David Ehrlich

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.

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.

If [LaBeouf's] ultimately powerless to make this film worth watching, his performance is a strong reminder that his work should never be taken for granted.

An inoffensive, almost endearingly lame whiff of a movie that has the misfortune of arriving at a time when the superhero genre has almost returned to pre-MCU levels of popularity, this “Daredevil”-ass disaster is hilariously retrograde for a story about someone who discovers that she can see a few seconds into the future.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The more this film begs to be told from the inside out, the more Zandvliet shoots it from the outside in. It’s enough to make you wish he hadn’t shot it at all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.