David Ehrlich

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Film.com, IndieWire, Slate, The A.V. Club, The Dissolve, Time Out
For 1,695 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 50% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1.8 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

David Ehrlich's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 64
Highest review score: 100 The Tale
Lowest review score: 0 Warcraft
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 976 out of 1695
  2. Mixed: 568 out of 1695
  3. Negative: 151 out of 1695
1695 movie reviews
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    • 56 Metascore
    • 58 David Ehrlich
    The Pale Blue Eye
    The Pale Blue Eye begins to double as a stiff but fanciful origin story for both Edgar Allen Poe and also the detective genre he would later help shape. The best stretches of Cooper’s thin and unhurried script find the film checking those two boxes at the same time, as its occult fascination enriches its all-too-human crimes (and vice-versa) until the border that separates this world from the next becomes as blurry as that which runs between reason and madness.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 42 David Ehrlich
    Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody
    A music biopic so broad and hacky it makes “Jersey Boys” seem like “All that Jazz,” Kasi Lemmons’ well-acted but laughably trite Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody is an anonymous portrait of a singular artist — a by-the-numbers “Behind the Music” episode that needs 146 minutes to say almost nothing about a once-in-a-lifetime voice.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 David Ehrlich
    Babylon
    It reminds us the movies have been dying for more than 100 years, and then — through its heart-bursting, endearingly galaxy-brained prayer of a finale — interprets that as uplifting proof they’ll actually live forever. It just doesn’t have any idea how the movies will do it, or where the hell they might go from here.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 42 David Ehrlich
    Pelosi in the House
    In trying to thread the needle between a tribute and a testimony, Pelosi in the House ultimately succeeds as neither.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 91 David Ehrlich
    Avatar: The Way of Water
    For now, the only thing that matters is that after 13 years of being a punchline, “going back to Pandora” just became the best deal on Earth for the price of a movie ticket.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 David Ehrlich
    Something from Tiffany's
    Adapted from the Melissa Hill novel of the same name, Something from Tiffany’s starts with a premise sweatier than Patrick Ewing at halftime, forcing Tamara Chestna’s script to untangle some ultra-messy story beats when it needs to be more focused on sparking a love connection.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 58 David Ehrlich
    Emancipation
    American movie-watchers are used to consuming their history lessons with a heavy layer of artificial butter on top, but William N. Collage’s script filters Gordon’s saga through so many creaky Hollywood tropes that the over-cranked genre stuff begins to feel more honest by comparison.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 David Ehrlich
    Spoiler Alert
    It made me cry at the end, but my tears were as canned and untrustworthy as the sound of a sitcom laugh track. I could barely remember what I had just watched, only that it was often honest enough to make me want to be with my family but never specific enough to justify the fact that I wasn’t.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 67 David Ehrlich
    There There
    If the faintly amusing final product is pretty thin gruel when compared to the rest of its filmmaker’s output, the project’s high-concept construction is clever enough to sustain the meandering story it tells.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 David Ehrlich
    Memories of My Father
    Adapted from a popular memoir by the late doctor’s son, Trueba’s film overcomes its ham-fisted clumsiness because it goes a step beyond hagiography. It’s a story filtered through the eyes of a grieving son in complete awe of his father, one told with enough warmth and detail that it could be easy to forget its memories don’t belong to the filmmaker himself.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 42 David Ehrlich
    The People We Hate at the Wedding
    A short, patchy, straight-to-streaming piece of semi-amusing content that tries to fit several different romantic-comedies into a single movie that doesn’t have the bandwidth (or the interest) to mine any of them for major sources of romance or comedy, Claire Scanlon’s The People We Hate at the Wedding basically feels like watching a bunch of talented actors chug cheap red wine for 90 minutes.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 David Ehrlich
    Stutz
    However you slice it, Hill’s artifice proves intriguing even as it insists upon itself in ways that distract from Stutz’s lessons (which sound great but speed by in a blur of terminology that means almost nothing without him there to help us apply it to our own lives).
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 David Ehrlich
    Slumberland
    Slumberland is nothing if not an exhausting roller-coaster of missed opportunities, virtually all of which stem from the film’s lack of a solid emotional foundation.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 83 David Ehrlich
    Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
    For all of the film’s janky pacing, thoroughly mediocre action setpieces, and the clumsiness with which it’s forced to double as backdoor pilot for Disney Plus’ “Ironheart” series, Coogler’s subthread of the MCU continues to operate at a significantly higher strata of thought, artistry, and feeling than the rest of Marvel’s assembly line.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 58 David Ehrlich
    You Resemble Me
    Amer’s fraught but noble intent has resulted in a fraught but noble film; a volatile, urgent debut that’s semi-effective kaleidoscopic approach is meant to reflect Hasna Aït Boulahcen’s fractured identity.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 83 David Ehrlich
    Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me
    It’s not a movie about healing so much as a movie about learning to hurt in the healthiest way possible. And if its diaristic, inside-out approach has the strange effect of keeping us at a distance . . . it also invites its most vulnerable young viewers to appreciate that even their favorite superstar is still fighting to be closer to herself.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 David Ehrlich
    The Independent
    Despite appearances, The Independent isn’t much interested in the implications of a three-horse race for the Oval Office, or the viability of a down-to-earth superman uniting the country with promises that appeal to both sides of the aisle. No, that stuff is just a pretext for a tense but ultimately toothless polemic about the value of truth and the need for an independent press
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 David Ehrlich
    My Father's Dragon
    If this weren’t a Cartoon Saloon movie, it would probably fall apart long before Meg LeFauve’s screenplay arrives at its touching finale, which trusts kids to confront some of the more difficult truths that childhood forces you to intuit. But good news: My Father’s Dragon is a Cartoon Saloon movie, and the open-hearted sincerity of the studio’s work breathes singular life into even the least engaging scenes of its most anonymous feature.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 83 David Ehrlich
    The Novelist's Film
    I can’t say whether Hong has suffered any of the creative self-doubts that animate his latest heroine, but the film he’s made for her feels as revealing as the one she then makes for herself. Free your art, your art will free you in return — a nice idea, but one that the uniqueness of Hong’s career makes easier to admire than it is to internalize.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 David Ehrlich
    Peaceful
    The director’s palliative need for drama often snuffs out the very truths that Peaceful vows to restore to the process of dying. Where is the tedium of sickness? The discomfort of suffering? The banality of waiting for it to be over?
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 David Ehrlich
    Personality Crisis: One Night Only
    The documentary lets its subject’s weathered charisma do most of the hard work here — Scorsese and Tedeschi love him too much to beg for your attention — and yet it weaves in enough context to convince even the biggest New York Dolls neophytes of the band’s legacy. Even longtime fans might be struck by the contrast between the breeziness of the film’s tone and the weight of its history.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 David Ehrlich
    The School for Good and Evil
    Fans of Soman Chainani’s popular fantasy series might feel as if a giant bone bird swooped out of the sky and carried them to streaming heaven, but not even Charlize Theron’s Mad Hatter cosplay or Michelle Yeoh’s cameo as a professor of smiling will be enough to enchant a wider audience to such a painfully overworked saga of friendship.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 33 David Ehrlich
    Black Adam
    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.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 67 David Ehrlich
    The Same Storm
    The sum of Hedges’ film is greater than any of its parts, even if its parts are not always worthy of the people who have been hired to play them. Individual scenes feel flat, but even the least effective of them contribute to the larger web in some way, and the touching final call that brings this curio full circle effectively articulates how our isolation has only made us all more essential to each other.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 83 David Ehrlich
    Last Flight Home
    Yes, this crushingly personal film can make you feel like you’re intruding on a sacred ritual between perfect strangers, but that sense of trespassing (or TMI) is also what allows Last Flight Home to be such an immediate argument for the universal right to die.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 67 David Ehrlich
    Lynch/Oz
    Lynch/Oz is less compelling for any of its individual theories or observations than for how it frames movies as permeable membranes that flicker between personal obsession and the collective unconscious.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 David Ehrlich
    The Redeem Team
    It’s every bit as candied and superficial as you might expect from such a self-mythologizing stroll down memory lane, but its subjects bring some occasional edge to it . . . and the documentary’s slickness befits the story of a team that had been created to promote the NBA on the world stage.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 33 David Ehrlich
    Mr. Harrigan's Phone
    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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 David Ehrlich
    My Best Friend's Exorcism
    My Best Friend’s Exorcism isn’t funny enough to get away with so few genuine scares, and it isn’t scary enough to save most of its biggest laughs for the final act.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 67 David Ehrlich
    Vesper
    By the time this highly evocative work of low-budget sci-fi arrives at its eye-opening final scene, the clearest takeaway is that our only hope for survival has been coded into us since the beginning of time.
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