Hanna (review)

Joe Wright makes sure his story looks great — and sounds great, with its aurally spectacular Chemical Brothers score — but it’s an empty experience, a Frankenstein story with no heft, indeed with little apparent awareness of the classic tale it is evolved from.

Mars Needs Moms (review)

Do kids really need to be reminded — in IMAX 3D! — that Mom loves you and has your best interests at heart when she tells you to eat your broccoli and gets mad when you feed it to the cat instead? I guess someone at Disney figured this was the case.

Source Code (review)

If you haven’t already seen 2009’s Moon, I beg you to do so before you see Source Code, which will put you off director Duncan Jones, which wouldn’t be fair to you, to Jones, or to Moon.

Limitless (review)

It’s total utter complete fantasy of the best stripe, and just the kind that plugs into an ambitious but procrastinating brain. What if I could write my novel and make a million on the stock market and learn Japanese without even breaking a sweat? What else would I do? The what-if, as it turns out, is not all that, so much.

Battle: Los Angeles (review)

Battle: Los Angeles may be about invasion, but it’s not about aliens: it’s about us. This isn’t science fiction: It’s a bleak fantasy about karma being a bitch. It’s about collective cultural guilt. Looked at from that angle, it’s fascinating.

Paul (review)

What if you and your most superbly geeky bestest friend ever met an alien? I mean a real life honest-to-Carl Sagan extry terrestrial. What if? You would plotz. You would. Like Nick Frost’s Clive does here, you would giggle like a loon and then faint, out cold from the sheer splendidness of this happenstance. I know I would.

The Adjustment Bureau (review)

It keeps us on our intellectual and emotional toes as it blithely bounces us around thorny philosophical koans and lets us peek behind the scenes of the universe at the charming puppetmasters who pull the strings. But for the heaviness of the film’s metaphysics, there is something ineffably light and charming about it. If Frank Capra made The Matrix, it would be The Adjustment Bureau.

I Am Number Four (review)

High school is hard. High school is even harder when you’re a secret alien from another planet in hiding from big scary guys with enormous feet and weird tattoos on their bald heads who are after you for reasons no one really understands. Except maybe that you’re the last of your kind. Well, apart from your alien-warrior protector, who isn’t specially numbered like you are.

Tron: Legacy (review)

This totally superfluous and eminently forgettable sequel to the groundbreaking 1982 flick Tron will make a bloody fortune, not because it embodies any qualities deserving of such, but out of compelling nostalgia and, well, not much else.