Johnny Oleksinski

A film so rife with plot holes that it would make a decent pasta strainer.

What was great fun before is mostly mopey and depressing now. A hunk, a hunk of burning IP.

A couple of grand, intriguing ideas does not a movie make. Say it with me, folks: It’s the little things.

Branagh’s warped vision of these films as putrid, depressing slogs makes Death on the Nile interminable.

On this overstuffed ride, we also learn where wise Rafiki, royal aide Zazu, evil Scar and even Pride Rock come from. Who cares? The backstories only make us crave the peerless 2D original.

What’s said to be Marvel’s most powerful superhero ever is served Melatonin by Larson. There is precious little texture or detail, ups and downs, or emotions of any kind in her performance. The character, even when kicking ass, is a total bore. Such as it is, the film’s best moments are provided by Jackson and a hilarious cat.

Where is Wright’s mastery of tone and zany-but-unnerving quick-cut style? It’s been replaced by a cacophony of assembly-line sci-fi noise in a blah “Blade Runner” that, depending on the scene, is either stupidly serious or seriously stupid.

The voice work and the overly smooth animation mostly stink.

The plot goes nowhere glacially. Underdeveloped side characters are so far to the side, they’re out of frame.

Exploring pain in novel ways in film is a good thing. Next time, though, pick a different novel.

I wanna feel the HEAT … but I don’t. On the contrary, the animatronic new Whitney Houston biopic “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” left me shivering from a gust of arctic air as it so clinically and lazily examines the tragic life of the famous singer.

Director Andy Fickman (“Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2”) favors poop jokes and the cringe-humor of watching little kids court danger with a nail gun, kerosene, an ax and sometimes literally fire.

The best thing about the Escape Room film series is that it gives audience members clear directions in the title about what they should immediately do: Escape. Room. Get out of that theater and go see Black Widow instead. Run for your lives — and sanity!

The source material explodes with wit, but this hackneyed screenplay has swapped the crackling repartee for bargain-bin joke book lines delivered at a snail’s pace.

I don’t mind Diesel and Cena starring in movies like this, because it helps keep them out of other, better movies. But to see folks such as Helen Mirren (doing her weird cockney accent again), Russell and Theron’s talents wasted on such schlock is a shame.

While that winding, buzzword-filled title sounds like a cheap-o parody of a science-fiction epic, this is about as unfunny and unadventurous a movie as you could possibly imagine.

Burger’s half-assed attempt at an updated Lord of the Flies makes you long for a good old-fashioned school bus and a pig’s head on a stick.

For nearly two and a half hours, director Todd Phillips’ pathologically unnecessary movie cycles through so many potential reasons to exist. But, as “Deux” grows increasingly disturbing, repulsive and strange on the hunt, it ultimately never finds a satisfying one.

Moretz, meanwhile, acts like Little Red Riding Hood talking to her conspicuously hairy grandma — impossibly naive, and therefore dull and unbelievable. She’s a solid actress, but she shines best in indies or in parts with real edge. Greta is a camp-fest.

Who’s the audience for this movie? It’s not smart, scary or funny enough for adults and older teens, and it’s inappropriate for young kids.

A cautionary tale for the age of reboots, “International” takes over from a perfectly good comedy film series, and turns it into witless, generic space debris. It is the “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” of “MiB” — but somehow the aliens here are even worse.

Degreasing a stove is a more enjoyable way to spend your Saturday night.

Meet Moondog — a movie character you’ll want to punch in the face.

In the end, what “Caught Stealing” has stolen is time and talent.

The script is garbage, the voice acting is wooden and the songs are as infectious — and deadly — as the Mister Softee jingle.

Argyle is a pretty pattern. “Argylle,” meanwhile, is the latest example of a pretty irritating pattern from director Matthew Vaughn.

Writer-director Michael Mohan’s “drama” tries to be a modern Rear Window (emphasis on “rear”), but Hitchcock it ain’t. The Voyeurs is a cheap, never-ending trifle that takes itself more seriously than Hamlet.

If Falling for Christmas simply fleshed out Sierra more, and made us believe she was in love with Jake, not just grinning at everybody, we’d have a movie. Instead, it’s a predictable stunt.

Wolfs, a so-called comedy written and directed by Jon Watts in which Clooney and Pitt play rival New York fixers tasked with discreetly disposing of a dead body, is a dreadful, laugh-free slog that tests the limits of what star power alone can salvage.

It’s a harrowing tale that deserves a much better movie than this insipid junk.

The ending means to stir our emotions, and it does inspire one: relief that it’s over.

Many diehards, in their slavish, zombie-like subservience to the MCU gods, will tell you that Sam Raimi (brilliant on the 2002 “Spider-Man”) has directed a horror movie. Lies! It’s as scary and visually arresting as “Van Helsing,” “Underworld” and “Hellboy 2.”

“Secrets,” somehow the third of a planned five, really puts the “dumb” in Dumbledore.

In “Mistress of Evil,” everything is a notch less fun, romantic and engaging.

While the film is a modicum better than the actress’ “Falling For Christmas” last year — such a punishing world, this is — the improvement is also a knock against it. This high-fructose-corn-syrup movie remains air-headed, that’s for sure, but it’s far less campy and therefore a drag.

This bore fest is nearly two hours of sizzle-less romance and thudding dialogue, centered around the sort of obnoxious free spirit who’d start up an unwanted conversation with you at a bar

Murder on the Orient Express has been . . . murdered!

Hathaway floats in the air a few times and the sides of her mouth are slit, a la Heath Ledger’s Joker, but even that deformation doesn’t make her frightening or threatening. You’re supposed to believe this woman wants all children dead, and instead, you believe she is sometimes rude to Bergdorf’s employees.

It’s a shame that George Michael’s final major artistic contribution to the world is the crummy movie Last Christmas. In its shoddy attempt to make a splash in the British romantic-comedy genre, it amounts to nothing more than a careless whisper.

Linklater, a director who usually earns his sentiment, just can’t get the tone right. “Bernadette” is supposed to skewer the norms of family, suburban life and motherhood. While Bernadette should be a creature out of Wes Anderson, Blanchett and her director opt for “The Addams Family” instead. Nothing about it works.

Even without the laughable new material, the addictive quality of the short story is lost in adaptation from the get-go.

The abysmal “Gucci” would get a better grade, perhaps, if it was a term paper titled “How to Make the Assassination of a Famous Person Boring.”

Netflix needs to add a category for its new original film The Laundromat. Right under “Movies you might like” should be “Movies you will loathe.”

Thanks to Marvel, many films are trying to cash in on cape-and-spandex mania right now, but unlike the MCU, they look like crapola. If you’re going to make a superhero movie today, you gotta have a budget. “Secret Society,” perhaps, had Microsoft Paint.

The plot plods along — they drive a bit, guy gets shot, they drive some more, guy gets shot — and the dialogue is bottom of the barrel.

A lot of this is typical rom-com fare. The genre is not boundary-pushing and that’s perfectly fine — ideal even. But Ryan doesn’t have the sparkle and fizz as a director to make this lacking material sing.

It’s hard to believe Costner left “Yellowstone” to make such an embarrassing, poorly told mess.

“The Equalizer” should be locked in a room with “The Terminator.” Then this lousy series would finally be killed off.

The once-great franchise is hardly reborn from the amber this time. It’s slammed by an asteroid yet again.

Writer-director Kay Cannon has shattered Cinderella’s glass slipper. And we, the audience, are forced to walk across the shards barefoot.

Zeller’s latest mental health movie is an exhaustingly tedious experience in which you check your watch several times a minute while taking breaks from giggling at the clumsy dialogue.

Still, Poms mostly patronizes older people as it turns them into punchlines. Be regressive! B.E. R.E.G.R.E.S.S.I.V.E!

Ethan Coen’s road-trip comedy “Drive-Away Dolls” does not have that cinematic new-car smell. No, the stale scent is closer to months-old, unfinished McDonald’s Happy Meals and inexplicably maroon stains. The creaky vehicle has racked up so many miles, it barely starts. So tired and unappetizing, this dreadful film is.

Mine all you like. You’ll never find any smarts in this cavern of stupidty.

John Travolta’s new film is a lot like “Misery” — just without the acclaim.

Like most of Netflix’s films outside of awards season, “Atlas” is a sluggish afterthought that settles for being just short of OK.

Over its interminable, nearly two-hour runtime, the film repeatedly mocks its very existence.

“Love Hurts” is only 83 minutes long. “Hurrah!,” you say before it starts. But the film feels endless because the story is such a chore to follow.

The drama is a crude blend of history and pulpy romance, with maudlin performances from the two leads.

The son of Muppets creator Jim Henson has delivered a cliché-ridden, laughless bore that wastes lead actress Melissa McCarthy’s prodigious comic talents and beats well-trod territory with a mallet.

On paper, “Moonfall” has all the hallmarks of an Emmerich blockbuster — natural disasters, parents separated from children, the total annihilation of Manhattan — but with a twist so baffling, you pinch your arm to make sure you are really awake. No need to reach for your dream journal — it’s all painfully real.

The embarrassing drama — offensive, clunky, poorly written — sullies Eastwood’s storied legacy, and makes great actors such as Bradley Cooper and Dianne Wiest come off like amateurs.

As always, Dracula sucks blood. But his latest movie simply sucks.

Their heads spun 360 degrees. They vomited up green sludge. They violently shouted curse words...No, not the demonically possessed girls in “The Exorcist: Believer” — the awful movie’s furious audience.

No phrase terrifies me more than “for the fans,” because in the movies that tends to mean “awful and incomprehensible.” And so it does for “Mortal Kombat II,” an onscreen bucket of slop that people will give a pass to because losers cheer whenever a character, such as they are, is impaled or sliced in half.

This franchise really belongs in the rearview mirror.

The tragedy of Hutchins’ death overshadows anything that’s good about the film, sadly including her own grand cinematography.

“Solo,” sadly, should be frozen forever in carbonite.

For all its detailed worlds, like the Mushroom Kingdom and Jungle Kingdom, the Nintendo film is just another soulless ploy to sell us merchandise that doesn’t bother to disguise its creativity-starved greed. Mostly the movie comes off like a video game we’re unable to play.

The packaging of “Barbie” is a lot more fun than the tedious toy inside the box.

Coogan and Isla Fisher, as his friendly ex-wife, are well-cast, if too mean and fake. But their comic talents are wasted on Michael Winterbottom’s sorry attempt at a mockumentary. Actually, it’s a bit greedy.

Nobody is good in this thing. You’d think it would be nostalgic to see Dern, Neill and Jeff Goldblum together again, but they all act like old fogies, and they’re written to sound like morons.

Fresh off of winning the Best Director Oscar for "Nomadland," Chloé Zhao has upchucked one of the MCU's worst movies in ages.

“Venom”? More like cyanide. The latest movie off the Marvel assembly line is a disaster on every level, from the hatchet-job writing to the horrid performances. Like so many recent superhero movies, Venom has put its focus on juvenile humor instead of heart or action.

This fantasy flop is sunglasses-and-fake-mustache bad.

Gibson’s got another strong performance in him, I think, but this Christmas crapola sure ain’t it.

It’s long, dumb and there’s nothing below these high-school students’ conspicuously perfect complexions.

If Canadian director Bruce McDonald’s dreams are anything like the disgusting underworld we see in his new movie Dreamland, get the man a doctor.

The failed attempt at cleverness in Lanthimos’ movie is that nobody is actually kind here; they are inordinately cruel. There’s nothing wrong with that — so is Richard III — but these exploits are not particularly entertaining or profound, only random and repetitive.

The latest labored take on the old British legend, Robin Hood is little more than a pitch-black war film, complete with rudimentary medieval bombs and blood spatter on the camera lens.

The Rock arrives with the power of a pebble in the new action movie “Black Adam,” in which the popular star plays the titular anti-hero in his first solo outing. It’s just as thoughtless and rancid as the rest of DC Comics’ crummy catalog.

Some of the powerful characters you thought were good are evil and vice versa. It’s like “Wicked,” but wretched.

The characters are so wacky you don’t believe them as killers or strategists or even just bystanders who are in the right place at the right time. You simply don’t buy anything about them. Ever.

For those of you who thought Al Pacino yukked it up too much as Jimmy Hoffa in “The Irishman,” get ready for this ham dinner.

Making an outlaw flick — not so easy, is it?

Watching it, unless you’re already a demented diehard fan, is utter agony.

If you thought Marvel Studios was committed to getting back on track by making fewer movies of higher quality, wait till you see Captain America: Brave New World...The situation over there is so dire, they’ve brought back a plotline from “Eternals.” “Eternals”!

She also doesn’t satisfy. At all. After experiencing Meg, you’ll crack open your Little Shark Book and call up Jaws.

This whole half-baked sequel is a forced exercise, willed into being by the so-called “Keanussance” — society’s renewed love affair with Reeves. He’s a nice guy and a decent actor, but he’s made a lame movie. It’ll let down even hardcore fans.

At the start, “The Cut” is an adequate, typical gloves-and-shoves picture. And then, with a snap of the fingers, director Sean Ellis’ film turns absolutely interminable.

Moore, by the way, has never been a comic genius. The woman has played Hester Prynne — not the Laugh Factory. Still, she keeps giving the yuks the old college try. Here, the usually easeful actress cranks things up to Ludicrous Speed, and comes off like a drugged-up yogi.

As expected, director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s woeful film “Back to Black” doesn’t play as the gripping battle of musical genius vs. personal demons it fancies itself to be. Instead it’s all sadness, songs and sensationalism.

Directed by Guy Nattiv, the sluggish film caves to the worst tendencies of forgettable biopics. Mirren is ensconced in prosthetics and a gray wig in hopes that a lookalike transformation can distract from bad writing and a total lack of insight.

The seventh movie in the franchise, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, is a predictable return to rock-em-sock-em stupidity with nothing to add except Michelle Yeoh as a talking aluminum falcon.

One of the worst depictions of our city ever filmed.

Netflix has padded its catalog of cinematic background noise some more with Murder Mystery 2, the instantly forgettable sequel to its rancid whodunit comedy starring Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler as married crime solvers.

It’s a “Dumb and Glummer” of a sequel that confuses the worst punchlines ever for Prosecco fizz, when the groaner jokes go down like lukewarm vodka.

There is nothing to like or admire in this groaner galaxy. The movie has the unconfident, powder-sugar tone of a Disney direct-to-video release, like “The Lion King 1½,” paired with the overeager advertising of an internet pop-up.

The CGI, by the way, looks awfully cheap in a market that includes boundary breakers such as Pixar and DreamWorks. Hanna-Barbera was never the animation powerhouse that Disney and Warner Bros. were back in the day, but it overcompensated with personality. Warner Animation Group’s Scoob! has got none of that.

The treacly trifle is just more of the same Hallmark-inspired Christmas white noise for people who defend these terrible, sappy movies as chicken soup for the couch potato’s soul.

The fighting is unsatisfying, and renders the film a failure.

The Queen biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody” had plenty of issues, but the electricity of the re-creation of the Live Aid concert was not one of them. While “Michael” shares the same producer as the Freddie Mercury flick — and a nearly identical performance from Mike Myers as a jokey music exec — it boasts none of the nostalgic thrills.

Noooo! Anything but another slapdash horror film with a lazy plot that hinges on artificial intelligence!

Director Andy Tennant’s tone, by the way, resembles that of religious films, like last year’s “Breakthrough” with Chrissy Metz. Holmes is wholesome, and her third-wheel suitor, Tuck (Jerry O’Connell), is well-intended, if tortilla-flat. The music is cheesy and inspirational. But the whole thing is covered in materialist grime.

Please wipe this movie from my “Memory.”

For a film with the nuance of a nuke, Palmer’s by-the-numbers journey nods along like elevator music.

Hollywood isn’t just churning out crummy remakes of great films anymore — now it’s doing awful remakes of mediocre films. For evidence, see Overboard. Or, rather, don’t.

Carousel is one of those tundra, dimly lit living-room movies that snobs defend as closer to “real life.”

There are some surprisingly attractive shots in director Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s low-budget film — honey drips from Winnie’s mouth in a sadistic “Silence of the Lambs” way — and the acting is committed rather than arch (even if the dialogue is lousy-to-inaudible). Yet it is impossible to recommend to the average horror fan in search of a good movie.

80 for Brady would be close to worthless were it not for the prodigious talents and chemistry of its marvelous cast.

Donna Summer’s disco classic “Last Dance” does a good job of summing up Steven Soderbergh’s new movie Magic Mike’s Last Dance: When it’s bad it’s so, so bad.

Don’t expect a single novel element here — everything is recycled from the junkyard.

Legends is the latest in a long line of terrible “Karate Kid” movies. A passing of the torch, such as it is, to the next inferior rip-off.

The plot is a watered-down grab-bag of old, tired ideas.

By the end of this derivative, heartless mess, you’ll conclude that a garbage dump is exactly where writer-producer James Cameron’s new project belongs.

After two lousy sequels, here’s a pitch for Warner Bros.: “The Matrix Retirement.”

How would “Slightly less terrible!” look on a poster? That is my approved quote for Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a perverse exercise in fanboydom on HBO Max that tacks on two extra hours of footage to a maligned 2017 DC Comics movie to create a kind of new, still-bad movie.

In the pantheon of James L. Brooks films, “Ella McCay” is far from as good as it gets.

It’s a violently annoying and annoyingly violent ensemble piece speckled with “look how wacky we are!” characters that are impossible to put up with; a copycat Coen Brothers yarn with the depth of a tortilla.

The Goldfinch should be called “CliffsNotes: The Movie,” because after seeing this pedantic film adaptation, I now know all 3 billion plot points of Donna Tartt’s acclaimed 2013 novel. And, like skimming a colorless cheat sheet, I still have no clue what’s so great about it.

The long-gestating thriller The Woman in the Window, based on A.J. Finn’s novel, is here, and it sure is dusty.

Ronan has a flair for visuals, no doubt about it. And I liked looking at them. The trouble is his slideshow of impressive landscapes and environments evokes nothing deeper and, actually, is a roadblock to character development and story momentum. Scenic detours.

Racially offensive quips, flagrant sexism and Tourette syndrome gags all contribute to this witless, scare-free junk.

In the pantheon of films about magical cars, this one is not big, bold or beautiful.

Amsterdam has every advantage imaginable. Doesn’t matter. It’s the worst movie of the year so far, and I will bow down to whatever comes along and tops it.

I’d rather wake up next to a severed horse head than ever watch Gotti again.

Unfortunately, for the time being, the star of “Tár” and “Blue Jasmine” is stuck as the lead of the worst movie of the year — a grueling, 102-minute endurance test that’s as lifeless as the video game it’s based on.

There simply aren’t enough synonyms for “loathsome” to do the new movie The Hunt justice. Perhaps if we expand into other languages. C’est détestable! È ripugnante!

“The worst superhero movie yet” is a phrase I’ve written so much in the past three years, I should make a keyboard shortcut for it. “Madame Web” is F6.

With sub-par material, Levi pretending to be a kid and naively shouting and pouting has turned grating.

In order: bland, annoying and misused.

Music is totally unwatchable.

From beginning to end, the craft — directing, acting, writing, editing, design — is just not there.

The race for worst movie of the year is heating up. You could even say it’s hotter than hell, now that Hellboy has taken the lead. This awful, disgusting, unfunny, idiotically plotted comic book flick offends the senses as much as the rankest subway car on the hottest summer day.

Leave her at the altar! She is “The Bride!,” one of the absolute worst movies I have had the displeasure of watching in this job.

"I need something bad and fast,” criminal Graham Bricke says to a weapons dealer early in The Last Days of American Crime. The Netflix action film definitely fulfills one of those criteria: It is so, so bad — but it is ever eye-gougingly slow.

That this exercise in vulgarity was made at all is shameful. Dark Crimes is punishing to watch.

Talk about toxic masculinity — Buddy Games leaves you feeling dead inside.

For the most wonderful time of the year comes the worst movie of the year.

I Smurf-ing loathed it.

Miraculously, this clunker is worse than the original in every respect, but zero is as low as we can go. Like the original, “Spring Awakening” easily ranks among the worst movies of the year.

It’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen at Sundance.