Naming the worst movies of 2022, before we, mercifully, can forget about them forever.

Following the ancient rules established for movie critics, I wrote up my top 10 movies of 2022 for The Salt Lake Tribune. (They ran in print on Christmas Day, and online the next day.)

What I didn’t include in my roundup — in the spirit of generosity and positive thinking — was my list of the worst movies of the year. I still wrote that list, because it’s cathartic for me to recall the bad stuff one last time so I can expel it from my mind palace (to borrow a phrase from “Sherlock”).

So here, in the mindset of “waste not, want not,” is my list of the worst movies of the year.

1. “Minions: The Rise of Gru” • Lots of little yellow creatures, not a single funny moment. (Michelle Yeoh, the star of my favorite movie of 2022, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” is in this, too. That’s range.)

2. “Pinocchio” • Director Robert Zemeckis, again getting lost in the technology, creates a creepy live-action and computer-animated remake of the Disney version that misses the point of what made the wooden boy human — while also leaving Tom Hanks, as Geppetto, to his worst acting impulses.

3. “Firestarter” • An 11-year-old with pyrokinetic powers is chased by shadowy government agents, in an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel that’s even less energized than the 1984 version.

4. “Samaritan” • Sylvester Stallone plays a superpowered guy reluctantly pulled from retirement in this idiotic action movie.

5. “Where the Crawdads Sing” • How many book clubs did it take to convince Hollywood to make this Southern Gothic murder mystery into a movie? Even with Daisy Edgar-Jones in the lead, it still doesn’t work.

6. “The Whale” • Brendan Fraser will likely win an Oscar for playing a self-loathing 600-pound man. Doesn’t mean the movie built around him is anything more than cliche-filled trash.

7. “Secret Headquarters” • Imagine “Spy Kids” without the charm. And with Owen Wilson.

8. “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” • Whitney Houston gets a biopic that’s so tightly controlled and so sketchily plotted (by the same guy who wrote “Bohemian Rhapsody”) that you’ll know less about the singer after the movie than you did before. 

9. “Black Adam” • I don’t blame this bloated action movie, starring Dwayne Johnson as a brooding anti-hero, for causing Warner Bros. to hit “reset” on its whole DC universe. Not that I don’t want the reset to happen, because I do. I just don’t think “Black Adam” did enough to cause it.

10. “Jurassic World Dominion” • When you have dinosaurs, why do you want to make a James Bond movie? One of the many questions this confused franchise extender left the audience pondering.