There’s a scene early in Cop Out—the second half of the first one, actually—that’ll tell you right away how you’re going to get along with the rest of it. Crazy (but apparently smart) detective Paul Hodges (Tracy Morgan) coerces his partner Jimmy Monroe (Bruce Willis) into letting him take the lead in the interrogation of a low-level flunky in a drug empire. Paul enters the room and proceeds to rip off lines from probably a dozen different movies while Jimmy, on the other side of the one-way glass, lists off what it is Paul is referencing. This is tedious enough by itself, but the staging—extreme close-ups on Morgan shticking intercut with shots of Willis listing off movie titles while looking off-camera, up against a blank brick wall—takes the tedious and sinks it into the realm of the inept. Cop Out never recovers.

The scene is curious for another reason: only it and one or two other jokes bear the distinct voice of Kevin Smith, who in Cop Out is directing his first movie written by someone else. I would call the rest of the film “rote,” but it does not even put that much work in; Cop Out assumes you have seen as many buddy-cop movies as its creators have, and allows that shared cultural knowledge to do most of the work.

In brief: Paul and Jimmy majorly botch an investigation into a drug ring operating in Brooklyn. They’re suspended for one month (complete with gun-and-badge turn-in) without pay, which sucks for Jimmy, who’s looking for a way to fund his daughter’s extravagant wedding. (It never occurs to him to tell his daughter that a $50,000 wedding may be somewhat exorbitant.) Paul thinks his wife is cheating on him. And when Jimmy tries to sell a rare baseball card to fund the wedding, he finds himself involved with the drug ring again. Which is certainly one way to have your B-plot loop back into your A-plot.

There’s also some business with a tweaker cat burglar (Seann William Scott) and some rival detectives (Kevin Pollak and Adam Brody), but they exist only to remind everyone how much funnier Cop Out should be.

And it should be. This is a jokey buddy-cop movie starring Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis. Morgan’s made a name for himself doing exactly this kind of shtick on Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock, and Bruce Willis epitomizes the cop movie of the last 20 years. And though Smith has been trending downward since Chasing Amy, even the otherwise-abysmal Clerks 2 had some funny moments amid the dreadfully aimless scatology.

Some of the blame lies with writers Robb and Mark Cullen, no doubt, who together have a mostly unremarkable track record writing mostly unremarkable television. There is nothing special about this script, its people or its dialogue; it’s hard to imagine that anyone at any point in the film’s development process felt enthusiastic about it. The film’s tortured history—several roster changes both behind and in front of the camera--speaks clearly to that.

And that raises the question: if you’re going to pick Kevin Smith to do one of the two things he does for your movie, why on God’s green earth would you want him to direct? Smith’s movies are infamous for being of the “point the camera at the talking people” school of directing; it was always the dialogue that kept his work afloat. But no, in Cop Out we have the funny writer directing and the unfunny guys writing. Whose idea of success was that? If only Cop Out had kept its working title Dicks. That, at least, is clever.

I will say this for The Wolfman: it is an unabashedly, unapologetically old school Universal horror movie. The movie wears its Victorian Gothic aspirations on its sleeve, and even its title screen is carved into a tombstone. A tombstone that is, naturally, dripping blood.

So too are its themes and central conflicts a throwback to those old horror films (the original Universal Wolf Man was released in 1941) which were themselves a throwback to Gothic horror of the late 19th century. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the mob scenes, where men bearing torches, guns and hunting dogs walk in silhouetted lines across hilltops and through forests in pursuit of the beast. There’s a hell of a lot of Victorian horror that’s all about the bad old days of primeval horror making one last violent stab in the modern age, about the individual dividing and conquering before succumbing to the mob, and that is something this new version of The Wolfman understands well.

But as starry-eyed as I am for such horror conventions, I wonder if they’re not a liability to new filmmakers who take a whack at them. For instance, I haven’t mentioned anything about the plot yet—because if you’re stepping foot into this theater in the first place, there’s a better-than-even chance you already know exactly how it’s going to go down. Lycanthropy, in the classic mold, is a tragic curse as much as anything else. The horror is not just in what the werewolf does to others, but what the werewolf does to the werewolf himself. So you know how it ends.

And, in fact, you pretty much know how it starts, too: actor Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro, at turns seething or wooden) returns to his family’s rural estate in England upon hearing of his brother’s grisly death at the hands of some savage beast. Talbot is reluctant to return, as the old homefront brings back uncomfortable memories of a cold father (Anthony Hopkins) and a beautiful mother who took her own life in Lawrence’s youth.  It’s a place of bad memories, one Lawrence hoped to escape forever, but his mourning sister-in-law (Emily Blunt) is the first to tell him that no one escapes that house.

The rest you should be able to fill in yourself, which is where The Wolfman’s problem lies. “Origin” or “discovery” stories have an esteemed place in modern fiction, and when they relay something truly new—the world of wizards in Harry Potter, for instance—they are potent indeed. But when we’re dealing with the umpteenth rendition of werewolfism, it ultimately amounts to list-making: this version does react to silver and fire, is not in control of itself, et cetera. The movie’s second half moves past this retread into a larger story, but even then the conclusions are foregone. In great horror movies, a sense of inevitability can be a filmmaker’s ally. Here it is merely a beat sheet to be filled out.

To The Wolfman’s credit, it is considerably more organic about the “discovery” of a phenomenon we’ve seen rendered dozens of times on the big screen than one might guess, and it knows—as the best werewolf movies do—that the transformation scenes are “the money shot.” Special effects and makeup wizard Rick Baker manages to make the more-man-than-wolf werewolf not look ridiculous, which is something I would not have thought possible.

But there is absolutely nothing here that any fan of werewolf movies has not seen before.

A friend once defined horror as being “like a joke, but the punchline is the worst thing you can think of,” and that is largely true: you build tension and convince the audience you’re going one way before you jerk them into far worse territory than they could have imagined. The Wolfman, as beholden to its predecessors as it is an attempt to honor them, cannot break free of its bonds and give us anything new.

John C. Reilly is just about the last guy you’d think to cast as a vampire. He’s older, pockmarked, plays mostly goofy roles and is blessed with a mop of loose, curly hair. (And then there’s that slightly muppet-like voice.) It’s a pleasant surprise, then, to see him own the role of Crepsley the vampire, a tired and cynical old soul who puts on a kind of magic show with the traveling Cirque du Freak. Reilly is a talented performer, which aids him well: he’s good enough to be great without really trying, a fitting style for such a downbeat and aged character.

How, then, did he get surrounded by such a predictable and uninspired movie? Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant is an adaptation of the first in a series of young adult novels, and in every way it feels like it.

There’s the fateful introduction of the young protagonist Darren Shan (named after the series’ author and played by Chris Massoglia) to the Cirque, a lot of talk about destiny and redemption, even the “final battle” that we can sense is a penny-ante affair meant to set up the real conflict down the line. It’s a bit of a cheat, in other words, because you can damn near feel the weight of all the stuff that’s being held back for later work.

In that way I was reminded of The Golden Compass, another film that felt like a rush job to set up a lucrative franchise that you weren’t yet allowed to enjoy. (Not so lucky, that one.) Another shared characteristic is how rushed the proceedings feel toward the end; one gets the sense that there’s great whole hunks of this thing sitting on a cutting room floor somewhere. Such is the curse of a movie that must do all of that franchise setup work without dragging on far longer than is tolerable.

Briefly: Darren is a goody-two-shoes kid in Anytown, USA, with a bright future and a best friend (Josh Hutcherson, playing Steve) from the wrong side of the tracks. Rather unwisely, Darren steals Crepsley’s pet spider after a performance of the Cirque.

Darren is caught, deals are made, and before too long Darren is Crepsley’s half-vampire assistant and he and Steve are the objects of undue attention from a certain Mr. Tiny (Michael Cerveris), a charming villain with vague plans to start up a war between vampires. There’s also a love interest and a prophecy, because hey, fantasy epic.

Comparisons will be made to Twilight (a comparison the poster begs, to its detriment), that other YA series with vampires as their centerpiece. But The Vampire’s Assistant is a more traditional tale: more interested in sights and wonders and less in making sure everyone gets hitched up with their soul mates. Assistant’s frequent vampire fights, too, are distinctly masculine in flavor.

I wanted to like the movie, I really did. The premise was oddball enough and the cameo cast enticing enough (Salma Hayek, Willem Defoe, Jane Krakowski) to raise the probability of a surprise hit. Alas, no. Not even a wonderful opening title sequence or John C. Reilly could drag The Vampire’s Assistant out of prologue malaise.

With just ten sentences and a handful of beautiful artwork, Maurice Sendak made a timeless children’s tale in Where the Wild Things Are. Max, Mr. Sendak’s wolf costume-bedecked young hero, escapes a scolding mother to become king of a horde of monstrous-looking Wild Things until it’s time to go home again. And in those scant few pages, Max’s brief journey becomes a celebration of the essential wildness of a child’s imagination.

Adapting such a well-known and well-loved classic for the big screen is a challenge. Not only is the original book brief, it’s also very simple: Max causes a ruckus, Max is sent to his room, travels to a far-away jungle, parties with the Wild Things, then comes home. Then there’s the question of the Wild Things themselves, who are all chimeras that don’t look like anything found in nature. How best to bring them to life?

It’s fitting the task fell to director Spike Jonze (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich), an adept fantasist with a keen eye for making the surreal seem plausible. Jonze teamed with writer Dave Eggers (Away We Go), a self-appointed biographer for the Gen-Y hipster set, to flesh out Max’s story. In the process, Jonze and Eggers added an almost overwhelming air of melancholy to an otherwise free-spirited story.

In the film as in the book, Max (Max Romero) is wild, but with some reason. His mother (Catherine Keener, one of many Jonze regulars in the film) is raising him and his sister alone and on a tight budget; it’s not clear if Max’s father has died or his parents are simply divorced. Max lashes out one night and after biting his mom he flees the house . . . and flees . . . until he comes to an ocean, and a boat. Max sets sail and eventually lands on an island populated by the Wild Things, who are as huge and menacing as they are childlike: when Max says he’s a king, they hand him a crown and follow his orders.

The Wild Things make for great playmates. They’re big and strong enough to knock down trees and jump dozens of feet at a time, but they’re subservient to Max and playful without being dangerous. At Max’s whim they set about building the “most perfect fort,” and what little boy doesn’t want one of those?

But there are complications. Sadness and jealousy haunt the Wild Things, and their crowning Max king smacks as much of desperation as anything else. Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini) is especially volatile; while he quickly becomes Max’s closest friend, Carol’s damaged relationship with KW (voiced by Lauren Ambrose) juices the tension between all the Wild Things. A sense of loss, unavoidable and insurmountable, enters and eventually overtakes Max’s relationship with them.

As a metaphor for a child’s impotence in the face of pain and strife in his parent’s lives, the adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are is serviceable. The movie maintains Max’s point of view throughout; the camera stays at his level and never looks down at him, and the very vagueness of all the relationship troubles accurately reflects how little (and how much) a child can understand something like divorce or grieving a death.

That sadness, however, is overbearing. Where the Wild Things Are the book is joyous in its craziness; the book’s Max is creative, wild, and a bit of a punk, but you like him anyway. The movie’s Max is surrounded by a persistent melancholy that chokes the life out of the story with great big blocks of sad dialogue. Perhaps that pain is useful for children dealing with something difficult. But it is not what anyone buying a ticket to Where the Wild Things Are wants.

Well, this was inevitable. Between the time I wrote this and the time you read it, thirty zombie movies were produced in North America. Zombies are the poor horror filmmaker’s shortcut to social relevance and easy gore, and the genre now finds itself so overworked that any new zombie film that throws in a dash of genre bleed—say, the “alternative lifestyle” faux-doc like American Zombie or the Norman Rockwellian Cold War spoof Fido—is heralded as a minor work of genius before disappearing mere months later into merciful obscurity.

It’s an oversaturated field, and one in which every zombie movie, no matter how trite, feels the need to make some concession to the gravitas of the Romero films or the nihilistic undertow of Return of the Living Dead. It’s damned refreshing, then, that Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland has the guts and the will to acknowledge what we’ve all secretly known for some time: that in today’s film world, where nearly every big budget film must make some concessions to the action genre, zombies aren’t much good as anything anymore than video game targets. And God bless ‘em for it.

There is no attempt to explain the how and why of Zombieland’s apocalypse, and that’s perhaps for the best. As Romero first acknowledged in Day of the Dead, it doesn’t much matter what caused billions of people to die. It only matters that they did. So when we run into Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), named like everyone else in this movie for his hometown, he’s already on the run north from Austin, Texas, picking his way through a zombie apocalypse well past the time human society collapsed. He’s a nervous kid prone to irritable bowel syndrome, but he’s mastered the art of extreme caution, and his many “rules for surviving zombie land” mostly center around pragmatic nuggets like “don’t be fat,“ “limber up,“ and “stay armed in the bathroom.”

In short order Columbus bumps into the boisterous hick Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson, playing exactly the kind of character he is most gifted at playing), who smashes zombie heads with an almost lusty zeal. After a—well, let’s call it a series of misunderstandings—Columbus and Tallahassee add Wichita and Little Rock (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin, respectively) to their coterie before setting their sights for LA and the “Pacific Playland” theme park, which Wichita swears is free of zombie infestation. Hijinx ensue.

There are two states of being for protagonists in a zombie movie: traveling and holing up. Tallahassee, Columbus et al do a fair bit of both, and it’s to Zombieland’s credit that it drags for only a few minutes during its “holing up” middle passage. The rest is breezy fun.

A lot of this can be laid at the feet of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick’s script, which adamantly refuses to be anything but a gory action-comedy. (There’s very little sadness to be found, and only a smattering of what might constitute “scares.”). Fleischer, a first-time feature filmmaker, is up to the task, and it’s clear right from the opening credits—which seem to be a send-up of the opening titles to Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead—that he’s here to have a good time, and it‘s hard to pick out any day on the set that wouldn‘t have been a blast. The fun translates.

None of this is to say Zombieland is a dumb film, exactly. There’s enough wit and comedic chemistry at work to keep the thing meaty enough that it may be awhile before you notice—hey, there really isn’t much of a plot to this thing, is there? Just four funny people going from one place to another, and the zombies they maim and destroy on the way there. Sometimes, that’s all right.

Oh, and stay after the credits.

With The Invention of Lying, Ricky Gervais (creator and star of the original The Office and Extras) seems to be making a bid to be a soft-hearted Woody Allen. The opening titles cards are a familiar white-on-black text, and almost immediately Gervais begins his narration with a bit of snarky meta-commentary on the credits themselves. Gervais gives us the premise: he lives in a world where lying was never invented, and everyone is brutally honest with everyone else all the time. It’s just the sort of modern fantasy premise that would feel snugly at home in an Allen movie.

But the snark doesn’t last, or at least not the hard stuff. We meet Mark Bellison (Gervais) as he prepares for a blind date with beautiful, successful Anna (Jennifer Garner), who immediately registers her disappointment with Mark’s physical appearance. (In this world, “telling the truth” means holding nothing back.) It’s a funny kind of skit—Mark and Anna mostly skipping past nervousness and trepidation right into airing their many misgivings and uncertainties—that carries right into dinner and a humiliating (for Mark) phone call between Anna and her mother.

The movie carries on like this, giving us glimpses at what a world without lying would be like—shop signs that merely declare the goods, advertising that reiterates how famous the product is, and so on—right up to Mark’s job, as a screenwriter at “Lecture Pictures.” In a world without lying, respectable men reading lectures about history is what passes for cinema. Mark, unlucky at work as he is everywhere else in life, is in charge of the 13th century. And who wants to see lectures about the Black Plague, besides maybe teenage goths?

This carries on for a time, until Mark, at the brink of eviction, figures out how to lie. His fortunes change dramatically, and after a successful screenplay and the accidental founding of religion, Mark finds himself much wealthier but no more appealing to Anna, who’s succumbing to the attentions of Mark’s coworker and rival Brad (Rob Lowe). What’s a liar in a world full of rubes to do?

I circle again to the words “a funny kind of skit,” because that’s what much of The Invention of Lying feels like: A central premise and several ideas extrapolated from it and then mashed together to make a feature film. You know how a lot of Saturday Night Live skits introduce a joke within the first thirty seconds of a skit, and then hammer that joke into the ground for the next five minutes? Stretch that out to feature length. The endless procession of cameos only compounds the gimmicky, stretched-thin feel.

It doesn’t help that Gervais’s signature vicious humor—the reason anyone knows who he is—is almost completely absent. (An odd problem, considering he wrote the thing.) There are little barbs here and there, and plenty of humor at Mark’s expense, but the general softness and sweetness of the enterprise muddles the tone into an odd, unlikable mess. We’re really meant to believe that Anna is the woman for Mark, but aside from being very pretty, she is incredibly vain, arrogant, elitist, and unbelievably preoccupied with finding a “suitable genetic mate.” In a Gervais TV show, Anna’s vanity might be the joke. Here, I fear, Gervais has no idea how unlikable he’s made his female lead.

It’s that queer tone-deafness in characterization that mars The Invention of Lying, even more than the kid-gloves humor. Gervais seems to be groping for a statement in the detour-into-prophet segment of the proceedings, but the apparent lesson there—that religion is a safety blanket for many people—is both too broad and not terribly relevant to the premise of the film. It’s like a 45-minute detour into a parallel movie, and it is fatal to The Invention of Lying’s momentum. After this and Ghost Town (enjoyable but also thin and flavorless), I think I’ve learned my lesson: stick to small-screen Gervais.

Jennifer’s Body is the kind of teen horror movie that wants us to believe that bona fide blonde babe Amanda Seyfried (Mamma Mia, Mean Girls) is in fact a dumpy loser. Of course, as the movie’s written by the overbearingly hip Diablo Cody, you’d be forgiven for thinking this is some kind of intentional dig at how the Teen Movie genres operate. (Seyfried even sports glasses and pinned-up hair, which for time immemorial has been code for “ugly duckling.”) Surely Cody knows what she’s doing? Surely she’s taken even a passing glance at the genre she’s diving into, and the discussions surrounding it?

No, not so much. The most surprising thing about Jennifer’s Body is precisely how pedestrian it is; save for the occasionally overbearing cuteness of the dialogue, this is your standard-issue Dead Teenagers movie with about two or three ideas and a handful of creepy moments shoring up a whole lot of same-old.

In brief: “Needy” Anita (Seyfried) and Jennifer (Megan Fox) have been friends since childhood, though they do seem a mismatched pair: Needy’s a down-to-earth latchkey kid with a steady boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons, who really does look like a teenager and thus way too young for Needy) and Jennifer’s the vain cheerleader siren with a string of lovers. Why do Needy and Jennifer remain friends? Hard to say. There’s some overtures that there may be a deeper attraction between the two, but it’s hard to say if this plot thread is a red herring or simply badly developed. Even their one lingering kiss is bizarrely asexual, as if everyone involved knows how gratuitous it is.

Jennifer and Needy go to a roadhouse one night to catch a band Jennifer’s drooling over. One horrible fire later, Jennifer is drugged and abducted by the band, only to turn up in Needy’s house later that night seriously changed. Evil, even. “Not like high school evil,” Needy later tells Chip. The kind of evil that eviscerates and partially devours the horny boys Jennifer lures to their doom. Jennifer taunts Needy, no one believes Needy, Jennifer goes after Chip, and so on, and so forth.

The three leads are more or less up to the task; Seyfried makes Cody’s biggest verbal transgressions sound halfway natural and Simmons is convincing as a basically good-natured teenage boy. Fox sells Jennifer well enough, but given the persona she’s cultivated since her emergence into the public consciousness, “bitchy sexpot vamp” isn’t much of a reach. But she does walk and talk like a human, which is a step up from her Transformers work.

The lone spark of true originality comes in the form of the band that lures Jennifer to her doom: an indie rock act called Low Shoulder, fronted by the charmingly amoral Nikolai (Adam Brody). Brody is inspired as a debonair musician asshole, the kind of guy you might think girls like Jennifer would typically go for. The revelations of what Brody and his band did to Jennifer to make her such a (literal) man-eater carry the kind of comedic/horrific bounce the rest of the movie fails to maintain.

It’s not that Jennifer’s Body is bad; it’s that it is proud to be mediocre. With Cody writing you might expect some of the tiresome dialogue that so thoroughly soaked her Juno, the kind of verbiage that sounds a lot like an aging woman trying her best to sound young. Some of those pretensions are there, regularly halting the flow of dialogue; no matter how many times someone says “salty” when they mean “beautiful,” I’m just not buying that teenagers could ever talk this way. Cody is no Amy Heckerling, though it’s not for lack of trying.

Perhaps in vain, I approach horror movies that lay a claim to brains to see what they’re about, once you get past the spurting arteries and witty barbs. Jennifer’s Body, near as I can tell, is about nothing. There are brief, passing hints of some deeper, murky “meaning” to it all—some stab at the fruitful niche genre of “teenage body horror” and “sex horror”—but these themes are merely teased at to loan some of their thematic power, not to be developed, used, or even commented on. Jennifer’s Body is thus not really about anything but what it is plainly about, which is not necessarily a sin. That it is so mundane, however, is.

Paul Aufiero has one love in his life, and that love is the New York Giants. It’s the kind of love recognizable to any fan (sports or otherwise), the kind of love that engenders a love of trivia and no sense of nuance. Paul sees everything and yet sees nothing. His love is deep and very personal, but that’s not to say it’s monochromatic; to a certain kind of fan, despairing over your beloved thing is almost as much fun as adoration.

In all other parts of his life, Paul (played by Patton Oswalt) is childish and defensive, and not without reason: He is constantly berated by his family to get a real job (his current gig is holding down a toll booth at a parking garage in NYC), find a woman, and above all grow up. Paul only truly comes alive on game day, and on the nights he calls in to a sports talk radio show on WFAN. There, Paul spouts banal profundities (painstakingly composed in that lonely toll booth) like a man possessed. Most of the time Paul is a loser, but on WFAN, for a spare few minutes at a time, he is a star.

It takes a calamitous encounter with (and a savage beating from) Paul’s favorite Giants player to knock his life out of orbit, and much of the business of Big Fan is occupied with whether or not Paul will recognize what, exactly, has been done to him… and by whom.

It’s a character study, in other words, and both the press material and interviews with Oswalt and writer-director Robert Siegel (who previously wrote The Wrestler) are chock full of comparisons to Taxi Driver and other ‘70s-era films about unlikable losers who are unable or unwilling to rise above. It isn’t much of a spoiler to say Paul refuses to “grow” in the way we typically expect movie protagonists to.

This is a movie that should speak directly to me. I have been Paul and I have known Paul. (Chances are you have, too.) It’s not just football, though I play tourist with the Alabama Crimson Tide twelve Saturdays a year; as Oswalt pointed out in an interview with the Onion A.V. Club, our world is increasingly about obsessing over whatever weird little thing appeals to us. If you’ve ever signed an online petition, you know what he’s talking about.

But there’s a coolness to Big Fan that makes it damn near impossible to connect with. Oswalt isn’t the problem; he’s equal to the task of his first dramatic lead, and his pudgy figure gets us halfway to the man-child he portrays with convincing sullenness. The direction, too, is adequately authentic and seedy. Like early Scorsese, Siegel’s New York City by night is a collection of ill-lit islands in a sea of murky darkness.

The problem is the script’s tendency to overreach. Siegel is unable or unwilling to trust his audience to keep up, and he often feeds us one line too many just to make sure we know exactly how poignant or meaningful a scene is supposed to be.

The movie begins with one such faux profundity as Paul mulls over one of his scripted rants: He wants to complete the sentence “I can’t tell you how sick I am of…” but he stops cold for what feels like a dozen times. The truncated line is “I can’t tell you how sick I am.” See what he did there?

I haven’t seen The Wrestler, so I can’t say if this toxic juxtaposition of gritty verisimilitude and melodrama is par for the course for Siegel. Just when we‘ve reached some sublime level of absurd mundanity with Paul, just when we get intimate with a man defined by a profound lack of depth, Siegel pulls out the bullhorn. As one-note as Big Fan’s concept may be, executing it well is delicate work. Siegel is not up to the task.

“This isn’t an exact science,” says Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn) to one of his clients. He’s referring to the thornier details of his company’s work, which is to remove souls from people who’d rather not deal with the emotions and the baggage their soul inevitably accumulates over a lifetime. Time and again, Flintstein reminds his client that there’s so much about the soul nobody knows—what it’s made of, why each person’s soul looks the way it does, and so much more. Flintstein merely presents the option of soul extraction and soul rental; the larger ramifications he leaves to the individual to discover.

The client is Paul Giamatti (playing himself), whose soul is so weighed down with bits and pieces of his many roles that his interpretation of Uncle Vanya (in the Chekhov play of the same name) threatens to pull him down into a numb depression from which he might never emerge. His agent—ha ha—suggests soul extraction and, desperate, Giamatti signs up.

Losing his soul has peculiar side effects. Naturally Giamatti feels no great sense of loss and his depression is gone, but he can no longer read social cues—and he doesn’t much care. Rather than freeing him to play the explosively depressive Vanya, Mr. Giamatti is all over the map on stage. With no soul, he has no way to calibrate emotions.

Distraught (or at least intellectually aware that he should be), Giamatti returns to Dr. Flintstein and decides to rent the soul of a Russian poet, just for the duration of this play. It’s through this transaction we’re given a larger view of the “soul trafficking” trade, an unsubtle metaphor for the very real human trafficking pipeline from Russia and Eastern Europe to America.

The primary trafficker to Flinstein’s company is Nina (Dina Korzun), a “soul mule” who brings the “rental” souls from Russia to America and is pressed into stealing Giamatti’s soul and taking it to Russia. Nina is no villain; she is somber and tragic in that uniquely Russian way, and she quietly mourns her own lost soul. It’s Nina—intrigued by what she saw in Giamatti’s soul—who helps him recover it.

It’s easy to compare the premise if Cold Souls to the work of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, specifically the modern-day fantasies Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. All three films operate on the idea of technology providing a way to deny one’s self: Eternal Sunshine’s Lacuna, Inc. promised to erase painful memories and Being John Malkovich gave its characters a portal into a seemingly more interesting (and ultimately destructive) life.

Cold Souls is less caustic than Kaufman’s creations; writer-director Sophie Barthes is not interested in condemning her characters. The trade exists because there is a steady demand for it—and who do you blame for that? How do you curtail desire?

No, Barthes’ goals are more abstract, and sometimes so nebulous they threaten to detach completely from reality. But there are moments of real gravity here.

Giamatti, a gifted actor with sad and weary eyes, runs the gamut from manic to dead-eyed soullessness—but finds (and displays) beauty when sorting through the pictures and mementos of the Russian poet whose soul he rented. Nina, quiet and resourceful, bravely marches on even though her own soul has been replaced by the fragmentary “residue” of the many souls she’s brought into and out of America.

Believe it or not, Cold Souls is a dark comedy, and many of the laughs are pulled from the relentless (and often very human) refusal to consider the complete implications of soul-removal technology. (The final fate of Soul Storage, Inc., is both hilarious and horrifying and, I have to admit, quite plausible.) Yes, Dr. Flintstein’s procedure should shake both science and religion to their very cores. But who has time to consider such weighty matters when there’s money to be made?

Everyone in Cold Souls possesses some form of this shortsightedness, but it’s a fair observation to say that humanity has a history of breaking the miraculous down to cold numbers and short-term desires. That Nina and Giamatti find some peace and closure in the mess they’ve made of their lives is, perhaps, grace enough.

It’s a simple truism that funny people are often angry people, and angry people are often sad people. Humor, to funny people, is a coping mechanism; if the world can be made into a joke, if something horrible or offensive can be deflated without violence, then life becomes manageable.

This paradox—that comedians often have very little to laugh about—is the driving concern of Funny People, writer-director Judd Apatow’s first step into the serious business of comedy.

Adam Sandler plays George Simmons, who is for all intents and purposes a lonelier clone of Sandler himself. Simmons is wildly successful and popular, but he doesn’t seem to take any comfort from that; his life is spent in a cavernous mansion populated fleetingly by servants and groupies. When his doctor gives him a grim prognosis—a rare form of leukemia and about a year to live—Simmons seems ready to spiral the drain completely.

It’s at a stand-up gig that Simmons—spinning dark material reminiscent of the latter shows of the comedian Bill Hicks, who died of pancreatic cancer at age 32—meets Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), a struggling comedian with good material and poor delivery. Simmons hires Wright as a joke writer, assistant, and friend-for-pay.

Simmons is not an easy man to work for. Their relationship, mostly contentious and never “warm,” takes a harder turn yet when Simmons decides that, to get his life (or what’s left of it) back on track, he must reclaim the “girl who got away” (Leslie Mann, Apatow’s wife). And Simmons doesn’t much care if, in the process, he destroys the family she’s part of now.

This is an unwieldy story arc, to say the least. Apatow is fond of crafting stories that move from plot point to plot point without seeming to. His movies are meant to simulate the ebbs and flows of real life, a tactic that worked so well in The Forty-Year-Old Virgin, his breakout hit, and a little less effectively in Knocked Up, which made Seth Rogen a leading man.

Funny People rambles at great length, and at times loses all momentum during its aimless middle passages. It’s well over an hour into Funny People’s 146-minute running time before Simmons makes a go of stealing Mann away from her charming doofus of a husband (Eric Bana), and much of that time is eaten up with an endless procession of needless comedian cameos.

At 90 minutes or even two hours, this would be a lean movie with enough sting to make its harsh life lessons linger. Simmons is a tragic figure, all the more so because he willingly chose his fate and seems unwilling to take the salvation offered to him by Ira.

The key to Simmons—explored so well by Sandler, proving once again that comedians handle drama as effectively as any actor—is that, while pitiable, Simmons is not (and does not allow himself to be) sympathetic. Ira, bless him, never stops trying. It’s Ira’s little bit of grace that gives Funny People one of its few lasting merits.

There’s something unusual about Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), or so the ad campaign for Orphan more or less says. She’s a charming young girl with a faint Slavic accent and a hypnotizing stare. Other kids don’t seem to get along with her, but that may be due to her apparent maturity; she speaks with a clarity and depth that outstrips most adults. She’s also a gifted painter and pianist, and likes to dress herself in frilly princess dresses. What aspiring parents wouldn’t want to adopt her?

Those are the traits that see Esther adopted by Kate and John Coleman (Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard), a wealthy Connecticut couple who already have two children of their own. Not too long ago their third child, Jessica, died in the womb. Kate and John figure it only right they give the love they had for Jessica to another deserving girl.

This much you know, and further, you know that there is indeed something quite wrong with Esther. She has fits of screaming and a devious streak that manifests early. And brother, don’t you dare try to touch the ribbons she has tied around her neck and wrists. She is also apparently quite the psychologist, able to suss out the fault lines in a family dynamic (Kate’s a recovering alcoholic, John had an affair 10 years ago) in no time at all. It isn’t long before Esther’s maneuverings turn fully sinister.

Horror fans familiar with the “evil child” thread of movies can already start to guess where Orphan is going with its premise. There are two possible explanations, laid out in such movies as The Omen and The Bad Seed, for who—or what—Esther is: supernatural, or sociopathic. This either-or question is the only mystery at work in Orphan, and is consequently the only thing that raises even a modicum of tension. Pity the reveal comes so close to the end, and everything up till that point could point in any number of directions. That is not a proper mystery. That’s just the filmmakers seeing how long they can hold out on you.

You might expect a little more from the film, and not without good reason. Farmiga and Sarsgaard are both gifted actors and for approximately 45 minutes of the film’s 123-minute running time, they and director Jaume Collet-Serra seem to be playing Orphan’s shop-worn premise pretty straight. I started to wonder—in the optimistic part of my mind that never seems to learn its lesson—if Orphan might not genuinely surprise me.

But at some point past that 45-minute mark, Orphan jumps the track from moderately serious thriller to something more like a slasher schlockfest, and the movie’s distribution via Dark Castle Entertainment—set up to revamp and make movies along the lines of horror huckster William Castle—makes a lot more sense. The writing, too, seems to get a little shakier. Esther had some power as a creepy little moppet early on, but when her evilness is unveiled, her dialogue gets silly. When Kate says “We need to talk” and Esther shoots back with “We’re past that point, don’t you think?” Well, come on now, seriously.

Collet-Serra isn’t playing fair, either. There are about six moments designed precisely to build tension for the sake of it. Kate opens the fridge door, partially obstructing the frame (though not Kate’s vision, not that such things matter in horror movies), the music swells, builds… and she shuts the door and no one’s there, and we move on. There’s no reason to feel any tension or fear in that moment, and in the context of story a “scare” placed in those moments makes no sense. It’s like a late-stage Pavlovian experiment: all bell, no meat. The brazen manipulation is jarring and a little smug.

Which is to say that Orphan never is (nor attempts to be) scary. It is creepy, in a juvenile way; if I was 15 the reveal of young Esther’s artistry might have been chilling and/or cool. Fuhrman, bless her heart, is so damn good in her role as a cute little murderer (and other things besides) that the role damn near borders on child abuse. But that’s it. It’s disappointing when a filmmaker steps into a well-worn niche genre and aspires to nothing more than the expected. It’s even more disappointing when that filmmaker ropes a fine cast into it. Why bother?

French director Francois Truffaut is often quoted as saying that it is impossible to make an anti-war movie, as the filming of war will inevitably glamorize the violence by exciting the audience. I respectfully submit that Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker succeeds, at last, at portraying war as a brutal and endless game of attrition.

Calling The Hurt Locker “anti-war,” though, is an oversimplification. The film, written by Mark Boal (who previously wrote the far more melodramatic In the Valley of Elah), simply acknowledges that war exists and that for some people it is a drug they cannot (and will not) walk away from. Our starring addict is Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), leader of a three-man bomb disposal squad in Baghdad circa 2004.

James is a little dangerous and a little reckless, but he’s very good at his job—which involves suiting up and manually defusing IEDs, often while the people who set the bomb watch. While most people (including other Army grunts) stay away from bombs, James is not intimidated by them. They’re the force that gives his life meaning.

The other two members of James’ team provide counterbalance. Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) brooks no dissent and Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) seems on the verge of a breakdown whenever he’s not in the field. Their job is arguably as difficult and nerve-wracking as James’: while James dismantles the bombs, Sanborn and Eldridge scan the crowds of rubberneckers for the man (or woman, or child) with their hand on the detonator.

When The Hurt Locker begins, their company has 30 more days before they rotate out of Iraq, and Sanborn and Eldridge have every intention of surviving. With James, you’re not so sure.

On paper, this is ideal stuff for an action thriller; the story is a literal procession of “ticking clock” scenarios where one or more lives are constantly in danger. But as with every other aspect of the film, Bigelow subverts what could be an action movie cliché (that ticking clock) with the simple and unsentimental observation that this suicide march is actually going on, every day, in real life.

In a lesser film the episodic structure would just be another way to ratchet up the tension with more and crazier scenarios. But here, too, The Hurt Locker is pragmatic: There is no real catharsis from the tension because there will just be another bomb tomorrow. James’ skill matters, but as with games of chance, the house always wins. If today’s bomb doesn’t get you, surely another one will.

The lack of pretension extends even to the casting. The Hurt Locker features cameos from a variety of talented actors: Guy Pearce as another bomb technician, Ralph Fiennes as a private contractor, David Morse as a cowboy colonel, and Evangeline Lilly as James’ wife back home. None of these cameos are flashy; in fact, some of them are hard to recognize. They are simply small roles played well by skilled performers.

The Hurt Locker has so much potential for cliché and sentimentality. James’ character could be the “loose cannon” maverick we’ve seen countless times before, but Renner and Mackie are too skilled, too authentic to slip into the overwrought. (Geraghty’s Eldridge too often succumbs to melodrama, but that is more a fault of the script than of the performer, and those moments are thankfully rare.) You have known these people.

Bigelow is a serially underrated director. Her film Strange Days was the best science fiction film of the ’90s and was, like this movie, clear-eyed and unafraid to involve its audience in something far more authentic than the usual genre film rollercoaster. In The Hurt Locker she gives us a war film that is sympathetic without being sentimental. And in doing so, she has given us one of the best films of the year.

Bruno is the kind of movie that has 90% of the audience howling with laughter while the other 10% hurriedly exits the theater. This is not speculation; I witnessed this happen several times during the screening, and could only wonder what, exactly, these people thought they were getting themselves into. Bruno, a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashionista, is the third Sacha Baron Cohen character to get the big screen treatment, trailing behind the 2006 release Borat. But you knew all that, didn’t you?

The setup for Bruno (and Bruno) is simple: he gets fired from hosting his German-language fashion show and decides to come to America to become world famous. He will attempt to break into movies (by failing as an extra on Medium), host a celebrity talk show, try to make a sex tape (with libertarian icon Ron Paul), start a charity, bring peace to Israel and Palestine, and finally try to go completely straight, just like Tom Cruise and John Travolta.

And where Borat was content to tour large sections of the United States, Bruno is truly globetrotting. Yes, that really is Bruno dressed in, ah, provocative clothing walking down the streets of Jerusalem, and yes that really is him crashing onto a catwalk in Milan. There is a bit of sequel-itis going on here: the then-transgressive stunts of Borat have tamed over time, so to make the same kind of splash, Cohen (along with director Larry Charles and co-writer Anthony Hines) have to step up their game. And they have. There are a few times when I was genuinely concerned for Cohen’s safety.

And that may subtly point to how much more controversial the Bruno character is: doofy Caucasian foreigners like Borat are amusing but not threatening, while unapologetic gay men trigger far more chilling reactions in others. Cohen being Cohen, he dives headfirst into traditionally “masculine” activities: hunting, the armed services, even MMA fighting.

It’s something like a high-minded version of Jackass, where each segment begins with the sinking dread (and rising thrill) of “oh no, he’s not actually going to…” and then he does exactly that thing for the remainder. If there is a diffusion of intent in Bruno—at first it seems he’ll be mocking fashion and fame, a la Zoolander, then morphs into something vaguely about homophobia—it’s precisely because the stunts are so much more outlandish. We’re focused on the performer, not the performance.

The only useful metric for Bruno is a comparison to Borat. Either this kind of humor works for you or it doesn’t. It works for me. It did not work for those poor souls who left some 20 minutes in to an already lean (yet perfect) 82-minute running time. (Some footage of Latoya Jackson was chopped after Michael Jackson’s death.) It is both more and less daring than Borat, and as time passes will likely be seen as the less interesting of the two. But it does the trick, and it’s a damn sight funnier than anything else that’s come out this year.

Michael Mann’s Public Enemies begs a comparison to Heat, his masterful crime film starring Robert De Niro as a bank robber and Al Pacino as the cop who’s pursuing him. In Public Enemies, those roles are occupied by Johnny Depp (as John Dillinger) and Christian Bale (as FBI agent Melvin Purvis), along with a myriad B-cast that covers much the same range as the secondary players in Heat. It’s a shame, then, that Mr. Mann, who gave us such masterful characterization and intense action in Heat, can only give us a shallow and ultimately unsatisfying glimpse at the final exploits of Dillinger.

It isn’t as if there’s no good material to work with. Dillinger was a hero to the Depression-era working man, robbing banks and the federal government and always treating his hostages kindly. There was a brashness to him, too, as if he were one of the last Wild West bandits still thumbing his nose at the authorities in an increasingly standardized world.

His escapes were daring, not to mention improbable—they’d seem to be an invention of Mr. Mann’s (and fellow writers Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman) if they hadn’t been so well-documented elsewhere. Who else would think to escape prison using a piece of soap carved into the shape of a gun? Who else would march right into prison with a fellow bandit dressed as an FBI agent, just to spring the rest of his gang?

There are plenty of subplots lurking, too, that hold much promise: guiding Purvis is none other than J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), who thinks finally nabbing Dillinger and his compatriots will allow him to turn the FBI into the fearsome bludgeon it would soon become. Likewise, the Chicago mobs, previously friendly to Dillinger, grow increasingly hostile as they realize the robber’s interstate crimes threaten to put their whole operation under federal scrutiny.

On a more intimate level, Dillinger’s relationship with coat check girl Billie (Marion Cotillard)—again, so similar to De Niro’s love interest in Heat—is just one more loose thread that could unravel his life. Intermittently, Dillinger’s deliberate cultivation of his public persona—and the celebrity that comes with it—both helps and hinders his spree.

All of this is good material barely glimpsed as we move, with the plodding certainty of a History Channel recreation, from one famous point in Dillinger’s life to the next. For Mr. Mann, it appears to be enough to suggest the complexities and themes at work without fully exploring (or even acknowledging) any of them.

This is most fully evident in the scant characterization. In short order we learn that Dillinger is cocky and doesn’t plan ahead, and that Purvis is a straight arrow. And though we will spend 140 minutes with them, we will learn little else. Mr. Depp and Mr. Bale are talented actors with natural presence, and that’s a good thing; without them their roles would be simple ciphers, guided by historical footnotes and devoid of real life. Ms. Cotillard isn’t given much to do but pine for Dillinger and stand nobly by his side.

If Public Enemies has one thing going for it, it’s in Mr. Mann’s beautifully understated cinematography. He’s been using digital film for his last handful of films as his subject matter leans gradually toward a more authentic, documentarian sensibility. Miami Vice, for all its glitz, simply pointed the camera and observed its players. There’s a beauty in that simplicity, and every shot is composed as if waiting for Edward Hopper to paint it.

That sensibility—to film “life as it is lived,“ no more and no less—is at play in Public Enemies, but in his desire to be hands-off and simply record Dillinger’s last days, Mr. Mann misses a chance at real drama. It’s fair for characters to play with their cards close to their chests; but here they are so impenetrable they are simply two-dimensional. Though blessed with gifted actors and a great historical premise, Public Enemies runs merely skin deep.

Michael Bay is not a director; he is a general. He marshals resources, lashes together vast armies of cast and crew, travels the world and blows ten kinds of hell out of every landmark he sees. He innovates in the state of his field’s technological art to wreak havoc and chaos on his opponents, and in the style of excess heaps bombast on them until they submit. The good news is that he is technologically proficient. The bad news is that his opponents are the audience.

As an exercise in the numbing effects of relentless noise and whirling, nonsensical CGI, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a triumph. Even if your tolerance for such things is very high, the sheer length of it all will beat you down: Transformers clocks in at around two and a half hours, an hour of which—consisting entirely of plot chatter no one could possibly care about—could have disappeared with no one the wiser. This is not a movie. This is an endurance trial.

In brief: the good-guy Autobots, in league with the United States Armed Forces and plucky kids Sam (Shia LeBouf, who tries hard, bless him) and Mikaela (Megan Fox, who calls to mind a talent-free Bratz doll), must stop the evil-robot Decepticons from turning on some kind of energy miner that will destroy the sun.

There, that wasn’t so hard, was it? That summary took me as long to write as it took you to read it, but Bay (and writers Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman) seem to think this is very complex stuff, so we have approximately seven hours of humans chattering and globe-trotting and trading lame quips and trying to decipher ancient robot languages. Does this sound like the sort of thing you want to see when you pay for a ticket to Transformers?

What I am telling you is that a movie about giant robots who kick each others’ asses does not feature giant robots kicking each others’ asses for approximately 80% of its running time. But there is a cameo by Rainn Wilson, and that was nice.

I had a hard time figuring out who this movie was for. The few action scenes there are are actually pretty nifty; the opening chase through Shanghai is probably the best sequence in the movie, and some of the closing shots at the anti-climactic final battle at the Pyramids had me raising my eyebrow in appreciation. The eight-year-old kid sitting next to me was into those.

So I figured, yeah, this works pretty well as a kids’ action movie. Not for me, but not everything needs to be. But there’s so much adolescent sexuality, so many genital jokes and unnecessary profanity, that there’s no way this was planned as a kids movie. So: too profane for kids, but way, way too stupid for adults and (I hope) most teenagers. Who is Bay talking to here?

The characterizations are childish. It’s no secret that this movie and its predecessor are product placement ads for GM and the USAF as much as anything else. So there’s a lot of “soldiers rule, bureaucrats drool” ra-ra stuff, with Tyrese Gibson’s soldier character hanging around to make sure you know how to feel at the end of each scene with the snivelly rep from the White House (who exists to remind us that you Don’t Negotiate With Terrorists). Bumblebee is around, a little, still speaking entirely in movie quotes and song snippets—clearly the nerd identification character. Optimus Prime has little screen time and less presence.

But then there’s the twins. I don’t know what their names are, but they’re two small car/robots who are, shall we say, a little shocking. Some might call them racist caricatures, but that’s only true if you think if you think illiterate guys with gold teeth and huge ears who talk bad street slang is racist. They would be more offensive if the joke wasn’t so utterly tone deaf.

So that’s a crapshoot. What of the (comparatively very little) action? Well, there are one or two pretty cool sequences. The rest is, I’m sorry to say, like watching a bunch of highly-articulated heaps of garbage slug it out; when enough Transformers get into the mix you quickly lose sight of who’s who and why you should bother caring. There are a lot more Transformers in this movie than there were in the first (or so I’m told), but that ends up not mattering much. They don’t even get named and most of them die anyway.

My friends think of me as something of a curmudgeon. I’m sure they knew how I’d respond to the movie even before I walked in, but I promise you I tried to keep an open mind. This charity was in vain; there is too much here that is inexcusable for Transformers to approach anything like a good time. It is detestably stupid and relentlessly dull. There was a time when Michael Bay could craft an enjoyably schmaltzy over-the-top action sundae, but it appears that time has passed.

Oh well. Life goes on.