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

I'm not going to lie to you here, this movie is a steaming pile of you-know-what. The acting is horrendous, the story is the most cookie-cutter clone of every movie after Star Wars as you can get, and the effects are downright laughable. Even an easy effect such as a laser blast looks bad here.

Tom Hardy’s committed performance can’t overcome a painful script and indecisive direction, resulting in a film with a personality that’s as split as its titular character. There are occasional moments of brilliance in the dynamic between Eddie and Venom that give a hint of what the film could have been in steadier hands, but ultimately, that only makes the finished product a more frustrating viewing experience.

Despite the inherent ugliness of watching a rich kid diabolically dig into a mom and dad who are just trying to save their home for the sake of their own children, Home Sweet Home Alone has some decent wit and heart to it. Archie Yates is good as the new precocious protector of his lair, but it's Rob Delaney and Ellie Kemper who anchor the film and give it something resembling a soul.

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.

Matthew Vaughn’s latest directorial effort doesn’t traffic in the same edgelord button-pushing as his Kingsman series, but as that relief fades, it becomes clear how much Argylle is recycling ideas and imagery from those (and other, better) movies. Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam Rockwell make an endearing pair, but they’re committed to an occasionally loony adventure that lacks the grace necessary to match its stars.

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

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

Well written, well made, well acted, St. Elmo's Fire is a quintessential film about the strange middleground between youth and adulthood.

Super Mario Bros. has a solid cast of characters who are thrust into a psychedelic smattering of scenes hastily glued together in nearly offensively stupid ways, but it’s also strangely ambitious at times.

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

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

The Turning damns itself with good ideas turned bad and a flat-out ugly execution. Its talented cast can’t save it from cheap scares, poorly edited set-pieces, and a bad twist that leaves a worse taste in your mouth.

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.

Although Taraji P. Henson is always a delight, a rote plot, bland action, and a serious lack of interpersonal chemistry hamstrings any potential Proud Mary might have at being fun.

The second part of Zack Snyder's Rebel Moon space opera, The Scargiver, delivers a half-baked conclusion to a well-trodden story with flimsy character studies and lacklustre action.

“Random” aptly summarizes Harold and the Purple Crayon, with its patchy subplots, distracting amount of dialogue added after filming was wrapped, and geographic cluelessness.

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.

What you don't expect is for the monster to look like (and be as harmless as) a hermit crab on steroids.

It's rarely funny when it's supposed to be, and often unintentionally hilarious when it's not. But to be fair, that's not all de Sauza's fault. Some of the dialogue might have been funny had the punchlines not been botched by Van Damme's awkward accent and flat delivery.

[A] one-note, flat comedy.

Jack Black will be enough to lure both kids and parents to the holiday comedy Dear Santa. But Black can’t carry the whole thing himself, and he’s eventually subdued by some deeply questionable story choices.

Directed by the team of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the new film brings all the cartoonish insanity of the pair's Crank saga to the -- let's face it -- cartoonishly insane concept of the Ghost Rider, a burning skeleton in leather who rides an equally fiery motorcycle. It's a match made in, er, hell.

Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer have sparkling screen presence, but can’t thrive under Ben Falcone’s utter lack of vision. Thunder Force doesn’t work as a superhero movie or a buddy comedy, as it refuses to revel in the big moments of either.

The movie surrounds its mismatched stars with a whole lot of shockingly inconsistent special effects, preaching a sentimental yuletide message even as it looks like the height of soulless commercialization.

Danielle Harris deserves a lot of credit for her work in Halloween 4. It's hard to find truly believable child actors in general, and in the realm of a film like this, it's easy to expect the worst, yet she is very credible and relatable and took an idea that probably had some fans cringing -- a little girl as the hero of a Halloween sequel! -- and made it work.

A headache-inducing screenlife film that straps Chris Pratt to a chair and holds its audience hostage too, Mercy squanders its potential as a sci-fi thriller about the dangers of entwining justice and artificial intelligence. The result plays less like the tongue-in-cheek mystery-thriller director Timur Bekmambetov seems to be aiming for, and more like an advertisement to tech investors, making the movie chilling in unintended ways.

Kevin Hart and Woody Harrelson have solid goofball vs. grump chemistry in an entertaining action-comedy.