All Michael Bay’s “Transformers” in 3D is missing is a 40. (Take a 40, please.) Robustly cynical, “Transformers: Dark Of The Moon,” credited to screenwriter Ehren Kruger (“Scream 3,” “The Ring Two,” “Transformers 2″), serves up generous lashings of counterfactual pulp, including an Autobot-Decepticons-NASA-JFK-Nixon conspiracy with a soupcon of Chernobyl for spice. It’s like a Bizarro World Warren Report reduced to postage-stamp size. (The briefly seen JFK stand-in resembles someone who took second place in a Donald Trump look-alike contest.) “TDOTM” premiered at the Moscow Film Festival, and some of the most jazzed-up (yet largely incomprehensible) passages resemble the winningly cheesy special effects of local mogul Timur Bekmambetov’s “Night Watch” and “Day Watch,” but with less rude charm. Hope for keenly choreographed mayhem quickly fades. If not on the level of Michael Kidd and Vincente Minnelli’s work on “The Band Wagon,” say at least a few bars of “Collateral Damage,” the musical? When you’re working with Decepticons, a sentient race of mechanical beings that preceded film executives, you can hope to be the biggest and the best, but at best, you could only ever be ne plus Ultraman. (Or “Cars 3,” with eager-school-leaver Shia LaBeouf in the role of “Mater.”) Read the rest of this entry »

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Fassbender, Michael Fassbender. “X-Men: First Class” may be the most Bondian non-Bond movie of the decade to date to likely assure that a terrific screen presence becomes a box office player. The work in “Hunger,” “Fish Tank” and “Jane Eyre” were no anomalies. Call him magnetic, call him Magneto. Efficiency and dispatch are strengths of this latest Marvel origin tale. The most admirable skill Matthew Vaughn brings to his direction, and it’s a substantial one, is a sense of design, creating mood through an elevated use of color and décor. Some directors pare away so that one bit indicates everything, as in Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life,” where the white-walled, sunny, characterless duplex of disaffected architect Sean Penn is marked only by a black edition of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair. Vaughn pushes further, with fizzy bits instead of the tendency toward archive and diorama that mars “Mad Men.” It’s the past but with a present-tense eye to what has remained or become “cool” since 1962, the year “X-Men: First Class” is set. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Thor of “Thor” is but one of 8,000 characters The Walt Disney Co. bought from Marvel Entertainment two years ago. Chris Hemsworth is the Australian mortal fated to embody the son of Odin (Anthony Hopkins) and brother of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) from the exquisitely imagined realm of Asgard, where upsidedownness is part of the intelligent design. The blond uber-hunk who kisses the hands of maidens is also the new ga-ga love of astrophysicist (Natalie Portman), who is otherwise in the thrall of seventeen anomalies in the night sky over New Mexico. Via a magic wormhole, the Norseman and his legendary hammer land in The Land of Enchantment where the night thunders and things aflame fall from the sky with some frequency. As the shiny-black-shoe type from the government and his black-uniformed forces know all to well. Kenneth Branagh directs this summertime fun with the right mix of middlebrow lit and juvenile wit. “Get somebody from linguistics down here!” and “Don’t mistake my appetite for apathy!” are among the better lines crafted by Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz and Don Payne. With nods to Marvel’s 1962 source, the story is credited to J. Michael Straczynski and Mark Protosevich, a Columbia College alum and instructor credited with “I Am Legend” and “The Cell.” Conspiracies are afoot on our realm and Thor’s. Interlopers do some realm-to-realm interpolating. The best humor works with this rift in the cultural continuum. Stay after the end credits to see a tease for the next episode. It’s like the cross-franchise tip at the end of “Iron Man 2″ that teased “Thor.” With Stellan Skarsgård, Kat Dennings, Clark Gregg, Colm Feore, Ray Stevenson, Idris Elba, Jaimie Alexander, Tadanobu Asano, Joshua Dallas, Rene Russo. 114m. (Bill Stamets)

As kinetic and didactic as ever, Zack Snyder (“300″) unleashes another loud lesson of uplift. Aiming for a demographic a few years older than the one targeted in his better “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole,” Snyder continues his curriculum of empowerment and sacrifice in “Sucker Punch.” Its teen role model is pint-sized, pigtailed Babydoll (Emily Browning) who stands up to her evil stepfather, then welcomes psychosurgery during her fantasy of saving another imperiled girl. This “action fantasy” co-scripted by Snyder and Steve Shibuya starts as a music-video medley and then turns into a series of videogame battles. Read the rest of this entry »

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“It took over 200 years to create the symbol of the presidency,” notes the president in “The Sentinel,” a political thriller with an illicit romance that George Nolfi scripted in 2006. Now he writes and directs a superior “romantic thriller” that spells out what it will take to make David Norris (Matt Damon) president in a foreseeable future. Tinkering with this Brooklyn pol’s itinerary to higher office are strange men-in-hats carrying proto-iPads: their screens map the existential GPS of Norris and all the rest of us. Micromanaging fate is necessary to maintain the exact timetable of human history. Except hat-wearing Harry (Anthony Mackie) is a minute late for a preset spilling of coffee on Norris’ shirt. Norris steps into a venture-capital meeting a bit earlier than expected and sees Harry’s coworkers, some uniformed in long black leather coats like those worn by the firemen in “Fahrenheit 451,” in the act of adjusting the mind of one of his immobilized coworkers. As in “Inception,” subconscious recalibrations alter one’s later “decision trees.” Minimizing “ripples” in the space-time continuum is like maintaining film continuity. “The Adjustment Bureau” posits God not as the Ur-auteur, but as an executive producer with script doctors doing rewrites to steer history since the hunter-gatherers. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

The lightly likeable “I Am Number Four” may also be a breath mint, but I didn’t double-check to be sure.

It’s at least two, two different, media enterprises. The teen-out-of-place adventure is the first feature from the newly constituted DreamWorks Pictures, released through Disney’s Touchstone label, and co-financed by India’s Reliance Big Entertainment. It’s also the first fruit of Full Fathom Five, the young-adult novel forge fronted by James Frey. Frey may be best known for offending the ready-to-be-offended Oprah Winfrey, after her endorsement of his extremely fictionalized memoir of addiction and recovery, “A Million Little Pieces,” which is cheekily, implausibly melodramatic from its very first pages. After lying low for a bit, and publishing another novel under his name, the irrepressible Frey came up with a bold idea in the wake of novel series like the “Harry Potter” books and the “Twilight” tales. Why not trawl the ranks of underemployed graduate students who have paid a fortune to “learn” how to write and take them for another spin? They would propose stories that would be published under a pseudonym, and for which they could never take public credit, all in the “young adult” genre, all of which would hit the “beats” of a Hollywood studio screenplay, that would ideally lever both best-selling series of books and box-office-busting series of movies. (As in the studio system, most profits would accrue to the manufacturer, and not the writer.) Read the rest of this entry »

Back in 1235 A.D. three witches are hung off a stone bridge and then lowered into a river. In the dead of night, one came back. A century or so later, “The Girl” (Claire Foy) is called a witch, blamed for the plague and extradited to an abbey for trial. “Season of the Witch” is the plodding tale of that six-day trek that ends with a supernatural CGI smackdown. The key smackdowners are the unbeliever-slayers Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman). These lusty, smelly Crusaders killed for Christ throughout the 1330s and after. Until that day in Smyrna in 1344 (probably October 28, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia) when Behmen felt bad about impaling an unarmed woman, so he deserted the church. Captured by priests, the duo is forced to escort The Girl in a horse-drawn cage for 400 leagues across a rotting rope bridge and through the Wormwood Forest where demonic wolves lurk. At the abbey there’s a book of spells. The souls of the monks are hijacked by something terribly evil. “We’re going to need more holy water,” reports a cleric. The winged woman here beats the feathers off the one in “Black Swan.” Cage is a seasoned evil-killer, if you’ve seen him in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (2010) and “Ghost Rider” (2007). But the Middle Ages delimits the motor-vehicle mayhem that director Dominic Sena displayed in his “Swordfish” (2001) and “Gone in Sixty Seconds” (2000). Writer Bragi F. Schut continues the end-of-the-world stakes seen in his 2005 CBS series “Threshold.” Shot in Austria, Croatia and Louisiana, “Season of the Witch” is an unoriginal apologia for Catholic action-adventure. Reading scripture aloud in Latin may not smite heathens or halt the plague, but it always kicks satanic ass at the multiplex. With Stephen Campbell Moore, Stephen Graham, Ulrich Thomsen, Robert Sheehan, Christopher Lee. 95m. (Bill Stamets)

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On the 253rd day of enduring his two cousins displaced by the Luftwaffe bombing of London, the disagreeable Eustace Scrubb (Will Poulter, “Son of Rambow”) scribbles in his diary: “Investigate legal ramifications of impaling relatives.” He cannot stand their nattering about Narnia, a fantastic kingdom of chatty satyrs, centaurs, minotaurs and minoboars they visited in the 2005 and 2008 installments prior to “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.” All three were written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, based on the childrens’ book series by lit prof and theologian C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) that were published in the 1950s. Screenwriter Michael Petroni is also credited for the third, the first in 3D. The live action was converted; the CGI was created in 3D; both work quite well. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve never seen one of the Harry Potter films, the latest and next to last is no reason to start. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1″ is the seventh; the eighth will be Part 2. Much technical craft is evident throughout this tale of three friends armed with wands and potions. They undertake a tiresome chain of quests to decode clues, uncover magic items and destroy malevolent entities. Screenwriter Steve Kloves and director David Yates may be faithful to the source novel by J.K. Rowling, but they do no favors to fans of screen narrative. Plot points arise with out-of-the-blue asides like ‘Oh, you didn’t know that so-and-so had a brother?’ One producer readily admits it’s “all about resolution—the dotting of all the i’s and the crossing of all the t’s.” Read the rest of this entry »