Ranking the Most Disappointing A24 Films: A Look at the Bottom 10

These lesser-known titles don’t enjoy the same fame as hits like “Marty Supreme” or “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” but their shortcomings highlight that not every A24 project is destined for greatness. The reasons behind these failures are diverse. Some films suffered from monotonous atmospheres that made their lengthy runtimes feel endless, while others were based on weak concepts that failed to improve during filming. Additionally, some films squandered the talents of iconic actors, a significant misstep in the world of cinema.

Despite their distinct flaws, these films still bear the well-known A24 logo. These 10 movies demonstrate that the brand, widely recognized on hats and handbags globally, is not immune to missteps.

“Sharper” is a film caught in a struggle with itself. Directed by Benjamin Caron, who is known for his work on three episodes of “Andor,” the movie shows visual promise. Unfortunately, this potential is wasted on a dull heist/crime narrative that lacks energy. Even with characters like thieves Tom (Justice Smith) and Sandra (Briana Middleton), alongside affluent New Yorkers such as Max (Sebastian Stan) and Madeline (Julianne Moore), the film’s non-linear storytelling can’t hide its lackluster nature. The plot drags without momentum, and the dialogue is so uninspired it fails to even accidentally amuse.

“Sharper” is a film at war with itself. On the one hand, director Benjamin Caron (a TV veteran whose resume includes three Season 1 episodes of “Andor”) displays welcome chops visually. Unfortunately, his compositions inhabit a yawn-worthy heist/crime movie that’s totally devoid of vitality. Even in a saga involving thieves Tom (Justice Smith) and Sandra (Briana Middleton), as well as uber-wealthy New Yorkers like Max (Sebastian Stan) and Madeline (Julianne Moore), a non-linear plot structure cannot disguise how tepid the proceedings are. The plot lumbers along with no propulsion, while the characters keep exchanging tin-eared dialogue that isn’t even distinctive enough to be unintentionally humorous.

The extremely buttoned-up, subdued atmosphere drains not only audience investment, but also energy from usually excellent actors. The likes of Smith, Moore, and John Lithgow brood about to tedious effect, in a criminal waste of their immense talents. Worst of all, any of the “twists” in “Sharper” are comically obvious from miles away, and all the rug-pulls lack any entertainment or showmanship that could compensate for their familiarity. There’s just nothing here to hold one’s interest. Even Caron’s competent but flat filmmaking lacks zest or any way to invigorate the film’s pulse.

If this title sounds unfamiliar to you, that’s because “Sharper” went straight to Apple TV+ as part of A24’s 2018 deal to make original films for the streamer. It’s for the best that “Sharper” languishes in streaming obscurity. There’s nothing in this conflicted movie warranting a better release strategy.

After director Robert Eggers delivered for A24 with “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse,” the studio decided to stay in the Eggers business by picking up a movie from his brothers, Sam and Max Eggers. “The Front Room” follows Belinda (Brandy), a pregnant woman whose mother-in-law, Solange (Kathryn Hunter), moves in and begins turning her life into a nightmare. Chaos ensues, much of it involving racial microaggressions and human feces.

While Robert Eggers is known for his slow-burn works punctuated with bursts of maximalism, critics and Letterboxd users alike saw “The Front Room” as just an unpleasant mess. Chief among the complaints was that there just wasn’t much tension or creativity in a film hinging on scares, while the more abrasive story elements related to bodily functions tested the patience of even the most twisted audiences. A more conventional finale also didn’t give audiences something exciting as a reward for enduring all that grossness. In other words, “The Front Room” didn’t quite click as either mainstream entertainment or aggressive midnight cinema. It also failed to reflect much of a distinctive perspective from either of its two directors.

“The Front Room” was just a miserable experience only fleetingly helped by Kathryn Hunter fully committing to her deranged role. Any moviegoers or A24 executives hoping that Sam and Max Eggers could replicate the artistic heights of their brother’s seminal films were sorely mistaken.

“Opus” is the worst kind of modern horror movie. In an age when “elevated horror” is chic, scary cinema has abandoned many of the surface-level thrills of classic genre fare, discarding nudity, silly monsters, and trashy dialogue in favor of slow-burn atmosphere, minimal forays into sexual material, and postmodern commentary on the current world. Terrific modern horror films can adhere to this aesthetic, but too many just eschew any fun genre elements in hope of intrinsically being categorized as “thoughtful.”

“Opus” is one of these titles. Poor Ayo Edebiri is wasted as struggling journalist Ariel Ecton, who, along with a select few guests, is invited to secluded musician Alfred Moretti’s (John Malkovich) compound. It’s incredibly obvious from the start where this Temu version of “The Menu” and “Blink Twice” is going. The journey to that familiar destination is full of uninspired imagery and equally generic jump scares. It’s also crammed full of Malkovich being “wacky,” a schtick that gets very old very fast as the film tries way too hard to make him a source for future memes. The few deaths or frights that do happen lack imagination or memorable nastiness.  

Meanwhile, “Opus” characters constantly chatter about the movie’s central themes without delving deeper into those concepts. This film desperately needed the fun parts of a classic horror thriller — any of them — to liven things up. Not even a compelling presence like Ayo Edebiri could salvage “Opus,” the poster child for modern horror cinema that confuses tedium with depth.

“False Positive” has a decent starting concept. Lucia “Lucy” Martin (Ilana Glazer) and her husband want to have a child and only find success after consulting Dr. John Hindle (Pierce Brosnan). His miracle procedure finally gets Lucy pregnant, but ominous events soon lead her to suspect that there may be something fishy going on with this “miracle.” Beyond that elevator pitch, however, “False Positive” has shockingly little going on. The script never goes off the rails in a way that would make unhinged horror titles like “Titane” or “Cannibal Mukbang” proud. Instead, “False Positive” just stays buttoned-up and reserved, which makes it hard to get involved in the plot. 

The very generic scares are even more frustrating, especially when they materialize as derivative jump scares (a type of fright that “Positive” keeps going back to). With no real flair in the visuals or performances, there’s nothing in “False Positive” to keep one’s interest. It’s a movie that never figures out its identity beyond its basic premise. Even the stabs at social commentary come off as half-hearted. There are just so many other scary movies that have covered similar thematic territory about women’s bodies and autonomy better.

The climax has some fleetingly amusing moments, but as 2025’s “The Home” showed, a slightly unusual finale cannot salvage an otherwise dull horror film. “False Positive” is an inert title lacking the energy and spark of Ilana Glazer’s superior comedic work.

With her breakthrough directorial effort, “Madeline’s Madeline,” Josephine Decker solidified herself as a filmmaking talent well worth watching. 2020’s “Shirley,” which expanded the scope of Decker’s directorial vision and included extraordinary performers like Elisabeth Moss, reaffirmed how gifted she was. Unfortunately, her “Shirley” follow-up, “The Sky Is Everywhere,” was a real swing and a miss. Based on a 2010 novel by Jandy Nelson (who also penned the screenplay), the film follows teenager Lennie Walker (Grace Kaufman) navigating her life and a connection with new kid Joe Fontaine (Jacques Colimon) in the wake of her sister’s death.

Some of Decker’s more creative visual sensibilities from her two prior directorial efforts still materialize in “The Sky Is Everywhere,” but they’re not enough to salvage a title that feels like it came off a YA-novel assembly line. Young performers like Kaufman and Colimon have only thinly sketched characters to deal with, while nothing in the film’s themes or atmosphere can differentiate it from countless similar titles like “The Fault In Our Stars” or “All The Bright Places.”

Even the overtly sentimental moments (which are the whole point of these movies) feel phoned-in rather than appropriately grandiose and sweeping. Decker’s earlier films challenged viewers with fluid definitions of reality and fascinatingly complicated women. “The Sky Is Everywhere,” meanwhile, was rudimentary and frustratingly surface-level. Here’s hoping Decker’s next movie, “Chasing Summer,” is a welcome artistic comeback after this A24/Apple TV detour.

Vic Edwards is Burt Reynolds and Burt Reynolds is Vic Edwards. If that sounds ominous, it’s actually just the central conceit of “The Last Movie Star,” a 2017 Adam Rifkin directorial effort that starred Reynolds as aging film actor Vic Edwards. The fictional Edwards, though, has headlined real-life Reynolds movies like “Smokey and the Bandit,” in which he plays a character named “Burt Reynolds.” It’s a strange detail that’s much more interesting than anything else in the final film, which spins a rote narrative about the cantankerous Edwards getting an invite to an award ceremony in Knoxville, Tennessee, trekking to various hotspots from yesteryear along the way.

“The Last Movie Star” loves referencing the past (Edwards even interacts with his younger self, via dream sequences, in movies like “Smokey and the Bandit”), but it struggles to create a compelling modern-day plot. “The Last Movie Star” also fails on the character front, a critical element for a film this down to Earth. Nobody on-screen registers as a real human being, especially if the caricatured souls representing millennials in the movie. With few dramatically engaging figures to cling to, “The Last Movie Star” heads down expected narrative trails without giving either Reynolds or viewers anything unique to hang onto.

Burt Reynolds left behind an enormous legacy in cinema. Unfortunately, “The Last Movie Star” is an uninspired swan song for this silver screen fixture.

There is nothing more frustrating than watching an all-time great actor in a dismal movie. That’s just what happened with 2016’s “The Sea of Trees,” a Gus Van Sant directorial effort that co-starred Ken Watanabe. This iconic performer has appeared in movies like “Tampopo,” “Inception,” and “Isle of Dogs,” and in the process established a tremendous artistic reputation. Unfortunately, even he couldn’t liven up or imbue depth into this groggy movie about death.

Watanabe plays second fiddle in “The Sea of Trees” to Matthew McConaughey as Arthur Brennan, an American who travels to Japan’s “Suicide Forest” to end his life after the death of his wife, Joan (Naomi Watts). Watanabe plays Takumi, a man Brennan encounters in the forest. All Watanabe gets to do here is be a tool to help Brennan work through his grief. But even beyond the extraordinary waste of Ken Watanabe, “The Sea of Trees” is also anemically predictable. The whole thing treads familiar territory for a melodrama, and frustratingly, neither McConaughey nor Van Sant inject any freshness into this overly recognizable material.

That leaves “The Sea of Trees” as a 110-minute exercise in uninvolving dreariness. Don’t waste your time on something this poor — Watanabe’s headlined so many more infinitely better features.

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org

Chance the Rapper headlining a horror comedy that involves pizza delivery drivers navigating a town of ghosts, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures should be a creative slam dunk. Instead, “Slice” is a snoozefest seriously lacking in verve. Writer-director Austin Vesely struggles to inject either momentum or fun, shaggy hangout vibes into this script. Neither “The Evil Dead” nor “Dazed and Confused,” “Slice” just tumbles around for an interminable 83-minute runtime. Vesely’s script also has incredibly weird, distracting shortcomings like a third-act montage that hurriedly resolves several essential plot beats, brushing these narrative elements aside in the blink of an eye instead of letting them play out to comedic effect.

Not even a stacked cast of admirable actors can quite make this production click into place. Zazie Beetz and Tim Decker (the latter playing a grizzled detective) have their share of amusing moments, but others like Joe Keery and Chris Parnell are just going through the motions in their respective turns. This makes “Slice” just seem groggy, like a zombie that forgot to drink coffee. Not even Chance the Rapper’s presence as a leading man lends any energy to the proceedings, which lack any sort of pulse.

In hindsight, the one amusing thing about “Slice,” which was shot in August 2016, is that Ludwig Göransson co-composed the score, presumably before he worked on “Black Panther.” Thankfully, Göransson went on to do much better things than “Slice” in his career.

The 15 best acting performances in A24 movies, as well as the biggest A24 movies of all time, reflect the level of prestige and quality that this indie label is firmly associated with. However, few, if any, studios immediately kick off their existence with that level of acclaim. For example, before it began turning out best picture Oscar winners, DreamWorks SKG launched its existence with the largely forgotten Nicole Kidman-George Clooney thriller “The Peacemaker.” A24, similarly, was introduced to audiences via its first distribution effort, “A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III.” 

This feature, written and directed by Roman Coppola, was an allegedly wacky farce starring Charlie Sheen as a graphic designer who, after a breakup, begins experiencing delusions and chaos. Even with Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray in the supporting cast, “Charles Swan III” received rancid reviews. The film’s particular brand of silliness wore on people quickly, with most viewers lambasting it as more of an endurance test than a laugh riot. 

Sheen’s generic lead performance crystallized the larger problems associated with the movie, which couldn’t transform all its eccentricities into something entertaining. “A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III” was not an ideal launchpad for A24, but the studio quickly moved on to bigger and better things.

After debuting at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2022, the music documentary “Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind” languished on a shelf for years. In the early weeks of 2025, nearly three years after its premiere, “Trouble in Mind” finally, quietly reached the Prime Video streaming service. Anyone unlucky enough to watch this project won’t be surprised that A24 didn’t know what to do with it, despite the film focusing on a famous musician and hailing from iconic filmmaker Ethan Coen. A far cry from the artistry present in many of the best documentaries of all time, this is a shockingly slipshod affair.

Coen has frustratingly little to say about his central subject during the film’s 74-minute runtime, particularly when it comes to any of the negative or controversial qualities of the man’s life. Rather than realizing Jerry Lee Lewis with complexity or a unique presentation, Coen opts for a standard delivery of archival footage and a surface-level look at the artist. That flaw alone is enough to ensure “Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind” isn’t an especially exciting exercise. Crummy editing, though, from Tricia Cooke (which sometimes involves various pieces of audio intruding on each other) is shockingly inept.

Any of the magical creative prowess present in nearly every Coen Brothers movie, from the worst to the best, is absent in this solo Ethan Coen effort. A24 should have permanently shelved “Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind.”