when he hears something he shouldn't have. Cue various spooks and wrong 'uns on his tail as he fights to stay one step ahead of a grisly fate.

Thomas Kruithof's film lays out its groundwork expertly, drawing on '70s Hollywood touchstones such as The Conversation and Marathon Man as it builds tension and ushers in its subplots. But then disaster, as Kruithof keeps adding elements to the story, until the whole thing becomes ungainly and keels over like a drunken Frenchman on Bastille Day. At times, I even found myself thinking, "Hang on, who's that bloke working for again?' and 'I haven't the faintest idea what all this stuff about kidnapping and hostages is.' Worse still, diminutive Duval becomes the 'worm that turned', suddenly growing a pair of big brass balls as he threatens to transform into the unlikeliest of action heroes. Ultimately, Scribe doesn't live up to the elegance of its original French title, La Mécanique de L'ombre (The Mechanics Of The Shadow) and that's a shame.

Mr Write: thriller Scribe runs out of steam before the end

Finally, there's To The Bone (Netflix) W, a soppy and unconvincing drama about anorexia, written and directed by Buffy The Vampire Slayer alum, Marti Noxon. The promising Lily Collins (Okja, Rules Don't Apply) is Ellen, a young woman battling the disease who seeks treatment under Keanu Reeves' unconventional doctor at a live-in rehab clinic. I know the subject matter is one very personal to Noxon but that doesn't make her film any less self-conscious or limp. Characters exchange clunky dialogue that no one would ever say in real life, and 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.

The whole thing reaches a climax of cringe when Ellen allows her estranged mother (Lili Taylor) to feed her milk from a bottle, while she sits on her lap like a baby. If you're interested in seeing a better film about the same subject, give Sanna Lenken's My Skinny Sister (2015) a go instead.

Slim pickings: To The Bone is well intentioned but cringeworthy

What I shall be watching this week: Last time I took the kids to watch a Christopher Nolan film – 2014's Interstellar – they said it was the most boring movie they'd ever seen. Let's hope we have a bit more luck with Dunkirk.