Is there anyone who can play charming yet unsettling like Denzel Washington? Even when he’s not playing a legitimate anti-hero, there’s always a vague sense of threat from his characters, in the stillness of his face and the wryness of his delivery.

Washington uses the trademark sociopathy to great affect in “Safe House”, the new spy thriller meant partially to re-charge Ryan Reynolds career after the “Green Lantern” disaster of 2011. Reynolds seems to exist mostly to get out of Washington’s way, the tactic followed by every white guy in a Denzel Washington movie which I like to call the “Ethan Hawke Defense.”

Matt Weston (Reynolds) at the beginning appears to have the un-sexiest job in the CIA, as a keeper of a CIA safe house in Cape Town, South Africa. He spends most of his time listening to French language tapes in an empty room, and telling elaborate lies about his work to his French national girlfriend. His uniquely boring life is upended when Tobin Frost (Washington) a former agent who’s been selling secrets for almost a decade, inexplicably wanders into a U.S. Consulate and allows himself to be captured (the trailer gives you a rough approximation of what will happen next).

Cape Town is shown in gritty, stunning glory, and director Daniel Espinosa makes the best use of location shooting I’ve seen in a long time. The city operates as both an ally and a potential enemy to the two fugitives, from its upscale downtown, to the chaos of Green Point soccer stadium, to the maze of a shanty town. There is very little politics in “Safe House”, but Espinosa doesn’t ignore the realities of Cape Town either, allowing the city to tell the story and add to the sharp realism of the action sequences.

The cat and mouse game at the heart of the story is a little played, and frankly most of it is stolen from other spy movies anyway. But the exquisite little details, ingeniously picked by the director and his stars, allow you to forget that this is a story that’s been told before: a spectacular crane shot of truck barreling through a shanty town’s throughways; the jaunty smile Frost gives when taking pictures of himself to add to a forged passport, the way Weston hugs his girlfriend and buries his face in her hair. The details make this movie special, make it more than just another Saturday-night throwaway picture. Washington’s charming villain is just the cherry on top.

There is absolutely no reason in the world why an action movie in which Liam Neeson punches a wolf in the mouth should be any good at all.

The very premise seems like sheer B-movie schlock, another black mark in Neeson’s already questionable late career. Joe Carnahan, the writer and director of the film, has a resume that includes a disastrous version of “The A-Team” and “Smokin Aces”, a hyperactive Vegas thriller. “The Grey” should be the movie you rent from Redbox and watch while drunk, stuffing cheese doodles in your maw and laughing when Neeson makes Wolfman puns.

And yet…and yet. Carnahan, in a surprising move, chose not to make this into another lame, faux post-modern black hole of cheese. He made a film. A very good film actually, using stripped-down and rugged camerawork and sound to tell a story about primitive forces.

The 6 men who dominate the movie are pipeline workers in Alaska, heading back to the lower-48 for a break. Their leader Ottway (Liam Neeson) was tasked with protecting the pipeline and its workers from wild animals, so when their plane goes down in the middle of a wolf pack’s territory it’s only him who has any kind of expertise to lead them out.

The main characters seem undomesticated even before they are thrown into the merciless wilderness- Ottway himself is a man on the edge, haunted by a lost love and verging on suicide. The others are a motley crew of deadbeats, ex-cons or similar, hopeless cases who come to work in Alaska because no else will take them. But their breed of wildness seems positively tame when they are left alone in the woods, being stalked by a band of timber wolves (the wolves appear to be mainly computer-generated, but that doesn’t make them any less frightening).

Carnahan knows his way around an action scene, and infuses everything from a plane crash, to a wolf attack, to a jump across a ravine with blunt horror and panic. For once I was unconcerned that the camera was shaking and obscuring my vision, because I have a feeling that a plane crash and a wolf attack wouldn’t seem very clear to the person experiencing it. He matches the bluntness of the camerawork with precision sound, eschewing music most of the time and just using a howling, relentless winter wind as the background.

Neeson is positively electrifying, playing a ravaged husk of a man who wants to end his life even as he’s thrown into the odd situation of trying to keep himself and his comrades alive. And while everyone probably will pay their $10 plus tax to see Liam Neeson box a wolf with broken glass taped to his knuckles (and note that scene is actually not what it seems in the trailers), I find him even more riveting when he is doing quieter things, like telling an injured man that he is going to die, or staring worriedly at a thermos of dwindling jet fuel they are using to start their precious fires.

Carnahan obviously owes a lot to the Werner Herzog, who’s made an entire career about discussing man’s strange relationship with the natural world. Carnahan even references Herzog’s “Grizzly Man”, though it’s very telling that the reference is when a character refers to it as “that movie about the fag that loves bears.” There is little Disneyfication of the natural world here, and the wild is considered beautiful, vast, unknowable and unmerciful. And the emotional devastation and fear you feel comes not with the first wolf death (which is expected) but the realization that if these men are unable to start a fire in a snowstorm they are all going to die- not from a villainous wolf, or a complicated human scheme, but by the immutable fact of the cold. Fire: you live. No fire: you die. There is nothing more primitive, more basic, or more animal than that.

Steven Soderbergh is possibly the most hyperactive director in the business today. Just in the past five years, he’s put out an all-star broad-strokes drama about a killer disease, a spy-comedy with Matt Damon, a tiny indie starring a porn star and a five-hour biopic of Che Guevara. They vary is scope, in cast (and yes, in quality) but they are always inextricably his.

“Haywire” is no different. From the first sepia-tinged frame to the last moment of violence, the story of a woman betrayed by the Blackwater-esque company she works for is pure Soderbergh- even in its flaws.

I suspect the movie is supposed to flourish into a franchise, in the form of the character Mallory Kane (Gina Carano), who works for an unnamed independent spy agency contracted with the U.S. government. It’s a typical spy story: she goes off on a “routine” mission that quickly shows itself to be a frame job intended to either kill Kane or plant a murder on her.

The plot itself isn’t overly impressive- at just over two hours, the plot is a little undercooked and wrapped up in a tidy (and lazy) flashback scene. I found myself wishing there had been more to the story, or another twist to navigate. The end comes too quickly, leaving several threads hanging and a certain sense of dissatisfaction.

But Gina Carano makes it all worth it. As a mixed-martial arts champion (who previously appeared in competitions like “American Gladiator” and “Fatal Femmes Fighting”) seeing Carano run, jump, fight, or even just walk around a room is riveting- like seeing a wild animal do what evolution has specifically developed it to do. Combine that with a stoic, Bruce Willis-like acting style and raw sex appeal, she has all the makings of the next big action star. She’s backed up with an all-star, all-male cast (Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas and Antonio Banderas, among others) who despite their star power seem happy to simply get out of her way.

It will be intriguing to see if Mallory Kane can become a franchise; it’s always difficult to market a woman action star, but Carano’s worth her weight in gold if she can keep strangling people with her thighs. But there’s no telling. After all, who knows what Soderbergh will do next.

Brad Bird wants to help you love the movies again.

And I don’t mean film in the academic sense. I mean movies. Big, loud, fun, slightly insane movies. Movies with explosions and fast cars and fabulous locales and women in tight dresses. Not to put too fine a point on it, movies with balls.

And Bird has decided to take his stand for the good, old-fashioned action flick, and make his live-action film debut, using a tired, 15-year-old franchise starring a manic Scientologist entering middle age. Frankly it sounds like the perfect recipe for disaster. And it very well could have been, in another director’s hands. But Bird uses deft sense of storytelling, a visionary skill with the IMAX camera, and a healthy dose of humor elevate what could have been a flop to the best action film of the year.

Part of “Ghost Protocol’s” merit lies with Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec’s script- the plot is tight, complicated enough to keep your interest, but simple enough to keep you from getting tied up in knots. Instead of the overwrought cat-and-masked mouse game of earlier films,the problem is simple: a terrorist named Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist) has stolen nuclear launch codes, blown up the Kremlin and blamed it on spy agency IMF. The entire agency has been disavowed, including the legendary Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), who puts together a team to steal back the codes.

That’s it. No weird kidnapping scenarios, no Jon Voight. Without over-complicating the plot, Bird leave enough room to let the movie breathe and create truly stunning action set-pieces. The best take place in Dubai- Bird uses the surreal landscape of an adult playground in the middle of the desert to great effect. A scene where Cruise has to scale the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, is possibly the most thrilling, terrifying sequence I’ve seen this year- and a later chase scene through a dust storm isn’t far behind.

Say what you want about Tom Cruise (and there’s plenty to say), but he knows how to command a scene. Ethan Hunt isn’t exactly riveting by himself. Like Jason Bourne, and James Bond before them, the expert spy is only as interesting as the people and places around him. Cruise understands that limitation and knows how to work with it. Whatever he is in his personal life, in his career he’s nothing less than a consummate professional. He’s backed up by Paula Patton, making the most of the token hottie agent role, Simon Pegg, reprising his role as the comic relief techie, and of course Jeremy Renner, whose expressive eyes and fancy krav maga moves are worth the price of admission all by themselves. Renner is the only one who is capable of taking the spotlight from Cruise, with a slow-burn energy that will treat him well as he continues his ascent to stardom.

It’s not all gold. There’s a silly portion involving Renner’s character’s past, and a bizarrely out-of-place end scene that should have been cut out completely. There’s also the usual continuity/believability issues, but really why should we care how Ethan and his team get from Russia to Dubai when their entire agency has been shut down? Ignoring those little problems are part of the fun. Logistics are for suckers.

So bring on the explosions and the car chases and Paula Patton in a cut-out dress! Brad Bird is here and he wants to make goddamn movie. Give yourself a present this Christmas, and see it on the biggest screen you can find.

I do have this to say about “J. Edgar,” the biopic about the life of F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover that is one of many Oscar-bait flicks on tap: I certainly know a lot about the legendary administrator’s taste in clothing.

I speak not, of course, of the his rumored predilection for wearing women’s clothes (although that’s there as well), but rather his impeccable taste in men’s clothing. He apparently was quite the dandy, mocking the other agent’s for their shoddy attire, and hiring agents based on a man’s chosen cufflinks.

This is perhaps the most riveting aspect of this movie.

Director Clint Eastwood did a rare miss with this film. It could have been great. It could have been spectacular actually; the story of a man who became director of the FBI at 24, who was intensely powerful, one of the main protagonists in the story that is the 20th century. He made the FBI what it is today. He was an early advocate of forensic science. He was a spymaster. He was, in all likelihood, both gay and a cross-dresser. He was kind of a dweeb with a passion for devising elaborate catalog systems. He could act heroically, but thought Martin Luther King, Jr. was a filthy Communist.

But instead of a grand tale of the rise and decline of American dominance in the former century through one man’s eyes, we have a bloated, sepia-toned melodrama, complete with an over-bearing mother (played with relish by Judi Dench) and a weirdly campy love story. Leonardo DiCaprio is at his most squinty-eyed in this movie, both as the young, svelte Hoover, and the elderly, fat-suited, be-jowelled Hoover. DiCaprio’s performances are such gambles. Sometimes you get the brilliant, tight, cerebral DiCaprio from “The Departed”. Sometimes you get “The Beach”. He’s not terrible in this- not “Beach” terrible anyway- but there’s an absence of control in his performance, and trudging quality. He’s saying his lines, but doesn’t appear to be having any fun. The same goes true for Naomi Watts, who plays Hoover’s longtime secretary. Most of the fault seems to be with the script for them, which is written like a stodgy period piece on some sort of sub-BBC channel (Dustin Lance Black wrote the script, which seems incomprehensible after his luminous job a couple years ago on “Milk”.)

Armie Hammer is a bright spot in all the dourness. Playing Hoover’s second-in-command and possible lover Clyde Tolson, Hammer seems to glitter in the pool of mediocrity. His scenes with DiCaprio, while kind of melodramatic, are genuinely painful and gritty. Tolson and Hoover, whether or not they were actually romantically involved, had a wonderfully complex and layered relationship that’s conveyed well here. DiCaprio plays off of Hammer with a banter and casual affection that’s far more textured than the rest of the plots.

The primary issue is a simple one: the movie is just too long. At a solid two and a half hours, it slogs through the Red Scare, the bank robbery epidemic, the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby and the Kennedy assassination. There’s an unforgivable amount of voice over (the pretense is Hoover is writing his autobiography and is dictating to a series of young agents), and by the end you are so sick of watching DiCaprio in old-person makeup you don’t care about his machinations against Richard Nixon. It’s a semester of contemporary American history condensed into a class period. Which can be useful. But it doesn’t make it very much fun to watch.

There are two remakes of 80s movies hitting theaters today. One of them is a feel-good pill with lithe dancing teenagers and the other one is based on a claustrophobic horror movie starring Kurt Russell.

I have a feeling I know which one will do better at the box office.

“The Thing” is based, of course, on the 1982 John Carpenter movie of the same name, and is almost universally considered a masterpiece of horror spectacle. The new version doesn’t have the same skill, or the same sense of viciousness, but what it lacks in pacing and drama, it makes up for in sheer gore and thrilling effects.

It’s not truly a remake, actually, but more of a prequel, cataloging the events leading up to the opening scene of the 1982 movie: two men in a helicopter in Antarctica, shooting at a dog. The “final girl” in this case is Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a paleontologist with a heart of gold who is called down to a research camp in Antarctica by a showboating Norwegian researcher who believes he’s found a long-dead alien lying in the ice. It isn’t long before the creature wakes up, blasts from the ice, and begins “imitating” the life forms around it. It’s Kate who discovers that the creature operates like a virus, as well as the only way to kill it (in spectacular fashion, with a flame-thrower).

Writer Eric Heisserer dumps the whole notion of interior lives of any of these people- they are simply there to be eaten, or burned, or both. Indeed, my favorite character is Lars (Jorgen Langhelle), a mountain of a Norwegian who cannot speak English and spends the whole movie with a flame-thrower on his back silently appraising various foes. Winstead, who was previously terrific in “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”, is very appealing, but also generally just an empty suit to spout important lines like “It’s like a virus. It attacks relentlessly.” It would make the movie seem pretty dry and lifeless, but for a while I was too entranced by the monsters to care.

Ah yes, those monsters- they are computer-animated, but the disconnect that would usually accompany watching actors follow around a projected image seems wonderfully absent. The thing this…Thing turns into is a brilliant, kaleidoscopic image of gore with many limbs and tentacles and oozing, popping sores. It brings to mind everything from H.P. Lovecraft’s descriptions of Cthulhu, to Picasso’s Guernica, to even the Crab People episode from “South Park”. The monster in the original “Thing” was hailed as a breakthrough for special effects, and it seems like director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. felt a deep affection for the very special kind of grotesque John Carpenter unleashed on the world.

Eventually, however, the movie collapses. It’s too long, and soon even the image of a flailing, bleeding space virus being burned alive begins to lose its punch. The climactic fight scene in the alien’s abandoned ship is silly and poorly done, and you’re ready to go home about 20 minutes before it’s over. When I watched the 1982 version of the film the next day, I could recognize the love that this largely unknown Norwegian cast must have had for Carpenter’s film, and the great lengths they went to create a smart, thorough homage to its legacy. But in the end I felt little of it myself.

This movie was supposed to be terrible.

It’s a preposterous and sappy PG-13 action film with giant fighting robots and a precocious, yet adorable child. It’s a story that’s been told 1,000 times- down-on-his-luck raffish charmer learns the true meaning of love and responsibility, while making a spectacular comeback in the ring, demonstrating the power of the human/American spirit, etc.etc. The only real difference is, oh yeah, the GIANT FIGHTING ROBOTS.

So you can imagine my surprise at about the midway point for “Real Steel”, when a terrible, inescapable realization came over me.

I was actually enjoying myself.

How is this even possible, when the trailer was enough to make me laugh myself silly and then lapse into a dark reverie over the depressing state of American cinema? How could my impeccably pretentious taste levels be so overcome with ragged affection for a robot movie? The only answers I have for you lay with director Shawn Levy, a Brett Ratner–level hack whose past credits include the atrocious “Pink Panther” remake with Steve Martin and “Just Married” with Ashton Kutcher. Somehow, despite all expectations, Levy managed to imbue a ridiculous concept and script with stunning imagery, technical agility and, not least of all, charm.

Hugh Jackman, of course is the down-on-his-luck raffish charmer name Charlie, armed with a leather jacket and pissy attitude. In this near-future tale, Charlie’s boxing career was demolished years ago by the rise of robot boxing. He now travels around as a robot boxer controller, playing in (sigh) underground robot fight clubs. Charlie discovers that his son (Dakota Goyo), whom he has never seen, has recently lost his mother, and he must reluctantly bring him into his work and his world until he’s able to shove the kid off onto his aunt and uncle.

Of course, Charlie cannot remain a heartless bastard for long, and the story line between his son and him is ridiculous and very played. But young Goyo and Jackson have a rather shaggy repartee with one another that I actually found both charming and smart. The movie is primarily just the two of them and the robot, and in less capable hands their paternal angst could get boring very quickly. Goyo especially knows how to walk the fine line between adorable and nauseating and by the end I kind of wished he was my kid.

The movie also seems to have a surprising amount of technical literacy. A marvelous scene, which takes place in an underground robot fight club at an abandoned zoo, is both a terrific action sequence and an exuberant, noisy panorama of chaos, with tinges of “Mad Max” and Tarantino. In a real rarity, Levy seems particularly adept at shooting fight scenes. He eschews wide shots and shaky cam for solid, claustrophobic close-ups of metal and motor oil dripping, as the crowds roar around the players. It’s frankly gory, or it would be if it were flesh and blood being pounded on. Also, the technology in the film seems mainly on-par with what it would look like in 2024 (or whatever year it’s supposed to be). In fact, in many of the scenes the robots are real animatronic wonders created by Legacy Effects. Their physical presence can actually be felt off-screen; you’re strangely startled every time one of them walks up behind one of the human actors, or turns its head to look into the camera.

This isn’t a great movie. I’m not even sure it’s a good, given the basic concept and shoddy, exposition-heavy writing by John Gratins, Dan Gilroy and Jeremy Leven. And there’s a weird thread of xenophobia running through the narrative; the villains are both wealthy and foreign, and the least believable part of the movie is when they explain that Japanese robots are inferior to American-made ones. But God help me, I had a good time watching it; and unlike movies like “Transformers”, which are simply soulless holes to stuff with marketing tie-ins, this movie actually wants to be about something. It’s about people living on the edge of civilization, in all the ways people do, and about the pain and joy of watching your dreams give way to something you hadn’t expected. It doesn’t tell that story in a particularly adept or sophisticated way, but at least it’s making the attempt.

I’m kind of embarrassed to be admitting I liked this movie so much. I had dubbed this thing “Rocky-Sock ‘Em Robots” before I even stepped in the theater. But this story has been told 1,000 times because it still has the power to affect you. They wrote a movie about fighting robots because when it’s done right, fighting robots are awesome to watch. It’s a movie every machine-loving pre-pubescent boy (or girl) can love. And I didn’t mind it either.

There are two terrific performances in “The Devil’s Double.” The movie itself is a flawed creation, chronicling the life of Latif Yahia, who in the late 80s and early 90s worked as a body double to Saddam Hussein’s son Uday. It’s messy and undisciplined, with poor editing and poorer production values. But even though the movie itself is sub-par, these two performances are possibly two of the greatest performances of the year.

It’s even more of a trick when you realize that the two performances are played by the same man.

Dominic Cooper, who plays both Uday and his double Latif, has been making his way into my heart for a few years now. In every film I’ve seen him in (“The Duchess”, “Mamma Mia”, and, most recently, “Captain America”) Cooper seems to sidle into the frame and, with a flick of his gimlet eyes, make everyone else in the scene surrender. Latif and Uday’s similarities end in their appearance. Most people who see “The Devil’s Double” will talk about Cooper’s portrayal of Uday, the younger son of Saddam, with minimal responsibility and vast amount of wealth. He was also a psychopath, with a penchant for shooting his gun in fabulous Baghdad nightclubs and stealing headscarf-clad Iraqi schoolgirls off the street. His Uday is like what Jack Nicholson’s Uday would be if he had the bone structure. But Cooper’s role as somber, desperate Latif is just as fascinating and nuanced, all the more accented by his vicious alter-ego. When Uday first approached Latif the Iran-Iaq War veteran declined. He re-thought it after Uday threw It’s a tour de force performance in every definition of the phrase. This is not a story of seduction to the dark side. Uday is clearly insane, and the second Latif seems enamored with any part of Uday’s life, the prince does something like eviscerate someone who’s offended him or rape a bride on her wedding day, and puts a damper on his view of the lifestyle.

Ludivine Sagnier as Sarrab and Dominic Cooper as Latif Yahia in "The Devil's Double.'" Ludivine Sagnier and Dominic Cooper star in THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE.

Some of the movie has the same thoughtfulness as Cooper’s role. In the scenes in Uday’s compound and in the Baghdad clubs, everything is gilded and sparkling and utterly, terribly false. It reads less like a docudrama and more like an extended rap video with a true sense of the meaninglessness of the things it’s portraying.

It’s such a shame, then, that the rest of the movie is a bit of a mess. Side plotlines get dropped in the shuffle, entire characters are abandoned at their posts, motives are not clearly explained. The final third of the movie is awash in what I like to call the “And Then” Disease (and then Latif went to Malta, and then he went back to confront Uday, and then…). And the composition of shots, until then so beautiful and meticulous, become unfocused and shaky, relying on the hand-held camera technique that should have been permanently banned about four years ago. Somewhere along the way, the movie turns cold and distant. By the final, bloody climax in a Baghdad marketplace (most likely a very fictionalized account) we’ve completely lost interest.

I fear Cooper might be ignored come Oscar season- the movie was released a bit too early in the year, and besides a showing at the local art houses I’ve heard next to no buzz about “The Devil’s Double.” But if there’s anyone who deserves at least a tip of the hat from the Academy, it’s this young talent. Cooper took a mediocre movie and made it splendid to look at. I can’t wait to see what he does next.

I had such hopes for this movie. Really, I did. I thought, hey, something big and silly and infused with self-awareness. Perhaps Jon Favreau is the new pastiche-king, the new Tarantino, the new master of male-centric camp! Perhaps the steampunk aliens want to blow up lots of hastily constructed Western town sets! Wouldn’t that be lovely?

It sure would have been. Which is why it’s so disappointing that “Cowboys and Aliens” doesn’t fail because it’s too stupid, it fails because it tries to be too smart. Enamored with its concept, it riddles the writing, the cast, and the entire design with Western and sci-fi film cliché and in the end topples under the weight of its own over-confidence.

There are six- count ‘em- six writers who worked on this movie. And for what? The story is a Man With No Name (Daniel Craig) who wakes up in the desert with a bizarre mechanism strapped to his arm and no memory of who he is. He wanders back to a town that is literally called Absolution, complete with a meek bartender/doctor (Sam Rockwell), a preacher-man with a salty mouth (Clancy Brown, and the most likeable character in the bunch) and the local wealthy cattle rancher (Harrison Ford). No Name discovers that he’s a criminal named Jake, but before the feds can cart him away, the town is attacked by mysterious flying machines that steal people away using- really- steel lassos. The only person who seems to know anything about them is the mysterious Ella (Olivia Wilde) who seems to think “mysterious” can be conveyed by gaping your mouth open like a fish and staring at the sky.

The movie isn’t poor technically- in terms of camera work, editing, and styling it’s perfectly competent. Favreau makes excellent use of the natural scenery and everyone looks terrific, lit so the details on the spurs and prairie dresses glimmer as brightly as Craig’s pretty, pretty blue eyes. And the “Iron Man” director has a serious pop-culture literacy, which I suppose counts for something.

But somewhere along the way the writers decided that just making a Western blended with a B-sci-fi flick wasn’t enough. They had to throw in an adorable child, an adorable mutt, father/son relationship pathology and fierce yet noble Native Americans who can cure amnesia with chanting. They throw this all in, and the kitchen sink too, but include not an ounce of irony, fun or good humor. Somewhere along the way someone started taking this movie seriously, which basically killed it where it stood.

The one moment of clarity comes when they discover the reason of the aliens’ attack on Earth (spoiler ahead.).

They love gooooolllllddddd!

I’m serious. They want gold. And there is a much-needed release when Ford, scowling through his leather-mitt face, looks incredulously at Craig and exclaims, “Gold?! Well what are they going to do- buy something?!!” The line is much funnier than it has any right to be, because it’s the first time in the whole movie that someone stands up and says, “This whole concept is insane! Why are we acting so dour? For God’s sake can someone just take in for a second that this movie is called ‘Cowboys and Aliens’?!”

But then the moment passes, and there’s a weirdly bloodless action scene between the aliens and the cowboys, and Olivia Wilde sacrifices herself for the greater good, and all is well in the town named Absolution, where the Man With No Name finds…oh, whatever. But I wonder what would have happened if one of the 500 writers on this project wrote that line, and then had an epiphany. What if they went back and re-wrote the script the way it should have been written: with joy and madness and a keen love for the bizarre? “Cowboys and Aliens” could have been sort of wonderful, a masterpiece of insanity. Instead of reaching for the stars, Favreau and his team decided to stay down-to-Earth. That was the biggest mistake of all.

This review contains spoilers. If you haven’t yet seen this movie, read the book, or read spoilers anywhere else, then go ahead and skip it.

I was 11 years old when “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” first hit bookshelves in America. My mother brought them home from the library where she worked one day. My brother and I read them together. We were addicts from page one. It’s 14 years later, and I still pull out one of the seven novels when I have nothing else on tap to read, sprinting through the text that now feels like an old friend.

In many ways my fandom doesn’t influence the way I feel about the last installment of the Potter film franchise, and in many ways it does. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” happens to be my least favorite book, and most of what I dislike about the movie are simply faithful adaptations of things I disliked about the novel.

There’s always a lot of discussion whether the director of an adaptation of a popular book “got it right”- a phrase which truly makes no sense when you think about it. What is getting it right? Making sure everyone’s favorite part is included? Correct casting? Correct production design? The best most adaptations can hope for is that they manage to invite everyone to come see the movie while not inspiring murderous rage among the fans. Walking the tightrope between the two is difficult, and in something as virulently loved as this it’s well nigh impossible.

This movie perhaps had the hardest time of all. Encompassing the latter half of “Deathly Hallows”, it’s essentially a part of a part of a story, which also has the responsibility of bringing everything together into one grand finale- basically an extended curtain call. Director David Yates, who’s helmed the last 4 movies, is occasionally awkward or ill-paced in his execution, but his misty views of the United Kingdom and minimalistic camera work generates an oerwhelming sense of unease and loneliness. His movies deftly navigate Rowling’s roving text between fantasy, horror, prep school drama, and, in this case, an epic war story.

The film doesn’t stop for breath at the start before launching into what is really two massive action sequences. The first is a daring magical heist into Gringotts, a wizard bank run by a bunch of sarcastic goblins, for a Horcrux our magical trio needs to destroy (too long to to explain, just keep reading). The heist scene is truly wonderful, featuring a goblin’s mine ride, an abused, atrophied dragon, and pretty damn good explosion at the end. Helena Bonham Carter steals the beginning of the scene by performing a neat and hilarious trick by turning herself into the sociopath Bellatrix Lestrange- who is actually Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) imitating Bellatrix Lestrange.

The second sequence is the final battle at Hogwarts school. It’s less organized than the heist scene, but far more emotionally-charged. The siege on Hogwarts castle and ensuing violence evokes nothing less than the early days of World War II. We see the march of Nazi Germany into Paris, underground tunnels, pirate radio stations, and brave local townspeople sending supplies and information to the resistance. In the first firing of Death Eater wands, we see the blitz and the lonely, terrifying nights Londoners spent huddled in Tube stations, listening to the Devil knocking at the door. It’s no secret that Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) is a pretty easy stand-in for Hitler- a mad and ravenous murderer who likes his followers to have pure bloodlines and has plans to dominate the world. But Yates does well keeping it from seeming trite or disrespectful.

All of the past Potter characters, both living and dead, make an appearance or two, saying the line that basically sums up their character and then either dying or surviving in a valiant manner. The resolution of Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) is both satisfying and heartbreaking. Through the years Snape has been one of the most compelling, astonishing characters in the series, and Rickman has delivered each of his lines as if it’s the last he will ever speak. The end of his story in many ways felt like the end of an era.

But while the character actors make up the color and the sparkle of the series, it’s been watching the three main characters (and the actors who play them) grow from adorable, shiny-faced children, to gawky, shaggy adolescents, to polished adults. I don’t know what they will do after the series is over- Watson is considered by most to be the most talented of the three, able to convey complex emotions without speaking a word. But Rupert Grint and Daniel Radcliffe, while a little less blessed in their acting ability, are possibly flexible enough to shed their robes and throw their wands to the wind.

The unhappy truth that the result of a seven year epic tale of good versus evil climaxes in what is basically an obscure technicality involving wand ownership. This is not the film’s fault of course, and writer Steve Kloves does his best to limit the amount of time spent on “wand law”, but it’s still an anti-climactic and kind of lazy way to end a story. And the one-on-one wand fights scenes are, I have to say, poorly translated to the screen and seem kind of lame. And the unfortunate Epilogue (featuring a dubiously-aged Harry, Ron and Hermione) would have been best left out. But despite the occasional awkwardness, or poor decisions, I have to say- Yates got it right.

So it’s over now. I realized when the lights went down, and the cape-clad people around me began to applaud, that Harry has been with me for more than half my life. It feels very much like what J.K. Rowling was trying to say when she wrote her masterwork: the pain, the joy, the fear of becoming an adult, of leaving the things that were precious to us behind, and turning towards who we are becoming. “Harry Potter” isn’t about facing down evil. It’s about facing ourselves.

There is a specific event which almost every person who has lived in a city has dealt with at least once. You’re walking down the street, and a mentally-ill homeless person stops you and, without warning, starts screaming nonsense in your face. A shot of adrenaline hits your brain, and suddenly you’re taken from your normal life and set in a dangerous, unpleasant and surreal world. You stand there, unable to move for a moment, before you snap back to yourself, and walk carefully past the person accosting you.

Watching “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” is like that. Only you’re not allowed to walk away. You have to sit there as it goes on. And on. For two and a half hours.

This would not be so awful if not for the fact that listening to someone scream at you for so long is also apparently incredibly boring.

Everything, and yet somehow nothing, happens in this movie. To start with, director Michael Bay and writer Ehren Kruger re-imagine the moon landing as a top-secret investigation of the crash of an alien ship. This allows Bay to include such nuggets as a computer-animated JFK, a Richard Nixon look-alike, and Neil Armstrong exclaiming “My God, it’s some kind of giant metal face!”

The rest of the plot would take too long to explain, and would require I expound on the history of ethnic cleansing of Autobots by the evil Decepticons, and the continuation of their civil war on Earth. Frankly having to do that would make me die a little inside. Suffice it to say the movie has Chernobyl, anonymous terrorists in the Middle East, Russian cosmonauts and gangsters. There’s a hot babe named Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (a Victoria’s Secret model!) who is dating Shia LaBeouf instead of Megan Fox, who apparently was fired for being a bitch. There are character actors like John Turturro, Frances McDormand and John Malkovich gnawing scenery in the background, and Patrick Dempsey and his hair being evil in the foreground. There are all sorts of robots- geek robots, ghetto robots, anonymous steampunk evil robots, and what sound like Irish bruiser robots. And they all turn into designer cars. And explosions!! Thousands of explosions! Explosions everywhere, forever! And it’s all in 3D- even Whiteley’s ass!

The result of all these ingredients is both a cinematic manifestation of a 14-year-old boy’s psyche, and a love letter to American militarism and excess. There is crane shot after crane shot of muscle cars rolling down highways in a convoy; the camera luxuriates over the curves of a BMW, or the image of a fighter jet, more lovingly than anything else in the movie. The whole thing literally ends with a bunch of overgrown Hasbro toys posing majestically over a destroyed downtown Chicago, a battered American flag still waving behind them.

If this all seems pretty bad ass, it is- for about 20 minutes. But there’s just so much of it- endless battle scenes, rampant commercialism, gratuitous, yet bloodless violence- it becomes monotonous. How many times can a person watch a computer-animated machine triumphantly return from certain death and attack in slow-motion? Because it happens about a dozen times in this movie, and by the third time I could feel the people around me checking their watches.

In the effort of fairness, it’s important to mention that much of the 3D-filming is actually pretty terrific. The scenes in space are particularly lovely to look at, offering kaleidoscopic landscapes of stars and planets that shape the scene and give it a sense of flight. However, Bay isn’t content to just make the showpiece scenes 3-dimensional; even throwaway scenes of two guys sitting in a room has to be made bigger, larger, in your face. After all 157 minutes, my head was pounding, my eyes were weak, and I needed to pause at the door to re-adjust to a world where John Malkovich’s forehead isn’t 14 feet high and coming right at me.

What else can I say to make you not see this movie? Because I really don’t want you to pay good money, that you earned with your hard work in a poor economy, to reward this bloated, monstrous Frankenstein. Believe me, I love a good movie where shit blows up; in fact, I really liked the first “Transformers,” which had sun-drenched cinematography, a rapier wit and a healthy dose of irony.

But as the axiom goes, just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. I have a feeling that through the entire course of filming this behemoth, Michael Bay never once heard, “No, Michael, we’re not doing that. That’s a bad idea and it’s stupid.” Everyone needs to hear that once in a while, even guys who make a lucrative career of visually attacking us in movie theaters. Bay’s movie might have given me a good shot of adrenaline. But in the end I just wanted to be able to walk on by.

There is so much potential in “Bad Teacher”, a raunchy comedy starring Cameron Diaz as a gold-digging alcoholic who manages to worm her way into a job as a middle-school English teacher. It has a terrific cast, including Justin Timberlake as an effete substitute with family money, Lucy Punch as Elizabeth’s competent nemesis, and Jason Segel as a mensch gym teacher. It has Diaz playing off-type, as an unlikable, unpleasant and irredeemable bitch. It’s writers cut their teeth writing for “The Office”. It has all the makings of a good summer comedy.

Which is why it’s so frustrating that through the entire two hours the movie never reaches its own potential.

Most of the jokes in “Bad Teacher” are just expected enough and just off their rhythm enough to be dead in the water. And every time the movie seizes on something that works (like a study session in which Diaz’s character throws dodge balls at students when they answer a question incorrectly) it cuts off too early or veers away to a much less funny bit involving Timberlake dry-humping in jeans. In some cases it’s impossible to explain why the joke isn’t funny- at a couple points I almost began to laugh because I knew I should, before realizing that I didn’t actually want to.

Not that the cast doesn’t try. If you had told me in the 1998 that Justin Timberlake was going to become one of the most interesting, original and slyly funny entertainers in Hollywood I would have told you to throw out your N’Sync album and get your head together. Timberlake does his best in this, stripping his character of all humor and self-awareness until he is just a pleasant cipher in a Polo sweater-vest. And British comedian Punch exudes a quiet malevolence- the yin to Diaz’s zany, foul-mouthed yang. But their efforts fall victim to the sub-par writing, and general tone of malaise. While the actors appear to have shown up to work, the director and editor seem to be phoning it in.

My first thoughts after leaving the film was it wasn’t that bad. Worth the $10 at least. But it had the potential for so much more than the vague, forgettable thing it became. I would love to see a movie with Cameron Diaz as a filthy, manipulative sociopath who drives a middle school staff to madness. I just don’t really want to see this one again.

I think it’s a little unfair that the fate of feminism rests on Kristen Wiig’s ability to tell a poop joke.

But as they say, some have greatness thrust upon them. And so the destiny of modern womanhood lies not with Congress, nor within the trenches of women’s rights groups, nor in the ivory towers of feminist scholarship. Instead it comes to Wiig, and her crass, farting, fighting, deliriously funny costars in “Bridesmaids” to prove to the world that women are indeed humorous. And therefore have the right to equal pay, reproductive freedom and the ability to ride the subway without being groped. Or so the latest arts and living articles would have you believe.

The trailers for “Bridesmaids” which have saturated the market are billing the movie as a gross-out flick that just happens to star women. But it’s so much more than that. It’s a darkly comic meditation on the fraught nature of female friendships, a recession story about a woman trying to pull herself together after her business fails, a romantic comedy that centers around a wedding. It’s beautiful and tender and ultimately optimistic.

It just happens to be funny. Really funny. Raucously, grotesquely, slyly funny. It’s perhaps the funniest movie to come out in the past five years.

Wiig is Annie, down on her luck after her bakery closes in the recession. She lives with a pair of odd British siblings (Rebel Wilson and Matt Lucas), works at a jewelry counter to make ends meet, and feeds her starving self-esteem by sleeping with a Porsche-driving douchebag named Ted (Jon Hamm) who greets her cheerfully with “Hey, Fuck-Buddy!”

As is pretty realistic with down-on-their-luck girls the world over, the only bright spot in Annie’s life is her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph). So when Lillian announces that she’s engaged and wants Annie to be her maid-of-honor, the destruction that ensues is largely a result of Annie’s panic at losing her only lifeline.

Wiig as Annie is terrific. The script itself is rife with excellent gags, including a virtuoso scene catered around explosive diarrhea at a bridal shop, and the destruction of an over-the-top Parisian wedding shower. But through it all, Wiig’s Annie stands out as a representation of a person as opposed to a collection of neuroses. She’s disorganized but not clumsy, smart without being obnoxiously bitchy and self-destructive without being tragic.

And this is not even taking into account the other bridesmaids: There’s a friend-usurper who dazzles everyone around her (Rose Byrne, with passive-aggressive perfection), a housewife who likes to crack jokes about how awful her children are (Wendi McLendon-Covey), the pretty-in-pink romantic in her early 20s who’s headed for a disastrous young marriage (Ellie Kemper) and, my personal favorite, the large, overly confident tomboy (Melissa McCarthy). These are not the cookie-cutter females I’m used to seeing in a Judd Apatow-produced movie. I know these people.

The movie runs a bit long- there are a few scenes where the jokes could and probably should have been cut short, but looking back there’s not one scene where I didn’t laugh. This movie ruined me for any half-baked vehicle starring Kate Hudson or Katherine Heigl the moment when the housewife tells Annie what it’s like to have teenaged sons. “There is semen everywhere,” she laments. “I literally broke a blanket in half the other day.”

Speaking of which, what of the men?

Well, there aren’t that many. Besides the aforementioned douchebag and weirdo roommate, there’s an adorable Irish cop love interest (Chris O’Dowd), and Lillian’s largely unseen fiance. That’s it. That’s all. But you know what? It’s still funny, and funny in a way that both men and women can enjoy. Believe me, guys. I checked. I actually brought a man to the screening with me to make sure.

This movie isn’t going to give me equal pay, or ensure that no one roofies me at the next party I go to. But I hadn’t realized how brainwashed I was to the Heigl-vehicles of the world until Kristen Wiig came along and showed me what a movie about women could be. It can be vulgar and lovable in equal measure. It can be smart about female friendships and family and love.

And of course, it can tell a damn good poop joke.

The early reviews are in for “Your Highness”- and the verdict isn’t good. The medieval costume drama spoof has a 24 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Salon.com film critic Andrew O’Hehir mused about whether it was the worst film of all time. At the screening I attended, a fellow critic glanced at me after the show with a look normally reserved for trauma victims.

Indeed, not all of the jokes work in “Your Highness”- I’m not even sure most of the jokes work. But I’m not going to hate on “Your Highness”. Because while it’s stupid, hare-brained, strangely composed and pretty badly written, it managed to do what most comedies fail at: it really made me laugh.

The idea of creating a plot synopsis for this movie is like asking for an in-depth discussion of a Ke$ha song, but here goes: Thaddeus (Danny McBride), the younger son of a king of a faraway land feels overshadowed by his dashing, handsome elder brother Fabius (James Franco). After Fabius’ fiance (Zooey Deschanel) is kidnapped by an evil wizard (Justin Theroux) to be impregnated, Thaddeus accompanies his brother to get her back.

Ignore the fact that it’s basically a less funny Monty Python. Though it isn’t worthy to wash Monty Python’s feet, it does have its own offensive charm. Bad British accents, fart jokes and gratuitous dismemberment abounds. The jokes that work (including a particularly inspired piece involving a minotaur penis), work precisely because you feel slightly ashamed for laughing. Part of me felt I should be above the scatological, low-brow, obvious pot joke shitstorm that is this movie. But God help me, when Theroux crows triumphantly, “It’s too late! The Fuckening has begun!”, it was the most I’d laughed in a long time.

Not nearly everything works. There’s a far too long bit with a Yoda-like child molester called the “Wise Wizard,” and if this movie has a lesson, it’s that you shouldn’t ever include a child molester bit unless it’s the funniest bit of your life. And McBride is not a comedy leading man- there’s no lovableness to balance out all the homophobia and masturbation jokes.

This isn’t a smart movie, but it’s a fun one. Objectively I agree with all the negative reviews, but why hate on a brief stoner movie that brought me two hours of legitimate entertainment? I’ll bet anything you’ll feel a little bad about laughing. But laugh you will.

There is a paradox that exists in movies where not much actually happens. The lack of discernible action on screen makes you look closer, searching the screen for the signs of plot and action even more than in a movie where, say, there’s a lot of shit blowing up.

It’s true that sometimes, there really is nothing there, that the lack of plot is a false promise of deeper meaning. But there can be incredible movements and sounds in all that stillness and silence. Abbas Kiarostami meditates on this paradox, as well as many others in “Certified Copy”, the legendary Iranian director’s first foray to Western Europeon cinema.

“Certified Copy” is in itself a contradiction- it’s lusty and seductive but academic and occasionally overly-verbose. It soaks in the Tuscan sunshine where the story takes place but often seems cynical and cold. It stars Juliette Binoche as a frustrated, over-worked mother living in Italy who meets a British writer (William Shimell). He’s just written a book about the value of copies of original art. She’s an arts and antiques dealer. She asks to spend the afternoon with him to discuss his theory that copies have just as much value as originals.

They travel to a small town in Tuscany where a woman mistakes them for a married couple. Binoche doesn’t correct her, telling her that they’ve been married for 15 years, he works too much, etc. As the day progresses he gets in on the joke, and they spend their time wandering around as a married couple, fighting and making up and reminiscing about their difficult life together.

Much remains unexplained- there was a small but vocal minority at the screening I attended who insisted on an alternate analysis of the couple’s relationship. Obviously both characters have experience in marriage, though how much, and to whom, remains unsaid. Both Binoche and Shimell act with elegant minimalism. Nothing much may happen in “Certified Copy”, but simply watching the luminous Binoche as the unnamed lead character is riveting. She plays an exhausted mother, a bitter wife, but with warmth and flair and raw sexuality. In one scene, she stands in front of a bathroom mirror, putting on jewelry and lipstick in an effort to attract her companian’s attention, and her nakedness is both uncomfortable and impossible to look away from. Shimell, an opera singer making his film debut, works the camera with grace and command.

Kiarostami ignores the traditional route of drenching his movie in sunlight the way most most films in Tuscany do, but allows the sheer natural beauty of the landscape to speak for itself. The lack of stylization, along with the academic chatter between Binoche and Shimell can seem a little dry or soulless at first blush, but the minute you look at Binoche and Shimell’s chemistry with one another, you realize that this just one more paradox: its simplicity is simply part of the seduction.

The second you watch a trailer for “Limitless,” the new vehicle for rising star Bradley Cooper, you should have the entire movie planned in your head: Man is out of work loser who loses girlfriend/job/apartment. Through drugs/magic/trickery man becomes successful. Man engages in 5-10 minute montage showing him with fast cars, fast women, fabulous houses, and other aspects of a pretty, but empty lifestyle. Then, in the following “be careful what you wish for” scenario, there are two possible outcomes: either man somehow loses everything, learns valuable lesson, gets girl and goes on to live sensible middle-class life, or man does not learn lesson and ends the movie a defeated, broken man. Fin.

There’s nothing wrong with this formula. Technically, “Citizen Kane” is modeled on this blueprint, as is “Big” and “Goodfellas.” It’s what you put in between the lines that count.

Let me be clear. “Limitless” is not “Citizen Kane.”

Between the lines of a perfectly serviceable plot construct, director Neil Burger obviously didn’t know if he wanted a slick, polished thriller or a gritty B-movie aesthetic. So he decided to go with the mediocre version of both. Like a thriller it’s glossy and over-polished, but without the writing to back it up. Like a B-movie, it’s amoral, plot hole-ridden and ridiculous, but without any of the fun to make it enjoyable. The result is cold, cynical and unpleasant.

It’s fairly unclear what we’re supposed to think about Bradley Cooper’s character, an out-of-work writer named Eddie who discovers a drug that allows him to access every part of his brain. There’s something about Cooper I’ve always found a little unlikeable- like a friend’s ex-boyfriend who gets to keep hanging around because he’s so damn charming. Cooper’s not a bad actor (his comic timing for some of his lines in “Limitless” is spot-on), but his character is so poorly drawn-out all we see is the fact that he’s a lazy jerk who (spoiler alert) may or may not have committed murder during a blackout induced by his genius drug.

And the voiceover, my God, the voiceover. Every other movement Bradley Cooper makes is punctuated with grating commentary making sure you know what movement he’s making and why. “Limitless” doesn’t trust the audience to understand anything. Whole characters are explained the second they appear on screen. Many critics hold that any voiceover at all is lazy storytelling, which I find a little harsh. But this isn’t just lazy- it’s willfully trying to bypass the basic way you explain something on camera.

Cooper is joined by the stellar Abbie Cornish, who makes as much as she can out of a small role as Eddie’s girlfriend. A scene where she’s being chased through Central Park is both a badass action sequence and really frightening to watch. Robert De Niro also squints his way through a role as a Warren Buffett-type financier; he’s 100 percent phoning it in, but he looks like he’s having a good time.

The music and sound is without a doubt the best part of “Limitless”, often lifting the mediocre action on screen. Watching new and improved Eddie strut down the streets of New York is boring- watching new and improved Eddie strut down the streets of New York to the Black Keys’ “Howlin’ for You” is also pretty boring, but at least you’re listening to a good song. And the sound editing during Eddie’s genius trips makes the world around him seem impenetrable and fragile all at once.

Maybe I’m frustrated because January through March is considered the doldrums of Hollywood film releases (this is the time when producers clear off their shelves of anything that’s not an Oscar movie or a summer blockbuster). Maybe I’ve just seen a lot of crap lately and “Limitless” was the straw that broke the camel’s back. But this movie shouldn’t have been hard to make. The plot is right there to capture. The actors are competent and good-looking and the money’s in the bank. But do yourself a favor and just watch the trailer. It’s more satisfying than the movie itself could ever be.

Several people asked me over the past few weeks what “The Adjustment Bureau”, the Matt Damon vehicle directed by “Bourne Ultimatum” director George Nolfi, is supposed to be about. Sadly, the best way to describe it so everyone could understand was to tell them, “You know, it’s a little ‘Inception’-y.”

“The Adjustment Bureau”, with its morose grey tones, quick-paced chase scenes and pseudo-spiritual focus, is doomed to be compared with “Inception”, though the plot actually has little in common with last year’s Christopher Nolan extravaganza. Instead of pudgy, defeated Leo DiCaprio, we have Matt Damon as David, a chipper, up-and-coming politician, who stumbles onto the knowledge that his entire life has been engineered by a group of men who claim to work for someone called “The Chairman”. They alert him that his “Plan” entails that he not hook up with a feisty ballerina (the wonderful Emily Blunt) which would derail him from his career.

From the get-go, it’s made clear who/what The Chairman is, as well as his workers. These are bureaucrats from the Other Side, who fascinatingly seem to have the same type of business hierarchy as a large government office and are very fond of snappy fedora hats. It’s a strange, slightly silly conceit, but perhaps that’s what makes it brilliant. (It also gives an excuse to quote perhaps the most unintentionally hilarious line of the year: “The most important thing to remember is that everyone wearing a hat is a threat.”)

Nolfi is smart not pretending that his story isn’t a little silly, and a little on-the-nose. Rather he embraces it, so the chase scenes with Damon being followed by ten men in $600 suits and fedoras duels between being charming and actually a little frightening. Nolfi isn’t afraid of fun- something Christopher Nolan could maybe take a lesson from.

Damon and Blunt display some of the best chemistry on-screen that I have seen in a long time. Though their relationship is based on only three chance meetings, their slow-burning yet jovial banter makes it seems credible that they would be willing to take on God to keep it intact. John Slattery (who for the rest of my life I will always call Roger Sterling) is also terrific as a cosmic middle manager. And as David’s “case worker”, Anthony Mackie takes what could be a small, exposition-heavy character, and turns him into a melancholy, disillusioned soul with every turn of phrase.

Nolfi may not be afraid of fun, but he seems terrified of his audience not getting his concept. His script explains far too much. He doesn’t trust his cast members, many of whom are excellent non-verbal actors, to tell the story for him. More insultingly, he doesn’t trust his audience to “get” who The Chairman is, and why The Plan is so important. And worst of all, the focus group-approved ending kills the lovely spontaneous and slightly madcap quality of the rest of the movie. It’s only good sense, or sheer luck, that gave him a cast that work their butts off to elevate the average writing.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that “The Adjustment Bureau” has much more in common with the “Bourne” films than “Inception”. The movies are about Matt Damon being chased- The Chairman is just the guy who’s chasing him. It’s silly and over-the-top- and altogether not a bad way to spend the weekend.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ln1bDA1-04&feature=fvsr

2.5 out of 4 stars

“Cedar Rapids” has the feeling of a piece of crystal- pretty and delicate, but as if one good shake would shatter it. It’s not a hearty comedy, or a particularly memorable one, but it has a sweetness and gentleness that’s unexpected.

Perhaps the most important revelation I got from Cedar Rapids was that Ed Helms could make an entire career just using his toothy smile. He puts it to good use in the movie as Tim Lippe, a small-town insurance agent who goes to a yearly insurance conference in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Tim is sweet-natured man-child, with a bowl-cut and a vaguely creepy relationship with his former grade school teacher (a fabulous Sigourney Weaver). He’s never left his town, so comparatively Cedar Rapids is the big city, and he quickly falls in with some conference veterans, who are the grown-up version of what the cool kids in high school.

Helms is a careful comedian- he takes pains to make sure that Tim isn’t turned into one big hick joke, which can’t have been an easy feat. Tim is not just a punchline, he’s a relatable human being who could actually exist in real life. Though his childlike innocence at the surface seems ridiculous, his refusal to acknowledge, say, the fact that his former teacher probably doesn’t want to marry him, is more common than we’d like to think. We all want to see the pretty side of life, even long after we’ve traveled on a plane and seen humanity at its darkest hour.

John C. Reilly takes charge of most of the bigger laughs as conference pro Dean Ziegler, that guy you know who likes to drink too much at professional events and give everyone nicknames whether they want one or not. Anne Heche is lovely and funny as a brassy married woman who uses the annual conference as a getaway from her real life. And best of all is Isiah Whitlock, Jr. (a.k.a. Clay Davis on HBO’s “The Wire”) as a mild-mannered insurance agent…who is very fond of HBO’s “The Wire”.

“Cedar Rapids” is primarily about a man being confronted with some of the world’s ugliness and refusing to let it kill his innocence. It’s gentle and frequently very funny. But what’s curious about “Cedar Rapids” is why, in a movie where so much works, is it ultimately forgettable? This is one of the more difficult reviews for me to write, simply because I didn’t have much to say. I enjoyed myself in the theater, but the second I walked out it had gone completely out of my head. This is perhaps the problem with creating gentle movies- without the punch you run the danger of fading like a wisp of smoke in a hurricane. “Cedar Rapids” got me, but it couldn’t hold me. Crystal might be pretty to look at- but it often doesn’t stand the tests of time.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching “Gnomeo and Juliet”, it’s that lawn gnomes aren’t cute. Not even a little bit. They’re grotesque things, humanlike but with dead eyes that seem to see nothing. And, if you see them before going to bed, their blocky bodies and pointy hats will haunt your dreams.

At least that’s what happened to me after viewing a horrific 3-D version of “Gnomeo and Juliet” a reboot of the classic tragedy as a comedy starring garden gnomes. The fact that I even had to write that sentence in my lifetime illustrates the sad decline of Western art and culture, and makes me want to hit something very, very hard.

What I can’t seem to understand is how director Kelly Asbury managed to get a stellar cast for this insanity. James McAvoy and Emily Blunt voice the titular heroes; Michael Caine lends his voice to Juliet’s over-protective father, and Maggie Smith plays Gnomeo’s mother. I can see how they got Ozzie Osbourne to voice an absent-minded ceramic pony, but does Caine need money that badly?

I will say there is something kind of sweet about how lovingly the animators rendered the lawn gnomes, right down to their scarred and chipped finish and the cement clink sound they make when they touch each other. Likewise, the initial concept of lawn ornaments emulating the suburban lawn feud of their neighboring owners could have worked in more capable hands. Sadly, the writing is a deeply weird mesh of vaguely dirty jokes, on-the-nose Shakespeare references, bad puns, cheese and slapstick. For every joke that hits, there are ten that fall flat (as was marked by the confused silence of the children in my audience) The disjointed quality probably stems from the fact that there are six writing credits attached to the movie (seven, if you count Shakespeare).

And then there are the parts of the movie that play like some sort of insane fever dream. Every so often, for no reason it segues from the primary plot to musical interludes marked with Elton John songs (John wrote the original music for the film). In one case, the music accompanies some sort of John Hughes-style montage of the star-crossed lovers getting ready for their first date. And, of course, because it’s in 3-D, this psychedelic freak-out looks like it’s coming right at you.

At that point, I wrote in my notebook “SEIZURE” in big block letters. It was underlined twice.

I gave “Gnomeo and Juliet” one star for one reason: Hulk Hogan. Hogan voices the funniest part of the movie: an advertisement for “the Terrafirminator”, an unnecessarily powerful lawn mower that leaves devastation in its wake. It’s a very funny riff on how, in the absence of real lawns and real land, we tend to our tiny developed patches of Astroturf with ridiculous amounts of gas-powered fury.

Hogan’s scene is worth that star, and my congratulations. But I can’t imagine it’s worth the $10 to watch giant bulbous lawn gnomes lunge at you through the magic of 3-dimensional movie-making.

“The Dilemma” the new film by Ron Howard, seems to be known primarily for the moment in the original trailer that had Vince Vaughn saying that environmentally-friendly cars were gay (later trailers cut the line). It seemed destined to be known for only that line, a signifier of how truly crappy the movies are in the post-Christmas, pre-Summer malaise.

That’s unfortunate, because “The Dilemma” seems to be a smart movie in a stupid movie’s clothing. The movie, a vaguely moral tale of a man who discovers that his best friend’s wife is cheating on him, is not actually all that funny. It is, however, an unexpectedly pointed look at modern marriage and two men approaching the perimeter of middle age.

Vince Vaughn is Ronny, who works in the auto industry with his best friend Nick (Kevin James). He’s a recovering gambling addict, on the cusp of getting a contract with Dodge, and is preparing to propose to his longtime girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Connelly), sealing his transformation as a man settled down. Then he discovers that Nick’s wife Geneva (Winona Ryder) is cheating on him, sending Ronny into a downward spiral.

The movie’s being advertised as a light sex romp, but the movie itself takes a much darker take. If they had marketed the movie as a black comedy (and improved the writing somewhat) Vaughn could have been nominated for his role as the disillusioned and frustrated Ronny. The “Dilemma”, of course, is whether or not to tell his friend, and watching how the situation reflects back on his relationship with Beth is heart-wrenching. His gambling addiction is not played for laughs but actually portrayed as a legitimate, life-wrecking disease. At one point, Beth finds the cash that Ronny is planning to buy her ring with and asks “Why do you have so much cash on you, Ronny?” in a crushingly frightened way that rings absolutely true.

In fact, “The Dilemma” falters the most when it’s trying to be humorous. The “gay” line didn’t offend me because I thought it was homophobic, it offended me because it wasn’t remotely funny. We get jokes about fat kids and jokes about painful urination and jokes about bleeding ulcers. Even Vaughn,’s trademark manic rhythm, which normally could turn the most boring phrase into comic gold, at times seems awkward and listless. Queen Latifah, as a foul-mouthed auto executive, gets the brunt of the bad dialogue- no one should ever have to say the phrase “lady wood”, never mind a Queen. The best comedic moments are given to Zip (Channing Tatum), as Geneva’s oxy-fiend lover. Tatum has surprisingly good timing and physicality. He’s also obscenely good-looking, so maybe I’m a little biased.

The combination of frat-boy comedy and domestic drama comes off as uneven and disorganized by the end. The ending itself is a little too pat, and drops a few loose threads of the story. But for a movie that was supposed to be one big gay joke, it seems suspiciously thoughtful.

Is it possible to have a super hero with no super power, no redeeming qualities, no special talents and no moral fiber?

It’s an interesting question, and Indie darling director, teamed up with writer and star Seth Rogan, seem like the perfect, if unlikely candidates, to give it an answer in “The Green Hornet,” based on the 1930s radio show. The concept is fascinating, however the product is simply a profile of an unlikeable person, dressed up in a costume.

It pains me to say this; I really wanted to like “Green Hornet” with its strange choice of director and quick-witted star. But Rogan (as well as co-writer Evan Goldberg) wrote Britt Reid, party boy and newspaper publisher-turned-vigilante, to be so unpalatable, so manipulative and weak, it becomes embarrassing to watch him. There is no Batman-esque dark night of the soul, no Spider-Man adolescent angst, and certainly no Superman moral rectitude. There isn’t even any Iron Man charm softening the edges of Rogan’s Hornet.

The back story gives him a dead mom and a dick father, which is supposed to be the reasoning behind his meanneass and callowness towards his fellow human beings. When his father dies, supposedly from a bee sting, Reid take over his family’s news empire and discovers his father’s assistant, a Chinese immigrant named Kato (Jay Chou), who’s a mechanic, karate expert and all-around renaissance man. Together they become vigilantes who actually use their notoriety as a weapon.

I have to say, it’s entertaining for a little while, and even freeing. Here, finally, is a selfish, pompous, manic hero for the rest of us- a guy who uses a cape and a veneer of ethics to work out his daddy issues like a man! Reid talks very much like Rogan’s characters from other films, with a constant, slightly drunken stream of conciousness that really is pretty funny. And Chou as Kato, with his taste for classical music, badass karate moves and beautiful eyes, is more crushworthy than a thousand Edward Cullens with their shirts off.

But after, say, half an hour, Reid’s character isn’t just enraging- it’s boring. the genius of Robert Downey, Jr.’s performance in “Iron Man” was that he would do despicable things, but he was so damn charming you just didn’t care. And by the time he becomes Iron Man, you actually believe it.

Also, you know, he was a genius who could actually do super hero things. In case you haven’t figured it out, Kato is the one  with all the skill and ingenuity to be a super hero. Reid’s job is to use his newspaper as a marketing tool and buy all the stuff Kato needs. And then take all the credit. Perhaps it’s silly to rag on a character like this- normally I avoid making judgements of fictional people. But it’s annoying to go through a whole film thinking, “But I like Kato! He’s funnier and smarter and can actually do martial arts! Why can’t the movie just be called “Kato”?

There are wonderful moments in “Hornet”, mainly related to the film’s casting. James Franco makes a hilarious cameo as a drug lord, and Edward James Olmos galumphs companionably around Reid’s newsroom as its editor. Christoph Waltz, maybe the best villain of the last decade in “Inglourious Basterds” makes a lot of a small role as Chudnofsky, a criminal kingpin with an inferiority complex.

But Reid is the star. Hell, his alter-ego is the title. And if there’s no change, no illumination, why are we watching? Reid’s character ends the movie the same old bastard he started as- just in a mask. You can add as much 3D as you want to that story- it doesn’t make it interesting.

Before I begin, I have a terrible confession to make.

I’ve never seen the original “Tron”. And believe me, I’ve tried. The 1982 Disney film about video game designers who get sucked into their own game is bizarrely hard to find. It’s not on Netflix, and the cheapest versions on Amazon were $160. You can’t find it at most video rental places- the one I tried had a copy, which was checked out. Disney, of course, is very finicky about when they release their canon, but I would have thought they would have flooded the market with the original in time for the release of “Tron: Legacy” this week.

Regardless, I was unable to procure it, and so have a gaping hole in my nerd repertoire. But research and some creative Youtube searching tells me that “Tron” was a film ahead of its time, a cheesy cyberpunk adventure flick, revered by nerds the world over. It retains its cult status through a mixture of nostalgia and “so bad it’s good” hipster ethos. I have a healthy respect and love for movies like this- the “Labyrinths” and “Fifth Elements” of the world have an important place in cinematic history too, after all.

“Legacy,” was ostensibly a good idea. To take the subject matter and jet it into the world of 3D televisions and XBox Kinect, to take the piece to the next level, and show The Grid in its panoramic, fully realized glory. “Legacy” gives rakish hero Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) a son named Sam (Garrett Hedlund), and have him explore his father’s universe, fighting his father’s corrupt alter-ego Clu (a creepy, digitally-enhanced Bridges, along with a body-double) to rescue his father from digital exile.

Indeed “Legacy” is very beautiful, with sweeping landscapes of neon and chrome. The design is reminiscent of “Blade Runner” but manages to exude a freshness that other Ridley Scott imitators have been unable to match. It’s unabashedly a fanboy movie- the women are like satin dolls, with 7-inch heels and eyelashes like sabres- but there’s real care taken with every visual I find almost craftsmanlike. Most of the film takes place in the “Tron” universe, but even the scenes in this world are gorgeous and meticulously produced. A particularly inspired scene has Flynn’s son enter his father’s old arcade, flip on the power, and stand back as the early 80s are reborn with the sounds of Pac-Man, Frogger and Journey on the jukebox.

But watching “Tron: Legacy” is like going out with a really good-looking, but very stupid date: it’s all good until they open their mouth. The dialogue, written between four authors, is embarrassingly clunky. An example. Flynn’s hot assistant (Olivia Wilde) asks Sam what a sunrise looks like. “It’s warm…bright…beautiful,” he responds lamely, which I thought was a joke until I realized it was supposed to be romantic. Bridges is basically playing The Digital Dude, literally telling Sam at one point “You’re really messing with my zen-thing, man”. There’s a certain amount of silliness I’m willing to put up with, especially where Bridges is concerned, but this is just lame.

Then there’s the 3D.

“Legacy” has a lot riding on its 3D capabilities. Unlike a lot of movies, which are shot in 2D and hastily converted in post-production, “Legacy” was shot for 3D. In the trailers it’s touting itself as the “movie 3D was made for”.

Whatever its merits, I have a feeling I’m unqualified to judge, because frankly I hate 3D. I hate it so very, very much. I hate the stupid glasses, which I have to put on over my real glasses. I hate that they get smudged. I hate that squinting through them more often than not triggers a migraine that renders me incapable of functional thought. I hate having blood, or flaming car parts, or someone’s enormous hand flung at me for no reason. Most of all I hate that 3D is meant to create a more immersive experience, but usually only serves to make me remember that I’m in a theater, watching a movie with huge, uncomfortable glasses on. So I hated the 3D in “Legacy”, though I concede it was better than the 3D in, say, “Clash of the Titans.”

I have a lot of love in my heart for big, silly, fun action movies- movies hat make things go boom and don’t take life too seriously. God knows I’ll get my fill of pretentious Oscar-bait over the next few months, and I’m happy to sit back with my popcorn and have the CGI think for me. But, just like when you go out with the hot but dumb guy, there’s only so much a girl can take before she needs to rethink her priorities.

“The Fighter” is a title at which I would usually roll my eyes. Oh, yes, he’s a fighter, because you see he’s both a boxer and a working class guy from Lowell, Mass., who “fights” his way up from nothing. So it’s a play on words, sort of!

“The Fighter,” however, is in disguise. On the surface it masquerades as a played-out sports movie vehicle for Mark Wahlberg, a lazy mimicry of “The Wrestler” or “Rocky”. An easy win at the box office, maybe even an Oscar nod, without actually doing anything original. But, happily, beneath that mask lies a deep, rich center of terrific performances and surprisingly nuanced writing.

“The Fighter” tells a story of recent history: the welterweight boxer “Irish” Mickey Ward (Wahlberg), who rose to fame in the 80s and became the “pride of Lowell”, his hometown. His success superseded that of his brother, Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), who lost his own promising boxing career to crack addiction.

The outline of the story is really just a backdrop to the family drama surrounding Ward’s life. When we meet Mickey, he’s merely a “stepping stone”, meaning better boxers use him as practice before facing off against title fighters. He’s being trained by his brother, who has a tendency to abandon him for the crack pipe and blusters about his knock-down fight with Sugar Ray Leonard. Ward is also managed by his mother Alice (Melissa Leo) who tends to view him as something between a cash cow and placeholder for when his brother eventually returns to greatness. Leo, Wahlberg and Bale are perfect as a trio, playing this disordered, noisy and violent family drama with an eerie truthfulness. Writers Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson take what could be a basic story of a rising star, and melds it beautifully and wrenchingly into a story of a family orbiting one member’s self-destruction.

It would be easy for the movie to be overrun by Bale, who chews his way through his scenes as the charismatic Dicky. Bale really is stunning, moving about the screen with alternate cat-like grace, and halting, stumbling movements. In some scenes he tends to overdo the twitchy dope-fiend shtick a little, but in the quieter moments his sunken eyes tell volumes. But if Bale is the explosion in this piece, Wahlberg is the slow burn. Ward is a frustrated man, stuck in a town and a family that both reveres him and keeps him from achieving what he knows he’s fully capable of. Even his supportive girlfriend Charlene (the always wonderful Amy Adams) is an alternate pull, seeing what Mickey should do to ensure his success, but unable to see why he can’t do it.

The fight scenes themselves are hyper-real, shot with HBO television cameras documentary-style. The way they’re shot also gives non-boxer a good sense of the strategy and mindfulness that goes into the sweet science But all in all, “The Fighter” manages to transcend it’s own unoriginality to create a truly smart and clear-eyed view of a family and addiction. The “fighting” itself, in retrospect, seems secondary.

“Black Swan” operates within a genre that’s defined less by the kind of movie it is, and more by the kind of directors who make it. Aronofsky, who directed “Requiem for a Dream” and “Pi”, specializes in nightmares- the kind created by Lynch and Kubrick. His nightmares are dirty affairs, full of sex and blood and casual hostility.

If it’s nightmares you want, “Black Swan” delivers them in spades. Aronofsky’s tale of a dancer who may or may not be going insane, is a flawed creation, but also an exhilarating and quietly insidious one.

Natalie Portman plays Nina, a ballerina on the cusp of fame within her company, who dances with precision and technical strength but without passion. She’s stuck emotionally at about 13 years old- she still lives with her overbearing mother (a divine Barbara Hershey) and her pink bedroom is full of stuffed animals and lace. Her life is well-measured and structured, until she’s picked a both the White and Black Swans in her company’s performance of “Swan Lake”. She is suddenly faced with a a rival name Lily (Mila Kunis), and begins to (possibly) lose her mind. To tell you more would both make this review chock-full of spoilers, and, more importantly, make assumptions about what actually does happen in “Black Swan.” Suffice it to say, there will be blood, and a series of icky scenarios involving peeling skin and things growing out of Nina’s back- those who are squeamish would do well to go see “Harry Potter” or something.

A lot of people will go to see the movie for the sex- yes, fellas, there’s a sex scene between Portman and Kunis, and the fantastic Vincent Cassel also gets some play as the lecherous ballet choreographer Thomas. But the erotica involved is less titillating and more vaguely unpleasant, like a wet dream gone wrong. Far more important is Nina’s body itself, both a tool she uses within her work, and a palette on which we see the transformations (real and imagined) she’s going through. Her body is a map of the demands of a ballet career- the normality of anorexia and bulimia, the cracked toenails and jammed joints and nervous tics.

Vincent Cassel can chew the scenery all he wants (and he does), but this movie belongs to the women. Portman is getting a lot of buzz around her role; I don’t know if it’s the best performance of the year, but her focus and control within this role is stunning. Portman’s Nina is a raw nerve, her eyes perpetually full of terror. In a climactic dance sequence she simply owns the camera, and her energy is intoxicating. Kunis is excellent; unlike some of the other plot points Lily is diabolical in a completely realistic way. She throws off her prey with over-friendliness and relaxed energy, hiding ugliness beneath the surface. Winona Ryder is also lovely as an aging ballet star. But it’s Barbara Hershey who steals the show as Nina’s slightly mad and frustrated mother. Hershey’s scenes throw you off-balance in a way that the other admirable performers just can’t compete with.

Despite some terrific performances, “Black Swan” is far from perfect. Aspects of the movie are a little Film Analysis 101; there are broken or fractured mirrors, denoting Nina’s shattered psyche. Nina’s always dressed in white, while Lily dresses in black. A ballerina music box gets thrown across the room, and the little ballerina inside loses her head. The symbolism is a little too on-the-nose, too clever. It looks like Aronofsky is trying too hard, and he doesn’t have to. If he had let the movie fly on its own merits- the acting, the excellent representation of life in a ballet company, the absolutely gorgeous lighting and camerawork- it would come off more polished than it does now.

“Black Swan” is a strange work of art, and I still can’t tell whether it will be the biggest movie of the season, or a total flop. It is cerebral and pessimistic, and God knows such things generally don’t do well at the box office. But I’m pulling for “Black Swan”- it isn’t perfect, but it has power and soul. Everything else are just details.

About halfway through watching “Burlesque” I realized I’ve definitely seen it already. The story of sweet young ingenue Ali (Christina Aguilera ) who finds herself working for a burlesque club in Los Angeles is mostly told through extravagant musical sequences cribbed from “A People’s History of Modern Coordinated Dance Numbers”. There’s a montage with Ali learning her dance routine while walking down the street. There’s a scene with her dancing in the Iowa restaurant where she works. There’s a scene of her being seduced by the shark who wants to turn her into a commodity. It’s “Showgirls” and “Flashdance” and “Moulin Rouge” and basically every other dance movie you’ve ever watched with your girlfriends while mowing down cookie dough and doing your nails.

It’s derivative. It’s been done. And it’s fabulous.

I just can’t help it; this movie hits all my buttons. The musical numbers are exquisitely composed and beautiful to watch. I’ve been on Team Christina since I was 12 years old. She’s not a great actress, but she has presence and sass and can sing the hell out of every number she’s given. The first moment you see Cher (who plays the club’s beleaguered owner Tess), she’s standing regally among a pile of lithe young bodies, wearing a kicky little sailor hat like a crown. And Stanley Tucci steals the show every time he appears as Tess’ gay stage manager.

I mean really, its like they made it just for me.

It would even be better if it was just a series of music videos. The plot itself, involving Tess fending off a buyout offer by the aforementioned real estate shark (Eric Dane), is silly and almost extraneous to the showpiece numbers. So too is Ali’s romance with Jack (Cam Gigandet), the club’s bartender with a passion for guyliner. Writer and Director Steve Antin wisely keeps the these scenes short and to the point. He knows what we want to see, and it’s not a discussion of air rights.

What we do want to see, however, he delivers in spades. Aguilera nails a mix of performances from “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”, to “I Am a Good Girl” and “Tough Lover”. Aguilera is weirdly perfect for this role, with her tiny body and big, big hair, and sad eyes that make you believe she was the prettiest girl in her small Iowa town. As I said, she’s not an Oscar winner, but she can deliver a line credibly. Her big acting scenes are just placeholders for her music, anyway, so who cares?

Cher, though her face is now primarily held up with silicone and fishing line, still has a majesty and control that rivals all other divas. She doesn’t actually have a duet with Aguilera , and only sings twice throughout the movie, but she stands behind all the action like a master puppeteer. Its curious to look at her filmography and see that she mostly played working-class women, often single mothers or women wounded by fate. This is the first film I’ve seen her in where she was playing the Cher of the music industry- the fierce diva with killer legs and a killer voice.

“Burlesque” isn’t a movie that’s going to change the genre, and may not even become a classic the way that “Dirty Dancing” or “Moulin Rouge” have become. But it’s getting cold outside, and it’s getting darker earlier, and what better way to get away from your family during the holidays than going to watch Aguilera sing the crap out of “Tough Lover” in leather lingerie? Break out the cookie dough, wear your kickiest sailor hat, and go watch Cher and Aguilera do it all again, one more time.

When I got home from seeing “127 Hours” last night, I was asked whether I liked it. I honestly didn’t know what to say.

“127 Hours” isn’t a movie you like; not in the way you like “Fight Club” or “Casablanca” or “A Muppet Christmas Carol.” In many ways it’s a movie you endure, partly because you’re riveted, and partly because you feel like a bad person if you don’t. For God’s sake, it’s the story of a man who had to cut his own arm off. The least you can do is watch it.

Director Danny Boyle loves talking about the thin, fragile line that keeps us from becoming packs of roving, iPhone-using animals. He examined it in the zombie flick “28 Days Later” and the study of modern India in “Slumdog Millionaire.” But never is his favorite theme more present than in the story of Aron Ralston, who in 2003 became trapped under a boulder in a canyon in Utah for five days, finally cutting off his own arm with a dull multi-purpose knife to escape. Boyle uses his considerable talents, terrific editing and James Franco’s brilliant turn as Ralston to create a full account of a man who might have been saved by his own descent into animalistic madness.

Franco makes up most of the film. Aside from two girls he runs into while hiking and the people who find him after his ordeal, most of the actors appear in Aron’s flashbacks and delusions- shadows which are simply extensions of him. Franco is in many ways an old-style movie actor: consistently thrusting himself into other challenges, other genres. He’s simply not afraid to fail (a serious risk when you’re the star of a movie with no co-stars). His Ralston is an adrenaline junkie, a guy who takes a header off his mountain bike and snaps a photo to record the experience. His carelessness is based on equal parts hubris and genuine knowledge. He describes the Canyonlands as his second home, and after his fall he tries several smart, if unsuccessful, ideas to try to free himself. The moment when he realizes he didn’t tell anyone where he was going is soul-crushing. Part of you knows that it was an idiotic move not to take precautions, but part of you admires that wild spirit, that reckless sense of adventure and it hurts to see it fail him.

Boyle’s camerawork is masterful, considering most of the movie takes place in a canyon slot a few feet wide. No one knows how to film memories, delusions and dream sequences better (a nightmare Aron has involving a flood is especially fantastic, a sequence worthy of Kubrick.) Franco and Boyle make clear that Ralston’s act is based as much on madness and despair as it is on the will to survive.

The climactic and brutal scene where Aron finally breaks his own arm and cuts through it is astonishing. Boyle forgoes having too much blood or even close-up shots of the carnage, but the savagery remains. The moment where he cuts through the primary nerve in his arm is excruciating, though you don’t see much. It’s the white noise that demonstrates the incredible amount of pain involved that really makes it hard to view.

Boyle wants us to see how unbelievably close we are to the animal; how bad timing, a wrong step and a loose boulder can suddenly render us little more than a fox caught in a trap. Facing that knowledge, and the astonishing way Ralston eventually survived his ordeal and went on to lead a normal life is nothing short of emotionally exhausting. Did I like “127 Hours”? I have no idea. But you can bet that I won’t stop thinking about it for a very long time.

“Unstoppable” is a movie that begs for catchy pull quotes in its trailer.

I mean, come on, it’s a movie about a runaway train. There are so many metaphors I could utilize; obviously with caps lock and copious exclamation points. I could write

something like “NON-STOP action thrill-ride!” “This locomotive delivers the goods!” “Hop on the Denzel Train and hit the accelerator!”

At the risk of sounding like sucker, I’ll admit all the stuff I just wrote is kind of true. Because this was more than just a movie about a runaway train, it’s a well-acted, well-plotted and well-filmed movie about a runaway train. Starring Chris Pine. If that ain’t praiseworthy, what is?

The train in question was set off not by a terrorist or a crazed train operator, but by a more commonplace threat: people making stupid mistakes. After being sent off without a driver, carrying a load of extremely flammable materials, the train company scrambles to chase it down and stop it before it crashes in a highly populated area.

Meanwhile Frank (Denzel Washington) and Will (Pine) are riding on the same rail, having somehow missed the message that there’s a train coming on full speed directly at them. It’s totally cool though, because Frank is played by Denzel Washington, and knows exactly what to do, with the help of newbie Will and train depot middle manager Connie (Rosario Dawson).

It’s an absurd concept, but director Tony Scott handles the material with a surprising amount of restraint. His movie is a study of a little-seen industry, one based on sheer muscle, grit and rare American ingenuity. Between scenes with Frank and Will jumping on moving train cars and talking about Frank’s daughters working their way through college at Hooters are truly depressing; scenes of the train company’s corporate monkeys sitting in a high-rise and discussing whether it costs less to derail the train in the countryside, or blow it up in a small town. Sure it’s a little cliché, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

The movie is also about scale and noise. Scott includes shots of the trains, with their larger than life sounds and astonishing size the way other action film directors use gratuitous explosions. They’re huge, anxiety-producing and verge on the pornographic. Scott hikes the sense of panic up almost imperceptibly throughout the movie, until by the time you’re watching Pine dive in between to moving train cars to cable them together you’re holding your hands in front of your eyes without realizing it. In the climactic scene, as they round an impossibly sharp corner surrounded by flammable oil (yes, really) I can’t lie; I was on the edge of my seat.

Washington is the glue that make this piece of madness work. He’s almost lackadaisical in his delivery, funny and charming; you get the feeling he was having a blast making this movie. Together he and Pine are basically reenacting their actual roles in Hollywood: Washington as the older veteran, and Pine as the young upstart nipping at his predecessor’s heels, and their dual scenes are surprisingly snappy and fun. Rosario Dawson is also lovely and terrific as ever, acting the hell out of a very limited role.

After going to see this movie I thought about Lumiere’s public screening of “The Arrival of a Train in La Ciotat Station” in 1896. The legend goes that the French public was so astonished by watching a moving image of a train, apparently speeding right toward them, it made them flee the screening, running frightened into the Paris night. I wonder if they’d had trailers back then what they would have said. “This train is on FIRE! You’ll want to run from the shadowy force of MAN-MADE STEEL heading directly for your FACE!!”

“Unstoppable” proves that more than 100 years after Lumiere scared the hell out of those Parisians, and even with our jaded, experienced eyes, the movies we watch can still make our hearts race, can still get our adrenaline zooming through our lizard brains. That feeling is still well worth the price of admission.

There’s a scene in the new Bruce Willis spy-action-dramedy “Red” when everything is just about perfect. It comes about two-thirds of the way through the movie, and without giving too much away, it includes Bruce Willis and John Malkovich in trench coats and fedoras, Morgan Freeman bitch-slapping Richard Dreyfuss while wearing the cartoonish military costume of an African dictator, and Helen Mirren spraying FBI agents with an automatic weapon, a steel glint in her eye.

The scene is cool and funny and smart, with everyone acting at their best, and if director Robert Schwentke had filled the entire movie with that scene’s vibe, “Red” would have been a great movie. As it is it’s an occasionally very funny movie that wants to be too many things at one time.

“Red” stands for “Retired and Extremely Dangerous,” the categorization given to ex-CIA agent Frank Moses (Willis at his signature laconic). Moses is living out his days in a nice Cleveland suburb, pretending to lose his pension checks so he can call the cute customer service agent at the pension office (Mary Louise Parker). His quiet Golden Years are ruined when he realizes that someone wants to kill him, and reunites with members of his old team to figure out why he’s being targeted.

Directed by: Robert Schwentke

I’m not even going to talk about how silly it is when Frank’s nice neighborhood in Cleveland is shot to hell by black operatives without any of the neighbors noticing, or that an 80-year-old man with Stage-4 liver cancer could look as spry as Morgan Freeman (playing another retired operative with said disease), or any of the other types of madness that occur during the movie. “Red”, based on the graphic novel by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner, is a fantasy. It’s meant to be silly, and there’s a lot of charm to the plot’s stringent anti-realism.

But the silliness is tempered by too many other things- plots involving war crimes in Guatemala in 1981, corrupt politicians and Russian counter-intelligence agents. I was all ready, based on the misleading trailers, for a shit-blowing-up comedy- something fun and frothy to leaven the Oscar film season depress-a-thon. But this jerking between Willis pulling out one-liners, and discussing the murder of civilians in a Guatemalan village becomes awkward. It doesn’t help that the action scenes, though very good, are punctuated with meandering bouts of dialogue where the characters talk about “what it all means,” or “how they need to live a normal life” or whatever. It’s lazy characterization, it doesn’t lead to good comedy and it means there’s not nearly enough shit blowing up.

This wouldn’t be so frustrating, except for the wasting of a truly phenomenal cast. In addition to the considerable talent already mentioned, Helen Mirren plays a former “wetworks” agent from M-I6 (meaning she used to be an assassin) and John Malkovich plays a paranoid former agent who was given too much LSD by the CIA. These are not floundering starlets or brick-headed action stars. This is the woman who played Queen Elizabeth, and the man who, among other impossible feats, made “Con Air” an awesome movie. But even they could not save a film which changes moods like I change my socks.

That brings me back to that one perfect scene, where everything comes together and everyone does exactly what they’re good at. The music is good, the shots are beautiful, and, perhaps most importantly, it’s funny. I wonder if they shot this scene first, perhaps, or for some reason everyone was in a different frame of mind. If the rest of the movie had been like this scene it could be an outrageously funny form of escapism. As it is, the scene simply illuminates what could have been.

It’s very rare to see a movie which can be boiled down into one word. But in the case of “Secretariat,” the new Disney inspiration-porn, One word keeps popping into my head: awkward. Awkward pacing, awkward acting, awkward staging- the list goes on.

Which is a real shame, because it is so damn pretty.

“Secretariat” then is the awkward yet gorgeous tale of Penny Chanery, owner of the famed racehorse. She wins the colt in a coin toss which had previously been brokered by her father and Ogden Phipps (James Cromwell), then the richest man in the world. She gets a semi-retired trainer, with the fabulous name of Lucien Laurin (John Malkovich), who apparently had a penchant for fancy hats and cursing in French. Two years later she pits the horse in the grueling road to the Triple Crown, tearing herself from her clean and pretty nuclear family in an effort to bring glory of her father’s horse farm (and also, you know, make a ridiculous amount of money).

Diane Lane is one of my favorite actresses, so it pains me to see her used so badly in this. This is the woman who made the main character of “Must Love Dogs” a likable human being. But even Lane can’t save the stilted dialogue by Mike Rich and terrible pacing by director Randall Wallace. Her normal grace and almost off-hand delivery seems strangely tortured here, as if she’s working for every line. She’s still likable, though;  a scene where she has to listen to her daughter’s school play over the phone while she’s away at a race is a moment of pure compassion and humanity.

Malkovich is a high point for the film, as he brings his own special kind of crazy that not even the Mouse can control. I liked that he made Laurin a strange person but didn’t turn him into a caricature. And he has an easy semi-flirtatious chemistry with Lane, which made me seriously wish some enterprising young producer would put them in a romantic comedy together.

And then, of course, there’s the customary wise, subservient black man Eddie Sweat (“True Blood’s” Nelsan Ellis). It’s almost not worth being offended by this kind of character, who’s usually played by Morgan Freeman/Danny Glover/Cuba Gooding, Jr. But it’s annoying- a constant reminder of the archaic nature of some of Disney’s programming.

Everything is glistening in “Secretariat”. The sun falls in picturesque patches across Diane Lane’s lovely face, and Big Red (Secretariat’s real name) dances coltishly in the fields beyond her father’ farm. Penny’s husband barbecues on their back patio in Denver, while her darling daughters prance around in peasant shirts. It’s a creepy, Thomas Kinkade-like portrait of America in the early 70s, eerie but weirdly seductive. It eschews most of the social upheaval of the time period (the only reference is through one of Penny’s daughters, who likes to attend Peace rallies in her spare time), and decides that the 70s was less about the politics and more about fabulous sweater sets.

The script tends to meander through most of the movie, focusing way too much on the minutiae of horse breeding and Jockey Club rules. It wanders from moment to moment within Secretariat’s and Penny’s lives without a guiding thread. But my goodness, how it picks up when the races start. Horse racing is already exciting so it doesn’t take much art on director Randall Wallace’s part to create show-stopping, heart-pounding, vibrant scenes. In one of the best scenes in the movie, Penny’s family gather around the television to watch the Preakness Stakes, and we view the second race in the Triple Crown through their black and white screen. The scene both illustrates how Secretariat became a national story and gloats that even distanced by two screens, the race is still captivating.

Is it a great film? I think not, and possibly one that will fade in the shadows of bigger releases over the next few months. I don’t doubt that there’s a lot of heart in this movie, and a lot of good  old-fashioned American values. But in their efforts to tell an inspiring story, Rich and Wallace forgot to tell it well. And that’s, well, just awkward for everyone.

It wasn’t all that long ago I swore to my friends that I would never join Facebook.

It was 2004. I was a freshman in college, in a new city. Facebook was only available to college students, and only some colleges had a network. It was maybe not in its infancy, but definitely in its childhood, not yet ubiquitous, and I was certain I would never need it. I thought it was a grasping ploy at popularity, an excuse to count how many friends you have, stalk that guy in your French Literature class, and yak about your love of soccer, politics and "The Boondock Saints". I thought it was creepy, and a flash in the pan besides. I was too cool for Facebook.

I joined before my first semester ended.

Now I read my boyfriend’s Twitter page and link to my colleagues on LinkedIn. My mother is my Facebook friend, and writes comments on my status updates. You’re not really friends with someone unless you’re friends on Facebook.

Does Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg know what he hath wrought? He has publicly claimed that he will not see "The Social Network," about the formation of Facebook and the making of his riches and household name. But how could he not see that the very fact that the film exists says volumes about the importance of what he created?

Well in any case I think it’s Zuckerberg’s loss. Because "The Social Network" is a beautiful, intricate drama that defies expectations and portrays not just the making of a web site, but the steel, pulsating core of my generation.

It would have been easy for the film to falter. How do you create a movie about a bunch of guys who sit in front of a computer screen and then sue each other? How do you write a drama about one morally ambiguous nerd who writes code the whole movie? Thank God we have the masterful team of director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin, who brings his patented rat-a-tat dialogue and relentless wit.

Sorkin and Jesse Eisenberg (who plays Zuckerberg) portray the Harvard student as incredibly intuitive about the cultural and social structures of Ivy League institutions, but completely clueless as to how to navigate them, or any social structure. At the beginning he’s dumped by his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara), who’s had enough of his egotistical ramblings. "Having a relationship with you is like climbing a StairMaster!" she exclaims, after he taunts her about going to Boston University.

After he wanders home and gets himself good and drunk, Zuckerberg codes a web site in one night, a nasty little piece called Facemash which takes pictures of female Harvard students and pairs them, asking young Harvard men to judge who was hotter. Though his prank gets him in trouble with the school and makes him a pariah to the young ladies of Harvard, it also gets him an assignment from upper-echelon Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer), twins who want to create a dating and social site specifically for Harvard students.

The movie tries to remain as open as possible to whether or not Zuckerberg actually stole the brothers’ idea to make Facebook, or simply improved on their half-baked plan- my own uninformed opinion leans towards the latter, though he was certainly not forthright about what he was doing.

He partners with his best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), a financial brain who eventually sued Zuckerberg after he was pushed out of the company. Garfield takes what could be a one-note role, a gives a nuanced and delicate performance. He delivers each of Sorkin’s lines like he’s tasting them, feeling their textures and shapes.

As a minor character says in the film, every creation myth needs a Devil. This one takes the delightful form of Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker, creator of Napster and Internet playboy who both takes Facebook public and destroys its soul. Timberlake has limited range as an actor, but what he does he does well. He’s a pied piper in this movie, a maniacal ghoul who knows just what to say to hook Zuckerberg and push away the more cautious Saverin, though the movie also makes the point that Zuckerberg was well on his way to being corrupted all by himself.

The Winklevoss brothers (or the Winklevii, as Zuckerberg hilariously calls them) got a $65 million payout from their own lawsuit (small potatoes when you consider the billions that Facebook is now worth). Saverin, who’s painted as the far more wronged party, received an undisclosed settlement. These facts are less important in the movie than the idea of money itself, and of worth. It’s stated several times that Zuckerberg doesn’t care about money- he cares only for his creation, that he’s made something cool that people like. His longing for human connection, even as he spurns it with cynicism and condescension, was what inspired Facebook.

Fincher understands, and is able to convey, our brave new world in a way I don’t think any other director has. And he’s able to balance both the central themes of greed and alienation and the need to make a movie about computer programmers…you know…interesting. "The Social Network" moves at a good clip, and even has a few action-esque sequences, but Fincher never jumps off the cliff of melodrama. I don’t think that all of the events in the movie actually happened, but I can believe that they might have happened. His delicacy with the plot is matched by a truly wonderful score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which keeps the pacing and adds a lyrical quality to Sorkin’s dialogue.

The entire point of Facebook is to create a low-pressure way of becoming someone’s friend — of making a connection with them. You reach out, you "poke" them, then retreat to see if they return the sentiment. Your profile states your existence in the world. Here I am. This is what I like. These are my friends. This I what I have to say. That sense of simultaneous connection and separation colors everything in my generation’s social world. We move along together, parallel, but rarely touching in any real way.

Though the words "best movie of the year" stick in my throat as trite and kind of silly (how does one rank these things, anyway?) I will say that this was my most enjoyable experience at the theater this year.

In fact I plan to write a status update about it after this publishes.

After all, everyone needs to know.

Oliver Stone in many ways is America personified. At his best, his films are sharp, beautiful and earnest, with an unflinching view of the world and a sincere desire to change it.

At his worst, however, he’s shrill and overwrought, with an archaic view of right and wrong and overblown ego.

“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” is a well-meaning combination of his best and worst instincts; a half-baked jumble of ideas that might just have worked if not for a tacked-on focus group-approved ending.

I was encouraged by Stone’s idea — to recreate the Great Recession and Wall Street crash through the eyes of Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). To show what Gekko’s real-life counterparts have wrought and the misery it led to. Gekko, who himself is released from prison at the beginning of the film, is the same character, though this time he professes that time, not money is his main concern. Stone made up a wounded daughter (the luminescent Carey Mulligan) and her hotshot Wall Street analyst fiance Jake (Shia LaBeouf), who become enmeshed in Gekko’s inevitable mind games.

It’s a very different mood from the first film. The first was a game-changer in the way we thought about business and, contrary to Stone’s original intent, drove countless yuppies-in-training to the profession of assigning imaginary objects imaginary worth. It was incisive, minimalist and dark in just the right way.

This one is…different.

There are charts! Lots of charts! And shots of the New York City skyline superimposed on charts! And then the camera twirls around the Empire State Building, superimposes another image of the corpse of Frank Langella and does it again! There are also lots of spiraling shots of bubbles, which is symbolism for… economic bubbles!

About 20 minutes into the film I found myself silently pleading, “Oliver, for God’s sake, sit down, and stop spinning the camera! I’m trying to watch your movie!” The dozens of montages literally triggered a migraine.

That’s not to say there isn’t a lot to like. Mulligan and LaBeouf are a real-life couple and have a wonderful chemistry, aided by the fact that Mulligan could probably be riveting acting the phone book. Josh Brolin, as Gekko’s rival, is dynamite — a man with a thin veneer of charm barely concealing a core of violence.

But these are just the people in Gekko’s orbit, but Gekko himself. I feel sad when I look at Michael Douglas. He still has capacity for perfect line delivery and a vicious sense of humor. But, to be blunt, the man has had so much plastic surgery, he literally can’t give an expression beyond snakelike surprise. Watching Douglas’ zombified corpse stumble around and attempt to move his paralyzed facial muscles is terrible, especially when compared to the virile animal who latched on to Charlie Sheen in the first film.

Speaking of Sheen, he does indeed have a cameo in “Money Never Sleeps.” In fact, he has the dubious honor of winning the “Most Awkward Cameo” Award, literally sitting there, with a 20-year-old aspiring actress on each arm, spouting about what he’s been up to since he sold that pesky Bluestar airline.

I have a hard time hating Oliver Stone. He gets it right just as much as he gets it wrong, and he has a wild, muckraking spirit I admire. But there’s too much in “Money Never Sleeps;” too much noise, too many montages, and too many ideas. And I won’t tell you the ending of the movie, but I think you can guess. Stone’s “Wall Street” worked because in the end the bad guy didn’t reform. He was loyal to his base instinct right to the bitter end. “Money Never Sleeps” allows for hope for all God’s creatures, even the ones who commit fraud against their own children. And that’s not the Gordon Gekko, or the Oliver Stone, I know and love.

Great and noble is the history of films about horny teenage boys. From the moment Dan Monahan spied on Kim Cattrall in “Porky’s,” Hollywood has luxuriated in the epic journey young, nerdy heterosexual men take to finally tap that ass. “American Pie” is arguably the masterwork of the genre, making the phrase “One time, at band camp…” a joke for the ages, and ensuring Eugene Levy never has a serious career.

“The Virginity Hit” is the latest entry into the genre, and marketing itself as the “American Pie” for the Youtube generation. It follow the travails of Matt (Matt Bennett) the last boy in his group of friends to lose his virginity and who’s left by his girlfriend after his adoptive brother convinces him to tape himself attempting to have sex.

Ok, guys. I am really, really trying not to be called a sour, humorless feminazi. I am a feminist, and as such I see the real value in movies reflecting the teenage male psyche. They can be a goldmine of insight not just into the minds of men, but our own skewed cultural view of sexuality. Americans tend to think of sex the way teenage boys do- as something both to be feared and to be joked about, something dangerous but also brimming with mystery and possibility.

They can also be pretty damn funny.

But you have to have a heart and a soul to be able to navigate the shark-infested waters of teen sex romps, and unfortunately “Virginity Hit” has neither. It’s a mean-spirited little piece of work, using a pretension of “social commentary as an excuse to show a bunch of boys committing felonies by taping an underage couple having sex for the first time, and, in one scene, breaking into a teenage girl’s bedroom.

Because, you know, boys will be boys.

The cast is a bunch of dead-eyed guys who look pretty damn pleased with their own cleverness, and a rotating band of mindless girls who are little more than a series of holes to be conquered. The only likable person in the movie has to be porn star Sunny Leone, who gives a sweet, and very funny cameo as the porn star with a heart of gold. Leone is obviously the most intelligent, the most mature and the most sympathetic of this group of miscreants, a rare ray of sunshine (pun not intended) in a gloomy, depressing view of human sexuality in the 21st century.

I’ve been thinking a lot about voyeurism after seeing this movie. After all, most of the movie is about the fact that Matt’s life is being documented, posted and commented on. It’s a very different world from when Pee-Wee poked a hole in the wall at Porky’s, and its admirable that “Virginity Hit” wanted to address that. I just wish there’d been a little more joy in it. Directors Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland see nothing but humiliation, fear and objectification in losing one’s virginity. God knows that’s part of the experience. But there’s happiness too, and mystery, and even a little fun if you’re very lucky.

Ask Sunny Leone about it. She apparently was the only one who gets it.

The mark of a good Coen brother’s film is that you get the feeling as you watch it that the plot could take place anytime, anywhere, with anyone as its protagonists, all without sacrificing the meticulous character development and sense of place that makes their films great. They are directors who get to have their abstract cake, and eat it too.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in "Blood Simple," a devious little film they made early in their career that took a classic noir story line (a rich man pays someone to murder his cheating wife) and turned it into a meditation on marriage, humanity and our own violent tendencies.

Director Zhang Yimou, apparently, wanted in on the action. Yimou, along with writers Jianquan Shi and Jing Shang, allowed their adaptation "A Girl, a Gun and a Noodle Shop" to reflect and embrace the spirit of "Blood Simple" without simply retreading old territory. The result is a gorgeous, magnificently controlled, and, yes, devious little film, with a nightmarish quality and gory finish only Yimou can provide.

It is the same noir story line: a rich man (Dahong Ni) pays a travelling mercenary (Honglei Sun) to kill his wife and her lover. This time, our bloody microcosm takes place in what appears to be 18th century rural China, in a roadside noodle shop in the middle of an endless and ever-changing desert.

Yimou’s work is not easy to love. There’s a shrillness and deliberate discordance (particularly with sound) that won’t appeal to everyone. I wondered if there was a cultural disconnect in some of the images, particularly the foolish lover Li (Xiao Shen-Yang) who is literally dressed in what appears to be a girl’s pink pajamas and stocking cap. And it’s hard to stomach the other Fool of the opera, Zhao (Ye Cheng), who looks like a World War II-era caricature of an Asian person (Buddha belly, huge buck teeth and eyes that are simultaneously childish and demonic).

The characters and their costumes might be overblown, but damn if they don’t look gorgeous on the screen. Ni Yan is especially wonderful to watch, commanding the screen as the young, abused and unnamed wife with a emerald green dress and vicious, haunted eyes. And Sun, as the mercenary Zhang, gives a smart and understated performance, with the intelligent and soulless eyes of a shark.

But the real star is the set on which Yimou has placed his pseudo-Shakespearean tragedy. The desert surrounding the noodle shop is both the site where the lovers meet and where one or two of the characters end up buried. The space is empty and hostile, reflecting the sun so fiercely in the daytime that the viewer is made to blink. The noodle shop itself, with it’s trapdoors, and spare rooms and countless doorways seems more like a set for a stage performance than a film. In the middle of that timeless desert makes it seem like the violence we are seeing is happening nowhere. And if it could happen in this Nowhere, it could happen Anywhere. Catching the spirit of “Blood Simple”, and of the Coen brothers’ milieu in this fashion is the true mark of Yimou’s insight. How he reimagined it is the mark of his genius.

The producers of "The Switch" no doubt would like to market itself as an "off-beat", or "unique" comedy. Something that defies the norm, that gets people thinking, etc. Certainly this was true with their previous movies "Juno" and "Little Miss Sunshine," surprise successes that the "Switch" trailers take pains to make you aware of.

But just because the same guys made those movies doesn’t make "The Switch" either of them. Because despite an original premise and a decent cast there’s nothing new.

The new quirky premises surrounds a woman (Jennifer Aniston) who decides to get inseminated and her neurotic best friend Wally (Jason Bateman) who in a drunken fit drops the chosen "sample" and is forced to donate his own.

Bateman plays his best version of Jason Bateman. Aniston is her best Jennifer Aniston. Jeff Goldblum and Juliette Lewis play the kooky friends. Patrick Wilson is the good-looking nice guy. In short everyone plays themselves, the way they do in every film you’ve ever seen them in. The frame of the movie, however unusual the details, is the same as well: boy meets girl, boy accidentally inseminates girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. There’s even a classic montage of Aniston and Bateman staring out the window wistfully while angsty music plays in the background.

Which is not to say that doesn’t work. Aniston and Bateman are extremely likeable, and every line Jeff Goldblum delivers is pure gold. Newcomer Thomas Robinson, who plays the adorable product of the mistaken insemination, is charming and well-balanced as a young actor, with a minimum of hamming and Olsen twins-style cuteness. There’s a lot of well-written humor (the scene where Bateman drunkenly makes his donation with the aid of a magazine article about Diane Sawyer is especially hysterical.)

The problem is there’s nothing unconventional about this so-called unconventional comedy. And it cant be ignored that though the movie contains many platitudes about the modern family, in the end the only that will make Bateman and Aniston’s characters happy is the nuclear family unit: mommy and daddy and baby in one neat, conventional little package.

I left the screening for "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World" a bit confused and even more frustrated. It seemed just like the kind of thing I should like- a colorful, uproarious whirligig of post-modern fun, with Jason Schwartzman as the bad guy, and Edgar Wright as the director.

But try as I might, I just couldn’t find my way to completely liking it. Because in "Scott Pilgrim" all the pieces work. They just don’t work together.

Scott Pilgrim is a nerd who shares a bed with his friend Wallace (Culkin), yet somehow manages to have some luck with the ladies. He’s sought after by Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), a pint-sized stalker who’s still in high school, but he’s mad about Ramona Flowers, a bad-ass chick with dyed-hair who’s more awesome that Scott could ever hope to be. She decides to date him, though before he can he must defeat the "League of Evil Exes," in a series of battle sequences that riff on Kung Fu films, texting, westerns and Street Fighter.

Wright is in many ways the perfect person to direct this movie, which is based on the graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley. The novels are little gems of pop art- a 21st century romance as told through a video game fantasy. Wright, who also directed "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz", creates a slam-bang universe full of color and life. He’s peopled the landscape with a terrific supporting cast, including the lovely Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Anna Kendrick and Kieran Culkin. He goes a little overboard sometimes (especially in the action sequences, which can verge on nauseating), but it’s a solid piece within his wheelhouse.

There’s a lot of really great humor, aimed directly at the heart of Gen Y. In one memorable scene, one of the exes (Brandon Routh) has super-powers derived from the fact that he’s vegan. "When you get right down to it, vegans are just better than other people," he says. He’s then beaten when his power wanes from accidentally drinking half and half.

Winstead as Ramona is truly luminescent, and a joy to watch. Her delivery is a gentle sarcasm- you know that beneath that purple-dye exterior beats the heart of a truly kind and good person. Culkin, who appears to be channeling John Waters as every teenaged girl’s sassy gay friend, is funny and smart.

So, you’re probably asking, what’s the problem? Everything seems to be great, right down to the fantastic soundtrack (Scott Pilgrim is also in a pretty rocking band). What’s my hesitation?

I have two words for you. Michael. Cera.

I’ve grown weary of Cera. He’s got one mood, one mode of action: the slightly bored, slightly neurotic hipster. I’m tired of his hoodies with ironic sayings, and his poor man’s Woody Allen delivery. I’m tired of his good-nerd-gone-bad routine and fluffy hair. I’m tired of his whole aggravating Williamsburg indie-pop shtick.

In a movie with as much noise, and music, and hallucinatory images, why would you put it all on the thin shoulders of the kid from "Juno"? Cera cannot carry this movie in the way it needs to be. His inclusion, and the focus on him, renders the movie disjointed. He whispers his role when it needs to be shouted to be heard over the loudspeakers pumping out electronica in the background.

In short, he kind of ruins the whole thing.

I don’t want to beat up on Cera. He’s good at what he does, limited though it may be. I just wish they’d found someone more dynamic, someone who can rise above the roller-coaster of Wright’s directing. There’s a lot to be said for "Scott Pilgrim". A great leading man would have been the icing on the cake.

"Salt" wants so much to be "The Bourne Identity."

It has all the elements. It has a strong lead actor, a cavalry of character actors who look good in suits, lots of hand-held camera cinematography and a dark, twisted aura.

But despite it’s excellent qualities (and there are many) there’s something missing from this otherwise rousing spy thriller. It’s got the cool factor and the look of "Bourne." But it’s got none of the soul.

"Salt" refers to Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie), a CIA agent who’s forced to run from her employers (live Schreiber and the fantastic Chiwetel Ejiofor)when she’s accused of being a Russian spy by a defector.

Salt was originally written as a man’s role, and it’s fascinating to see how the plot adapts itself to having a woman in the role. Instead of rescuing a wife and baby, Salt sets off to find her sweet arachnologist husband (August Diehl) who’s been taken in the wake of her charges. We don’t often see this reversal in a major Hollywood picture, but director Phillip Noyce and writer Kurt Wimmer manage to navigate the startling new idea with almost blas© confidence. The only bump is when Salt actually needs to dress up as a man to get into the White House- it’s a little too on-the-nose, a little too graduate school gender theory for my taste.

Wimmer’s script may navigate gender bending with aplomb, but when it comes to a well-honed action film he tends to fall flat. The problem with "Salt" is it’s too big. There’s a conspiracy plot involving the Russian government planting long-term sleeper agents in the U.S. Plausible, especially considering the recent news that Russian spies have been spending the last 20 years hanging out in Montclair, N.J. But in this movie their mission is nothing less than killing the President and "taking over America." It’s an old-school, dated story, based in Cold War paranoia that just doesn’t apply today. Even more, the plot loses focus about halfway through, confusing Salt’s back story and getting lost in the woods of its own twists and turns.

Jolie is probably the only woman who could pull off this plot without looking ridiculous. In one of the most memorable shots in the movie, she stands on the Staten Island Ferry, wrapped in a fur stole and wearing a magnificent Russian hat. You’re both amused by the ludicrousness of the image, but because it’s Jolie it makes a weird sort of sense. Her beauty is so unusual, so foreign, why wouldn’t she be posing, looking like Julie Christie in "Dr. Zhivago"? She’s flanked by Schreiber, doing a delightfully campy Southern accent, and Ejiofor, who I would watch reading out of the phone book (as long as he did it shirtless). All three are people who you love to look at- the way they move, gesture, even the way they sit down. Diehl, who had a small role in "Inglourious Basterds", fits in perfectly with their coterie; he’s able to stoke the chemistry with Jolie in just a few short scenes.

The action scenes are, unfortunately, a problem. In their desperation to make the film PG-13, they appear to have edited the scenes to eliminate blood, injury and visceral power from the shots. This makes for a weirdly clean, and soulless action scene, and one where the hand-held camera simply doesn’t work. I certainly don’t need to see brains and viscera, but these sterile battles just can’t compare to better shot scenes in "Bourne" or the latest "Bond" films.

There is, however, a pretty awesome scene where Salt makes a rocket launcher out of office furniture and cleaning supplies. I wish we could have seen more scenes of that style- a sort of resourceful action sequence that doesn’t rely on tricky editing or impossible technology to achieve its ends. "Salt" wants to be "Bourne" but Noyce forgot what made "Bourne" great: dirty, raw action scenes balanced with tightly controlled plot. "Salt" is too unbalanced. It wants to do too many things. And in the end, despite it’s positives, it’s actually accomplished nothing.

If you’re a parent, you could easily find yourself watching "The Sorcerer’s Apprentice". The kiddos have reached the mid-Summer ennui, stuck between enthusiasm for being out of school and the nervous anticipation for the next year. More than that, it’s hot, and the air conditioner is on the fritz. You’ve taken them to the pool, the water park, the mall, the sprinklers in the backyard. They’re bored, you’re tired, and- hey look, a Disney movie! That’ll keep them entertained for two hours or so!

The kids might be happy for that two hours. Heck, they may even enjoy this loosest of adaptations of "The Sorcerer’s Apprentice" from "Fantasia". But if, out of hope or simple desperation you decide to shell out $10 for each of your kids as well as yourself, keep this in mind: I didn’t think "Apprentice" was absolutely heinous. But about five minutes after I left the theater I promptly forgot about it. The only reason I remembered was I saw the listing in my planner saying this review was due.

One of the main problems is there’s just too much dry plot. "The Sorcerer’s Apprentice" stars Nicolas Cage as an ageless wizard from the time of Merlin and Jay Baruchel, the physics major from NYU who becomes his protege. There are evil wizards, which Cage’s character has been battling for the past thousand years or so, including Morgana La Fay from Arthurian legend and her biggest follower (played by Alfred Molina, who seems to be having just a whee of a time). There’s all sorts of discussions of the Prime Merlinian, and Cage’s love interest (Monica Bellucci) who’s locked in Morgana’s body, who’s been locked in a doll, and if she gets out of the doll she’s going to raise an army of dead wizards…and round and round she goes.

There are a few charms in the movie, including images of Cage riding metal eagles from the Chrysler building and Bellucci swaying and cavorting atop a fountain in Battery Park, electricity flowing from her maestro fingers.There’s a terrific riff on "illusionists" like Criss Angel (an Angel lookalike is played by Toby Kebbell). The writers (yes, all five of them) introduce some intriguing ideas about the intersection between magic and science, and reference the patron saint of mad scientists Nicola Tesla, but these themes were explored more beautifully and completely in "The Prestige" a few years back.

Baruchel plays David, the titular apprentice, like a nerdier Woody Allen, but in this he’s got none of Allen’s dubious charm. Listening to Baruchel affect a slightly autistic stutter is irritating at best and kind of offensive at worst. But it’s preferable to watching Cage trudge like a reanimated corpse through this movie, delivering his lines like a petulant child who’s been asked to behave at a dinner party. Only Molina seems up to the task of bringing life and vigor into his role as the evil Horvath (and how great a name is Horvath for a villain?) He seems to relish the bowler hat and cane he carries, drawling his lines in that divine voice of his.

Looking now at the cast list, this film should be far more memorable than it is. I of course blame director Jon Turteltaub, the man who is second only to Brett Ratner in hackery. The thing about Turteltaub is that his movies are never spectacularly horrible; they don’t explode but rather implode with a whimper, bogged down with the weight of their own inconsequence. The children at the screening I was at laughed at some of the jokes,and definitely seemed to like the steel eagle scenes. But when the lights go up and you face the long ride home to your busted air conditioner, will it stay with them? Will they want to play games where they too can harness the power emitting from a Tesla coil? I don’t think so.

Besides, wouldn’t you like to just take them back to the pool instead?

"Inception" had equal chance of being either a disaster, or the best movie of the summer. 



It clocks in at almost 2.5 hours, and it stars Leonardo DiCaprio, a talented actor with an unfortunate penchant for lumbering message movies. Nolan, the director behind "The Dark Knight", is a visionary in some respects, but tends towards the clumsy and overwrought when he’s not carefully edited. It had all the money in the world, and a Big Idea. It could be perfect. It could be ridiculous.



I wasn’t terribly surprised that "Inception" is somewhere in between a masterwork and a mess. Though buoyed with supreme action sequences and brilliant cinematography, it threatens to tumble under the weight of its own self-importance. 



In an unexpectedly brave move, Nolan puts his Philip K. Dick-esque story in the present, or the near-future, instead of some sort of abstract dystopia. Cobb (DiCaprio) is an "extractor" a thief who specializes in stealing information from corporate heads by entering their dreams. Turns out we’ve unlocked a way to "share" dreams, and to knowingly interact within them. He’s found a man who wants "one last job" from him, and who will fix Cobb’s legal problems allowing him to return to his children in America.

DiCaprio falls into his usual trap of mistaking heaviness for gravitas. He’s wonderful in some scenes, particularly one fraught sequence involving his dead wife Moll (a thrilling, and perfect Marion Cotillard), but if he’s not careful he simply comes off as dour. Besides DiCaprio the movie has a slew of talented actors, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobb’s partner, and Ellen Page as an architecture student who literally builds dreams to use as staging areas. Nolan unfortunately doesn’t allow a lot of personality to filter through the big ideas his cast has; that talent is still visible but it’s muted.

And the cast, as star-powered as it is, pales in comparison to the real star: the beautiful camerawork. The dream sequences are too beautiful and haunting to describe. You should not expect accuracy-there’s no real connection to the dreams we usually see, in equal parts trivial, terrifying and drenched with meaning. These are action scenes- the fact that it’s all a dream is merely a backdrop. But just watching Gordon-Levitt float through a hotel bathed in golden light is like watching the culmination of a hundred years of filmmakers trying to simply create something beautiful.

Nolan’s story is an original- no adaptations here, in a Hollywood that satisfies itself picking the bones of the literary dead- and that’s an achievement of its own kind. The themes he presents, like the intersection of dream and memory and the way our minds betray us even if there aren’t men in black walking around in our subconscious, are thought-provoking and elegantly stated.

All gushing aside, there are serious problems with the movie as well. In these types of movies, there’s always rules governing the world you’ve created. Page plays Ariadne, the newcomer to the team, and the person that Cobb explains his world and its rules to. But the rules don’t mean anything when you break them, and near the end of the movie all the carefully constructed regulations begin to unravel.

Yes, at 2.5 hours it’s about 20 minutes too long. But it’s so damn gorgeous to look at, by the end you’re ready to let that, and all its other sins go. There’s something to be said for Nolan’s vision. It’s imperfect but it’s his and only his. And I’m more than happy to share his dream.

I feel almost like I should grade “Eclipse”, the third in the “Twilight” series, on a curve.

While viewing the movie, I was reminded of my thoughts regarding books the series is based off of. I read the first one. I didn’t particularly like it, and I didn’t have the urge to read more. But all in all I found the novel thoroughly inoffensive. Good to see young girls (and their mothers) reading anything, I thought. It’s not progressive in its views or even terribly well-written, but why should boys get all the fanboy fun? Bring on the hot vampire action!

I feel the same about “Eclipse.” The third installment of the vampire sensation that’s sweeping the nation is a fun diversion, and even sometimes enjoyable for the non-Twi-hard viewer. It’s got humor, a healthy dose of self-awareness and a surprising poignancy.

The story takes place during the last few months of heroine Bella’s (Kristen Stewart) time at Forks High School. She’s already made her icy soulless beloved Edward (Robert Pattinson) promise to change her into a vampire once she’s graduated, something he’s endlessly trying to persuade her not to do. Jacob (Taylor Lautner), her Native American/Werewolf friend is trying to convince her that she belongs with him and his pectoral muscles. Meanwhile, the vamp Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard) is busy raising an army of bloodsuckers in Seattle to make war on the Cullens, with the ambivalent aid of the Volturi (or, as I like to think of them, the Vampire Vatican.)

One of my colleagues made the comment that this might be the Twilight episode that boyfriends of Twi-hards might be able to enjoy, or at least tolerate. I’m not totally sure I agree, but the action sequences are riveting, with expert use of hand held cinematography and smooth CGI. I could have used more time dedicated to the climactic fight- you couldn’t shave off a few minutes of Edward and Bella discussing yet again how dangerous it is to become a vampire?

Writer Melissa Rosenberg, God bless her, does her very best with translating Stephenie Meyer’s eggplant purple prose onto the screen, and managed to inject some much-needed humor into the mix, much of it extremely self-aware. “Don’t you own any shirts?” growls Edward at the perennially half-naked Jacob. For the most part, though the dialogue is pretty painful, with Pattinson repeating “I won’t let anything happen to you, Bella.” or “It’s too dangerous, I can’t let anything happen to you, Bella.” or “Bella’s in danger?!” over and over with varying degrees of urgency.

Pattinson, Lautner and Stewart don’t seem to act so much as pose their way through the film provocatively (and in Lautner’s case, shirtlessly). Their performances are less wooden than in “Twilight” and “New Moon,” but I still found myself cringing through a lot of their exchanges. Stewart especially seems incapable of letting any emotion cross her face, assuming that “determined” means she can never crack a smile or display any signs of personality.

There were some profoundly touching moments, however. The scene where Edward tells Bella that he wants to wait to have sex until marriage was incredibly sweet. “I’m from another time,” he says. “If I had met you then, I would have courted you.” Also lovely was a scene where Jacob gets into bed with Bella to keep her warm during a snow storm, while a jealous and resigned Edward watches. I’m an active member of Team Jacob, but dammit if Pattinson didn’t make me feel for Edward’s tortured sparkly soul.

As a feminist, I suppose I’m obligated to comment on the “message” of the movie. But I’m not going to, save for one comment: one of my favorite things about these silly films is that contrary to most mainstream movies the eye candy is decidedly not female. In “Eclipse” Bella’s almost always dressed in sweatshirts, flannel and jeans, her hair hanging in her face. The boys on the other hand are so very pretty, with their chiseled abs, brooding eyebrows and sparkly faces. In a world where the term “male gaze” is shoved down the throats of film students on their first day, the “Twilight” movies are attempting something that might actually be perceived as radical: they make the men the sex object.

So what the hell — it’s not great cinema, just like the books aren’t great literature, but it’s fun, and relatively satisfying. It’s the summer! Let’s crank up the Twi-mania to 11! And those werewolves look awfully uncomfortable in their shirts…

You know when you’re at a family reunion, and there’s that one goofy uncle? Let’s call him Uncle Adam. Uncle Adam likes to tell jokes. Actually, he likes to pigeonhole you and subject you to his “jokes,” which are really heinous puns and borderline racist/sexist/homophobic one-liners. Then he takes a break for another swig of scotch, and you take the opportunity to run away, leaving whatever poor cousin in your wake to take up the slack.

Watching “Grown Ups” is like listening to Uncle Adam. Except there are five of him. And you’re stuck with all of them for two hours. In a darkened room, where you can’t run away because afterward you need to write about the awful, awful jokes they made you listen to. For two hours.

This is the part where you would normally hear about the plot. Unfortunately, there is no plot. A bunch of middle-aged guys (Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade and Rob Schneider) learn that their childhood basketball coach has died. They go to the funeral with their respective families and then hang around a lake house for a weekend, telling their terrible jokes and embarrassing everyone who’s watching them.

There are jokes about old women with painful bunions. Old women who still have sex. Fat people. Breastmilk squirting in someone’s face. People covered in cow dung. Men who stay home while women work. Guys getting hit in the crotch. Old women who fart. Adorable children who don’t know the meaning of the word “wasted.” Guys peeing in pools.

Mind you: all of these topics can be covered in a way that’s hilarious. But for a film that has five established and well-known comedians, the comedic timing and delivery is amateurish and frankly painful to watch. By the time the seventeenth “Take my wife, please” equivalent rolled out I felt desperate to get out of the theater.

And then there’s what they did to the women.

Sandler managed to array a coterie of gorgeous, talented actresses: Maria Bello, Maya Rudolph and Salma Hayek, as well as character actress Joyce Van Patten. Bello is the overprotective mommy who can’t say no. Rudolph is the ball busting career woman, and Hayek is the woman who has the temerity to be annoyed that she has to stay at a lake house when she has a fashion show in Milan. Van Patten is the old woman who still has sex (eww gross!). None of them are funny. Let me say that another way: Maya Rudolph wasn’t funny. When your script is so bad that even Maya Rudolph can’t save it, you really need to reevaluate your career choices.

It’s very unclear exactly who “Grown Ups” is made for. The trailers make it seem like a family-friendly film, but there’s a lot of sex jokes I wouldn’t think appropriate for the 12 and under set. The jokes aren’t raunchy in the way that teens or the 18-24 groups would enjoy. That leaves those who are older, and middle aged. Those who have families of their own, who could maybe “relate” to the plight of Uncle Adam and his friends. Frankly it’s hard for me to imagine anyone who could feel warm and fuzzy about a bunch of unfunny people sitting around a lake.

As for me, I made a beeline for the door as soon as the credits rolled. I didn’t want to take the chance that Uncle Adam had another joke in him.