1. On the surface, it seems obvious why you'd attempt to reboot the Superman franchise using the Christopher Nolan-Batman model. Nolan's Dark Knight films are terrific, brooding and powerful, and, oh by the way, they grossed a combined $2.5 billion worldwide. But their trying to make a tortured-superhero Batman movie out of Superman was, frankly, a lousy idea. Batman is a hero, sure, but a twisted, human one; by the end of the second film, you're legitimately wondering, in name of his personal vengeance and obsessions, whether or not Batman is doing more harm than good. That is not who Superman is. Superman is brightness, goodness, a shining example for humanity to aspire to. Superman needs to have a light touch. Man of Steel does not have a light touch. Man of Steel is loud and bludgeoning and exactly the wrong kind of Superman movie to make.

2. The movie starts out promisingly enough, with a vast, lavish destruction-of-Krypton sequence that is impressively imagined and conceived. (It features better sci-fi battles than Star Trek Into Darkness, that's for sure.) And, somewhat surprisingly, it also gets the boy-in-Smallville bits right, with Kevin Costner and Diane Lane quite strong as Pa and Ma Kent, trying to figure out what to do with this god they have living in their house. It casts Lois Lane well too, with Amy Adams a stronger, smarter, more aggressive Lane than the wimpy damsel played by Kate Bosworth in Bryan Singer's Superman Returns.

3. Unfortunately, that's about the only way Man of Steel is better than Superman Returns. This movie doesn't understand Superman at all. There is no wonder here, no awe. In the world of director Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen), Superman isn't a beacon for mankind; he's a fighting avatar who can fly and do cool shit with his eyes. There is a rather stunning lack of humor or even joy in Man of Steel, no winks at one of America's most iconic figures (a large chunk of the movie takes place in Canada), no Christopher Reeve-esque charm and bumble. Henry Cavill, who plays Superman, is certainly muscular and handsome enough for the part, but I'm not sure what the point of having someone just glower and flex. He's Superman. The point is that he doesn't need to look tough. Snyder directs Cavill to act like he's in 300.

4. The movie is so jam-packed and busy that it's essentially an origin story, a coming-of-age story, a science fiction film, a superhero movie, an alien invasion, and a disaster movie all bumping into each other. I'm trying to describe everything going on, and I haven't even had the chance to talk about General Zod yet. Played by the great Michael Shannon in a sadly what-am-I-doing-here-again? performance that will make no one forget Terence Stamp, General Zod is some sort of master-race genocidal lunatic who Shannon tries to make compelling but can't. He sort of pops in whenever the plot needs him to, leading up to an obligatory end-of-world fight scene with Supes that, basically, derails the film.

5. We need to probably finish up with that fight scene. It's impressively directed by Snyder, but, once again, completely misses the point of Superman. As the two fight, they completely level Metropolis, and rarely does Superman stop to save any of the citizens; he barely gives them a second thought, in fact. This is getting Superman completely wrong, using him as a fight avatar rather than a character; the collateral damage those two cause in the closing would be entirely unacceptable for the Superman we know and love. In a moving, damning essay by Mark Waid—author of seminal comic Superman: Birthright from which this film drew inspiration—he details an awful climactic moment that shows just how far away from Superman Snyder has drifted. (You'll know it the second you see it.) Even stranger, Snyder doesn't even seem to recognize the moment; he just has it happen, and then moves on, then Superman's kissing Lois Lane, and all good, sorry Metropolis got destroyed. It's indicative of the constant tonal issues Snyder has; the film just veers from one mood or genre to another, never once showing the directorial discipline of Nolan. Snyder is trying to make a science-fiction action film, but he doesn't realize, jeez, man, he has Superman at the middle of it. The genius of The Dark Knight is that it was basically a Batman movie that wasn't about Batman. That will not work for Superman, and it definitely won't work for a Superman origin story. We really shouldn't have been complaining so much about Superman Returns. It had a much better grasp of this character. Man of Steel is about the strongest man on earth, who can fly and shoot stuff with his eyes. But it ain't about Superman.

Grade: C

The best part about Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing is that it's not particularly proud of itself for adapting Shakespeare. Filmmakers tend to tackle the Bard out of hubris (the Mel Gibson Hamlet), an attempt to be some sort of authority (Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet), a flamboyant go-for-batshit-nutty-broke spirit (Baz Luhrmann's Romeo & Juliet) or self-consciously artsy revisionism (the Ethan Hawke Hamlet). What I love about Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing is that he seems to have made it just because he thought it might be kind of fun, why not? It has an infectious, collaborative, hey-kids-let's-put-on-a-show! spirit, and it is irresistible.

Whedon, who put together the production with his friends (including old TV buddies Amy Acker, Nathan Fillion, Fran Kranz, among others) as a way to decompress after finishing up the massive project that was The Avengers, has the light touch of someone who is just trying to have a good time and cleanse his palette. It takes place in modern-day Southern California—shot in crisp, unobtrusive black-and-white—and is fantastically unfussy. It takes what's great about the play—the endless wordplay and romantic confusion, the sense of good cheer—and just lays it out for us. There isn't any reinvention: This is Whedon taking a play he loves and goofing around with it to make it his, a student play with professional actors and directors in charge. It's light as a feather and will put a hop in your step.

The actors are always sort of key in these, and three stand out here. Fillion, from TV's Castle and Serenity (and a Whedon vet from way back), is a bumbling, deeply amusing Dogberry, the incompetent cop who knows something nefarious is going on but doesn't have a clue as to what to do about it. Kranz, another Whedon vet whom I liked quite a bit as the stoner in The Cabin in the Woods, has the thankless, largely boring role of Claudio but makes it charming, conflicted, and even funny. (Kranz is one of those actors who makes me laugh just by looking at him.) But Acker, an actress whose work I was unfamiliar with, is the film's real find, as Beatrice. Whedon has always specialized in strong female leads, and he gives Acker a plum role and tons of rope to run with it; Beatrice is a modern character who both modernizes the play and keeps it locked in the past. Acker kills the role. I sort of want to see her in every TV show now.

Yes, there's nothing revolutionary here, and one could make a pretty strong argument that this film exists so Whedon and his actors could have a weekend in a scenic cottage and get drunk together. But it's never self-indulgent. It's just here to have a good time. It means only to entertain and ingratiate, to welcome you into its party. It's not all that far from what Shakespeare was meaning to do with this play in the first place. This approach wouldn't work for Hamlet or Macbeth. (Though the failure would be highly watchable, that's for sure.) But the combination of Whedon, his pals, and Much Ado About Nothing is frothy, relaxing fun. Whedon's on quite a run, with this, The Avengers and Cabin in the Woods. If this is what he does just to kick his feet back in between projects, well, the rest of us are in for a fun few more years. He's hitting his stride as an entertainer and as a filmmaker. He's making it look easy.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

1. The Hangover, Part III is better than Part II, but not by much, and really only because it didn't just recycle, almost beat for beat, the plot of the first film. The plot it lands on this time isn't much better, though, and all told, it doesn't have much more energy than that film did. The two sequels to The Hangover don't even have the energy to try to recapture the lunacy of original; they can barely muster up enough juice just to bring the cast back together into the same shot every once in a while. These movies have become such a franchise—it amazed me to see a Hangover-themed slot machine at a St. Louis riverboat casino—that people are starting to forget what made the first film so funny and so fresh. These two sequels are doing their part in that as well.

2. The plot this time is so dull and derivative that you wonder if they should have just gone ahead and remade the first film again, as some sort of Dadaist stunt. The gimmick: After the death of his father, Alan needs to be transported to some sort of mental health facility, and Phil, Stu, and Doug agree to accompany him there. But lo! Turns out a mobster (John Goodman) is trying to find their old adversary Mr. Chow, and he takes Doug hostage until they can locate Chow. The rest of the film is them finding Chow, losing Chow, finding Chow again, losing Chow again, and then the movie finally ends.

3. What's strangest about The Hangover Part III is how, well, not funny it is. I don't mean that it makes a bunch of jokes that don't work; I mean that there are not a lot of jokes. It's basically a series of action set pieces—our heroes in a car chase! our heroes in an armed standoff! our heroes rappelling down a building!—that contain little to no dialogue other than "look out!" and "oh shit!" I guess we are supposed to laugh, out of simple muscle memory and because of all the goodwill built up toward these characters, but the movie never even bothers to give them amusing things to say. Director Todd Phillips has an ear for comedy and a surprisingly sharp visual eye—these movies always look better than they have to—but he is not an action director, and you find yourself yawning through the car chases, waiting for these characters to start interacting with each other again. And it never happens.

4. The movie is wise enough to focus itself almost entirely on the Alan character, who in the second film was weirdly peevish and cruel but is a little more recognizably Alan this time. Galifianakis slept through the second film but brings a tad more effort this time, particularly in scenes with Melissa McCarthy, who plays an unlikely love interest. Out of nowhere, though, the movie turns oddly mawkish in its last 20 minutes, as if this were, like, an arc or something. Bradley Cooper and (especially) Ed Helms look lost and narcotized in this version too, as if they know they have to do this for contractual reasons but would really love it if this could get wrapped up by 7, if possible. They're not too taxed, though: The movie gives them little to do other than react to a car crash, or something wacky Alan did. Also, it is worth noting that the appeal of Ken Jeong, particularly as this repellant character, is an absolute mystery to me. I guess I'm not sure what the joke with him is supposed to be.

5. More than anything, though, you'll find yourself looking for jokes in The Hangover, Part III that aren't there. Remember, the fun of the first film was in the discovery of these archetypes (the smug handsome asshole, the nerd, the underdeveloped space alien) and the mystery of what, precisely, happened last night. There has been none of that in the last two movies, and this one, in particular, seems to be straining for any possible reason to exist. Phillips and company know they might have undercooked this one, too. There's a "shocking!" after-credit coda that seems to admit, oh yeah, we forget to put in any actual COMEDY. Sorry about that. Try this, maybe? The gag isn't that hilarious, but after 90 minutes of everybody just killing time, you at least appreciate the half-hearted attempt. Finally.

These movies are surely done now, and for that we should be grateful. They haven't had any new ideas in two films. By Part IV, we'd just see these actors sitting around a table, occasionally waving to the camera, checking their cellphones, stretching from time to time. That'd be an improvement, actually. That might be fun.

Grade: C-

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

Did you want to learn that Jesse and Celine, the couple we fell in love with as they fell in love with each other in the Richard Linklater films Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, have become cantankerous, unhappy middle-aged jerks? That their love has curdled into passive-aggressive routine and barely disguised resentment? That the openness they showed each other during their courtship—the very basis of the first two films—will be something they use against each other during merciless scenes of verbal battle? I ask you these questions, sincerely, and in all seriousness. The third film in this series, Before Midnight, opens in select theaters this Friday, and it is extraordinary and incisive and true down to its very marrow. I wish it didn't exist.

I should probably give you a spoiler alert you here, in case you don't want to know what has happened to Jesse and Celine in the nine years since we last saw them, Celine dancing to Nina Simone, Jesse knowing he's going to miss his flight and not caring. So if you don't want to know, stop right here. All right, so as it turns out, Jesse really did stay in Paris and, in fact, left his wife back in the United States to start a new life with Celine. Yay, right? You guys, they finally did it! Well, Before Midnight is largely devoted to what comes after true love, after a big romantic gesture in the name of human connection ends, once the white-hot passion that had been denied for so long fades and reality forces its way in.

We see Jesse and Celine with their button-cute twin girls, driving through the Greece countryside, as compatible as ever—no matter what happens with those two, they'll always be able to talk—but getting bogged down in all the junk that the world throws at you when you're a parent in your 40s. They complain about Jesse's ex-wife—who, understandably, now despises the two of them—and about their jobs and about the sacrifices each of them have had to make and about how much Jesse would love to be closer to the son he left behind in the United States. (The idealist Jesse from Before Sunrise would be aghast at the divorced, cranky, indulgent fortysomething he has become, and he knows it.) There is still love between the two, no question, but there's also real bitterness, and a vague sense from each of them that by throwing all caution to the wind and deciding to be with each other, the rest of the world be damned, they have lost much of themselves, and what they once deeply cared about.

This culminates in a surprisingly intense, quite brutal fight scene between the two of them in a Greek resort hotel that is funny, scary, moving, and, I gotta admit, pretty depressing. It is jarring to see these two people we've come to care for over three films just tear at each other's throats, wailing on each other, in large part using emotional cudgels established in the first two films as warm, relatable personal details. Celine thinks Jesse uses his impulsiveness and romanticism as ways to nudge situations to his own advantage—to always get his own way, with little individual sacrifice—and Jesse believes Celine doesn't appreciate all he gave up to be with her and openly resents her for it. They hammer each other, for basically the last half hour of the film, relentlessly, to the point that you'll find yourself wanting to look away.

The scene is massive, devastating, and completely exhausting, and is absolutely true to the way that marriage can sometimes feel like a war between two people who desperately want to defeat the other person in a battle they don't even realize they're having. This is what happens after true love, the movie is saying, and I do not doubt that it is true. I am just not sure I want to learn this lesson from Jesse and Celine, one of the most romantic film couples of the last few decades. The first two films are almost painfully pure-hearted, aching and hopeful while still being grounded in real places with real people. (I love how, in the second film, in the middle of the Iraq disaster, Celine sort of hates Jesse because he's an American, and he keeps calling her a Commie.) We saw a lot of ourselves in these two characters—probably more than we should have—and it's probably true that, generationally, we see a lot more of ourselves in them now, as they're unhappily stumbling toward middle age.

Which is why seeing them unhappy is painful, even if it feels true. (It doesn't help that Hawke and Delpy, both so great, are looking so grizzled and haggard, respectively. They're both still gorgeous movie stars, but they both also look so tired.) The film is as open and honest as the first two films, but now in a darker, more upsetting way, idealism replaced with harsh reality. There's a coda after the big hotel fight that lets us know there might be a little hope for these two, that in seven years (when we'll probably get another movie), there will be another chapter to the story. Maybe this is just a tough phase for them, one we all go through. But seeing these two, who spoke so lovingly to each other for two films, spit at each other here is sometimes too much for this old '90s-nostalgia-obsessive romantic to bear. Before Midnight, like the first two films, reflects the real world in a way that seems almost preternatural. It's just that, here, the real world is a harsher, more disappointing place. This makes for a stronger, more unsparing, extremely powerful film. It lets you know how these characters turned out in a truthful, realistic way. It's just, well ... I'm just not sure I wanted to see it. Now that I know, I kinda wish I didn't.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

1. I've never gotten the sense that J.J. Abrams really cares all that much about the Star Trek franchise. Abrams has said that he was far more into Star Wars—as any reasonable person would be—and that his first, well-received Star Trek was more about rebooting a franchise than any particular passion he had for the original brand. The first film, thusly, has a shake-it-up quality that's sort of irresistible, sci-fi nerds both adhering to and upending the expectations of fanboys. (They even make a "Beam Me Up, Scotty" joke.) It was fun, if ultimately a bit empty. But I'm not sure you can pull off an improved sequel—almost an expectation, in the world of The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 2—without some real, deep affection for the material. Abrams is going to direct one of the upcoming Star Wars films, and in Star Trek Into Darkness, you can almost feel him rushing through this to get to something he really cares about. Abrams is too natural an entertainer to let anything get boring, but this one, in many ways, feels like everyone just going through the paces.

2. All the characters from the first film are back, with Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto, who always stands out) and Zoe Saldana's Uhura taking the Enterprise into new and strange places. This time, they're out to find a deadly terrorist named James Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch), a former Starfleet commander obsessed with taking down the regime of Starfleet Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) for reasons that are not initially clear. Kirk and the crew head into Klingon airspace to take Harrison in, and, well, the predictable hell breaks predictably loose. The plot is surprisingly simple: The first hour is all windup, and for the next hour, all our characters are in the same place, with a broken-down Enterprise and a ton of exposition.

3. What's most disappointing about Star Trek Into Darkness is the almost total lack of wonder or awe or invention in any of the set pieces. None of the action sequences is particularly mind-blowing, even on a basic summer-movie level, and they lack the spatial logic of the fun drill-fight sequences from the first film. (The opening sequence, set on an alien planet while a volcano is exploding, is unnecessarily busy and cluttered.) A lot of the director's little tricks—the smash zoom, the lens flares—feel more like gimmicks than they did last time, Abrams fidgeting with nothing really to say. Even the big explosions, like a scene in which a spaceship crashes into San Francisco, aren't particularly inspired; you'll be surprised at how small-scale the action scenes feel, like they were done in a hurry.

4. The smartest move Abrams and company made—after attempting to cut the cord with Star Trek universe continuity in the first movie—was to tie the film back to the franchise history, specifically to the second (and most beloved) of the original Star Trek films. (There are also nods to the fourth film, also beloved, with the setting of San Francisco.) Kirk and Spock's friendship has always been the centerpiece of the great Star Trek films, and it comes through strongly here, with an ongoing theme of personal affection versus profession responsibility. The movie even makes sure to provide some handy bits of fan service, not just with those two, but with the Harrison character, leading to a particular moment that'll make even the most cynical non-Trekkie, who might have seen the moment coming, grin in recognition. But unlike that second film, Abrams isn't willing to let this one end with a moment of sadness and reflection: He has to keep the ride going.

5. There will be far more incompetent summer films released in the coming months. (I glance warily in M. Night Shyamalan's direction.) And I wonder if this franchise will improve once Abrams is away from it; his heart is just not quite in this one. He's biding his time to expand and deepen Star Wars. (He is truly the perfect guy for that job. One wonders if he ever would have touched a Star Trek film had he known Star Wars would become available.) These are still such well-cast, well-constructed films that they'll never truly be a disappointment; having such strong polar opposites as Pine and Cumberbatch—with Quinto intriguingly in the middle—will always keep them watchable. But if the action scenes aren't up to par, and the passion isn't in evidence, then what is there? This movie is fine, and dull.

Grade: C+

1. I'm confused at to what Baz Luhrmann, the crazy over-the-top director of Moulin Rouge and Romeo + Juliet, would possibly want with The Great Gatsby. Well, I see why he might like it as a theoretical challenge: What ambitious filmmaker (and Luhrmann is nothing if not ambitious) wouldn't want to try to solve the Gatsby mystery? (Every Gatsby movie has been terrible.) And I see why he'd want to recreate the Roaring Twenties through set design and CGI: The costumes alone could keep him occupied for months. But I have no idea why he'd want to do Gatsby. He seems to lack even a passing understanding of what the book is about. He has zero interest in class struggle, or the doom of the American Dream, or the cruel thoughtlessness of the privileged. Luhrmann has said in an interview that he was drawn to Gatsby because, in part, he loves stories about ill-fated lovers. The Great Gatsby is many things, but one thing it sure as hell isn't about is ill-fated lovers.

2. Luhrmann is a firm hand in the early scenes, with all the lavish parties and wretched excess of a plush, decadent era. His Gatsby mansion is breathtaking—it looks like a floating castle—and the scenes involving all his wild soirees have a fun, pulsating intensity. (Scoring these new money flapper fetes with Jay-Z and Lana Del Rey does seem to fit the cultural moment.) The problem, of course, is that Luhrmann doesn't understand—or, perhaps more accurately, care—that such garish indulgence is what Fitzgerald was trying to upend, not celebrate. Luhrmann is only at home when he's portraying excess. Adapting Gatsby just so you can recreate the party scenes is like remaking Born on the Fourth of July for the war scenes. Luhrmann has a knack for missing the point.

3. This couldn't be more clear than during the scenes between Gatsby and his beloved Daisy, which are all soft-focused and romantic, like they're Romeo and Juliet rather than a deluded cursed megalomaniacal social climber and a spoiled old-money brat who just wants everything at no cost to her. Luhrmann just doesn't get the Gatsby-Daisy relationship—or the lack thereof—and the whole second half of the movie collapses once people start doing more talking than dancing. The scene in which Daisy is confronted by both Gatsby and her husband Tom Buchanan is incompetently staged, as if Luhrmann's camera didn't know what to do with itself if it weren't leaping and diving from the top of a chandelier. The story and the characters are just excuses for Luhrmann's visual gigantism. The Great Gatsby, for cripes sake.

4. A lot of the fascination in a project like this comes from the casting, and Luhrmann shoots about 50 percent on that. I'll confess that the appeal of an actor like Tobey Maguire has always been a bit lost on me; he looks so modern and callow and fake that I never quite buy him in anything. (At least not since Wonder Boys. That's the issue with Maguire: He always looks more like a precocious grad student than an actual adult person.) As Daisy, Carey Mulligan does her best, but she isn't quite classical and remote enough to nail the role; her smiles, frankly, are too sincere. Joel Edgerton does his best to give Tom less Snidely Whiplash, and it's a little surprising how quietly sympathetic he makes him. But the movie belongs to Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, and I will say, I think he's sort of perfect. DiCaprio, who often tries to ugly himself up as a way to convey inner torment, goes the opposite route this time, looking full movie-star glam throughout. (Luhrmann surely had a lot to do with this, too.) It works, because DiCaprio lets you still see the insecurity and fear underneath the facade while still always keeping on the mask. He's such a strong presence that every time he's offscreen, you keep waiting for him to come back.

5. Look, the film isn't a disaster. Luhrmann, a born showman, always keeps things moving, and even though the film's framing device is idiotic (Carraway telling the Gatsby story to his therapist), it still provides ample opportunity to have Fitzgerald's words read aloud to us, something not even 3-D can ruin. (Oh, and the 3-D is as pointless as you'd suspect.) I remain convinced that, someday, someone's gonna get Gatsby right as a movie. Its themes of ambition and loss and status and reinvention are universal, as powerful today as ever. We may have to wait 20 more years to give it another try, but I think we might eventually get there. The definitive Gatsby movie might get made. But boy, this sure ain't it.

Grade: C

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

1. Other than that terrible Todd Phillips-Zach Galifianakis comedy Due Date, Robert Downey Jr. hasn't played a character other than Tony Stark or Sherlock Holmes in four years. Of all the actors who could have ended up settling into tentpole action star roles? Downey? I caught Robert Altman's Short Cuts again recently, and while Downey has a small, minor role, I was taken aback by how compelling and terrifying he was, just on sight. He was just as shiftily charming then, but in that sort of mad, apocalyptic, drug-addled '90s way. He seemed headed for a career of playing doomed, insane poets for a few years until someone found him in a hotel somewhere. He was going that way, too—remember all his arrests, the Ally McBeal recovery period, and the time he lost his part in Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda (and was replaced by Will Ferrell) because he couldn't get insured—until he turned around. And, amazingly, he turned into this.

2. You can make a pretty strong argument that the Marvel movie universe, and its billions in profits, exists because of Downey. Iron Man was the first wholly Marvel-made movie—the X-Men and Spider-Man franchises, among others, had been licensed out to other studios—and it was a massive hit. That was due entirely to the combination of Downey and director Jon Favreau, who understood that they needed to bring an entirely different sensibility to the superhero movie, less hero worship and more postmodern, semi-cynical entertainment. That sensibility infused some energy into some pretty square superheroes—I mean, even the movie about freaking Thor was kinda fun—and led to the brilliant, ridiculously profitable decision to put Joss Whedon in charge of The Avengers. The whole thing was born from Downey finding the perfect role, and knocking it out of the park.

3. Iron Man 3 doesn't have that anarchist, game-for-anything feel of the first film, but it's tons more fun than the dreadful second one. (I'm pretty sure Mickey Rourke was asleep for half that movie.) Its premise is your basic hero-falls-from-grace-and-must-be-reborn arc, the one Christopher Nolan has mastered. An evil terrorist supervillain called The Mandarin (played by Ben Kingsley) has some sort of new bomb that leaves no trace, and he wants to destroy the United States and the President, specifically. When Stark butts his nose in, the Mandarin, along with some shady helpers from some technology corporation (led by a sneering, enjoyable Guy Pearce), basically destroys his life, kidnaps Pepper Potts, and forces Stark to start over completely, figuring out who, exactly, that man underneath the suit really is.

4. The movie is directed by screenwriter Shane Black, and it moves along nicely, even if there are a ton of story holes that aren't worth worrying too much about. (There are several scenes where characters just show up where the story needs them to be at that exact moment, without explanation.) The villains, always key in a superhero movie, are perfectly adequate, and while the movie gets bogged down with a dull, cloying subplot with a Helpful Adorable Child Who Assists Our Hero In His Darkest Hour, it more than makes up for it with some ripping action set-pieces. The movie certainly hits its obligatory summer-movie marks, from a wild escape from a crashing plane to the ohhh shit moment when Stark summons dozens of identical Iron Men. It doesn't skimp on the big stuff.

5. But the movie mostly cooks because of Downey, who, as always, keeps up a funny, rollicking meta-commentary on the action while engaging right in the middle of it. There's a side story about Stark suffering post-traumatic stress after the incident at the end of The Avengers that doesn't quite work—no one wants to see a self-doubting Tony Stark—and seems included just to remind you that Tony Stark was in that movie. (And to keep the franchises tied together, of course.) But everything else, from the large-scale explosions to the little moments with a never-more-charming-than-in-these-movies Gwyneth Paltrow, Downey nails. I don't know if they're going to make an Iron Man 4, but the way it's looking, Downey's gonna be around to play this character, in various movies, as long as they keep making money. I'm all right with that. Maybe Downey didn't end up being the crazed poet who changed the world, but the way he turned out is just fine.

Grade: B.

Mud is a movie I don't get, and I don't think the problem is necessarily with me.

It's written and directed by Jeff Nichols, who directed Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter, two films that were adored by pretty much everyone but me. (I enjoyed much of Take Shelter but felt Nichols had lost control of his tone by the time Michael Shannon gets into fistfights at the fish fry.) And I liked both of those movies more than Mud. Nichols is a master of atmosphere who can conjure up the old Southern gothic, and I have no doubt he has lots on his mind. But I have a hard time following him everywhere he wants me to go.

The "Mud" of the title is in fact a grizzled, scrawny Arkansas drifter/fugitive played by Matthew McConaughey in another impressive performance in a movie I can't go all the way with. (Now that McConaughey has decided he doesn't care about being a huge movie star anymore, he's becoming better—and bigger—than he ever was before.) Mud is on the run after shooting a man for beating up his longtime love Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), whom he called "a dream you don't wanna wake up from." Mud talks like this a lot, through rotted teeth and odd optimism about love and the universe. He ends up stranded on an island, where two boys, Ellis and Neckbone (though Nichols probably should have stopped kidding himself and just called them "Tom" and "Huck") discover him and end up helping him escape and save Juniper.

Along the way, of course, they meet all sorts of unsavory characters, like the sniper who lives across the water (Sam Shepard), the evil Arkansas mob-lord father of the man Mud killed (Joe Don Baker, an actor I was ecstatic to learn was still alive) and Juniper herself, who turns out not necessarily to be worth all the trouble Mud goes through for her. Ellis and Neckbone travel the muddy Arkansas terrain, rambling from one adventure to another, trying to figure out love and women and what it all means.

Technically speaking, Ellis and Neckbone get themselves into some hairy situations, but as Nichols shows it, they never seem in any real danger. There's a weird fantasyland aspect to the whole film, like it's an old memory only hazily recalled. And for a while it works: The movie drifts into pleasant metaphorical fog so easily you don't mind when the story starts to wander all over the place. But then Nichols clicks back into the actual plot, and its resolution, and all these characters—who seem more like representations of people than actual people—suddenly all have to move themselves into position to wrap things up, and next thing you know, there's a big climactic shootout scene. I might not have been crazy about Take Shelter, but at least Nichols kept a firm hand on the till in that movie; here, he keeps floating aimlessly down the same river that's at the middle of the movie. Are we supposed to take all this seriously, with the boats and the talk of love curin' all, y'all, the coming-of-age story morphing with a weird Ozark romance shoot 'em' up?

Oh, and about the romance. I humbly submit that Mud perhaps has a bit of a lady problem? There are only three women in the film. There's Juniper, who does nothing but betray Mud throughout the whole movie and seems to enjoy men being beaten and killed over her hand. There is Ellis' mother, who has a couple moments of quiet dignity but mostly seems to be browbeating her quiet but noble and hard-working husband. And there is the girl Ellis has a crush on, an older girl who appears sweet and gives him his first kiss but is necking with a senior and not giving two shits about Ellis, with no explanation, only a couple of scenes later. I understand that a lot of this movie is through the perspective of a 14-year-old boy, so we're not exactly going to get a Hélène Cixous dissertation or anything, but it's also ostensibly a film about love and what it means to give yourself up for someone. And all the women in this movie are shrews, liars and/or emasculators.

There's a lot to like in Mud, from the warm, inviting atmosphere to the likable relationship between Ellis and Neckbone to, particularly, McConaughey's performance. (Witherspoon is as bad as I've ever seen her, though. She keeps trying to find a character to play, but can't.) But it's pretty all over the place and never quite figures out what it's actually about. I think Nichols is someday going to make a great movie. I just bet it happens when he stops trying so damned hard to.

Grierson & Leitch write regularly for Deadspin about movies. Follow them @griersonleitch.

1. You can make all the jokes you want about Terrence Malick's movies, particularly these last two later-era ones, whose interest in normal movie things like "plots" and "stories" and "coherent narratives" is minimal at best, but they knock my socks off. I know that both The Tree of Life and now To The Wonder (which opens on Friday and is available On Demand, but you shouldn't watch it there; Malick is not a filmmaker whose films are logical complements to household chores and browsing cat photoshops) feature endless shots of people running through fields of wheat, dancing around in circles, and whispering new-agey psychobabble ("The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by") in voiceover. I still love them, and if you give them a chance, I bet you'll love them too.

2. Still, it has to be said that To The Wonder is even more elliptical and story-averse than The Tree of Life was, and that's saying something. (The Tree of Life famously inspired a theater to warn moviegoers that they were about to watch something that "does not follow a traditional, linear narrative approach to filmmaking.") That film at least gave you a central story that you could get your arms around, the reminiscences of a man wrestling with the effects of his youth in rough 1950s Texas. What can we pull out of To The Wonder? Ben Affleck plays some sort of health inspector who falls in love with a French woman played by Olga Kurylenko, and then he falls out of love, and then back in, and then back out. Affleck is the central character, but I believe he has roughly 10 lines of dialogue, most of which are delivered in voiceover. There is also lots of wheat.

3. I understand if this the whole "traditional, linear narrative approach to filmmaking" thing is scaring you off, but I'm obliged to let you know what you're in for. Malick's movies are all about mood and rhythm and feel; they are structured, as Bilge Ebiri pointed out in a To The Wonder rave, not all that different than a classical music performance, a symphony. You find yourself swept along, if not necessarily away, by To The Wonder, as Malick just glides over any traditional narrative clues. I don't know what goes right and wrong with Affleck's and Kurylenko's relationship, but it feels vast and epic and tragic, even if I'm not sure why. Malick's sensual, almost ethereal filmmaking specialty is making the personal feel cosmic, and I'm not sure he's even been better at that than here. He makes the (muddled, sorta confusing) story of a relationship feel like the span of the universe.

4. Another thing I loved about To The Wonder: It takes place today, in a normal American (well, Oklahoman) city, with all its mundanity and ugly corporatism. When Kurylenko has an affair (with the actor who plays Skinny Pete, of all people), she has a depressing, trashy tryst in an Econo Lodge, next to the highway, bookended by sad gas stations. Yet Malick somehow finds the beauty even in this. One of his techniques in this film is to sneak in normal everyday exchanges–banal drive-through chit-chat–in the midst of his loopy philosophizing voiceovers. The merge is stunning and lovely, a strange valentine to the poetry and prose we all encounter all the time and never think about. I appreciate Malick setting his film and his musings in a recognizable, drab setting, and making that gorgeous as well. For a few hours after seeing To The Wonder, I found myself finding the beauty in subway grime, and rat feces, and the guy muttering to himself while wearing bags on his feet up and down 57th Street. Malick gets in your head that way. He makes everything feel important.

5. Not everything is, though. Affleck's and Kurylenko's buildups and breakdowns, as sketchily constructed as they are, aren't quite enough to build a movie around. (Affleck mostly just looks confused throughout.) You'll be grateful for Javier Bardem's priest character, who wanders in and out of the film, delivering sermons, serving communion, looking lost. I'm not sure how he fits into the main story, but I perked up every time he came on screen anyway; I've never thought so much before how lonely it must be to be in the clergy, communicating only with a God you can never be entirely sure is listening at that particularly moment. Bardem's character is sort of a spectral guide through the Malick world, in which you see the pain and loss and confusion, but you hang on and you keep moving forward, because there is too much beauty around for this all to be some sort of coincidence. To The Wonder is a tough slog only if you let it be one. If you give yourself up to it, you'll be carried along–not knowing where you're going, and never really minding much either.

Grade: B+.

A sweet article by a long time friend who did indeed once bring a wince to my fat face. All is forgiven. http://j.mp/95lUGu

1. A good rule of thumb: If you are holding a book in your hands and you notice that someone has gone to the trouble of shutting that book with barbed wire, do not attempt to open this book. If you do open this book, then do not read from it–particularly when previous patrons of the Satan Public Library have scrawled "GET AWAY FROM THIS BOOK" and "DO NOT READ THIS ALOUD" all over the pages, in blood. And if you do read from this book ... well, I suppose you have what's coming your way. Still: I feel like the best way to avoid reading from the book of the dead, all told, is just to put a big "TL;DR" on the cover. Wonder if it still conjures up demons if you read it on a Kindle.

2. That book is the central text of the Evil Dead movies, both the three original Sam Raimi films and this month's remake from Uruguayan director Fede Alvarez (who made the terrific short Panic Attack!), put together with the explicit approval of Raimi and his cohort in the early films, actor Bruce Campbell. Those Raimi films are thought of as gross-out slapstick comedy bits more than actual horror films, but the original film, the one this one is nodding to, was straight-up low-budget terror, with a lot less self-referential winking. One of the things I like about this remake is that it's far more interested in shocking you than in making you giggle; it doesn't wear its self-awareness on its sleeve. It's trying to conjure up that anything-goes spirit of the original–with, of course, buckets and buckets of blood.

3. Seriously, I'd recommend wearing galoshes to the theater for this one. Alvarez has said his goal was to go as over-the-top as possible, and boy howdy, did he ever. There is one character who, honestly, I think is stabbed more than 100 times, via five different implements, on three different occasions. (To be fair: He's the one who read from the book, so he sorta had it coming.) There were, by my count, four different moments in which my audience audibly gasped, particularly during one scene involving a knife, a tongue, and a sudden, horrific hunger. Also: There are many, many dismemberments, and every snap and gristle is amplified for effect. It's like if 127 Hours actually ran for 127 hours.

4. For a horror movie, none of this is particularly new, and deep-diving fans of schlock horror won't find much here that they haven't seen tons of times before. (Even the evil violating demon tree feels like a trope at this point.) And even with the mythos of the book and the necronomicon and all that, I still never quite understood what exactly turned someone into a demon, what brought them back, how you ended the curse, so on, and I'm not sure the movie really understands (or cares) either. The movie has a smart idea about why all these young people are at this abandoned cabin in the first place–they're trying to help the main heroine kick a heroin habit, which makes her initial freakouts after being possessed by the demon seem like withdrawal pangs–but it drops it once the blood gets flowing. I'd love to read an alternative take on the film that supposes the whole thing is her detoxing fever nightmare, though I don't think even the Trainspotting guys ever saw anybody cut someone's skull in half with a chainsaw.

5. A lot of the film is blatant Ain't It Cool News fan-service slash-fiction; the nods to the original film(s) are just subtle enough to make sure the true "fans" get it. But I still admired that the movie didn't go too far in that direction; Alvarez (who I bet ends up having a long career that's marked by a lot of non-horror films, like Raimi himself) is skilled enough to spring each surprise with maximum effect. The movie is over-the-top, sure, but not cartoonishly so; it legitimately wants to scare you, even while you're chuckling at the audaciousness of it all. It's not great, it's not quite as anarchic as the original or as you want it to be, but as a gorefest aiming to pop you out of your seat a few times, it does the trick. Maybe by the inevitable sequel someone will figure out to keep that goddamned book closed.

Grade: B.

Grierson and Leitch write regularly for Deadspin about movies. Follow them @griersonleitch.

To make a list of things I do not understand about Shane Carruth's Upstream Color would be to simply list everything that happens in the movie. But lemme try out some questions on you anyway: Who is the man who kidnaps a woman and drugs her by feeding her a worm? And why does that worm cause her to obey his every command? Why is she saved by a man who transfuses her blood with a pig's? Why is there a pig farm? Are the worms and pigs related somehow? Is this real life?

That paragraph didn't make any more sense to me than it did to you, and I'm only asking the surface questions about Upstream Color; trust me, the movie has far more profound questions on its mind than ones about pigs and worms. The thing about the movie, though, is that even though I don't know any of the answers to any of the questions, I'm pretty sure the answers are in the film, if I just look hard enough.

The same could be said of like Carruth's previous film, Primer. In a fantastic profile of Carruth by Brian Raftery in Wired, Looper director Rian Johnson tries to put his finger on it. “From a first viewing of Primer, you’re inevitably confused, but you know that it makes sense. It’s that kind of dangerous fishing hook that can draw in a conspiracy theorist—the tantalizing notion that if you can put all the pieces together, this will add up to something.” The answers are all there. You just have to find them.

If you've seen Primer–and/or if you're aware of the cult obsessed with solving its mysteries–you'll have an idea of what you're in for with Upstream Color, but what's most impressive about the film is how much more of a film it is. Primer was determinedly low-fi, obsessed more with detail and construction than with anything cinematic. But Upstream Color is gorgeous, lyrical and hypnotic and mesmerizing; the upgrade in Carruth's ability is staggering. (The Wired piece talks about how obsessive Carruth is about solving problems. It's possible he just figured out cinema the same way your or I would figure out how to put together an Ikea shelf.)

It also–and this is the big surprise–has a huge, romantic heart. The movie (I think) is a love story, about two damaged people (Amy Seimetz and Carruth himself) who find each other and fix each other. Now, it's possible that they are damaged because of a deranged con man who poisons people with worms and works with a pig farmer who transports their souls into baby swine, but that doesn't make their love story any less affecting. (Again: I'm not sure all that happens. I'm just guessing.) The movie is warmer and more welcoming than Primer; Carruth wants you to feel in a way he didn't in that film, even while he's still manufacturing his intricate puzzles. There is a theme of redemption, of pain eased through love, through human connection, that shines through even as you're baffled by what's going on. This is, more than anything else, a romance, and a deeply moving one.

I've only seen the movie once, so I can't even pretend to make heads or tails of it. Carruth is releasing the movie himself, and it'll be available for download on May 7 after hitting theaters this Friday. I highly recommend the purchase. There were countless times during my screening when I wanted to pause the film and go back a couple seconds, like I just missed something important that I'll need to know for later. This is the genius of Carruth: You are constantly being fed bits of information that don't make sense but that feel like they do, and you find yourself certain you can pull them together if you just have the time. His films are confounding, but pleasingly so; he's not being arch and obnoxious about his riddles as much as he's letting you in on the trick–slowly, almost mathematically.

And the major difference here, as opposed to Primer, is that the experience of watching the trick is so sweeping and grand that you don't even care that you don't understand it. (Carruth has warmed as a performer, but Seimetz is a revelation; without her ability to instantly win your affection, it'd be tougher to go along with her journey.) But you will care that someday you will. I know the answer is in there, somewhere. I can't wait to watch it again, and again, and again, to figure it out. (Or at least try for a while and finally go online and see what everyone else has come up with.) Upstream Color will leave you giddily befuddled. I've never been so swept away by being so lost.

GI Joe: Retaliation

I was going to do a whole review of this and everything, but it's already playing in theaters, and if you're planning on waiting in line to see it tonight, at this point, there isn't much I can do to stop you. Instead, I just decided to quote the eight worst lines from the film. I'm not sure if this is helpful or not, but there were so many that were so awful that I had to take out my notebook and write them down, lest I some day be subpoenaed and need physical proof to back me up. You can watch London explode in the trailer, you can watch The Rock in better movies like Snitch, and you can just follow along with these lines, and you'll get the full GI Joe: Retaliation experience.

8. "There's only one man who could authorize a strike like that. And I voted for him." In the film, the president (Jonathan Pryce) has been kidnapped and is being impersonated by one of Cobra Command's flunkies. As one does.

7. "Sorry for the delay. The director was running behind."
[smirk] "He won't be running anywhere anytime soon." (Because he's dead now.)

6. "They call it a waterboard, but man, I never get bored."

5. "I'm Amy Vandervoort from Fox News."
"Of course it's Fox News. That's why you look so fair and balanced." I'm pretty sure I made this joke in the green room of Red Eye once.

4. "You feel so much hate that you stop feeling it at all, like a fish not knowing it's in water." I don't think I understand what this means.

3. "I'm the quicker-blower-upper." Someone was paid for writing this.

2. "I'm not here to sell you anything. Well, maybe hopelessness." The worst part about this one is that it's delivered by Walton Goggins, aka Boyd Crowder.

1. "The Joes are out of the picture. And by 'out of the picture,' I mean, 'out of this earth.'" Because they're dead.

I'm sorry, that's all you're getting out of me on this one. Sometimes writing about movies seems kind of dumb.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

1. Steve Carell, leading man, is a lot funnier when he's not trying to be funny. He tends to work better in supporting straight comedy roles (most famously Anchorman, but also Bruce Almighty and even Bewitched) than as the lead (Dinner For Schmucks, Get Smart). His sweet spot as a leading man is basically the Tom Hanks role; he exudes a fundamental decency and generosity that can center and ground a story. Tad Friend's wonderful New Yorker story about Carell based this in his improv past; it argued that training allowed other actors to bounce off him, to let them have the spotlight and work along with them. Carell has always been someone you cheer for, but now that he's older, he's not always someone who makes you laugh.

2. This is the fundamental miscalculation of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, a surprisingly timid comedy that has a ton of talent and a terrific concept behind it, but never quite musters up the energy to do much with either. It starts Carell as the eponymous Wonderstone, a famous Vegas magician (along with his longtime best friend partner Anton Marvelton, played by Steve Buscemi) who discovers he has been made irrelevant by the emergence of a new kind of "street art" magician, the kind who spends the night lying on hot coals or goes four days without urinating. (Jim Carrey, in what's essentially an extended cameo, plays him part David Blaine, part Criss Angel.) Wonderstone, of course, loses everything and has to get it all back by rediscovering—say it all together now—Why He Fell In Love With Magic In The First Place.

3. The movie never quite figures out if it's going to be a go-for-broke, non-stop-gag comedy in the Anchorman vein or a warm-hearted sincere character comedy like, say, The 40-Year Old Virgin, so it ends up being a lot of neither. A lot of this is, sad to say, thanks to Carell, who seems unsure if he should be playing a real person or a caricature. On one hand, he invests considerable serious good cheer in Wonderstone; he wants us to care about this guy. On the other hand, the script portrays him as a clueless jackass who is so accustomed to his Vegas hotel lifestyle that he leaves the dishes outside the front door of an apartment. Which is it? The movie keeps hedging about what type of comedy it is, careening from the warmth of Alan Arkin's performance as a retired magician learning to love the craft again to the prancing set pieces of Carrey and the cartoonish, aggressively-laugh-free dopiness of Buscemi. (I love Mr. Pink as much as anybody, but Buscemi is never as funny in these comedy roles as you want him to be.) Carell keeps trying to center the movie in a real place, but the script keeps cutting his knees out from under him by portraying him as a buffoon.

4. Thus, we're left with a lot of silly jokes about Vegas performers—including tired gags about the guy whose act features his tigers continuously mauling him—and Carell alternately turning on the good-guy charm and mugging for the camera. Some of the jokes still land, including a funny-sad routine in which Wonderstone tries to do his two-person act solo, but the movie's so all over the place that it never stops anywhere to settle. Olivia Wilde has some nice moments as a woman who grew up worshipping Wonderstone and has dreams of being a magician herself, but the movie ultimately just sells her out and turns her into the love interest. The more I think about it, the more I think the movie probably should have just been about her.

5. You get a sense of what the movie could have been during a scene that runs over the closing credits, which is never a good sign. Without spoiling it, let's just say that it shows, in unsparing and hilarious detail, just how much trouble Wonderstone and his crew had to go through to pull off their signature trick. In Chris Jones' Esquire profile of magician Teller, he writes about how "the method behind most tricks is ugly and disappointing, something blunt and mechanical." The movie's close brings this point to its logical conclusion. It's a great joke in a movie that needs more of them. If the rest of the movie had put much thought into its characters as it did into that final scene, we'd have really had something.

Grade: C+

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

1. Spring Breakers is trashy: I'm not telling you something you don't know here. It's self-consciously trashy, but not in any sort of wry, ironic, removed way. It dives headfirst into its trash, wallowing in it, wringing it for every last drop of slime. This is a nothing movie about nothing people doing nothing things, but it never feels that way in the moment; it always feels important while you're watching it, like you're investing more depth and emotion in the characters than any of them actually have. You know how if you stare into the eyes of an animal long enough, you can start to believe they have human-like soul and intelligence? Even though they're really just thinking about food and being in heat? That's what Spring Breakers is. It is a soulful look into a world that has no soul. Everyone here is just thinking about food.

2. The story really doesn't delve much deeper than its title. Four college girls (Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine) rob a diner to get money to head to Tampa for spring break, where debauchery ensues. They end up in jail, but bailed out by a local hoodlum named Alien (self-pronounced by a profoundly lunatic James Franco as "Ah-leen") who happens to be in the middle of one of those St. Petersburg drug wars. Some of the girls go home, some of the girls stay and fight and fuck with Alien and, well, that's pretty much the whole movie.

3. Spring Breakers is written and directed by Harmony Korine, the defiantly anti-commercial director who wrote Kids, directed 2009's Trash Humpers (which was a movie about people who wore grotesque masks and had sex with piles of garbage, shot and cut on VHS) and once made a short called The Diary of Anne Frank Part II that was "a 40-minute three-screen collage featuring a boy burying his dog, kids in satanic dress vomiting on a Bible, and a man in black-face dancing and singing 'My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean.'" So you have some idea what we're dealing with here. (I'm old enough to remember when Korine was a regular on Letterman's show, back before he was banned from the show for pushing Meryl Streep backstage. Note to young directors: Do not shove Meryl Streep.) The thing about Korine, though, is that in spite of his legendary not-give-a-shitness, the guy has an undeniable talent as a film director. Spring Breakers is nothing if not hypnotic, drawing you into this seedy, increasingly terrifying world and investing it in nothing if not sincerity. It's a bizarre magic trick: Korine is simultaneously fucking with you and also desperately trying to make you believe this is all important, to make you care. I'm not sure it always works, but it never fails to be riveting.

4. The four girls are mostly interchangable with the exception of Ashley Benson, the primary provocateur, who is digging the film's nihilist wavelength; for all the supposed "adult" behavior of child stars Gomez and Hudgens, they've got a long way to go to be grownup actors. (At first Gomez seems the star of the film, but Korine rightly gets bored with her halfway through and sends her home.) But Korine's muse here is Franco, who hasn't been this much fun in years. Franco's Alien is deplorable and disgusting, but in an entertaining, almost existential way. He recites idiotic poetry, plays Britney Spears on the Axl Rose-esque white piano next to his pool and gleefully inventories "all my shit," listing all the cool stuff he owns like the 14-year-old boy he always will be. It's a wild, giddy performance, one Franco invests with genuine, if clumsy menace; you're scared of him, even if you know he's too dumb, really, to hurt anyone from himself. Every moment Franco's on screen, the film is a riot.

5. Ultimately, Korine doesn't have much to say, but there probably isn't much to say other than "Spring Break!" (Franco has a way of saying "spring break" that hasn't left my brain in 24 hours.) This is an empty exercise in trash and indulgence and style that doesn't go anywhere and doesn't accomplish much. But boy, what an exercise. How odd it is that this festering weirdo of a movie is the most mainstream thing Korine has ever done? The man can make a goddamned movie, that's for sure, with whole segments that feel like David Lynch-dreamland crossed with a nightmare you had while falling asleep watching phone sex infomercials. All trash should be this loving and fussed over, and all trash should have some Alien at its center. What a Franco performance. He's lurkin'. He's LURK-in! You're probably gonna hate Spring Breakers, but I bet you love it, too.

Grade: B+.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

1. The notion of doing a prequel to The Wizard of Oz focused on Oz himself isn't an inherently terrible idea. The wizard, after all, is the one character in that story who's neither completely good nor bad; he's full of shit, sure, but he also means well for Oz and ultimately tries to grant everybody's wishes anyway. The story of how he got to Oz, how he ended up in charge in the first place, could be a fascinating one. Unfortunately, that's not the story of Oz, the Great and Powerful. The story of Oz, the Great and Powerful is that Alice in Wonderland made a bunch of money, so Disney thought they'd try to same remake/reboot thing with Oz. There are so many missed opportunities here.

2. The movie tries to parallel the original film in ways that are both in homage to and, sometimes, in outright copyright theft of. (Disney had to base the film on the book, which is now in the public domain, rather than the film, which is owned by Warner Bros.) In L. Frank Baum's book, Oz is a real place, not a dream populated by characters from Dorothy's home life, but this film steals that conceit. A carnival-magician huckster named Oscar Diggs (played by James Franco) is swept into a tornado in Kansas, and suddenly the world's black-and-white turns widescreen 3-D color, with his assistant, ex-girlfriend and audience members as the slightly altered real-life denizens of Oz. This sort of had my brain spinning. So, this is Oscar's dream, and then Dorothy is having a dream within that dream? Were they both taken away by the same tornado? When Dorothy wakes up and returns to Kansas, does she cease to exist? Did she ever exist? What if we're all just insignificant specks in this grand universe?

3. Anyway, we follow Oscar as he is drawn into an ongoing battle between the various witches, wicked and otherwise, in Oz. It's perhaps not surprising that the three witches (Mila Kunis and Rachel Weisz as the wicked sisters, Michelle Williams as Glinda the good witch) are the best parts of the movie; all three actresses have a grand time both occupying and transcending parts that are roughly three times as old as they are. (Kunis has a harder time than the other two, but she's still game.) Williams, in particular, has a witty take on a character who is basically goodness personified; she's in her own joke. The movie also looks sharp and impressive, even if a lot of it is empty candy. And there are occasional nods to the original film that feel warm and respectful, particularly when a field full of scarecrows are used as a mock army. Director Sam Raimi has lost most of his nihilist edge, but he can still pull together a set-piece when he needs to.

4. But this thing has to start and end with the rather disastrous casting of Franco as Oscar. The Wizard is supposed to be a showman, a song-and-dance man, the type of fellow you can imagine conceivably selling your town a monorail. (W.C. Fields was originally cast as the Wizard, and even though he would have just gotten in the way, you can see what the producers were thinking.) The Wizard is a charming vaudeville peddler, a bullshitter. It's a storied archetype, the selfish egotist who learns he's a good guy after all. It doesn't require much energy to play a guy like this, but Franco still can't muster it. He never can quite get the patter down, and he never feels truly invested in what's going on; he mostly just looks sleepy. (He's also the worst acting-against-a-green-screen actor I've ever seen.) I spent most of the movie trying to figure out what actor would have been the right pick, and while Jim Carrey and Steve Carell and Will Ferrell and Bradley Cooper all immediately came to mind, the fact is, almost anyone would have brought more to the table than Franco. Certain movies Franco seems to decide it's just not worth working himself up for. This was definitely one of them.

5. The movie ends up getting bogged down in bland set-pieces and dull characterization—Oscar's fellow travelers on his journey are all more boring than freaking Toto—and it strays so far from the whimsy and joy of the original that you forget the two films are even part of the same universe. (I hesitate to say this, considering this movie is long enough as is, but it probably could have used some songs.) It doesn't ruin anything about the first film, because that movie's a classic, and this is just a half-hearted cash grab. But this is still sacred territory we're talking about here. If you're gonna do a prequel to the freaking Wizard of Oz, you should probably put some more thought into it past just the premise. And for crissakes, don't give us a cute flying monkey voiced by Zach Braff. You're better off just forgetting this ever happened.

Grade: C.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

1. It's sort of amazing how low the bar has fallen for big tentpole action/fantasy films. With the rise of 3-D (and, more to the point, 3-D surcharges), spectacle is the minimum entrance requirement, and even that has been watered down to the point of monotony. You can pick your poison, but I've always thought the worst of these were the Clash of the Titans movies, so dim, so ugly, so lazy, so lacking in the basic foundation of story structure and any sense of awe or wonder. They're basically cheap sets, bored actors, and a final half-hour of murky, haphazard CGI. You can make these so inexpensively now, with so little effort. It's creeping Worthingtonism.

2. Which is why, grading on this steep curve, Jack the Giant Slayer is such an unexpected pleasure. It's a determinedly old-fashioned, elegantly paced retelling of the "Jack and the Beanstalk" tale, and it's a relief to see the film not try to be something different than what it is. There's no forced modern additions, no silly comic relief, no attempt to be some revisionist "hip" retelling of an ancient tale. It simply tries to imagine the tale of Jack and his beanstalk writ large, but filtered through the imagination of the children who read it and have it read to them. It, quite simply, tells a story. What a relief.

3. Next to bozo junk-peddlers like Jonathan Liebesman and Louis Leterrier, director Bryan Singer (the X-Men franchise before Brett Ratner ruined it, The Usual Suspects, Superman Returns) feels like a revelation. This is a big special-effects-laden movie that actually has someone in charge who knows what he's doing. Singer imbues the whole story with a lighthearted, sincere tone, never winking, never cynical. He just introduces us to Jack (Nicholas Hoult, from Warm Bodies and, as a kid, About a Boy) and Princess Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson) as children, hearing legends of giants and knights and daring adventures, and then lets them have their own. It's simple and basic and extremely well done.

4. All the plotpoints from the story show up—the beanstalk, the beans, the "Fee-fi-fo-fum"—but Singer doesn't play it for rib-nudging in-jokiness; he tells the story as if no one has ever told it before, as if he truly believed people needed to hear it. This has always been a strength of Singer's. Superman Returns might not work, exactly, but you can't deny it's not plainly, almost painfully, sincere. So it is with Jack the Giant Slayer. Casting someone like Ewan McGregor as the lead knight defending humans against the giants is a clue; McGregor is a big, open grin of an actor, incapable of smarm or irony or even self-protection. (The movie is also populated with terrific British actors, from Ian McShane to Eddie Marsan to a motion-captured Bill Nighy.) Singer wants to play this all straight, and because of that, it all works.

5. This is a movie for kids, to be certain, and I bet they'll respond to it. (Adults will enjoy it almost as much, if just by remembering what it was like before the real world crushed their sense of wonder.) It's all about adventure and escape and acts of derring-do that are said to have been out of fashion for decades but actually never will be. It's not a classic, and it's not anything we haven't seen before. But it's something we haven't seen much of in a long time. If this is the new baseline for kid's fantasy films, and not freaking Wrath of the Titans, we're in very good shape.

Grade: B.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

The only thing we know for certain about next year's Oscars is that: a) Seth MacFarlane won't be hosting them, and b) It's pretty stupid to be talking about them already. But being stupid has never stopped me before.

So, considering the Oscars have been over for roughly 40 hours now, it seems the perfect time—the perfect time!—to speculate about next year's Oscars, sure to be hosted by a holographic monkey voiced by Mark Wahlberg. In some ways, looking forward to movies is almost more fun than actually watching them.

Thus, here are my complete out-of-random-orifice guesses for the nine films to be nominated for Best Picture in 2014. Obviously, I haven't seen any of these movies; one of them has already been shown at the Sundance Film Festival, but otherwise, not only have none of these been screened, most of them aren't even finished. Since when has that ever made a difference to the Oscars?

The nominating envelopes, please...

Before Midnight. The one movie on this list that has already been seen, it's the third (and presumably final) installment of the Richard Linklater/Ethan Hawke/Julie Delpy series of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. You should know that the first two films are among my favorite films of all time, and therefore I'm ecstatic that it received such rapturous reviews at Sundance. (Grierson called it his favorite film at the festival, and he was hardly alone.) It would seem a risk to predict such a small film to make the Best Picture list, but it appears well on its way to be the most well-reviewed American film of the year. Also, I love these movies so much that I just wanted to type a little about them.

The Counselor. It's tough to argue against: Director Ridley Scott; screenplay by Cormac McCarthy; a cast featuring Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt (as the bad guy), Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, and even Dean Norris from Breaking Bad. It's about "a lawyer who finds himself in over his head when he gets involved in drug trafficking," and that's all we know, but with this pedigree, that's probably enough.

Foxcatcher. Definitely the most bizarre and potentially intriguing film on this list, it tells the true story of John DuPont, the paranoid schizophrenic millionaire who went crazy in 1997 and killed a gold-medal-winning wrestler who was training on his estate in Newtown Square, Pa. (Also training at the camp at the time: Kurt Angle!) Directed by Bennett Miller (Capote, Moneyball), it stars Steve Carell as DuPont and Channing Tatum as the wrestler he kills. Just sounds fascinating. (Correction: Mark Ruffalo plays the man DuPont kills; Tatum plays his wrestler brother.)

Gravity. The Academy doesn't typically go for sci-fi, but they might find the combination of George Clooney, Sandra Bullock and director Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men) too much to resist. Clooney and Bullock are the only actors in the film—they play astronauts stranded in space—and it reportedly begins with a nearly 20-minute shot with no cuts. Cuaron is the master of the technique.

Inside Llewyn Davis. Three of the last four Coen brothers movies have been nominated for Best Picture, and one of them won. So I wouldn't dare exclude their new film, about the early-'60s folk music scene in New York City, even if it does feature John Goodman with some really weird John Goodman facial hair.

Monuments Men. Here's Clooney again, this time as a director. Generally speaking, Clooney has underwhelmed when behind the camera—The Ides of March was pretty much a clunker all-around—but he's got a killer premise this time. It's a heist movie in which a group of art historians try to recapture paintings stolen by Hitler before he destroys them. The cast is pretty much an all-timer: Clooney, Matt Damon, Daniel Craig, Cate Blanchett, Jean Dujardin, John Goodman and Bill Murray. This one would seem hard to screw up.

Nebraska. The newest from Alexander Payne (The Descendants, About Schmidt, Sideways, Election), it's a road trip movie about a father and son shot in black-and-white. Originally Payne had attempted to get Gene Hackman out of retirement for the film, which would have been amazing, but he ended up with the quixotic duo of Bruce Dern and Will Forte.

Saving Mr. Banks. We were reminded with Argo just how much the Academy likes movies about movies, so here's next year's entry. It's about the making of Mary Poppins—specifically the life story of Poppins author P.L. Travers, played by Emma Thompson—and features the so-obvious-you-worry-it'll-be-horrible casting of Tom Hanks as Walt Disney.

The Wolf of Wall Street. Pretty much destined to lead every op-ed for the final two months of this year, it's Martin Scorsese's film about securities fraud on Wall Street. It's the fifth Scorsese-Leonardo DiCaprio collaboration, though it's the first with Jonah Hill. (Unless I missed him in Gangs of New York.)

Other possibilities include:

*** August: Osage County, an adaptation of the play, featuring Meryl Streep, Ewan McGregor and Benedict Cumberbatch.
*** The Bling Ring. The true story of celeb-obsessed teenagers who robbed movie stars' homes, starring Emma Watson and written and directed by Sofia Coppola.
*** Captain Phillips. Tom Hanks again, this time directed by Paul Greengrass in a movie about the American kidnapped by Somali pirates.
*** Elysium. Matt Damon and Jodie Foster in the first film by director Neill Blomkamp since District 9.
*** 42. The Harrison Ford-as-Branch Rickey movie, though I was less wowed by the trailer than others.
*** The Great Gatsby.. I think it's going to be horrible, but you shouldn't doubt the cast.
*** Upstream Color. Shane Carruth's followup to Primer that was so revered at Sundance doesn't have a chance, but I'm so excited to see it I included it anyway.

I'm sure I'll end up getting all of these wrong, but by the time we know, no one will remember.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

As far as action movie franchises go, the Die Hard films hold up pretty damned well. The first one is obviously a classic: Grierson summed up its enduring charms quite well over at IFC. But the way the movies worked never seemed a proper fit for a franchise. The greatness of Die Hard lies in large part in its randomness. This guy really isn't supposed to be here today; it's just John McClane's bad luck that he happens to be in this building during a massive heist. Then it turns out to be Hans Gruber's bad luck, too.

It was telling that what was new and fun about Die Hard—that it had an unlikely hero trying to escape an enclosed space—became movie-pitch shorthand: Die Hard on a bus, Die Hard on a train, Die Hard inside a cow. Die Hard was so different and smart that it could only copy itself, and become something worse.

But that something worse was still pretty good. Die Hard 2 was more bloated and more vain than the first film— at this point, Bruce Willis realized he was a pretty big movie star—but it was still probably the definitive sequel: The same story but different, bigger. Die Hard on a plane! The movie keeps the spirit of the original but still brings more to the game, including a shocking plane crash sequence that is still pretty jaw-dropping, 23 years later:

The third movie, Die Hard With a Vengeance, is aggressively stupid and served to essentially end the franchise until we all rediscovered that we liked big old movie stars in our action movies sometime in the last five years. It basically existed so that Samuel L. Jackson could get some buddy-movie heat from Pulp Fiction, thought it is responsible for one of my favorite poster quotes of all time. ("Fun with a vengeance!") It piled on stunt after stunt but lost a ton of the charm of the McClane character and included the most ludicrous scene in the whole franchise, when Willis is ejected from a New York City manhole at exactly the same time Jackson happens to be driving by, saving them both. At this point, the McClane-as-American-James-Bond comparisons stopped; the character and the franchise had run out of gas.

Which was what made 2007's Life Free or Die Hard so fun. Willis, comfortable in his most recognizable role, just has a cheerful good time going insanely over the top, with every possible lunatic action-movie cliché inflated to the goofiest degree. Your favorite might be when a fighter plane chases a truck down an interstate, but for me, it's tough to beat the moment when McClane crashes a cop car into a helicopter.

That movie also had the good sense to have a terrific villain, key for any Die Hard movie: Timothy Olyphant, the best since Gruber himself. Of all the old-action-stars-returning-for-another-lap movies of the last decade, Live Free or Die Hard is my favorite, and it got me excited for one more.

I was wrong to be excited. A Good Day to Die Hard is shockingly lackadaisical, a Die Hard movie that barely notices it has John McClane in it. Here, McClane heads to Moscow to try to save his son from Russian prison, but he's such a bad dad he doesn't even know his kid is a CIA agent. They end up having to shoot themselves out of various predicaments that never feel inventive, well-thought-out or even noteworthy. Willis has been known to sleepwalk through roles he doesn't care about before—which has made his great performances in movies like Moonrise Kingdom and Looper all the more special—but he's never done it as McClane. He seems to know this is junk, though, and his performance is basically him saying, "I'm supposed to be on vacation!" three or four too many times. The movie is basically indistinguishable from those old junk action Willis movies like Striking Distance or Hostage or Mercury Rising, all the ones that devalued his career in the first place. John McClane is supposed to be better than that. Also, Willis is a talented enough performer than you don't ask him to have banter with a stiff like Jai Courtney, who plays his son; Courtney is basically a poor man's version of Sam Worthington, and just typing that I realized that's one of the meanest things I've ever said about a person.

This is clearly the worst entry in the franchise, a movie so lazy and dull that if you simply took the Die Hard out of the name, it might as well BE Mercury Rising. This is a Die Hard movie where no one is trying and nobody cares, which is depressing; even Die Hard With a Vengeance gave a shit. The goodwill accrued with the last installments will probably bring people to the theater on opening weekend, but it wouldn't surprise me if this dreck kills the whole enterprise entirely. It's probably for the best: John McClane is running out of family members we'd never heard about before that he must travel to some far-away location to save. I'll still remember the whole series fondly, but mainly because I've already forgotten about this one.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

"I was watching one of those iconoclast shows on the Sundance Channel. Jamie Oliver said Paul Smith had told him something he hadn't understood until very recently: 'I'd rather be No.  2 forever than No.  1 for a while.' Just make stuff and don't agonize over it. Stop worrying about being No. 1. I see a lot of people getting paralyzed by the response to their work, the imagined result. It's like playing a Jedi mind trick on yourself, and Smith is right. That's the way I've always approached films, the way I approach everything. Just make 'em."—Steven Soderbergh, in an interview with New York magazine.

That quote sums up Steven Soderbergh's film career—which he claims will end after the release of his Side Effects, opening this Friday—better than I'd necessarily like it to. Soderbergh's career has been so consistently excellent for so long that you can't help but be a little disappointed by it, and that line goes a long way toward explaining why.

That's to say: That is an extremely logical, rational, and sane way for any person to look at his or her career—whatever the field; I'd say it's not a terrible way of describing how I've tried to go about my own, for example—but I'm not necessarily sure I want my film directors thinking it. There is something inherently limiting about it, something humble and smart and good yet seemingly wrong in a way that probably isn't fair but is there anyway. I await Soderbergh's movies like few other filmmakers', and every time they're over, I'm comforted and grateful to have been in the hands of a master filmmaker ... but I'm never quite satisfied either. You admire Soderbergh films, but you never run out of the theater with your heart pounding, wanting to slam through a wall. They don't leave you cold. But they don't get you boiling either.

This is a matter of taste, I grant you, and I'd rather see a Soderbergh film than some huge swing for the fences by a lesser filmmaker who can't pull it off. That said: If he's really done, I wish he'd swung for the fences more. The closest he came was probably Che, which is still experimental and cerebral and weird in its Soderberghian way. (And it's worth noting that it's the film that Soderbergh wishes he had never made. "Literally I'd wake up and think, 'At least I'm not doing that today,'" he's said.) He takes on such a wide variety of projects, for such a wide variety of reasons, that finding a through-line in his career other than "eclectic intelligence" is difficult, if not impossible. There's an element of self-protection to some of his choices; sometimes they're so strange and different and forcefully odd that it's as if Soderbergh were covering his flank, knowing that you can't fall that far if you don't promise too much.

In his best films—Out of Sight, The Limey, The Girlfriend Experience, The Informant!, Ocean's 11—you see Soderbergh putting his own spin on something familiar. (The Girlfriend Experience might be the exception there; It feels like a film only Soderbergh could make.) They're thrilling movies, but they still feel self-contained; they feel like they're happening in a closed place, with Soderbergh holding the lid on. I say that with admiration. Like Grierson, he's my kind of filmmaker, an unpretentious, work-a-day sort who just goes about his business, doing his own thing his own way. I just can't help but wish he'd get a little more pretentious once or twice. Pretentiousness occasionally gives you high-wire-act failures like Oliver Stone's Alexander. But sometimes it also gives you JFK. Do I like Soderbergh's career more than Oliver Stone's? Of course. I can't think of a single Soderbergh movie I actively disliked. (Maybe Full Frontal.) But I like JFK more than I like any Soderbergh movie. Soderbergh has always seemed to direct from a defensive crouch.

You can see this a lot with Side Effects, which is expertly made and smart and unconventional and still distancing and frustrating. It's a movie you'll enjoy more the less you know about it, something that's true of all movies but particularly so with this one. Suffice it to say, it goes in all sorts of wild directions, but because Soderbergh has his hand on the tiller, it never hurtles out of control. It's a crazy thriller that never feels all that crazy. I enjoyed it, and I certainly admired it, but I never felt stirred by it. It's a fitting one for Soderbergh to go out on, if he's really going out on it. (And I don't believe for a second he's done.) You're relieved the movie is so smartly put together, but still feeling a little left out of the fun.

Soderbergh responded to this exact criticism in the New York interview. "I would argue that some of the things I've done that frustrated people upon a first viewing, ten or fifteen years later you're happy that they're that way," he said. " I remember describing making movies as a form of seduction and that people should look at it as though they're being approached at a bar. My whole thing is, when somebody comes up to you at a bar, what behavior is appealing to you? And there are certain things that I'm not willing to do to get a reaction." He's right, of course, and it's unfair to make a case against his logic, which is pretty airtight. But still: I dunno; I kind of like reacting to movies sometimes. Sometimes, I would have liked it if Soderbergh had put his intelligence and good sense aside and just done something crazy, just to see if it worked. It might not have. It might have made him look like a fool. But it would have been worth a try. I would have love to have seen Soderbergh embrace his inner soap opera once or twice. This is why, ultimately, I find myself gravitating toward Quentin Tarantino more than Soderbergh. Is Soderbergh a smarter, more disciplined filmmaker? God yes. But Tarantino is willing to look insane in service of his own vision. Django Unchained might be my least favorite Tarantino movie, but I love that he just went for it, full hog. When you're willing to take crazy risks, sometimes you fail, and sometimes they all pay off, and you get Inglourious Basterds. Soderbergh never made an Inglourious Basterds.

This is all nitpicking: Soderbergh is one of my favorite directors, and I'm deeply sad to see him "retiring." But then again: Being sad about what is being withheld is one of Soderbergh's trademarks. I admire Soderbergh as a filmmaker more than almost any other. I just wish he went a little more batshit, when he felt like it. If he's really gone, my brain will miss him more than my heart will.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.