Fourth Row Center

Like super heroes, not all comic book movies are equal. Marvel has done a mostly terrific job with their franchises, with a slew of super types getting ready for an Avengers movie next year. The DC hero, Green Lantern, gets the big screen treatment this year with director Martin Campbell ( Casino Royale , Edge of Darkness ) at the helm, and an A-list cast that includes Ryan Reynolds, Peter Sarsgaard, Angela Bassett, Michael Clarke Duncan, Geoffrey Rush (voice) and Tim Robbins. Martin does the best he can with what a slew of screenwriters have given him. The film looks good and Reynolds is passable as the hero, but the script is talky, predictable, clunky, and not nearly as tight as, say, Iron Man or its sequel. Sarsgaard, an actor I pay attention to, is almost unrecognizable as the nasty villain Hector, and he chews the scenery and does the best with the clichéd dialogue and one-dimensional character he’s saddled with. The once-great Tim Robbins dials in a performance as a senator who...

I don't go into many movies blind, but with Super 8 I did. I had read nothing about the film, nor had I seen the trailer. I only knew that it was directed by J.J. Abrams ( Lost, Star Trek ). Now that I have seen it I have read up on the film. Read about Abrams's connection to Steven Spielberg in 1982, how Speilberg , having seen the teenager's student Super 8 film, hired Abrams and a friend to restore his own decaying Super 8 movies from the director's childhood days. How Spielberg encouraged Abrams to say "yes" to the Trek reboot. How Super 8 is E.T. retooled for the new millennium . And so on. And in many ways it is something of a retelling, or homage, to E.T. And I came out of the film having enjoyed it but not knowing what I really thought about it. The first hour was enthralling. Teenagers making their own Super 8 movie find themselves involved in something strange and mysterious and terrible. SPOILER ALERT . And yes, there's an alien who only ...