The 12th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2025)

THE 12th ANNUAL SLIP-ME-A-MICKEY AWARDS

The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards are the final award of the interminably long awards season. The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™®, or as some lovingly call them, The Mockeys™®, are a robust tribute to the absolute worst that film and entertainment has to offer for the year.

Again, the qualifying rules are simple, I just had to have seen the film for it to be eligible. This means that at one point I had an interest in the film and put the effort in to see it, which may explain why I am so angry about it being awful. So, any vitriol I may spew during this awards presentation shouldn't be taken personally by the people mentioned, it is really anger at myself for getting duped into watching.

The prizes are also pretty simple. The winners/losers receive nothing but my temporary scorn. If you are a winner/loser don't fret, because this year’s Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® loser/winner could always be next year’s Mickey™® winner!! Remember…you are only as good as your last film!!

Now…onto the awards!

WORST FILM OF THE YEAR –

Caught Stealing – I’m old enough to remember when Darren Aronofsky was the cool kid on the cinephile block…oh how the mighty have fallen. Caught Stealing is the most idiotic, moronic, and laziest film imaginable. So stupid as to be offensive. Darren Aronofsky should be banned from making any more movies after this criminally dreadful film.

Alto Knights – I’m also old enough to remember when Barry Levinson was an important filmmaker. I’m very old. Levinson’s attempt at a mob epic is a staggeringly incoherent exercise that is shocking in its ineptitude.

Jay Kelly – Director Noah Baumbach and stars George Clooney and Adam Sandler are a Murderer’s Row of putrid and pedestrian performers…and for proof of that you need look no further than the saccharine shitbag of a movie that is Jay Kelly.

After the Hunt – Luca Guadagnino is a critical darling addicted to all things queer…in After the Hunt he once again shows himself to be a philosophically trite and painfully limited filmmaker. A tremendously putrid waste of time.

Song Sung Blue – The most batshit, tone-deaf, bizarro movie experience I had in 2025. An alarmingly awful movie that features some of the cheesiest supporting turns in recent memory.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey award goes to…

CAUGHT STEALING: As much as all these movies suck…most of them have at least one little thing about them that is a tiny bit redeeming. For example, Alto-Knights is awful but DeNiro is ok playing dual roles (and does it considerably better than Best Actor Oscar winner Michael B. Jordan). After the Hunt is atrocious but Julia Roberts does a pretty good job in it. Song Sung Blue is so bad it is amusing. Jay Kelly is terrible but ultimately it is a harmless little George Clooney attempt (and fail) at being charming and relevant again. But Caught Stealing? Caught Stealing has absolutely nothing redeeming about it. All of it is absolutely awful…which is a great asset when it comes to this category. So..congrats Caught Stealing!!

WORST PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR –

Michael B. Jordan – Sinners: Mr. Jordan just won a Best Actor Oscar for a performance that is so amateurish and underwhelming it would make not just Sly Stallone, but Frank Stallone, blush. Jordan plays twins but is completely incapable of differentiating between the two of them – so much so that he has to wear different color hats so that we…and he…can know which one is which. Add in Jordan’s acting style – nothing but posing and preening, and his vocal style – mush mouth akin to talking with two Snickers bars in his mouth…and you’re left with a truly terrible, two-bit performance.

Adam Sandler – Jay Kelly: Adam Sandler’s career strategy is to be awful in as many shitty movies as he can and then give the most minimal of effort in an allegedly less shitty movie and have critics slobber all over him for his dramatic abilities. Don’t be fooled. Adam Sandler sucks. He is a shitty actor….and his soft talking, “aww shucks”, acting technique in Jay Kelly is an embarrassment to anyone who has the slightest bit of knowledge about the craft of acting. Dear Adam – please go away forever. Dear Adam Sandler apologists – you will burn in hell forever.

Ayo Edebiri – After the Hunt: Ayo Edebiri is so abysmal in After the Hunt it felt like she had never acted before and was thrown before the cameras with no preparation or notice – like a Make-A-Wish kid having their dying wish to be in a movie come true. As wooden and dead-eyed a performance as you will ever see. Truly remarkable for how awful it was.

Idris Elba – A House of Dynamite: Idris Elba is great…but he was definitely not great in A House of Dynamite as the President of the U.S.A. Elba was like a fish out of water…literally. He could barely walk like a human being…and his speaking wasn’t much better either. I would be relieved if I read that Elba was strung out on heroin and LSD while he shot this movie…but unfortunately that wasn’t the case.

Anthony Ramos – A House of Dynamite: This dude starred in Hamilton on Broadway and has been so fucking terrible in every single thing he’s done since then it is actually shocking to behold. In A House of Dynamite, he puts on a masterclass in awful acting…so much so that if it were a stage play I wouldn’t throw tomatoes at him, I’d throw rocks…sharp rocks.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey award goes to…

AYO EDEBIRI – AFTER THE HUNT: Ms. Edebiri is a big tv star on the show The Bear…but I simply can’t bear to watch her be such a shitty actor in After the Hunt. She’s such a bad actress she should not only stay away from doing movies…she should stay away from even watching them.

Worst Scene of the Year –

JAY KELLY - A CHRISTMAS CAROL-STYLE FLASHBACKS: When the character Jay Kelly starts walking through his past and is watching his young self (played by a different actor) go through critical moments in his life, I wanted to kill myself…but not before killing Noah Baumbach who wrote this shit and George Clooney who’s terrible acting in it. An all-time embarrassing piece of cinematic detritus.

MOST OVERRATED FILM OF THE YEAR –

Sinners – Ah yes…Sinners…a second-rate vampire movie that dipshits and dopes adore but that is so amateurish it pains to even recount. This film was slathered over by every numbnuts know-nothing ignorant of cinema…it is like every online asshole’s favorite movie ever. As I so astutely observed in my review of this nothing burger – this is the type of movie that dumb people think is deep and stupid people think is smart. Critics and many “fans” loved it because they were afraid to tell the truth about its artistic mundanity out of fear of being called “racist”. Yawn.

One Battle After Another – As a “film bros” and a PT Anderson fan, it pained me to see other film bros and PTA fans get a giant boner over this middling mess of a movie. This movie was so over-hyped and underwhelming it gave me the bends. Stop with the slurping already – this ain’t no masterpiece…it is bottom-tier PTA, plain and simple. Deal with it.

Marty Supreme – I diverge from the Film Bros community when it comes to the Safdie Brothers…they love them, I can do without them. Josh Safdie wrote and directed this grating and annoying and seemingly endless film…and he did it very, very poorly. A toxic and odious odyssey of Jewish arrogance and self-loathing that goes down like a matzo ball of shit and makes you want to retch….but critics loved it! Yuck.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey award goes to…

SINNERS – Sinners is such a second-rate piece of moviemaking it makes my colon twinge just at the thought of rewatching it. Pedestrian and puerile through and through…it is embarrassing that this movie was both a big hit and shameful that it received more Oscar nominations than any other film in Academy Award history. It is unquestionably the most overrated film of the year.

SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT IN CINEMATIC MALPRACTICE –

James Gunn, Spike Lee, Guillermo del Toro, Steven Soderberg: These are the Four Horsemen of the Shit-pocalypse who have taken a shit all over either their careers, their films or their audiences.

James Gunn got handed the reigns of the DC universe and promptly took a shit all over it with the truly awful Superman. The fact that we have at least a whole decade of Gunn taking shits all over the already shat upon DC universe does not fill me with any semblance of joy.

Spike Lee is such a spent creative force he did a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece High and Low – and to show how creative Spike is he titled it Highest 2 Lowest…yawn. To top it all off Highest 2 Lowest isn’t just an embarrassment of a title, it is an embarrassment of a movie.

The great Guillermo del Toro got to make his dream film – Frankenstein…and promptly made one of his very worst movies…and absolute muddled mess. Now he will never get to make his dream project again.

And finally, Steven Soderberg had all the pieces in place to finally return to form and actually make a great and meaningful movie once again…and dropped the ball entirely. Black Bag, starring the great Cate Blanchet and Michael Fassbender, was so forgettable you forget it exists even while you’re watching it.

These four heavy hitters should be ashamed of themselves for their shoddy work on these shitty movies.

POS ALL-STARS –

BLAKE LIVELY AND JUSTIN BALDONI AND ANYONE WHO CARES OR HAS AN OPINION ABOUT BLAKE LIVELY AND JUSTIN BALDONI – I have no idea what this entire story is about, but the fact that anyone gives a shit about these two twats irritates the living shit out of me. I want Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni to be locked in a septic tank together for the rest of their lives. I want anyone who cares about the Blake Lively – Justin Baldoni story to be boiled alive in a vat of elephant excrement.

BILL MAHER – Little Bill loves to fellate all things Israel and Military/Intelligence Industrial Complex. He is such a Zio-whore and so blind to his own hypocrisy and ignorance he has devolved from being hate-watchable to simply unwatchable. On the bright side…he has never been less relevant!!

JAKE PAUL/LOGAN PAUL – I don’t give two shits about who or what these two shitsticks are. I just want them to go away. If you want to be some asshole influencer who makes a trillion dollars off of dumbass Youtube viewers…go ahead. But once you cross over into my life…and things I am interested in…like boxing…then we have a problem. I’m glad Jake Paul got his jaw broken in two places by Anthony Joshua…I only wish I was the one doing the jaw-breaking. Fingers crossed someone cracks Logan Paul’s skull open soon.

POS HALL OF FAME –

PRINCE ANDREW – Imagine being born into endless wealth and privilege and never having to work a single day in your life and instead of being grateful and living a life of charity and good will…you decide to be a sexual predator who fucks young girls simply because you can.

Prince Andrew is the worst in a family full of worsts…quite an accomplishment.

Jeffrey Epstein’s dear friend Andrew, is like the rest of his in-bred, arrogant, parasitic, useless family, a predator to the core who loves to prey upon the poor and the weak. He despises those beneath him, both literally and figuratively.

He preyed upon the girls provided by Epstein not because he couldn’t get laid in the real world, but because he wanted to force a young girl to suffer for his pleasure. He wanted her to be uncomfortable…to be subservient to him…because that is how he is wired.

Truth is his whole filthy fucking family is wired like that. These royal vermin should be stripped on their titles, their lands, their wealth and their limbs…like William Wallace…drawn and quartered in the public square. That won’t happen, of course, because the rules don’t apply to people like Prince Andrew or the rest of his cohorts in the elite Epstein Class. They get to dance between the raindrops while we drown in the deluge of their depravity and destruction.

The best-case scenario for the Epstein class regarding Prince Andrew is what happened to his friend Jeffery Epstein…happens to him too. He is “suicided” and quickly thrown in the bin of forgotten history so that his story goes away as quickly as possible.

Worst case scenario for Andrew is that they lock him in a room with me for fifteen minutes. Now that would be entertaining!

And thus ends the 12th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® Awards!!! To the winners/losers…don't take it personally…and God knows I hope I don't see you again next year!! To you dear reader…thanks for tuning in and we'll see you again next year!!

©2026

Alto Knights: A Review - Monstrous Mess of a Mob Movie

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Whoo-boy…this is a massive mess of a movie.

Alto Knights, which stars Robert DeNiro in dual roles as mobsters Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, chronicles the troubled relationship between those two gangster big wigs.

The film, which boasts a bevy of big-name talent besides DeNiro – including Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson and Oscar-nominated writer Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas), hit theatres on March 21st and bombed at the box office (it made $9 million on a $50 million budget). It is now available to stream on MAX, where I just watched it.

Alto Knights is an extraordinary piece of cinema if only becomes it is so incoherent and dramatically impotent.

The film, written by acclaimed scribe Nicholas Pileggi, feels less like a narrative arc than a collection of mismatched scenes pasted together like a kindergartener’s art class collage.

The film meanders from nothing to nothing with no dramatic stakes until it reaches a non-crescendo with a flaccid non-ending that is so odd and dull it felt like everyone just stopped showing up to work on the film one day and they decided to call it quits and let the editors try and figure out how to make it a full story.

To give some context, the final sequence/shot of this film is so bad and so poorly done it is actually shocking. Although I guess since it involves nothing more than an old man wandering around aimlessly it is fitting for this disastrous movie. (Not to mention that the sequence is cut to too quickly and cut away from even more quickly…so bizarre!!)

The film is meant to dramatize the often-tumultuous relationship between the fiery Vito Genovese and the calm Frank Costello, two major players in the mafia in the 1950’s and 60’s. The selling point of the film is that DeNiro plays both characters...much like Michael B Jordan plays the twins in Sinners. This construct actually works because DeNiro does very solid work as both Genovese and Costello, and unlike Jordan, gives both characters distinct traits and personalities and you never mix them up.

That DeNiro would do solid work is somewhat surprising considering his obvious struggles to give a shit in the latter part of his career, but that his performance would be absolutely wasted in this steaming garbage pile is a tragedy.

One can only assume that the responsibility for this mess lays squarely on the shoulders of once-esteemed director Barry Levinson. Levinson, who won the Best Director Oscar for Rain Man, was at one time one of the heavyweight auteurs in American cinema…but that time has long since passed.

A brief glance at Levinson’s filmography reveals a stunning-amount of terrific films at the start…films like Diner (1982), The Natural (1984) - my favorite baseball movie of all-time, Tin Men (1987), Good Morning Vietnam (1987) and his Oscar winner Rain Man (1988).

Then in 1991 Levinson made Bugsy starring Warren Beatty and Annette Benning. Bugsy was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, but people with eyes to see (people like me) could see something had shifted. Bugsy is a bad movie – and similar to Alto Knights, it is dramatically incoherent and feels frantically stitched together by underpaid and under-appreciated editors desperate to find some coherence in a sea of nonsense.

After Bugsy, Levinson’s filmography takes a disastrous turn from relevancy into the dark void of the instantly forgettable. Toys, Jimmy Hollywood, Disclosure and Sleepers are all surprisingly second-and-third-rate films.

In 1997 Levinson has a bit of a comeback with Wag the Dog, a clever and decent enough film but one that isn’t nearly as good as it was claimed to be.

After Wag the Dog the wheels really come off the Levinson wagon and he makes a string of some ten entirely worthless movies over a nearly twenty-year span that thrust into the deepest depths of irrelevancy.

And now, at the age of 83, he once again has a big budget and movie star and he’s reaching for the brass ring one more time and he falls flat on his face.

It would seem highly unlikely that Levinson, at his age and with this level of failure artistically and financially on Alto Knights, would be allowed back into the arena and given money to make a movie again. In a sense that is sad…he seems like a nice guy and he did make some quality movies early in his career…but this is life…if you make shit for long enough, people will realize you can now only make shit…for proof of this theory look no further than Alto Knights.

As for Alto Knights, what is so frustrating about the film is that it could have, maybe even should have, been a really good movie. There is a terrific story at its core about Genovese and Costello, and DeNiro really does do quality work in the film, but it is all scuttled by some really poor storytelling and structure.

It also doesn’t help when disastrous casting decisions are made where Debra Messing is given a major role. Messing is so bad in this movie it actually made me uncomfortable and I felt bad for her. The same is true for Cosmo Jarvis, who comically contorts himself to such extremes in order to look like Vincente Gigante I worried he might give himself a stroke.

Ultimately, the problem with Alto Knights is that it is so poorly structured that it neuters itself dramatically by failing to have a climax or a clear and definitive ending. It just walks off into the sunset whistling to itself like a dementia-addled, elderly gangster in his pajamas being led off to a state-run nursing home with bars on the windows.

I suppose Alto Nights greatest accomplishment is having an awful lot of big-name talent attached to it, yet still managing to be nothing but awful.

 ©2025