Odie Henderson

Director Antoine Fuqua traffics in fan service of the highest order and the lowest quality. This is nothing more than a 127-minute series of poorly executed recreations of milestones in Jackson’s life.

I save the zero star designation for movies that I think have no redeeming value whatsoever or are morally repugnant. “The Drama” meets both criteria.

I suppose that if you’re familiar with the designer and his history, you’ll find this movie entertaining. But there’s nothing here for newbies or those wanting to know more about its subject. I found little of use, so it was a long, dreary slog to get to the end credits.

There isn’t a single original idea to be found here, nor a twist you can’t predict immediately. This film has what Siskel and Ebert used to call “the Idiot Plot.” That is, a plot that doesn’t contain a single credible moment, and would be over if everyone involved wasn’t an idiot.

How to Make a Killing should be a lot more fun than it is. The murders are poorly staged and unfunny, and Powell’s performance is so one-note and smug that you can’t root for him even if you think his killing spree is justified.

When Fennell swaps in her adult actors, the cracks start showing immediately. While strikingly attractive on their own, Elordi and Robbie have zero romantic chemistry.

Unfortunately, director Aidan Zamiri and his co-writer Bertie Brandes are equally bad at mockumentaries and generating suspense.

None of this is visually compelling, and “Mercy” plays like it was written as an AI system’s prompt response.

There is nothing I dislike more than a movie that demands that you love an obnoxious, insufferable protagonist. Marty Supreme is not only one of the worst examples of this phenomenon, it’s also one of the worst movies of the year.

Song Sung Blue leans too far into biopic tropes, and Brewer rushes through tragic and life-changing events far too quickly for a film that runs almost 2½ hours.

There’s a real identity crisis going on here. I can’t tell if director Tom Gormican is making a new horror comedy based on the original movie, a straight remake, or a feature-length fan fiction controlled by its characters.

This movie is a raging, unwatchable bore, filled with unnecessary details and interminable ramblings. Though it runs a mere 76 minutes, it feels like 76 hours.

The writing is coy when it should be direct, and the characterizations of the main antagonists are so broad that it reduces Martin to victim-like status.

If only this movie weren’t as slow as a sleepwalkng turtle. The story is constructed like one big, dark joke whose punchline isn’t worth sitting through 110 minutes to hear.

Nora Garrett’s screenplay isn’t concerned with fleshed out characters; everyone here is a stand-in for some issue designed to get a rise out of the audience.

Eleanor the Great is one of the worst and most distasteful movies I’ve seen in a long while.

The History of Sound is even more repressed than its characters, and at over two hours, that’s far from entertaining.

I’m not implying that a horror movie needs to be coherent to deliver the chills — watch any J-Horror movie for proof that this concept can work. But “HIM” doesn’t even try to be scary. It’s too busy bombarding us with nonsensical, quickly flashed images that divulge nothing.

Honey Don’t!, the neo-noir by director Ethan Coen and his wife, co-writer Tricia Cooke, is an unsatisfying mishmash of plot threads that neither intrigue nor coalesce.

As it adds extraneous characters, “Oh, Hi!” becomes so frustrating and unbelievable that I wanted to yell advice at the screen.

Fantastic Four: First Steps alternates between battle sequences that you’ve seen countless times and interminable scenes of exposition disguised as emotional beats. The actors play this poorly written material as if they were doing Ibsen, which is commendable, but their attempts fail because you truly don’t give a damn about their plight.

Your kids will probably love this movie, which means you’ll be watching it often. Excuse me while I giggle with unSmurflike malice.

Despite a high body count, director-cowriter Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s version is not gory enough to satiate gorehounds. The atmospheric cinematography, by Elisha Christian, and the bombastic score, by Chanda Dancy, fail to accompany or elicit a single good scare.

Song deconstructs rom-com tropes in service to a much meaner drama, with unlikable characters, a flimsy love triangle, and a dark subplot that is poorly handled.

After watching the worst Anderson movie yet, I was envious of the guy who blew up; he got to leave after only two minutes of this wretched comedy, the title of which sounds like a Robert Ludlum novel adaptation.

Robinson’s dedicated commitment to the bit is a given, but the bit is so one-dimensional that Craig stops being believable or human.

The Legend of Ochi is being pitched as a family movie by A24, but I don’t believe most kids would enjoy this slow-moving slog set in the Carpathian mountains.

The absurd plot twists in “Drop,” might be tolerable if the film weren’t so distastefully tethered to domestic violence.

This movie is bad in all sorts of ways, none of which has to do with the fact that Disney cast a Latina actor as Snow White. In fact, that actor, Rachel Zegler, is the film’s saving grace.

When we’re not being fed warmed-over narration and editing tricks that remind us of the Scorsese-directed examples, we’re trapped with a visibly disinterested De Niro. He barely gives one performance, let alone two.

While Lumbly brings a refreshing amount of Black anger and cynicism to his performance, Mackie is stuck in a kumbaya mode designed to not offend white viewers. It may be a brave new world, but it’s the same old story.

The big surprise is that none of these talented voice actors bring anything new or interesting to their one-dimensional roles.

It’s the cinematic equivalent of a classic-rock station, except instead of getting the genuine articles to serenade you, you’re stuck with a bunch of actors cosplaying famous folk singers.

Couple the broad acting and cliché-ridden screenplay with the fixed-frame format, and “Here” comes off like a bad sitcom, or even worse, a school play made by a bunch of fifth-graders who decided to tackle Eugene O’Neill or “Death of a Salesman.”

Perhaps Crowley was trying to deconstruct the clichés we’ve become accustomed to in romantic movies since the old studio system started churning them out. But even that explanation fails to hold water as “We Live in Time” repeatedly falls back on those dated, tired tropes.

Despite the frenetic pace, “Saturday Night” falls flat and fails to raise one goose pimple.

In addition to being a lousy musical, “Folie à Deux” is also a dreadfully dull courtroom drama.

That the director spent 40 years trying to make this worthless, 138-minute hot mess shocks me to no end. “Megalopolis” plays as if every iota of this once-great filmmaker’s talent got sold along with his vineyard.

Reagan is the worst kind of hagiography. It’s a wretched 2½-hour bore that’s uncurious about its subject.

Blink Twice may be aiming for a feminist statement, but it’s ultimately just a slasher movie with a bunch of one-dimensional Final Girls played by Alia Shawkat, Trew Mullen, Liz Caribel, and “Hit Man”’s Adria Arjona.

It’s sad when a film wastes the talents of so many fine actors. Sad for us, that is, because I’m sure they were all paid handsomely.

The reason romantic comedies fail so often is that they attempt too much. “Fly Me to the Moon” may be the busiest example I’ve ever seen. It’s also one of the worst, despite its eclectic needle drops convincing me that I need to buy its soundtrack album.

It felt like I was watching a Wayans Bros. movie instead of one that expected me to take the ideas of dying and grief seriously.

Julia von Heinz’s direction can’t handle the film’s tonal shifts, and the screenplay (co-written by von Heinz and John Quester) centers on two very poorly written leads who clash in ways that are supposed to be comedic but are mostly infuriating.

There are plenty of things that go bump in the night. “The Watchers” proves they’re only effective if you don’t sleep through them.

By the time the film settles down to give us a few solid dramatic scenes, I appreciated the effort but had long since stopped caring.

The somewhat inappropriate story won’t matter to youngsters who’ll be hypnotized by a color scheme so bright you need sunglasses to view it.

The problem with “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” is the same as so many of these franchise-based films: They’re all soulless special-effects extravaganzas where CGI takes the place of character development, good writing, and emotional connection.

Just as in the first film, I was put off by the white-savior narrative (Stilgar’s fervent belief quickly becomes grating), and the Hans Zimmer score that sounds as if Arrakis were in the Middle East rather than space.

Johnson tries her best, and O’Connor is good for a few laughs, but “Madame Web” is a lost cause. The special effects are confusing and the action scenes are poorly edited. By the time we get a rote explanation of Webb’s powers, it’s too late to care.

Argylle is a cynical cash grab that has the audacity to use that “new” Beatles song, “Now and Then” (itself a cynical cash grab pieced together with far more skill than this movie) as the basis for its score and the “love theme” for Aidan and Elly.

Night Swim has its characters make infuriatingly asinine decisions to serve its plot.

Parents will be tortured by this film. If the whiny adult ducks and their even whinier kids don’t give them a headache, the garish animation will.

Silent Night wants to be the new action movie associated with Christmas. But don’t worry, fans of “Die Hard”; that movie’s place is still secure.

Fierce and chaotic, the re-creations of war also fall short — the CGI in many scenes is shockingly bad. Whenever the movie threatens to become too dull, there’s a battle sequence. They start to blur together as the minutes slowly tick by.

This film’s comic antics are relentless, exhausting, and devastatingly unfunny. Waititi’s script (co-written with Iain Morris) can’t go 30 seconds without attempting a laugh — and failing most of the time.

Even if you’ve only seen one of these films, you won’t need to spend 156 minutes witnessing the rise of a madman whose actions never required any backstory in the first place.

Priscilla gives us little idea of the inner workings of Priscilla Presley. She’s an enigma in what is supposed to be a story of her empowerment.

PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie is not a good movie, but it should appeal to its intended audience. I admit I was bored, but to my surprise, I didn’t find it that much of a chore to sit through.

Gillespie and his editor Kirk Baxter cycle through scenes of these one-dimensional characters, headache-inducing montages of cable news footage, YouTube re-creations, and TikTok videos. The pacing is frenetic, but the content is mind-numbingly dull.

The end result is an inert bore. Golda fails as a character study and as an exploration of wartime mechanics. It succeeds only as Oscar bait.

The film’s visual look is as inert as its screenplay, and its attempts to make the real racing scenes look like Gran Turismo gameplay by overlaying the game’s graphics with live footage fall embarrassingly flat.

Strays is a live-action flick about talking canines. As a movie, it is not a good boy; it is a bad dog. But if I were currently 12, I might have reacted in a more positive way.

Inside the sci-fi dramedy Jules lurks a message about senior citizens being ignored and deprived of their independence simply because of their age. Unfortunately, the script by Gavin Steckler takes a most confounding route to get to it — one involving an alien, town hall meetings, and FBI agents who want to keep the extraterrestrial here under wraps.

This musical should have taken center stage in Theater Camp. The dreadful story surrounding it deserves to get the hook.

If you asked an AI program to create a Wes Anderson movie, you’d get Asteroid City, the latest — and worst — film from the writer-director of “The French Dispatch” (2021) and “Isle of Dogs” (2018).

I admire Maniscalco’s decision to make his character the butt of the jokes, literally and figuratively. If only the jokes were funny. He has zero romantic chemistry with Bibb, who appears to be acting in another movie entirely, but he and De Niro make a credible father and son.

Master Gardener is the third film in writer-director Paul Schrader’s redemption trilogy. The series includes 2017′s “First Reformed,” which is good, and 2021′s “The Card Counter,” which is not. Unfortunately, the trilogy ends with its worst entry, an excruciatingly slow white-savior narrative that aims to provoke yet does nothing but bore.

While Mafia Mamma fails as a comedy, it succeeds in delivering the graphically violent moments one expects from a movie about the Mafia.

Paint is so haphazardly thrown together it’s painful to watch.

The best I can say for The Super Mario Bros. Movie is that it’s infinitely better than its predecessor. But you don’t need a power-up to clear that bar.

At an outrageously over-long 127 minutes, writer-director Christopher Landon’s adaptation of Geoff Manaugh’s novel “Ernest” feels like a different movie every 15 minutes.

Not even John Toll, who won two Oscars for cinematography, can make this movie look good. Stay home and watch the real Super Bowl instead.

Director Kenya Barris, who also co-wrote the script with Jonah Hill, intended to make an edgy, race-based cringe comedy; the result is afraid of its own shadow. This Netflix release commits an even bigger sin by wasting the considerable comedic talents of former “Saturday Night Live” castmates Eddie Murphy and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

The Son is so concerned with trying to get an emotional rise out of the audience, to choke us with its pathos, that it fails to create believable three-dimensional characters.

Samaritan proves, to paraphrase Tina Turner, that we don’t need another superhero.

What I saw was a racially suspect disaster and another exploitation of Black pain for cheap, lazy thrills. Good Madam is a bad movie.

Director Patrick Hughes’ latest is both 112 minutes, and a hodgepodge of so many other movies that it becomes the most obnoxious of cinematic collages.

Not since Morgan Freeman’s Joe Clark in “Lean on Me” has a real-life person’s ass been kissed more by a movie. At least that movie had superior lips.

The Last Victim plays like a bet between the filmmakers and some sadistic bully who triple-dog-dared them to fit all its disparate plotlines into a cohesive whole.

The Aviary experiences a drop in quality during its attempts to goose the audience, but its two lead performances remain consistent.

How can we be interested if the movie we’re watching is as unimpressed with itself as we are?

Black folks don’t need the classes in Racism 101 “Master” offers; life gives us PhD’s early on. It’s not for horror fans because it’s a complete failure as a horror movie.

If this film were a person, it would tell you it had a Black friend and voted for Obama twice. That’s how insultingly simplistic it is about race.

The prior end to this series, “A Madea Family Funeral,” was actually a decent movie. Madea should have quit while she was ahead.

This is the same "young man's coming-of-age story" you’ve seen over and over. Nothing new has been added. The poster calls this “a feel good movie,” but who is supposed to feel good here? Certainly not the average viewer, who has seen this tired material so many times they can practically recite the dialogue.

This is three movies in one, each of which is progressively worse.

Umair Aleem’s script is so paint-by-numbers familiar that it leaves you wishing you’d watched one of the better movies it’s ripping off.

If you didn’t know Beckett was a thriller, you’d think it was about two mismatched people with dry interests, mundane conversations, and zero attraction.

Whether you think Casanova's a hero worth idolizing, or a dull-as-dishwater man whore from a sexist past, Casanova, Last Love will make you believe he deserved better than this.

Summer of 85 plays like a bad parody of movies like Love Story and Summer of ’42, stories where some undeserving male learns a valuable lesson from a love affair and death.

The main goal of Port Authority is the simple but unfortunately necessary message that “hey, trans people are people, too!” It’s too bad this film isn’t really about them.

This is one of those super-convoluted conspiracy theory movies where nothing makes sense and you simply stop caring. Saviors show up inexplicably at just the right time. People come off as evil for the sole purpose of misleading us. There’s no character development, a lot of patriotic posturing and the villain gives a lecture that must have been written before they cast a Black actor as its recipient. Despite endless gunfire and a lot of shit blowing up, most of the action sequences fail to quicken the pulse.

The three leads do a good job creating their characters, with cinematographer Kristian Zuniga giving each of their tales a specific look and color scheme. But this also suffers from that indie fever where the camera and framing goes askew and "documentary style" for no reason except to distract you from how familiar the story is.

A film with this incendiary of a title needed to have more to say about being LGBT in a hostile environment.

Horror movies don’t have to make a lick of sense as long as they get under your skin, engage in some intriguing myth making, gross you out, or simply terrify you. The Toll tries to do several of these, failing so badly that you may be angry at yourself for watching it.

How can a movie this visually glossy be so devastatingly uninteresting and dull?

Come Away evokes memories of “Radio Flyer,” the equally appalling 1992 child abuse drama where fantasy and cruel reality merged in ways that were shockingly offensive.