Brandon Yu

This is, in short, as polished as you would expect of a work about a pop behemoth, a companion piece to their new album that’s less a revelatory look at the meaning of their time away than a sentimental welcome back for the group and its fans. For the BTS Army, that’s likely more than enough.

It has its momentary charms, mostly when it’s just .Paak and Rasheed riffing off each other, with the buoyant chemistry of a real father and son, or, when we see .Paak be less BJ under K-pop’s bright lights and more himself, just the artist with a mic and a set of drums.

It’s a story with few surprises and mostly rudimentary emotional concepts, but is enlivened by artwork with colorful texture and a dynamic animation style.

Damon is the only one keeping his head above water, mostly because he’s the only one given the space to make decisions and navigate different dynamics. Everyone else is trapped in a kiddie game of cops and robbers.

Like any decent soap, The Mother and the Bear is powered by human dramas that are contrived, silly and ultimately a little weird. But what actually happens belie what is in execution a relatively sedate story about the spoken frictions and unspoken secrets between mother and daughter, father and son.

It’s all meant to be viewed through the lens of camp, that increasingly diluted and all-too-broad category that here feels more like an excuse for the film’s flat construction than an aesthetic approach. Though you’ll get a few laughs out of its cast.

Rabbit Trap, the horror folk tale from Bryn Chainey, is that unfortunate kind of creation: a work that so clearly possesses the tools that might make a good, captivating film, but instead ends up lost in the workshop, too busy admiring its own handiwork.

Rather than being its own entry into the genre, Pools instead is a green director’s hodgepodge emulation of ideas and tricks we’ve seen elsewhere.

The film can’t quite fill in much beyond its initial wacky conceit, lacking the extra narrative and comedic pieces to match, for better or worse, a counterpart like “Sausage Party,” Seth Rogen’s own bawdy animation entry.

Their relationship plays out mostly to set up the film’s second half, but even when things get juicier, Mylchreest and Carson can’t seem to find much chemistry through the flat writing and direction.

The early and largely easy fun begins to curdle into inanity that simply drags (there is, oddly enough, way too much actual golf in this movie), before devolving into an overextended fever dream of celebrity cameos.

To help us buy in, the film mostly relies on the polish of this retro universe and its premium cast (who turn in uneven performances, save for Moss-Bachrach), along with one’s faint familiarity with the iconography of the heroes, to do the legwork. But those pieces sometimes are sufficient to keep this a smooth-enough ride that can even be periodically thrilling.

Sovereign is most intriguing for its subtle, if incomplete observations of the more complicated realities of both sides of the law that inform and ripple from Jerry’s paranoid world.

There is at once a roughshod, zippy energy coupled with a sedateness here that results from the simple fact that the film never quite knows how to square the pure awkwardness of two teachers — two stars from different eras of a franchise — instructing a karate kid at once.

There’s just enough to make for a moderately fun, mostly serviceable and often adorable revamp that will probably satisfy fans of the original.

For a road-trip buddy comedy, a greater crime than being unfunny is perhaps, amid all of the shenanigans, being dull. That is partly the feeling one is left with in the R-rated movie Brothers, which, even with an A-list cast, seems to move on autopilot through all of its pit stops.

Despite the film’s aims at spiky commentary, the class rebellion mostly serves as the thin wrapping to, at best, a middling heist movie that loses some of the punchy tension of the original’s getaway sequences. At its worst, it’s no more than a teenage soap opera.

Most palpable in its frames are the heart and genuine love for this universe, and when the bots start colliding, with action sequences toward the end that are thrillingly punchy, it’s easy to surrender to the lore.

The paranoia sets in all too quickly in this awkwardly paced thriller, and it’s among a handful of defects in a film whose creative process seemed to begin and end with its final twist in mind, haphazardly and unconvincingly working backward to construct what’s necessary to build up to i

There’s still occasional fun to be had and a budget that’s clearly put to use, but we’re mostly here, it seems, to keep the Minion cash cow chugging along.

Half-sketched and sometimes hard to follow, the stories glimpsed here ultimately fail to produce a fully legible or consistently engaging arc of what must be a roiling inner world.

Cobweb, directed by Kim Jee-woon, mines the comically absurd reality that is filmmaking, at times with bouncy cinematic verve, at others somewhat aimlessly and a little too indulgently.

The animation is strong, if too candy-coated, and the film is clever and funny from time to time. And parents might even find their own inner boy band fever ignited alongside their kids.

It’s a mostly well-crafted film with decent visual scope. The film’s greatest flaws are in Cage’s shakily written character.

The film lacks any well-executed surprises to help it push past one-dimensional satire, and Howery is not strong enough of a dramatic actor to keep a single-setting, single-character film like this consistently engaging.

The fun premise can make for a passively enjoyable watch during a Halloween binge, but the film mostly feels like it’s just going through the motions.

It’s a promising debut from Dutta, who offers a fresh premise that proves a natural fit for the genre.

Outlaw Johnny Black struggles to establish a consistent comedic rhythm.

It’s both a shame and a wonder that the film managed to assemble such a beefed-up roster of talent — Snipes, Haddish, J.B. Smoove, Faizon Love and, in a cameo, Kevin Hart — for what amounts to a stilted, factory-line comedy.

The ultimately sparse dramatic elements here feel more suited to a short film; in a feature-length production, they become too thin to support the big feelings and weighty themes the movie wants to leave us with.

It’s not an easy task to make a movie out of a kids’ show from a bygone era, but the film does a relatively smooth job of dipping into — but not overdoing — the nostalgia and retaining the lighthearted, wacky tone that was the show’s signature.

For what it sets out to do, detailing the bond of young boys under surreal circumstances, Shooting Stars is a relatively sturdy retelling.

Harder has made good and entertaining use of a premise that could have become a simple gimmick, and Naud and Saper prove strong leads as their characters try to read each other between the likes.

It’s dumb fun that is at times entertaining, at times flat.

The film reads like a faux-hip youth pastor in movie form, only instead of an acoustic guitar, it’s an 808 drum machine luring the kids toward God.

As they have in past team-ups, Sandler and Aniston maintain a charming midcareer looseness, and have a palpable affability as a duo — one can sense the fun they had making such silliness, even if the result isn’t gold.

Braff is going for something broader than indie naturalism, so perhaps the film calls for less subtle brushstrokes. But the result is something that rings with far less thoughtfulness than he’s clearly capable of (particularly in light of the opioid crisis that the film mentions), despite Pugh’s remarkable attempts to ground the story.

The silly premise is one that a better Ritchie film could, with some charm, style and wit, have turned into a workable romp. But everything here is stuck on autopilot.

The movie doesn’t have enough of a narrative engine to compensate for its lack of world building.

The plot, as a result, can’t quite find its momentum; it doesn’t help that most of the film’s scares fall flat on a visual and technical level.

This film from Li Xiaofeng turns a crime soap opera into an allegory about the moral costs of rapacious expansion — to middling effect.

Like any rager gone south, the buzz is fun early on, until it’s suddenly too much, the house is overrun, and the room starts spinning.