Like a human turned into a creature of the night, Salem’s Lot kicks off with a strong sense of identity that slowly gives way to mindless vampire nonsense.

This futuristic sci-fi thriller has some good moments of ambiguous tension, but it’s too scaled back to make much of an impact.

This is a Star Wars movie missing the thrills, the surprises, the challenges, the addition of really anything of note to the franchise, not to mention a vested interest in seeing its characters grow and change. This is not the way.

Tron: Ares somehow forgets where it came from and relentlessly revisits the original, only making the latest version of the Grid paler by comparison.

Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon can’t quite salvage You're Cordially Invited, a comedy that's as overcrowded as the dueling nuptials it depicts.

Bugonia is a film that tries to balance barbed sci-fi themes and conspiracy looniness funneled through Lanthimos’ trademark quirks, but it slips off the pommel horse on the dismount.

Less of a movie and more of a series of non sequiturs, Despicable Me 4 is a Minions showcase interrupted by Gru and his family.

A one-angle drama spanning centuries, Robert Zemeckis' comic adaptation Here is experimental in appearance, but highly conventional in approach.

It has no soul or style, and creates no sense of chemistry between lead actors Omar Sy and Nathalie Emmanuel. They try their best to fill the movie's dead air with charm and anguish. Unfortunately, their best isn't enough.

Despite having an interesting take on werewolves, The Beast Within proves to be a middling experience.

Transformers One’s strong central friendship – and a great Brian Tyree Henry performance – aside, this animated origin story could have used some major transforming before rolling out.

There’s a disappointing amount of “same old thing” to Jurassic World Rebirth. Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and the rest of the cast are intriguing and sympathetic throughout, but Gareth Edwards doesn’t quite recapture his signature flair for grand-scale visuals nor does David Koepp find the magic of his original Jurassic Park screenplay, opting to follow that movie’s structure as more of a remix than a rebirth.

You can admire the ambition of The Life of Chuck while still wondering if such a lightly philosophical story needed to make the leap to the screen – or if turning all of its prose into Nick Offerman voice-over was the best move. It’s less an adaptation, ultimately, than a glorified book on tape from a talented King superfan.

Although it has some delightfully grotesque monsters, Mr. Crocket is a kids’-show horror spoof that isn’t ready for primetime.

Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman’s performances are a treat in Song Sung Blue. They sing and perform their hearts out, but none of it ends up in service to a coherent vision, let alone one that says something meaningful or profound.

With heavy inspirations from games like Dead Space and movies like Alien and The Thing, Flying Lotus' Ash is an ambitious, visually enthralling sci-fi horror movie. But its tale of a space station terrorized by a mysterious, gooey threat is otherwise empty and derivative, and takes too long to get going.

Bambi: The Reckoning is an audaciously bloody but distractingly humorless creature feature.

Too sweet to be sordid and too gross to be taken seriously, Ryan Kruger’s Street Trash makes a mess of its anti-capitalist message.

There’s no snap to the dialogue, no thrill to a majority of the action, and the other characters played by Cooper Hoffman and Lucy Liu (and their relationships to Dolinski) make no lasting impression.

Director Martin Campbell (Casino Royale, The Mask of Zorro) offers some reliably, well, clean hand-to-hand combat without showing us anything we haven’t seen before. Only a mid-film twist and the oddly sympathetic motives of the bad guys distinguish Cleaner from a thousand other movies with basically the same sturdy premise.

It’s no Purple Rain – though Jenna Ortega is a much better onscreen foil for Tesfaye than Apollonia was for Prince – but it at least manages to find a handful of visually stimulating moments amid the vapidity.

Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare is a bleak, mean-spirited take on a childhood classic that trades Peter’s sparkle-bright magic for overbearing seriousness and disappointingly straightforward thrills.

Josh Hartnett does a fine job in Fight or Flight’s intensely physical, one-versus-100 lead role, but the movie doesn’t have much to offer beyond 15 minutes of inventive action and 80 minutes of aggressive mediocrity.

Screamboat isn't a good movie, but it can be an entertaining experience if you only care about indulgently bloody kill sequences.

Until Dawn is more disappointing than deadly, leaving all the promise of the horror game behind for a jumble of horror-movie re-creations.

Do you like Scary Movie!?… Well, there’s a new one and it’s got some funny stuff in it, but just not enough in terms of how many jokes land and how many are duds.

Despite a passionate performance from Colby Minifie and some compelling visuals, The Surrender sidelines its deft exploration of grief for drawn-out, pointless supernatural horror.

It’s morally upstanding but dramatically dull, without any of the allure or excitement that made Armstrong’s Succession series such a smashing success.