Worst movies of the past decade: 'Joker: Folie à Deux,' '50 Shades Darker,'  8 more

With the pandemic behind us and Hollywood box office expected to improve this year, it’s time to get back to a hallowed tradition at the movies: making fun of them.

As Newsday’s film critic, I rate movies on a scale of four stars (the very best) to zero stars (the pits). Both extremes are rare: I give out maybe one or two of each in an average year. And while I love to heap praise on a great movie, I’ll be honest: The bad reviews can be fun to write (and, I hope, to read). With that in mind, here are the 10 worst movies — all rated zero stars — from the past 10 years.

ALOHA (2015)

Bradley Cooper plays an ex-military man who tries to bed a happily married woman (Rachel McAdams) while also flirting with a Hawaii resident Air Force pilot (Emma Stone). Some hero! But he also blows up a satellite by pumping it full of rock music. So, all is forgiven?

BY THE SEA (2015) Angelina Jolie wrote, directed and starred in this faux-European art film about a woman moping around France with her novelist husband (Brad Pitt). There’s a lot of staring and smoking. Imagine a two-hour fragrance commercial, and you’ve got the gist.

JUPITER ASCENDING (2015) A housecleaner (Mila Kunis) sells her eggs to buy a telescope, then meets a half-wolf warrior (Channing Tatum). Oh, and she has the power to control bees. From the Wachowskis ("The Matrix") comes a statistical marvel — 127 minutes and not a single good idea.

FIFTY SHADES DARKER (2017)

We all knew the sequel to "Fifty Shades of Grey" could only be worse. Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan try to bring E.L. James’s kinky romance novel to life, but all the sex toys in the world can’t help them. Lines like "I don’t know whether to worship at your feet or spank you" should have remained a fantasy.

UNDERWATER (2020) The crew members of a deep-sea research station (Kristen Stewart, T.J. Miller and others) run afoul of a predatory creature. That sentence has more thrills than the movie, another uninspired "Alien" knockoff. (Even the alien looks the same.) The deafening soundtrack is the only thing that kept me awake.

GODZILLA X KONG (2021) The screeching lizard meets the chest-thumping ape in this CGI-driven blockbuster, but the most repellent creatures are the humans. The rebellious teen (Millie Bobby Brown), the paranoid podcaster (Brian Tyree Henry) and the nonsense-spouting scientists (Alexander Skarsgård and Rebecca Hall) are all so irritating that you’ll start to root for world destruction.

AMBULANCE (2022)

What "Airplane!" was to disaster films, Michael Bay’s "Ambulance" is to action films — just not intentionally. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as bank-robbing brothers, the movie is one long high-speed chase during which the actors scream incoherently while the camera swoops around like a mad hornet. Secretly, I might recommend this one. It’s hilarious.

BLACK ADAM (2022) Dwayne Johnson inaugurates the DC Comics title character, who is either humanity’s savior or a harbinger of destruction (I’m still not sure which). The plot was impossible to follow yet, somehow, predictable.

THE MARVELS (2023)

Marvel outdid itself here with the cute one-liners, inside jokes and back-issue Easter eggs that fans have come to expect. Thing is, even fans need more than that. Despite the star power of Brie Larson as Captain Marvel, this self-amused superhero movie became the lowest-grossing title in the MCU.

JOKER: FOLIE à DEUX (2024) And the prize for worst film goes to ... Todd Phillips’ miserable musical starring Joaquin Phoenix (reprising his Oscar-winning title role from 2019) and Lady Gaga. What was this thing — a sad, sickly version of "Funny Girl?" A Broadway-style adaptation of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?" Aside from spending two hours with a cranky teenager, I can’t think of anything less tolerable than this movie.

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com