David Ehrlich

A limp and lifeless historical melodrama that aspires to be the “Pearl Harbor” of the preamble to World War I and still falls well short of that ignoble goal, Joseph Ruben’s The Ottoman Lieutenant tries to snatch a love triangle from out beneath the Armenian Genocide but fails to get any of the angles right.

The only meaningful connection made over the course of the movie is the one between its actors, whose inability to salvage their material does more to braid them together than any of the machinations of Day’s script.

Save for dashes of Jeunet’s bespoke visual flair and an enthusiastic cast of actors whose go-for-broke performances scream for stronger material, Bigbug doesn’t resemble a late-career misstep from a beloved auteur so much as it does the product of a neural network that was simultaneously forced to binge-watch “The Terminator” and “The Dinner Game” until it spat out a shooting script.

The film is so busy attending to all its people that it never manages to adequately serve any of them.

Cats may have nine lives, but you only get one, and it’s too precious to waste on this drivel.

Geostorm is terrible entertainment, but it’s a remarkably effective window into Donald Trump’s soul.

Not even a fun premise and a talking parrot sidekick can save the movie from its low budget, general lethargy, and abject lack of craft.

Brian Petsos’ interminable Big Gold Brick may be a film absent even the faintest trace of purpose or momentum — its endless parade of energy-less moments connected only by the lack of life shared between them, like a daisy chain of skeletons who are all holding hands — but the writer-director sincerely deserves credit for willing his feature debut into existence.

The jokes are few and far between, and the film lacks the spark of imagination required to engage meaningfully with young viewers... but Fire & Rescue is a competent distraction all the same, mostly on the strength of its non-threateningly round animation and magic-hour color palette.

There are any number of reasons why the vast majority of comedy sequels are borderline unwatchable, but there’s ultimately only one thing that the worst of them all share in common: They give the audience what they think they want, not what they don’t yet know they want.

Series fans will feel cheated by such a chintzy and incurious take on something they love, while the rest of us will be left wondering how the source material earned itself any fans in the first place.

It’s hard to find even ironic enjoyment in something this high on its own supply; something much less interested in how its namesake broke the rules than it is in how its director does, and something tirelessly incapable of finding any meaningful overlap between the two.

Even if it’s possible to understand how Music got made, and even if you accept that Sia’s blinkered approach began with good intentions, such generous allowances don’t make this tone-deaf debacle any less difficult to stomach.

Entourage can’t muster enough conflict for a podcast, let alone a feature.

Graced with a hilariously definitive title, America is astonishingly facile, a film comprised entirely of straw man arguments.

The Railway Man is such a safe, respectful portrait of true-life catharsis that it feels afraid to reopen the same old wounds it exalts Lomax for confronting.

Sing is the Platonic ideal of an Illumination movie. It’s a profoundly soulless piece of work that shines a light on the mediocrity they foist upon the children of the world.

Told with the gravitas of a comedy sketch and the edginess of the funny pages, Elvis & Nixon at least has the good sense to appreciate that its namesakes were larger than life, each walled off from the world in their own way.

Perhaps no other movie has better illustrated the golden rule of CGI: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

The maddening frustration of her first unambiguous misfire — which is worse than bad because it could have been good — is that it feels so much, but conveys so little.

Cross-cutting the story of a cancer victim who’s struggling to maintain her agency with the story of the woman who’s trying to cure her should compellingly enhance both threads, but Bernstein refuses to take advantage of his film’s structure and draw meaningful connections between the two.

Like all of the very worst dark comedies, Jon S. Baird’s insipid and self-satisfied Filth isn’t content to merely tap into viewers’ most odious desires. It also insist that it’s revealing them.

A downcast and thoroughly dreadful supernatural drama that somehow fails to mine even a moment of fun out of a cautionary tale premised on the idea that your smartphone might literally be a portal to hell.

It’s the work of a studio that’s gobbled up the rest of the film industry and is still hungry for more. The Lion King feels less like a remake than a snuff film, and a boring one at that.

Lewins’ reductively humanist approach is at odds with how distanced the movie feels from any trace of a real human at its core.

A stagnant portrait of the degradation that envelops those fortunate enough to live so long, the film desperately tries to mine sweetness from the banality of life’s endgame, but the falseness of its bittersweet storytelling only accentuates the misery.

While the rest of Silent Night is so abysmal that its prologue might as well be the last hour of “Hard Boiled” by comparison, it’s hard to imagine a more appropriate introduction to a movie whose only upside is the vulgar thrill of watching something that feels utterly anonymous and wildly idiosyncratic at the same time.

Woefully inauthentic, milquetoast as a mild breeze and far too tidy for any of its sweeping resolutions to have even the faintest hint of staying power, The Hollars takes 88 minutes to inspire the same warm and fuzzy feeling that a Hallmark card can deliver in a heartbeat.

An insufferable movie that wants to be profound and benign in equal measure.

If you’re going to make an R-rated horror wank about Dracula slurping throats with a smile on his face, make sure that the rest of the movie doesn’t suck as hard as he does.

The poorly wrapped The Christmas Chronicles 2 feels like a last-minute gift that someone bought at a gas station on December 24. By the time a bunch of Pikmin-like elves get sloshed on spiked cocoa and start singing “Who Let the Dogs Out,” it’s clear that children will only remember Columbus’ latest out of resentment at how soulless Christmas movies have become, if they remember it at all.

Janney makes a great murderous curmudgeon, but the script’s big reveal strands the actress with a “layered” character who’s never given the chance to transcend the most basic aspects of her archetype. Worse: She only gets to kill like three people!

Ultimately, the lackluster fight scenes are what make 14 Blades a disposable addition to the wu xia world.

The critical failure of Bohemian Rhapsody is that, 134 minutes after the lights go down, the members of Queen just seem like four blokes who’ve been processed through the rusty machinery of a Hollywood biopic.

From the flat battle sequence that’s shot with all the excitement of folding laundry, to the literal chess match that anchors the underwritten dynamic between Berg and his target, The Catcher Was a Spy shrugs through each bad scene as though it’s biding time for better ones to come.

A junky, paint-by-numbers crime saga that stacks up to The Town like Cats does to Singin’ in the Rain. It pains a lifelong New Yorker to say this, but Boston deserves better.

A slumming Spike Lee is still better than most directors at the top of their game, but Oldboy isn’t just Lee’s worst movie, it’s practically his “Wicker Man”.

This miserable chimera — skinned with Black’s wicked sense of humor, but too underdeveloped to survive on its wits alone — should never have been let out of the lab, as it poses a serious threat of boring people to death.

Luck is a terrible idea for a movie, executed poorly, and by someone who used to know better. The best thing I can say about the finished product is that, unlike most forms of bad luck, this one is wonderfully easy to avoid altogether.

No matter how basic Hawkins’ book might be in comparison to some of the ones that came before it, it’s hard to argue that it didn’t deserve better than this, that any story so smartly attuned to the need for women to hear themselves and each other should be reduced to such flavorless swill.

Zemeckis has made some unsuccessful films over the last 20 years, but The Witches is the most frustrating of them all because it feels like it could’ve been made by somebody else. Anybody else.

We used to watch movies and wonder “How did they do that?” The problem with Now You See Me 2 isn’t that we already know the answer, it’s that we’re not even inspired to ask the question.

A sugar-addled My Neighbor Totoro ripoff with a beautiful message and a hideous everything else.

Angel Has Fallen is the kind of movie that leaves you feeling restless and thinking about dinner long before the third act, but anyone who sticks it out until the bitter end will be rewarded with one of the greatest mid-credits sequences ever devised.

What does Rampage have? No satisfying action beats, no memorable images, and so little to say that it’s virtually impossible to say anything about it in return. It’s not a movie for critics, that much is clear. The problem is that it’s not for anyone else, either.

Cherry sometimes feels like more of a live-action comic book than any of the Avengers movies ever did.

This runaway train of a biopic renders an iconoclast in the most generic of terms, straining Mapplethorpe’s brief life into a series of bullet-points that feed into each other with all the drama of a Wikipedia page, and a fraction of the context.

Don’t be fooled by the lack of spandex: The Legend of Tarzan turns the Lord of the Apes into just another superhero, the newest movie about fiction’s greatest wild man memorable only for the dull irony of how housebroken it feels.

The Emoji Movie might have been a boring and brazenly cynical piece of corporate propaganda, but at least it had the courtesy to be offensive. Kidnap, on the other hand, doesn’t have the the courtesy to be much of anything.

This “Mortal Kombat” is more broadly watchable than the 1995 version ever was, but it’s hard to shake the dull sensation that video game movies are now playing us.

Hulu’s dull and exasperatingly basic “The Princess” wastes a slew of talent on a straight-to-streaming cheapo so undercooked that it feels like an AMC psy-op designed to make you run to the nearest multiplex and beg for a ticket to whatever’s showing next.

Even among Gerard Butler vehicles, this one sinks right to the bottom.

It’s hard to understand why Doremus, whose Sundance-winning “Like Crazy” was an effective reminder that emotion can be a narrative unto itself, would regress towards a story in which he renders that idea redundantly literal.

Lee’s proven talent for mixing broad situational humor with sly character work is almost completely missing in action here.

It just sort of happens, and not even the movie itself seems to know why.

Like any office Christmas party you’ve ever been forced to attend, it kind of feels a little bit too much like work to be fun, and — like any office Christmas party you’ve ever been forced to attend — it’s just a tiny bit too diverting for you to storm out before the whole thing crawls to its sad conclusion.

Unfrosted sprinkles in a few choice examples of Seinfeld’s observational schtick (“the magic of cereal is that you’re eating and drinking at the same time with one hand”), but it mostly sees him using the film’s Boomer milieu as a backdrop for an uninspired mishmash of contrived sight gags and anachronistic cultural references.

The Current War forces viewers to spend so much time wading through its aesthetic that it becomes easy to lose track of its ideas, or grow too bored of them to bother following along.

Part of the problem is that films like Marauders have become so synonymous with cut-rate mediocrity that their awfulness is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Like most of Netflix’s seasonal assembly line of yuletide fare, “Love Hard” is both too well-cast for the Hallmark Channel and too half-assed for movie theaters. It’s likewise adrift between rom-com nostalgia, reckoning with the anxieties of dating in the digital age, and simply hitting enough data points to give the algorithm what it wants for Christmas.

The problem isn’t that Johnson can’t act — he definitely can! — the problem is that he doesn’t want to. He still wants the simple idolatry that a kid might have for their favorite athlete. He wants to be larger than life. But even the biggest of movie stars need to be a little smaller than that in order to give people something to watch, and not just look up to.

Faster than you can say, “Alexa, show me a piece of streaming content that crystallizes the grim future of feature-length comedies that have to satisfy an algorithm but not a theatrical audience,” you’re watching a lifeless, laugh-free slab of nothing like Superintelligence, which starts with “what if Skynet, but with jokes?” and then just gasps for air for the next 105 minutes.

The same video game aesthetic that facilitated his earlier B-movies has otherwise entombed this new one in a generic mess of C++.

A blockbuster as big and hollow as the Moon itself; one small step for bland, one giant leap for bland-kind.

The scenes where Creech and co are outracing the Terravex death squads are playful and inventive enough to provide a glimpse of what this movie could have been if it weren’t so remarkably bad in most other respects.

The Most Hated Woman in America makes it abundantly clear that Madalyn Murray O’Hair was a riveting human being whose story is worth telling in our messed up times, but the film never has the slightest idea of what that story might be about.

This bland stab at seasonal entertainment is too enamored by its own edgy revisionism to deliver on that promise, and after the 2020 that we’ve been having, everyone — young, old, Christian, and not — deserves something better in their stocking this year.

Blitz manages to land the occasional punchline, but the smattering of decent jokes only call further attention to the film’s complete lack of rhythm.

Suicide Squad never has the courage of its convictions — it doesn’t own anything. At best, Ayer rents some pre-existing pop iconography and charges us $15 to watch him take it around the block for a spin. Forget the “Worst. Heroes. Ever.” These guys don’t even know how to be bad.

The big problem with The Goldfinch — a lifeless film that doesn’t consist of scenes so much as it does an awkward jumble of other, smaller problems stacked on top of each other like kids inside a trench coat — is that it mistakes its source material for a great work of art.

The Lost Village may be awful, but it’s not malicious. It doesn’t flaunt its mediocrity or celebrate its ugliness — it isn’t “Sing.”

For a movie with so much stuff to look at, the only things you really see during The Nutcracker and the Four Realms are all of the recent movies that it’s flagrantly trying to recycle.

If we ever truly sympathize with Doremus’ nebulous characters, it’s only because they help us appreciate how painful it can be to spend so much time trying to divine meaning from utter emptiness.

An execrable film that’s redeemed by almost nothing besides Leslie Odom Jr.’s well-modulated lead performance and the ambient sense of unease that Green casts over the story’s first half, “Believer” is so creatively spineless and bereft of its own ideas that its entire concept of sacrilege is limited to imperiling its franchise’s legacy.

Rock biopics often struggle with the part after the party’s over, but The Dirt becomes unusually adrift; at times, you can’t even tell what decade you’re supposed to be watching.

Without a bloody foundation of truth to ground their swagger in reality or give it some kind of moral purpose, these two certified alpha males are completely lost; it’s like they were given all the various bits you need to assemble a watchable action movie, but went into production without any idea of how those pieces might fit together.

For better or worse, Akin’s eye remains a remarkable thing, as he arranges even the most emptily nihilistic parts of The Golden Glove with the gravitas of arresting visual geometry, and casts every role to sick perfection. It’s just his vision that seems to be the problem.

Of course, I’m fully aware that The Family Plan 2 wasn’t made for the critics. Not because it’s bad (which it is), but rather because it was only intended to be watched by people who don’t care if it’s good. This movie often feels like it was made by them too, which should be comforting to anyone who considers themselves a fan of the franchise.

Murder Mystery is the kind of lazy and uninspired trash that can only be made by someone who knows that it doesn’t matter; bad movies are made all the time, but precious few pieces of content are so content to breathe in their own foul stink.

Here is a movie that encourages you to give it the benefit of the doubt at every possible turn but has no interest in offering anything in return. If you liked the original, you’ll like this one less. If you loathed the original, may God be with you. Opa!

Using an overabundance of plot to pave over a remarkable paucity of jokes, “Memoirs” quickly tailspins into a lifeless supercut of cheap action, terrible gags, and a series of scenes in which increasingly dangerous stereotypes are fooled into believing that Sam is an actual assassin.

It’s worth remembering that the “Cloverfield” movies were only able to successfully disrupt conventional distribution methods because they’re good. The best thing you can say about this one is that it’s free with your Netflix subscription.

Trigger Warning only exists to serve the needs of a streaming algorithm, which is just as well, as that streaming algorithm is the only audience this undercooked and utterly lifeless piece of streaming content could ever hope to satisfy.

Special Correspondents is more about smirking sideways than it is laughing out loud, but it doesn't provoke much of either — it's one thing for Gervais to subdue his usual bark, but his bite has never been softer.

Blind is bad for many reasons, chief among them how it contributes to the belittling notion that representation doesn’t matter for a demographic that will never be able to see themselves on screen.

From the start, Whittington’s script lays everything out so schematically that there’s little reason to keep watching for the story.

For most of its interminable runtime, Action Point feels like a porno that deliberately ruins the sex scenes in order to stop you from fast-forwarding through the plot.

The strength this film exists to celebrate is directly contradicted by the weaknesses of its storytelling.

It’s almost a blessing in disguise that Proud Mary is so light on action, as Henson and Winston generate some real chemistry during the low-key moments they share together, both of them doing a fine job of negotiating between violence and vulnerability.

If this catastrophic bore of a film isn’t game over for “Rebel Moon,” then nothing will be able to stand in her way.

If Sleepless feels like the microwaved leftovers of a dish that was designed to be swallowed whole, Foxx is the frozen part in the middle, the bite that makes you regret that someone tried to heat this up in the first place.

As Alice runs from one hollow set piece to another, hitting every standard mark that a colossal movie like this must in order to pay for itself, her adventure grows less and less interesting with every turn. By the end, all that lessness is too much for the muchness to match it. Less is usually more, but when it comes to this franchise, none would be ideal.

It’s hard to tell if it’s deliberately targeting a certain demographic or just too sloppy and unsophisticated to work on anyone who’s learned to tell the difference in quality between “Cars” and “Planes.”

It’s not that it’s bad, it’s that it never could have been good. It’s an irredeemable disaster from start to finish, an adventure that entertains only via glimpses of the adventure it should have been.

These charmless characters are meant to learn that spending time with each other isn’t so bad, yet surviving 100 minutes with them is one of the great cinematic endurance tests of our time.

Apatow gets a lot of shit for making scattershot comedies that run the length of David Lean epics, but the patchwork of scenes that comprise his latest have less in common with “Funny People” than they do “Movie 43,” and might just be aimless enough to make the director’s critics appreciate the flow of his earlier work.

Song reference or not, the title alone should be a major red flag, but there’s no way to fully prepare yourself for the navel-gazing narcissism to come during the film itself.

Never quite sure where to put his cameras, Creevy attempts to compensate by placing them everywhere, and cutting between them as if at random.