Alma & the Wolf is an amusingly off-kilter combo of monster movie and psychological thriller let down by a disappointing ending – but it’s a showcase for rising star Li Jun Li.

A House of Dynamite has the acting and directing goods, but its weak resolve arrives late in the game.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle offers plenty of action and some emotional flashbacks, but it suffers from an overuse of flashbacks that undermine the story's pacing.

V/H/S/Halloween is an enjoyable assortment of vicious holiday horror shorts that might take a step backward after last year’s fantastic V/H/S/Beyond, but it’s hardly a throwaway sequel.

Swiped is constructed well-enough for the movie it’s trying to be, but its lack of ambition and nuance keep it from being its best self. It can still be a worthwhile enough watch for Lily James’ admirable performance as Whitney Wolfe, but the movie never affords its subject the same level of depth as what James tries to imbue her with.

Riz Ahmed makes for a vigorous lead in Aneil Karia’s contemporary British-Indian Hamlet, which loses its emotional clarity beneath an intriguing exterior. Its use of silence and intimacy grants it a fascinating texture, but the film never challenges or re-invigorates Shakespeare’s greatest work, ensuring that it ends up somewhere in the middle of a lengthy pile of adaptations.

Crime 101 has everything a heist thriller ought to have… but not much else.

Scream 7 packs in plenty of satisfying slasher action, and may even bring some lapsed fans back into the fold by focusing down the scope of that action after Scream 6, but the new ideas it does bring to the table are either too thin to fully explore or ill-advised enough to detract from the success the movie does find in playing the hits, the deep cuts, and the killer tracks.

On the heels of several other Dracula-based films in very recent memory, Luc Besson’s take on the story doesn't do enough to set itself apart, despite its fair share of weird comedic moments.

War Machine has just enough juice to prevent it from being a Snore Machine.

A tale of miserable spouses plotting each other’s demise, it doesn’t always work, but its action comedy stylings are enough to keep it entertaining even when it swerves into ugly excess or extraneous subplots.

If you think ballerinas using their dance skills to fight and kill bad guys sounds fun, Pretty Lethal does deliver on its premise. However, it takes too long to get going, and is ultimately a somewhat amusing trifle instead of the more fun spectacle it could have been.

The Cloverfield Paradox is a paradox in itself. Split between trying to be a standalone sci-fi space horror and a key linking point in the Cloverfield mythos, the film never truly succeeds at either.

The Darkest Minds is a wholly rote YA sci-fi adventure that continues a genre that is pretty much dying out. Despite this, the film is capable and enjoyable and features a great lead actress in Amandla Stenberg.

The Halloween monster mash iconography is incredibly strong and the cast is excellent, but Goosebumps 2 is in far too much of a hurry – and perhaps too eager to be widely accessible – to be actually scary or wholly effective.

Green Book lacks the depth it aspires to, and only works on a very superficial level. Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali give exceptional performances but this message movie fumbles its message.

If you can get past the many bizarre inconsistencies, The Star is a relatively decent film for young Christian audiences. The writing, voice-acting and animation are unremarkable, but they get the job done, and the film’s heart seems to be in the right place.

Birth of the Dragon is not the Bruce Lee biopic you’ve been waiting for, as strong performances and martial arts action by Philip Ng and Xia Yu are wasted on a movie that had too little faith in the real story.

Mary Shelley's fascinating life story is told to contain a few brief glimpses of modern insight, but ultimately weakens under its over-use of conventional, romantic storytelling tropes.

Point Blank's production bones are solid and the action itself is clear and capable, but the story is woefully past its expiration date and the attempt to tether it back to the types of "action movies we grew up with" falls flat.

As heartwarming as the story in Leap! can sometimes be, and as strong as the relationship is between Félicie and Odette, her actions can make it difficult to cheer for her as wholeheartedly as the film intends.

When is a murder mystery not about the murder or the mystery? When it's as beautiful-looking as Gemini.

Hold the Dark is a beautiful-looking bore.

Underground is cartoonishly raucous explosion porn from mayhem maestro Michael Bay that feels like a film that was made over a decade ago and was just somehow recently unearthed by Netflix. It's a testament to star Ryan Reynolds and his seemingly effortless charisma because without him the movie would have been a snow-blind mess.

Amityville: The Awakening has a good cast, and, if viewed by a group of rowdy friends late at night, may certainly do its due diligence in periodically startling you for 87 minutes, but never manages to transcend its genre in any meaningful way.

There are moments where it reaches out for horror and produces something interesting and distinct from Hollywood’s other blockbusters, but those moments are buried beneath unremarkable and, by the end, tedious action sequences.

Tomb Raider fails to develop interesting characters or motives but at least offers viewers some fun action.

Mute tries to tell a transformative sci-fi story but struggles to find its footing with a less than stellar hero.

The Bad Moms sequel suffers from an uneven script and the addition of too many new, superfluous characters.

Liam Neeson is back with The Commuter, though viewers may wind up wishing they bought a ticket to a different train.

Rampage doesn’t really offer much of anything new as a giant monster movie, a video game adaptation, or a Dwayne Johnson vehicle, but it still checks all the boxes expected from it, offering one just enough entertainment value to not make you completely hate it.

There are hints of greatness, but Glass is tonally confused and will likely disappoint fans of Unbreakable and Split.

The relentlessly slapstick Peter Rabbit may please the kids, but the film never quite realizes its full potential.

As a piece of the larger Conjuring universe puzzle, The Nun is a fun, if ineffectual history lesson that will provide fans with plenty of dots to connect. On its own merits, The Nun stumbles by not delivering any real terror or investment in its characters, instead resting on its strong visuals and atmosphere and, strangely, humor.

The Kitchen has a good cast and strong premise, but it never quite finds its footing and falls into gangster cliches.

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile has some interesting ideas about how little we know the people we love, and about the power of a celebrity cult status. But no matter how good Zac Efron’s performance as Ted Bundy is, this is the tamest way to explore such a complex and interesting story.

While there are some creepy ideas in this surprise Netflix-Blumhouse offering, the quality of Mercy Black is strained.

Miss Bala never quite delivers on its potential and lets down the woman at its center.

After a while, rather than just being funny (in a dark way), it's questionable why one should sit through the whole thing.

Trier manages to make a movie about passion that feels almost completely detached, right to the end. It’s an approach that gives Thelma, the movie, the appearance of portent without fully exploring the fascinating themes, characters or storylines that might actually have justified that self-serious tone.

Action Point contains some crazy stunts and some funny-ish gross-out humor, but is ultimately a pale echo of the dark destruction Johnny Knoxville became famous for.

All the genre elements play like an afterthought, and that's frustrating because the rest of the movie isn't quite spry enough to stay interesting without action, adventure, or at least little more weirdness.

Everything about this "movie" is a joke. What really pisses us off is the fact that: a) Ben is now white (yes, white!); b) there are people doing drugs; and c) there's a sex scene! What in the hell? Not making things any better is a simply ridiculous ending that just about abandons all hope for the movie's success.

Jim Brown: All American is visually impressive, but about halfway through the documentary it gets so defensive and excusive that it stalls. It's as if Lee is forming a defense case rather than exhibiting the man's life.

The Dark Tower is a thoroughly average take on some truly incredible source material. While the fantastic leads do the best with what they’re given, it’s ultimately not enough to compensate for a lack of time spent building characters and their motivations in the script.

The film is particularly disappointing as McTeigue also directed V for Vendetta, a much sharper, much more intriguing, much more thought-provoking look at our post-9/11 world.

Pitch Perfect 3 tears up the rule book for the franchise but sadly all the rules in it are what made the original work so well and the second film work well enough.

Patient Zero never realizes its potential.

Snatched has its fair share of laughs, but the film’s attempts at sustaining a legitimate emotional underpinning throughout are unsuccessful, thanks to a lackluster turn from Schumer, and some tiresome writing all across the board.

An underwhelming lead-up to the series finale, Fast X's only real redeeming quality is Jason Momoa's bonkers performance as the villain.

Flatliners had every opportunity to improve on the original, and it doesn’t take most of them. It falls flat as a horror movie but the cast is good enough, and the sci-fi concepts are interesting enough, to keep it from crashing completely.

It’s not very funny, it’s not very dramatic. There’s a spark of intelligence here, a valid critique of doomsday culture and escapism, but it’s the sort of message you can easily get off of a cocktail napkin.

While trying to hit the basic markers that have come to define a Purge film, The First Purge comes up empty when mining real-life tragedies as the backdrop for a summer movie.

It's for kids and it's cute. It's also an absolute eyesore, crassly overstuffed with retina-scorching color combinations and explosions of glitter. Frankly, it's disappointing that an animated movie with so much talent attached didn’t strive to be more than just "cute for kids." But hey, at least you can dance to it.

Not as annoying as it looks, but hardly a stirring or imaginative entertainment, Sherlock Gnomes has a comfortable home right in the middle of the road.

Never Say Never Again never reaches the escapist thrills of vintage Connery and Moore; it cares too much about getting sued than it does about giving the actor a vehicle worth coming back to.

A workmanlike sequel, it lacks the wit and intelligence of its predecessor.

While it has an interesting hook, Chaos Walking never capitalizes on its premise or the promise offered by its cast.

Cleaner needed serious editing and instead, seems intent on being long and drawn out to prove some sort of point.

Clichés combined with poor dialogue and badly drawn characters that lack dimension bog down the heist movie Den of Thieves, which fails to sustain, or generate, any real tension.

Scott Cooper directs Hostiles with an eye for quote-unquote “greatness” but the actual material simply isn’t deep enough to justify the solemn presentation. It’s not entertaining, it’s not illuminating, it’s not even complicated. It’s mostly just a bummer.

Three A-listers globetrot and double-cross each other in Red Notice, a derivative action film that should be much smarter and sexier than it ends up being.

Taylor Schilling does her best here to keep things alive and afloat but The Titan insists on languishing in unremarkable material way too long.

Greyhound has occasional bursts of violent excitement but it's overall lack of engaging characters, the unappetizing CG, and the lackluster story make for a very color-by-numbers outing from a headlining star capable of a whole lot more.

Even as its ambitions are laudable in casting a wide net over a variety of societal ills, the film can’t quite muster the will to follow through on those ambitions and instead succumbs too often to cliche when complexity was required.

I'm not sure who first had the idea to fit a father/daughter drama into a rom-com casing but the result is very weird and very unfulfilling. Tonal whiplash is the least of Like Father's problems though as it basically furthers the messaging that Netflix likes to have talented people make unexceptional films.

Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich almost works. The dialogue and performances are unusually good for this kind of material, and the gore effects are shocking. But the changes the filmmakers made to this franchise have unpleasant consequences, which dramatically reduce the film's entertainment value, and arguably rob these iconic puppets of the very characteristics that made them special.

Sadly, this routine remake doesn't manage to recapture the surreal strangeness of the original Disney classic or elevate the dated premise into something better.

While not as sweeping as The Warriors - lacking that film's epic underpinnings - Class of 1984 is a goofy jolt of low-octane ultra-violence.

Once Upon a Deadpool is a cute idea that doesn't live up to its potential, leaving audiences with little more than a less interesting version of a better movie they might have loved.

Zemeckis turns this beloved, dark story into a campy, weird, yet still fairly entertaining kid-friendly story of accepting oneself. The problem is that it pales in comparison to what came before.

There’s plenty to giggle at throughout, and even a few moments that might just give you goosebumps. Those qualities alone, despite the film’s flaws, make Ma an almost endlessly entertaining watch.

Here A Quiet Place thrilled by presenting a fleshed out family under a precise and horrifying threat, The Silence is satisfied to just plop down barely sketched characters then throw them into The Birds but more violent. That doesn't make it satisfying. There's just nothing special to be found in The Silence.

Stuber is an awkward, uneven action-comedy that never realizes its full potential. It squanders a good premise and an odd couple pairing with potential that could have delivered something special.

The Jesus Rolls, while a passion project for the writer/director/star -- though it's unclear what Turturro wanted to do more: remake Going Places or do a Jesus follow-up? -- comes off like a flat fever dream. The famous faces are fun and at times there's a wee bit of misfit charm, but in the end it's clumsy and churlish.

It's a by-the-numbers variation on "The Monkey's Paw" coupled with a revenge flick. What makes the film worth seeing is not the story, the production values, or even the work of a truly underappreciated character actors like Henrickson. It's an eight foot tall demon ripping people to spare parts.

Wrinkles the Clown is a documentary that frequently entertains, but lacks true insight into the viral phenomenon.

Netflix's Earthquake Bird is a not particularly engaging thriller featuring an inert performance from Alicia Vikander.

It achieved a cult following for its uncompromising brutality, but it never really earned the critical or financial success many thought it deserved.

Charlize Theron's eerie turn as Megyn Kelly aside, Bombshell doesn't do justice to the subject matter it explores.

Though Benh Zeitlin clearly has a knack for directing children and an eye for shooting beautiful locales, Wendy ultimately falls flat. The pacing is uneven, the overt messaging spirals from hamfisted to uncomprehensible, and as good as the children at its core are, the film never offers up a story or film that is deserving of them.

Morbius is unspectacular in ways that waste the potential of what could be an intriguing hybrid of sinister horror and superhero thrills.

Vivarium rates as an ambitious near-miss.

This journey from sun-soaked beaches to chilly English country, from heart-racing flirtation to soul-shattering stress, from new love to old regrets, feels dry and flaccid. Much like Mrs. de Winter, the long shadow of Hitchcock's Rebecca proves just too powerful to ignore.

Minions: The Rise of Gru is more Minion compilation than Gru prequel. It wastes its fun ideas and comedic setups in favor of disconnected slapstick gags, which may delight the diaper-wearing crowd, but will end up a chore to anyone forced to comprehend its inert dramatic scenes and ’70s pop culture references.

Though visually engaging, Malignant can’t overcome the genre identity crisis at its core.

The story's lifted a bit by some of the solid comedic actors, and the WWE Superstars who make a run-in, but when the story isn't sloppy, it's paint-by-numbers.

Ultimately, it's bland, not bold, and achingly absent of enchantment.

Ultimately, this storied provocateur deals out shocking imagery and disturbing scenes, but he refuses to lay down a thrilling climax much less anything satisfyingly entertaining.

Hubie Halloween is aggressively stupid, sure, but it's also occasionally endearing (with a guilty chuckle or two).

Despite the efforts of Idris Elba and the cast, Concrete Cowboy never explores its characters or premise in much depth.

The movie plays up sexual innuendo more than a group of junior high school kids, and it comes across almost as juvenile. Some of the jokes are indeed funny, but there aren't enough laughs to propel things through the dry spells.

Try as it might to capture lightning in a bottle, Black Adam never manages to find its spark.

Glenn Close and Amy Adams shine in Ron Howard's new, rather unfocused film about abuse, poverty, and addiction.

Cherry is big on style and features a bouncy, pricey soundtrack but its examination of the grim reality behind the veteran/addiction cycle feels rather routine. Holland breaks down many barriers here, performance-wise, and delivers the goods as a fantastic surrogate for societal ills, but the movie is plodding and, overall, an underwhelming patchwork of previous projects.

Malcolm & Marie is a well-acted but frustrating exploration of art and bad romance.

Rebellious game developer Midway's rise and fall gets a surprisingly tame retelling in the doc Insert Coin.

It’s disappointing to see a triad of talented actors like Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, and Jared Leto wasted in The Little Things, a straightforward and seldom surprising murder-mystery.