Odie Henderson

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 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.

Science fiction is often used in allegorical fashion. It may not be fair to judge Automata by this gauge, but the film is so deathly somber and heavy-handed that I can only assume director Gabe Ibáñez wanted to tell us Something Important.

Isle of Dogs does not have a compelling story, and even worse, it has the most egregious examples of its director’s privilege since “The Darjeeling Limited.” This movie really pissed me off, and the only thing I found soothing while watching it was silently repeating to myself “the dogs are very furry.” Reminding myself of the film’s best asset kept me from walking out.

Sure, the events are scrambled, with minor changes here and there, but if you know what happens in “Madame Bovary,” you will not be surprised by this film. In fact, you’ll probably be as irritated as I was by Gemma Bovery’s attempts to be clever and meta.

It’s a slog at over two hours, much of it spent with Marinelli screaming or acting coarse.

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.

The most noticeable influence is “Universal Soldier,” a film that shares so many plot elements that Bloodshot can be classified as a blatant rip-off. That movie spawned three sequels; I can only hope Bloodshot’s bloodline ends here.

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 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.

So listless and dry that the only jolt of electricity I experienced was when the screener blew up seven minutes before the end. The half hour I spent fighting with the Magnolia Pictures website was more suspenseful and interesting than anything I saw in their product.

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.

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.

This movie is one big, unsatisfying tease.

The fact that director Ben Berman is making a documentary would make this concept quite unsavory, that is, if the entire enterprise weren’t so damn dull.

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

Would you enjoy a movie where Warren Buffet robs a bodega — and kicks the bodega cat for good measure? Because that’s what American Animals feels like.

Wait for this to show up where it belongs — on cable.

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.

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.

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.

There is not a single original idea in All Day and A Night. Not one solitary surprise is to be had here.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

There is little else worth mentioning about this derivative, clunky, haphazardly written and visually dull sports movie except the performances by Christopher McDonald and Michael Nouri.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Unfortunately, The Stanford Prison Experiment is a dramatization, and no matter how much it may adhere to the well-documented specifics of Zimbardo’s work, it is a massive failure.

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.

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

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.

As a techie, I expected more from Creative Control.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A sex comedy that just lays there and expects you to do all the work. Gordon-Levitt's direction is repetitive and dry, and his screenplay is a collage of badly cut out pieces from other movies.

You may think it unfair that I make comparisons between "Starbuck" and Delivery Man. Truth be told, my rating is higher because I'd seen "Starbuck." Had I not, Delivery Man would have been intolerable.

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

The ultimate invasion of its subject's privacy.

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.

Unfortunately, Words and Pictures fails at portraying both titular nouns.

Five Nights in Maine is as evasive as a corrupt politician. Its coyness about what’s truly in its heart of darkness is either cowardly or lazy, or some measure of both.

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.

Nothing in An Ordinary Man rings true; not the location, nor the performances nor the story.

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 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.

While Double Lover is as squeamish as most Cinemax-style wank material about a certain male organ, it’s more than charitable about its female counterpart. One can’t be faulted for expecting greatness from a film that opens with a close-up of a stretched out vagina morphing into an eye.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Luce is the worst kind of provocateur; it tosses out all manner of outrageous ideas and then, like those pathetic dudes on Twitter, it yells out “DEBATE ME!” As soon as you accept the challenge, the film folds like cheap origami. And this film has a lot to toss at you.

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.

Its plot is an unholy blending of “Taken," “The Searchers” and "Angel Heart." As befitting a January release, it’s also an early candidate for the 2016 worst movies list.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But don’t be fooled! This is not Oscar bait at all. Roman J. Israel, Esq. is the kind of horrendous hot mess an actor makes directly after he wins the Oscar.

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

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).

Best Man Down is billed as a "warm and funny comedy," a subjective description with which I do not agree. I would not consider this a comedy, let alone a warm and funny one. There are no laughs, and most attempts at humor are mean-spirited or embarrassing.

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.

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.

The current incarnation of Seagal is no fun at all.

For a movie that is supposedly about the consequences of absentee fathers, it sure has little of importance to say about the families they desert. The Moon deserves better symbolism.

Watching Drinking Buddies is like being the designated driver for a most uninteresting bunch of drinkers.

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.

All you need to know is that this slow-moving, sci-fi origin story was made by Norwegian co-writer/director André Øvredal, the man who previously gave us the far more entertaining “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.”

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

I suppose director Paula van der Oest was trying to go for some kind of European Gothic feel, but something this unsavory needs to move a lot faster than this. This contraption is slower than molasses in winter.

This is a very bad movie that manages to be as insulting as it is stupid.

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

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

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

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.

Here is a movie that wants to traffic in Coen Brothers-style nihilism yet lacks any of their storytelling skill.

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.

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.

At a scant 84 minutes, you’d think it would move fast enough to make you forget its massive lapses in logic in favor of chills and thrills. Alas, that’s not the case here.

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.

This is an astonishingly bad film.

Ghost Team is neither scary nor funny.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

There’s a rather disturbing sense of privilege in After the Fall. It can’t help but justify Ben’s actions by stacking the deck against the victims.

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.

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.

Watching Hercules, you can feel your intelligence being insulted in almost every frame.

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.

The resulting mishmash is as exciting as getting a tow from AAA, and just as slow.

The word convoluted does no justice to just how poorly designed Girl on a Bicycle is. It is also stereotypical, unfunny, unromantic, absurd, sitcomish, insulting to several European ethnicities and a slave to what Roger Ebert used to call "The Idiot Plot Syndrome."

If you want to see the 1992 Los Angeles riots turned into a bad sitcom and an even worse Lifetime movie, buy a ticket to Kings.

Traffik begins with that classic cinematic lie “inspired by true events” and ends with statistics for women who have been victims of human trafficking. Between these two bookends is a steaming pile of exploitative horse manure masquerading as a feature concerned with the sexual enslavement of women.

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

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

This movie isn’t just tone-deaf, it’s ass backwards.

A Haunted House 2 tones down the gay jokes but ups the streak of animal cruelty.

For those who like their romance movies filled with unnecessary mysteries, murdered dogs, poached lobsters and the ghosts of deceased little girls, Dirt Music will fit the bill. All others need not apply, not even if you’re into the kind of Nicholas Sparks-style drama this movie shamelessly marinates in for an interminable 105 minutes.

The plot is completely forgettable and Story’s direction is atrocious here. He can’t balance the numerous attempts at unfunny comedy with the sudden outbursts of extreme gunplay. The action sequences lack any sense of excitement and only once do the stars of comedy and action align.

It’s tedious at best, almost unwatchable at worst.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

You’ll see some durable makeup in Nina. What you won’t see is any justification why this film should exist.

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.