Buried somewhere deep inside this phony, flashy movie there are thoughtful questions of racial identity, ingrained social perceptions, environmental conditioning and codes of masculinity. . . . But any thematic coherence is sacrificed to stylistic showboating that keeps taking us out of the story.

While offering some of the expected musical material and concert footage, the film is much more interested in the singer’s emotional health, especially as it pertains to political unrest in his native Colombia. Though these themes might open the film up to interest outside Balvin’s fan base, neither is explored with enough depth to really accomplish that; in practice, Boy is for pretty devoted fans only.

One unfortunate effect of the jumbling is that it cools off Statham’s slow-boil performance, and prompts us to question the logic behind H’s plan.

Here Today doesn’t fully succeed in any department. But it does provide some alternately amusing and touching moments, thanks largely to the heartfelt performances by Crystal and his co-star Tiffany Haddish.

There's enough here to keep you engrossed, particularly once the camera pulls back in a majestic reveal of the environment surrounding the pod. The visual effects are slick, but the most indispensable effect is the human element of Laurent's performance — by turns distraught, desperate, tough, determined and resourceful.

Although some might argue that not mentioning anyone's difference is a kind of erasure in itself, it's hard not to get swept up in the cast and crew's joyful insouciance. Plus, the cheeky showtunes, co-written by onscreen villain MuMu and executive producer Peter Halby, are a hoot.

It's an odd match of a screenplay (adapted by Berman and Pulcini) that's too obvious, telegraphing rather than teasing out its twists, and direction that's overly timid; one gets the sense that the filmmakers are checking off genre tropes and tricks from a list instead of finding ways to invest them with fresh chills or shivers.

The result is a solid entry in the Clancy screen canon — gritty, briskly paced, laced with vigorously choreographed fight scenes, explosive weapons action and twisty political intrigue that seems prescient as it taps into the most strained period in U.S.-Russian relations since the Cold War.

A student-teacher romance that’s so slow-burn it almost never flares up, Wet Season marks a skillfully observant if somewhat tepid and overwrought sophomore effort from Singaporean director Anthony Chen.

A challenging work which punctuates taxing stretches of austere stasis with interludes of sublime beauty — including a ravishingly spectacular underwater finale — it uses a slight fable of a story as framework for some extravagant sensory stimulations.

Bettina Oberli is more interested in the interplay of her characters than a barbed look at geopolitics, an approach that clicks only to a point in this well-performed but overlong and uneven feature.

A B-movie that would benefit immensely from some wit in the script and charisma in the cast, it’s not as aggressively hacky as P.W.S.A.’s oeuvre, but it runs into problems he didn’t face in 1995: Namely, the bar has been raised quite a bit for movies in which teams of superpowered young people have fights to save the universe.

The strength of the ensemble helps give the proceedings further dramatic resonance, with the performers providing subtle emotional depths that keep us firmly invested in the characters' plight.

Ultimately, this is an original adventure that feels stitched together out of a hundred familiar film plots, often freely acknowledging its pop-cultural plundering, as in the family's obligatory slo-mo power strut away from a building exploding in flames. But for audiences content with rapid-fire juvenilia, the busy patchwork of prefab elements will be entertaining enough.

Duty Free is warm, personal, beautifully structured and socially relevant as it creates a vivid portrait of its real-life heroine and the ageism she encounters. Smoothly edited into a swift 71 minutes, the film rarely goes beneath the surface of its issues, but that surface is smart and, taking its cues from Rebecca, refreshingly unsentimental.

A heavy-handed reimagining.

The doc pads out its assertions of malfeasance with personal scenes that fall flat, never giving much insight into its subject's personality or deepening the sympathy we may have started off with for the children she left behind.

The brisk pacing and capable cast still can't quite mask a certain routine feel in a movie without much heart.

Gallo displays none of the screenwriting elan he's exhibited in such previous efforts as Midnight Run and the Bad Boys films, although here it's hard to separate the ponderous dialogue from the way it's delivered.

With its bland positivity (regular people can be superheroes!), flimsy-bordering-on-indifferent plotting and Post-it-note-deep characters, that leaves the bits and shtick to buoy Falcone's screenplay. They're hit-and-miss, but it's definitely the off-track digressions where the film sparks to life.

Cannily exploiting #MeToo themes and the opportunities for cinematic mayhem provided by technology-driven smart homes, Held proves an uncommonly thoughtful and provocative suspenser.

The conflicts feel just a tad too routine and the characters too thinly drawn to get the blood flowing.

Filmmaker Harry Michell doesn't quite stick the landing in his sophomore feature, aiming for a complex mixture of comic irreverence and sensitive character study. But he does earn points for creative ambition, and Say Your Prayers, benefiting from a terrific ensemble, has enough entertainingly startling moments to mark its filmmaker as capable of bigger and better things.

Night in Paradise contains a lot of good plotting, several amusing characters and a decent array of exciting action scenes and bloodshed. But it is indulgently long.

Some will say that Nina Wu is a courageous work for exposing the abuse powerless young actresses face when trying to break into an acting career, while others will no doubt feel that, by what it shows, the movie remains part of the problem. As unevenly presented here, it’s a wobbly tightrope.

After an intriguing setup that takes its time building atmosphere and characters, declining to rush the first death, the film becomes progressively more overwrought and hokey. It also loads up on derivative tropes that worked better everywhere from Ringu through The Conjuring Universe.

A likably low-rent, low-ambition entry into a genre whose standard-bearer, Meatballs, doesn't set the bar very high, Mike Stasko's Boys Vs. Girls goes to summer camp for its promised battle of the sexes.

Despite an undernourished thread connecting key characters by their experience of loss, seldom have the human figures and their interplay been as peripheral to the headline action in a popcorn blockbuster. The good news is that even if the convoluted kaiju mythology tends to trip over itself in a plot that only barely makes sense, the Monsterverse face-off delivers plenty of visceral excitement.