There's an undercurrent of desperation in the frenzied dialogue readings and hamming for the camera, as if the skilled people assembled here somehow implicitly felt the need to compensate for the writing by forcing things.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 24, 2022

It has nothing new or insightful to add to the discourse, and instead seems comfortable recycling jokes that weren’t funny when we first encountered them on Twitter two years ago.

| Original Score: 0.5/4 | Apr 20, 2022

Maybe I’ll regret writing this after a rewatch – or when we’re back in lockdown after the Pi Epsilon 2.0 variant – but there is semi-purpose and not insignificant pleasure to be had in Apatow’s experiment.

| Apr 13, 2022

Apatow's movie sinks under the weight of its own farcical execution.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 12, 2022

The Bubble puts its own budget on full display throughout, yet rarely makes that a target of its satire.

| Apr 11, 2022

The Bubble never feels like it's the lacerating satire it wanted to be.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 8, 2022

The boredom the cast endures sitting around in isolation begins to spread to the viewer, overcoming the over-the-top efforts of Leslie Mann, David Duchovny, Keegan-Michael Key, Pedro Pascal, Iris Apatow and many, many celebrity cameos.

| Apr 6, 2022

The satire is scattershot and the humor often forced, but the anger feels authentic and personal.

| Apr 4, 2022

A movie so staggeringly unfunny as to be barely recognizable as comedy at all.

| Apr 4, 2022

The Bubble is composed mainly of long, excruciating sequences where everyone is trying very hard and producing zero laughs, like people trying to start a fire by rubbing two wet sticks together.

| Apr 1, 2022

There are occasional flashes of barbed, satirical wit here. Generally, though, The Bubble resembles a flutter of loose ideas, to which a vast ensemble of reliably funny actors have been tasked with adding colour.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 1, 2022

Blunderbuss parody and over two hours of it. You have been warned.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 1, 2022

Released more than two years into a global crisis that continues to surprise us with fun new twists every time we get cocky, The Bubble crystallizes the unique pain of watching a woefully dated satire about the same crisis you’re still trying to outlast.

| Original Score: D+ | Apr 1, 2022

If The Bubble feels like old headlines repackaged as breaking news, perhaps that’s because we have already seen something very much like it from the same corner of Hollywood.

| Apr 1, 2022

The film is best in its embrace of the random, its moments when the talented and funny cast goof off with each other, responding to one another's eccentricities.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 1, 2022

Overlong and excruciatingly unfunny.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 1, 2022

Doesn’t bring anything new or especially satisfying to the genre, going for gently absurd rather than truly savage in its ridicule of the rich and famous.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 1, 2022

The targets here are depressingly easy: the narcissism of actors, the mindlessness of special-effects movies, the even greater mindlessness of TikTok videos.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 1, 2022

Apatow seems stymied by his soft targets: The usual-suspect jokes — about age, ego, Hollywood — are broad where they should be specific, and smug even when they're not sharp.

| Original Score: C- | Apr 1, 2022

Even if the characters on screen didn’t become better artists during the pandemic, then Apatow at least should have. With The Bubble, he seems to have mistaken jokes about moviemaking for moviemaking that shouldn’t be taken seriously.

| Original Score: C | Apr 1, 2022