Johnny Oleksinski

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

It's not asking much that a thriller be scary or shocking. This one waffles between being predictable and absurd.

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

This re-imagining of Chucky’s origins manages to be both crazier and more level-headed than the original, in which the doll strolled around Chicago talking like a gangster from “Guys and Dolls.”

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

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

Sorry to Raid on your parade, “Ant-Man” fans, but the third chapter is a pile of dirt.

You never believe Buck is the genuine article, so moments of danger and even cute mannerisms don’t land. Even the best-trained contestant at Westminster has some unpredictability.

Pugh, a sensational actress, keeps our interest as she grows increasingly suspicious and sees disturbing visions in mirrors and on windows. She brings class and gravitas to a movie that would otherwise be kinda trashy.

The whole movie is indistinguishable rubble.

Waffling Disney can’t decide if it wants this thing to be a quirky and fun but unsettling movie like “Beetlejuice,” with some real guts and creativity, or another schlocky ad for a Disney World FastPass. At times Simien’s film is surprisingly dark and emotionally honest, while at others it’s kitschier than “The Country Bear Jamboree.”

Do these stylistic and narrative departures constitute a smart shake-up of the old mummy formula, as Cronin’s movie promises to do? Eh, not really. The director mostly reshapes what a mummy actually is to suit his lackluster whims.

If the title makes you wince, know the movie is a lot better than it deserves to be. You’ll actually care about what happens to the prickly blue dude, even if you never cared about getting to zone seven.

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

The overlong and too-steady movie tries to say so much — about the struggles of being gay in the ‘80s, gender identity, nontraditional relationship structures — that it all comes off as white noise. Albeit white noise that has a borderline oppressive desire to make us cry.

Not a bad idea — and one that already worked out pretty well for John Hughes’ “Weird Science” in 1985. But here it’s a single-joke skit that’s too self-aware to be distinctively funny, freaky or thrilling.

What I love about Green’s style is he has both a sense of the grand — he gives Michael’s mask the cinematic weight of Moses’ Ten Commandments slabs — and the goofy.

In “Pinocchio,” when Geppetto wished upon a star, a hunk of wood became a real boy. Eighty-three years later, Disney’s latest animated film, called “Wish,” which is sort of about the origin of that same magical ball of gas, couldn’t be more wooden, manufactured or lifeless.

The will to live is missing from Netflix’s not-quite-sequel Bird Box Barcelona, and so is our will to watch.

Worse, it’s as funny as a political science class.

The first “Sonic” worked unexpectedly well because it thrust the wisecracking alien into a small town filled with humans — a hog out of water — and gave Carrey the opportunity to once again do the physical comedy he’s best known for. Now the novelty has worn off, the charms of the original have evaporated and there’s nowhere for the series to go.

There is also something a bit off about CGI that makes these behemoths appear less sturdy and imposing. Oddly enough, the most gravitas comes from Hall’s all-business scientist.

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

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.

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

Really, “Small Player” is a great movie until it abruptly isn’t.

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

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.

While Bigbug is characteristically eccentric, it also has the most mainstream appeal of any Jeunet film since “Amélie.”

The voice work and the overly smooth animation mostly stink.

Scott Thomas sounds like she’s about to pull out a shiv and knife her new boss right then and there. The actress is so good, you wish she could reprise the role in a better film that actually deserves her.

The film begins at ugh and ends at dang. You don’t yell at the screen so much as yawn at it. An intriguing plot then turns into a telltale heart that doesn’t pulse.

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.

This franchise really belongs in the rearview mirror.

This wannabe works oh so hard to be a contemporary detective noir, with its shadows, damsel in distress and brooding narration. But it never finds the suspense or sensuality of that genre.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Upside has a downside: We’ve seen it a million times before.

I’ll give credit to Krasinski for endeavoring to deliver a new, if derivative, story. He’s not made a loathsome movie, really, but forgettable mush.

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

The Tomorrow War, in trying to become the new Independence Day (this release date is not arbitrary), throws Alien, The Terminator and A Quiet Place in a blender. And, like that gross kale smoothie you made once, the result is gray goop.

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.

Uncharted, you say? That’s a funny title for an action-adventure movie that doesn’t stray one inch from the well-trodden path of what came before it.

Crowe — knowingly, I think — clowns around from start to finish. Even if the horror doesn’t have you screaming, his Italian accent will.

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

If Wonder Park were a carnival attraction, it would be the merry-go-round. The animated movie has animals, relentless positivity and the most predictable journey ever. You must be no more than 4 feet tall to ride this one.

[Reitman] finds the perfect tone here . . . He’s also skilled at getting genuine performance out of young actors, as he proved in “Juno,” and balancing humor with stakes — essential for comedy-horror like “Ghostbusters.” The jokes are very funny and Wolfhard and Grace make life-threatening peril look like a ball.

“Pieces” becomes just like every other addiction film, relying on colorful addict characters and torture-porn scenes to arrive at a hopeful end.

Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo of “Avengers: Endgame” fame, the well-worn drama gets high marks for style and proficiency, but you don’t have to be Nostradamus to know exactly where it’s going every step of the way. At the movies, stories like this one are a dime bag a dozen.

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.

While a tad too light, as these films often are, nobody is making animated characters as funny or likable (or marketable) as the Minions.

Writer-director Matthew Vaughn, who’s helmed all three, needs to either call it quits or hand over the reins to someone with some self-control. The formidable talent of Ralph Fiennes can lift his movie some, but the man’s not Hercules.

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.

In Hot Summer Nights, Chalamet proves he’s learned Hollywood’s most important trick of all: consistency. His performance here is every bit as good as those past credits — more so, in some respects, thanks to his comedic chops — even if the film’s prestige is dampened by, well, tons of pot, cocaine and gnarly murders.

The film is empty-headed good fun that’s blessedly under two hours and has just enough character development to make you kind of care when someone gets bitten.

The action film is as unpretentious as Charlie Sheen eating a Krispy Kreme doughnut at Six Flags. In short: blissfully dumb entertainment.

A purely entertaining, scary flick will infuriate the culturati who like their movies like they like their Atlantic articles: long and academic. However, despite some issues, this Janelle Monáe film is a breathless watch.

A slow trudge devoid of suspense and adrenaline.

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

Providing a hint of redemption is Edgar-Jones, a naturally vulnerable actress who can turn the shallowest of material into something deep. We like Kya and are with her every step of the way, even though at over two hours there about 50 steps too many.

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

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

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.

Pretty far-fetched even for a franchise about rare genetic mutations that allow people to read minds and shoot lasers with their eyes. It’s not bad, just crazy.

Director Josh Boone’s goal was to jettison the usual comic-book trappings and make The New Mutants a horror film. He succeeded on the first part, but not the second. Nothing is scary or heroic. Perhaps unsurprising coming from the guy who directed “The Fault in Our Stars,” it’s all teenage troubles: love, sex obsession, a tinge of self-harm.

The fights, taken on their own, are occasionally OK, but not enough to lift this joke-and-fun-free slog.

Whenever there’s a lull here, a big laugh soon comes along with the force of a boa constrictor that conceals the flaws.

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.

It’s a lot better than the 1997 version, if equally as stupid.

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.

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.

The Lost Kingdom isn’t well done, but it isn’t miserable either.

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”!

Blunt and Dornan’s chemistry eclipses anything the hunky actor ever managed with Dakota Johnson in “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

This film should be reliably filling as pizza for dinner. But the deliveryman is an hour late and has dropped the box.

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

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.

It’s a pleasant watch with some solid jokes.

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

Although a quick summary would suggest that Our Little Secret is the simplest and most domestic of Lohan’s trilogy of terror, the devices that lead to its wrap-up are anything but Hallmark happy.

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

Indeed, Clancy has written 20 books featuring John Clark. But, even with a star as charismatic and physically formidable as Jordan, audiences won’t be hungry for a single sequel.

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.

Such a comedy cannot depend solely on its supporting cast, especially when they’re tasked with lifting up subpar material.

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

Crystal, for what it’s worth, stays genuine through the increasingly viscous plot. He still has that warmth beneath his zingers that you don’t find in the frigid comedians of today. Nonetheless, we resent his movie’s aggressive efforts to force us into crying with strained, untruthful moments by the bucketful.

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.

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

As the horror genre has, in recent years, grown more sophisticated and clever, you heave a sigh of relief to be handed a thriller that’s so dumb.

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.

It really all comes down to the Bellas. With brilliant actresses like Wilson, who has a badass fight scene this time, and Kendrick, the stealthily vicious pixie, the studio could drop this cast in a DMV with a pitch pipe and they would make a decent movie out of it — a movie that I would pay to see.

Most of this film is humorless and with not so much of a score as a subwoofer.

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

Robert Zemeckis’ film “Here” is an object lesson in how to take a touching idea and make an extremely annoying movie out of it.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Nestled inside that warm setup is cloying dialogue, condescending voice work and confusing story tangents.

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.

The book is a fascinating, insightful, touching window into a unique community with immense struggles. On-screen, it’s exploitative.

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

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.

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

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!

“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.

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

A loony con-job that comes up short on being convincing.

This humorless, sadistically violent wreck has not a single satisfying second. It does, however, have more than 50 F-bombs.

The cacophonous ending sets up a sequel, but I hope it never sees the light of day. Actually, considering it’s about vampires, maybe I do!

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

“Grandpa” is, at least, not as moronic as much of De Niro’s recent résumé. But that’s a low, low bar.

Of course, nobody watches a Jackie Chan movie for the sophisticated plots or deep characters. They come for the martial arts. But those, too, settle for being not much more than a kick in the park.

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

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 races of Trading Paint, however, are as exciting as a Ford Taurus trying to parallel park.

“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.

Please wipe this movie from my “Memory.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

I Smurf-ing loathed it.

Preying on a hurting city might be forgiven if the movie was any good. But Willis, who was once a formidable action star, is performing “Die Hard With an Ambien” as he exhibits zero emotion and mutters under his breath like an accountant who’s upset with his boss.

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.

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.

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

Devil, make a better movie.

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

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.

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.

“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.

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.

Rambo: Last Blood features what’s easily the most violent movie scene of the year. It’s awesome.

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.

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

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

Music is totally unwatchable.

The scenes are either too heavy (the climax is the downer of the year), too sedate or too gross.

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

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

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

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.

"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.

This British sci-fi thriller is like the violent offspring of “Black Mirror.”

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

Regina Hall is always extraordinary — even in projects that are mediocre.