The seven most overrated films of the 2020s (so far)

And what you should watch instead

A short profile I wrote of graffiti artist Slawn went live on GQ.co.uk this week – give it a read, if you like.

I’m away in Scotland this week, dipping into whiskies and possibly bagging a cheeky munro. But given you people all really enjoyed my summary of the ten best films released since 2020 – it’s my most-read piece on this platform by a factor of about eight – I thought I’d treat you to another listicle. The Substacks you read are the Substacks you deserve, huh?

This time, we’re looking at the most overrated films of the 2020s, so far. I want to get a couple of honorary mentions out of the way, of films that nearly made it, but didn’t: Men, Alex Garland’s misfiring folk-horror tribute act whose trailer was oh-so promising; Last Night In Soho, which hit every single derivative cliché of a psychological thriller as though it was trying to single-handedly trash Edgar Wright’s glowing reputation for smart pastiche; Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, which if it was trying to be deliberately camp didn’t make it obvious enough; and the recent Netflix movie Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare, in which a filmmaker so sympathetic to her catfished subject that she doesn’t pose the question once, in 82 minutes, of why said subject continued to “date” a man she had never met in person for nine years. Despite being very average, none of these films are really acclaimed, as such, and so it’s hard to argue that they’re overrated.

So without further ado…

7. Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig)

If you’ve ever heard me talk about Barbie in person, I probably deployed my favourite attack line: that it’s a film that was adored and acclaimed by people who watch perhaps 2-3 films a year in the cinema. Barbie wasn’t a bad film, per se – in fact it was broadly good – but it was deeply overrated when held up against the lavish praise heaped on it by New York Times types and the collective meltdown about Gerwig not getting a Best Director nod at the Oscars.

Doesn’t she have elections to be not winning?

Most objections to Barbie came from the online, far-but-plausibly-deniable right – people like Ben Shapiro and co. who called it feminist trash, man-hating propaganda, etc etc – which counterintuitively is exactly what a film like this needs to succeed, because it makes legitimate criticism of the film impossible. If you say you didn’t like it, then at best it’s your internalised misogyny speaking, and at worst you’re an alt-right “your body, my choice” guy. Well – Barbie had deep formal and ideological flaws. The main one is that just because you lampshade the fact your film is a corporate marketing exercise, it doesn’t get to suddenly not be a corporate marketing exercise. Knowing, winking humour can only get you so far when you’re casting Rhea Perlman to play Ruth Handler, Barbie’s creator, in the twinkly-eyed grandma vein usually only reserved for wise old black characters in 1990s films or oblivious mafia nonnas obsessed with feeding up their murderous offspring. Barbie manufacturer Mattel is now currently planning to make films based on Hot Wheels, Polly Pocket, the Magic 8 Ball and – I shit you not – Uno. As in the card game. You have Barbie’s hot pink success to thank for that.

More prosaically, the film also has significant narrative holes: why is Barbie scared of death at the beginning of the film, but not at the end? This is the inciting incident of the narrative, the one which makes her come to the “real world”, but… it’s never dealt with? Is it? If it was, I missed it. Why is Barbie the only one of the many Barbies who live in Barbieland¹ who is affected by America Ferrira’s anxiety in the real world? And after Barbie gently rejects Ken’s love at the end of the film he just sort of shrugs and… becomes happy again? I didn’t really understand why. Plus smaller things: Barbie became a bizarre Chevrolet advert halfway through during its car-chase scene, and it woefully underused the comic genius of Jamie Demetriou. Then there’s the criticism posed by others pointing out the film’s puddle-deep lib feminism, though I’m sympathetic to the argument that for a lot of people, Barbie might offer more of an introductory text than an entire, you know, political worldview, so I’m not going to lay that one at Gerwig’s door. In all, this was a three-and-a-half-star film, but naturally, if you only watch two per year and the other was bloody, I don’t know, Ant-Man: Quantumania, I can see how you might think it was worth five.

What you should watch instead: Oppenheimer (joking! You should watch Support The Girls instead)

6. Anyone But You (dir. Will Gluck)

The most disappointing fact of Anyone But You’s release was that Glenn Powell and Sydney Sweeney weren’t really dating on set during filming, the rumour of which must instead have been a masterstroke of PR dark arts on behalf of someone involved behind the scenes at Netflix. Those of us who pined for a return to the glory days of the beautiful, ridiculously Hollywood starlet couple – think Winona and Johnny, Freddie Prinze Jr and Sarah Michelle Gellar, et cetera – were left hanging by the news that no, Powell and Sweeney were not about to combine to reassert the post-war American world order through strength of jawline alone, but were in fact pretending to go out with each other for publicity. Which, ironically, is exactly the storyline of Anyone But You: two antagonistic twentysomethings pretend to be in love when they’re invited to a wedding in Australia, in order to fend off those irritating “When will it be your turn?” questions people apparently get asked a lot at that sort of event. Obviously, they end up falling for each other for real.

If you asked ChatGPT to design an all-American couple

Anyone But You had a turgid script and a tired premise (the plot is based on Much Ado About Nothing, and the main characters are called Bea and Ben – i.e. Beatrice and Benedick – but that’s where the wit ends). There were some funny moments involving hyper-macho Aussies doing normal Australian stuff like barbequing koalas and drinking their own piss, and a good bit about Ben being scared of flying and only able to get through a long flight by listening to Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” on loop, but that wasn’t enough to save the film. The return of the rom-com? I wouldn’t count on it.

What you should watch instead: Rye Lane (2023)

5. I’m Thinking of Ending Things (dir. Charlie Kaufman)

A 134-minute Exhibit A of the widely mooted idea that streaming services giving directors free rein to make anything they like results in little more than their (the directors) indulging their worst excesses (see also: The Irishman). Turns out those artless studio execs who are always stereotypically pushing for films to be shorter and more action-packed may occasionally have a point!

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is peak Charlie Kaufman; it’s the culmination of the 20-year career of a man who has written some of the most high-concept scripts in Hollywood, including Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and the moment where he finally tipped into self-parody. Malkovich and Sunshine were odd ducks, but they at least featured central characters who were unnerved by the surreal things that happened to them (respectively: discovering a doorway into the mind of John Malkovich, and erasing all bad memories of their ex-lovers via medical procedure). That made those films relatable on a human level – at least John Cusack in Malkovich and Jim Carrey in Sunshine were as weirded out by what was going on around them as we, the viewers, were.

I’m Thinking Of Ending Things, by comparison, is an overlong, meandering and plotless death march towards apathy which pays lip service towards some sort of existentialist philosophical outlook without ever really getting there. It has its moments, such as a genuinely unnerving dinner table scene in which Jessie Buckley’s character eats dinner with her (in her plans) soon-to-be-ex boyfriend and his parents for the first time, but mostly it’s visually drab and speciously deep. It’s hard not to think praise directed at Kaufman is anything more than a sort of emperor’s-new-clothes Stockholm Syndrome among reviewers who want to seem smart, these days.

What you should watch instead: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

4. Don’t Worry Darling (dir. Olivia Wilde)

This film’s easily the hardest to write about in the list, because truth be told, I barely remember it. I remember the drama around it. Why did Florence Pugh fall out with director Olivia Wilde? Why did Wilde sack Shia LaBoeuf? Did Harry Styles really spit on Chris Pine at the premiere?² But after sitting through two hours of Don’t Worry Darling, my main impression is of a sort of sub-Stepford pastiche of 1950s Americana as a metaphor for brainwashing and inceldom (spoilers: Wikipedia reminds me it turns out Pugh’s character is stuck in an artificial, Matrix-like virtual world where loser men can control their wives to their hearts’ content – ah yes, I remember now!).

The other abiding memory is that an image of a red single-engine plane spiralling towards the desert was used very heavily in marketing…

…and then never explained in the film.

Don’t Worry Darling is full of moments and details like this – ideas which clearly sounded good during a freewheeling pitch session or a hasty script rewrite but whose actual sense nobody ever stopped to consider (perhaps they were too busy trying to keep Pugh, Wilde, Styles and LeBoeuf apart…). In all, it was a triumph for relatively mediocre production design and aesthetics over utterly nonsensical storytelling. The drama around the making of the film itself left a bad taste before it had even been released, and the only reason I can think of for it not to make this list on The Chimera is because in hindsight, I’m not certain there was really anybody I spoke to who enjoyed it.

What you should watch instead: Room (2015)

3. Everything Everywhere All At Once (dir. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert)

Everything Everywhere All At Once – whose name is already more annoying than it is whimsical, and which had me blithely calling it “Everything Everywhere All The Time” for about six weeks after it came out – was a film which began on an extremely promising high-concept note. Essentially, that there are lots of different parallel universes that make up one “multiverse”; ours is one of many.³ In one of these parallel universes, the film’s main character, harried Chinese-American laundromat owner Evelyn Wang, has learned how to jump between these universes. But other-Evelyn has also driven her daughter Joy mad by making her (the daughter) jump too much, and now the daughter, totally nihilistic in the knowledge of infinite universes existing, is jumping between them to kill all the different Evelyns she can get her hands on. Our universe’s Evelyn, as the least impressive or successful of all the different Evelyns who exist, must save them.

EEAAO was a good film – a very good film. It was stylish, full of references to films from Chinese cinema – other universes, in other words – like In The Mood For Love or wuxia classic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon without hitting you over the head with them.⁴ It was beautiful and funny at the same time, quite moving, and full of smart imagery (I do kind of like that stupid googly Third Eye thing despite myself). It made some decent gestures towards cod absurdism and ideas around fulfilment and “what could have been”, as Evelyn discovered more impressive, happier versions of herself and her family in parallel universes, and reconsidered her life choices.

The problem is, it wasn’t as good as people said it was. Think Barbie, but with the hype amped up by about 1000%. To hear people talk about EEAAO was to hear them enter a state of rapture. “Profoundly deep, genuinely moving, utterly hilarious, highly imaginative and a visual feast,” reads one of the top reviews on iMDB. “Haven’t laughed this hard, cried this much or thought so deeply about any film in 2022. Much less all in the same viewing. This was indeed everything, everywhere all at once.”⁵ It’s currently sitting at 4.3 stars out of a possible five on Letterboxd, the home of self-identifying film buffs, though its Google reviews point to a subtly different reaction among normies.

A review valley like this is usually the sign of an interesting film

The film really falls apart from about the halfway mark. At 139 minutes, it’s already easily half an hour too long, but that aside, the latter sections of the film provide a classic example of the old saying that any fool can fly, but it takes an expert to land. The villainous, murderous version of universe-jumping Joy, who is known as “Jobu Tupaki”, captures Evelyn and shows her a huge “everything bagel” – that’s not a typo – which can supposedly end the multiverse. What was the bagel? Literally, I mean – I know it was a doomsday device of sorts, but if you liked EEAAO, can you explain to me what it was, physically? How it worked? Or why it was bad and dangerous? I haven’t found anyone who can. Likewise, the last 40ish minutes descend into a massive, multifaceted fight scene involving Evelyn, her husband Waymond, Jobu and her minions (which I think takes place in the IRS building?) which ends when everyone sort of just… decides not to fight each other any more and instead embrace existentialist kindness, at Waymond’s urging.

If you haven’t seen the film then this will all sound mental, because it is. EEAAO does that great trick of making you believe you’ve understood it, until you come out of the cinema, and then someone asks you to explain the plot mechanics, and you can barely stumble past the “parallel universes” thing. It’s all style and some substance, but in my view, you need both to pull the sort of reviews that this was getting back in 2022.

What you should watch instead: you should definitely still watch EEAAO, but perhaps with a slightly more critical eye. Or you could watch Donnie Darko (2001).

2. Stutz (dir. Jonah Hill)

In July 2023, a series of text messages was posted on Instagram. Supposedly sent by Jonah Hill, they were leaked by his ex-girlfriend, the surfer Sarah Brady. One text in particular, allegedly dating back to late 2021, was a hybridized monster paragraph of therapyspeak deployed in the service of light coercive control:

Plain and simple, Hill allegedly wrote to Brady, If you need: surfing with men, boundaryless inappropriate friendships with men, to model, to post pictures of yourself in a bathing suit, to post sexual pictures, friendships with women who are in unstable places and from your wild recent past beyond getting a lunch or coffee or something respectful. I am not the right partner for you. If these things bring you to a place of happiness I support it and there will be no hard feelings. These are my boundaries for romantic partnership. My boundaries with you based on the ways these actions have hurt our trust.⁶

It’s a bit tasteless to splurge private texts all over the internet – Brady’s reasoning was that she wanted to warn Hill’s then-partner and the mother of his newborn child, which… fine, I suppose – and all the more so for someone like me to then pore over them and dissect Hill’s clearly intense psychiatric state. Except that Hill himself has already done just that, on camera, literally inviting the public into his therapy room by directing Stutz in 2022.

Stutz is named after Hill’s therapist Dr Phil Stutz. The movie sees him and Hill talking on camera for an hour and a half or so about a range of topics – they start with Stutz’s childhood, a recent cancer diagnosis, what he has taught Hill about managing his inner life, emotions and mental health, and then how his technique differs from usual practice. You see, Stutz’s whole thing is that unlike traditional therapists, who try to be impartial about what their clients tell them and gently leading at best, he gives direct advice to his therapees (is that a word?), often in the form of these weird cryptic little notes that Hill seems to swear by.

Me neither

I found it simultaneously self-indulgent – how could it not be? – and impenetrable. Clearly, from those leaked texts, Stutz is a terrible therapist, because Hill seems to have very serious problems with jealousy and control, and anxiety (for which I do have sympathy). But likewise, Hill comes across badly. Very badly, in fact, as one of the most unlikeable and self-involved people in Hollywood. If this sounds like an ad hominem, consider that in this film Jonah Hill is appearing as himself in a documentary he directed himself about his own mind and his own therapist – he had literal total control over how he is presented.

And yet, per Stutz, Hill embodies all the worst, most self-regarding elements of American liberalism and its truisms. One such truism is that “You should only date men who go to therapy.” Ladies: you might be happier with a man who doesn’t confront his demons and insecurities quite so much as Hill does. Some subconscious thoughts should stay there – beyond consciousness, where what you can’t see or name can’t hurt you. Because my God, does Jonah gaze so far into his navel you start to wonder if he can’t see out the back of his bumhole.

What you should watch instead: Shirkers (2018)

1. Poor Things (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)

One day, I’ll write something longer about Yorgos Lanthimos. I really, really liked The Favourite, and that film naturally shares a lot of DNA with Poor Things. But my main issue with the latter is that yes, Emma Stone gives a career-best performance as a woman with a child’s brain, certainly, but to what end? Children are famously not very interesting. To spend ten minutes in the company of Stone’s Bella Baxter as she, I dunno, gormlessly tries to eat soup with her hands is to spend nine of them thinking “Okay, I get it, please move onto the next scene, Yorgos.” But he won’t, and instead we’ll be forced to keep watching as Stone does a baby voice and says something like “Bella no like soup! Soup horrid!” and then throws her bowl across the room and starts masturbating, probably, and for this she went on to win an Oscar and a Golden Globe.

Zooming out a little, I found that having such heightened performances made it next to impossible to empathise with these characters as real humans. Watching Poor Things is like watching panto without the winks and nudges. It’s empty. It’s oddly joyless. (People will try to refute this with an “Ah! But what about Duncan Wedderburn?” – meaning Mark Ruffalo’s caddish supporting character, who provides a lot of what passes for the film’s comic relief. To which I would say I’m sure it is very funny, if Ruffalo having a funny moustache and saying the word “retarded” in a plummy English accent is what makes you laugh. Eh.)

Yes, Poor Things looked quite nice at times, particularly when they went to Lisbon, and yeah, Bella became a socialist and a sex-positive feminist after attaining near-adult cognitive ability in what was a smart sop to the type of people who review these films, but ultimately Lanthimos’s Oscar winner had none of the true radicalism people ascribed to it, whether aesthetic, political or otherwise. I’m shrugging as I write this; I don’t know what else to say. Sorry!

What you should watch instead: Happiness (1998)

1. If the word “Barbie” hasn’t reached a point of semantic satiation for you yet, then you have considerably more stamina than I do.

2. He absolutely did not.

3. Multiverses are very in right now after the MCU mainstreamed the idea.

4. Mostly… the Ratatouille/“raccacoonie” joke was funny the first and maybe the second times, but Rémy the rat was well and truly dead by the time the Daniels stopped flogging him.

5. See what they did there???

6. (Side note: “Friendships with Women Who Are in Unstable Places” would be a great name for an Almodóvar film.)