Additional Notes: Based on the story by Robert E. Howard. Film was previously set up at Warner Bros., who had the rights for seven years with no progress.

After witnessing a mysterious train crash, a group of friends in the summer of 1979 begin noticing strange happenings going around in their small town, and begin to investigate into the creepy phenomenon.

Director: J.J. Abrams
Writer: J.J. Abrams
Stars: Elle Fanning, Amanda Michalka and Kyle Chandler

In 1962, Charles Xavier starts up a school and later a team, for humans with superhuman abilities. Among them is Erik Lensherr, his best friend… and future archenemy.

Director: Matthew Vaughn
Writers: Ashley Miller (screenplay), Zack Stentz (screenplay), and 4 more credits »
Stars: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence

Jack Sparrow and Barbossa embark on a quest to find the elusive fountain of youth, only to discover that Blackbeard and his daughter are after it too.

Director: Rob Marshall
Writers: Ted Elliott (screenplay), Terry Rossio (screenplay), and 7 more credits »
Stars: Johnny Depp, Penélope Cruz and Ian McShane

Picked as her best friend’s maid of honor, lovelorn and broke Annie looks to bluff her way through the expensive and bizarre rituals with an oddball group of bridesmaids.

Director: Paul Feig
Writers: Kristen Wiig, Annie Mumolo
Stars: Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph and Rose Byrne

From time-to-time, I suppose we all succumb to daydreams of what it might be like to have lived during a different, perhaps simpler era. Filmmaker Woody Allen, whose cinematic recipes have often incorporated more than a pinch of nostalgia, embraces this conceit with his 2011 effort, Midnight in Paris. An odd creation by some standards, this production is neither pure drama nor true comedy. It is too light and airy to touch the emotions in more than a fleeting fashion, and its humor is gentle and low-key, rarely exhibiting the edge associated with Allen. Instead, Midnight in Paris is a fairy tale, a parfait of whimsy. The film is constructed in such a way that suspension of disbelief isn’t too hard because there’s something universal in what Allen explores. Like Santa Claus, we know it’s not real but the idea is so appealing that we go along with the fantasy.

Gil (Owen Wilson) and Inez (Rachel McAdams) are taking a pre-wedding vacation in Paris. It doesn’t take many scenes for us to become aware that, as a couple, they are mismatched. He’s a simple guy who dreams of living a bohemian life. Despite being a successful Hollywood screenwriter, he yearns to move to Paris and write a novel - a notion the materialistic Inez scoffs at. One night, instead of going out dancing with his fiancé and her “pedantic” friend, Paul (Michael Sheen), Gil opts to wander the streets of Paris. Shortly after midnight, an old-time roadster pulls up alongside him and a group of party-goers motion for him to get in. He finds himself transported to another era - a between-the-wars City of Lights where he can keep company with F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston), Ernest Hemmingway (Carey Stoll), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), and the alluring Adriana (Marion Cotillard). Before dawn approaches, Gil finds himself returned to the modern world, but his time traveling excursions are not over.

For the most part, the story of Midnight in Paris is undemanding, especially for those who are familiar with tales of time travel (or who watch Doctor Who, which is the level of “science fiction” upon which Midnight in Paris resides). No attempt is made to explain the mechanism by which Gil wanders into his time warp - it simply happens. This is appropriate since applying any sort of reason to magic always feels forced and frequently sounds silly. Midnight in Paris is about mood, emotion, and tone. Allen frequently employs long, unbroken takes in which the roving camera makes us a fly on the wall. (These are not the shaky cam techniques that made watching some of Allen’s early-’90s films difficult.) The movie’s Paris is the city of post cards and romantic movies. Allen opens the film with images of many famous tourist spots as a cloudy day gives way to a rainy evening. The sequence is Midnight in Paris’ most evocative.

The production fails to come up to the level of Allen’s great movies, but there haven’t been many of those in recent years. It’s an entertaining trifle that is at least as engaging as, and perhaps more likeable than, a majority of the filmmaker’s recent excursions. However, while filming in the City of Lights may have ignited Allen’s visual instincts, it did not result in a superior screenplay. The dialogue lacks verve and the wit is muted. Perhaps Midnight in Paris is wish-fulfillment for Allen, and the thought of so many literary and artistic luminaries in one place results in an unusual level of respect.

Owen Wilson’s Gil is Midnight in Paris’ Allen stand-in. Occasionally, one can almost hear Woody speaking the lines. Gil, however, is not a neurotic, which makes for a pleasant change; this allows the character to be more sympathetic and independent that the usual protagonist in an Allen movie. Gil has two love interests. The one in the present, his fiancé Inez, is played by Rachel McAdams with all the charm of a coiled snake (or that of Katherine Heigl). Marion Cotillard’s Adriana, however, is the kind of alluring muse who might make any person think of giving up television, computers, and the benefits of modern technology. Many of the secondary performers - Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein, Adrian Brody as Salvador Dali, Carey Stoll as Ernest Hemmingway - are scene-stealers. Allen gets the best out of these actors as they step into the shoes of icons. He also gives France’s First Lady, Carla Bruni, a speaking part. (She’s the tour guide who translates Adriana’s diary into English.)

One oddity about Midnight in Paris is Allen’s insistence upon making this a true fairy tale by giving it a moral. The message, which has to do with being content in the present, isn’t merely sitting in the subtext waiting to be discovered by a discerning viewer. Instead, it is broadcast with all the subtlety of a day-glo neon sign so even a dullard who sleeps through half the movie will get it. Rarely has Allen come across as so preachy.

Words like “pleasant”, “enjoyable”, and “undemanding” apply to Midnight in Paris, although some may consider that damning with faint praise - especially those who look to Woody Allen to cast a cynical eye on the foibles of a man in love. Allen’s movies often deal with love and sex and, although he often dabbles in nostalgia, rarely does he do so with such unabashed romanticism. Midnight in Paris does not challenge greatness, but it’s a nice, low-key way to spend 100 minutes.

I didn’t attend the critics’ screening for “Thor” because it was at the same time Ebertfest was showing “A Small Act,” about an 88-year-old woman named Hilde Back. She’d flown from Sweden, and I wanted be onstage to present her with the Golden Thumb. Missing “Thor 3D” was not an inconsolable loss, because I was able to see it in Chicago in nice, bright 2D. The house was surprisingly well-populated for a 8:50 p.m. screening on a Monday, suggesting that some people, at least, will make an effort to avoid 3D.

“Thor” is failure as a movie, but a success as marketing, an illustration of the ancient carnival tactic of telling the rubes anything to get them into the tent. “You won’t believe what these girls take off!” a carny barker promised me and my horny pals one steamy night at the Champaign County Fair. He was close. We didn’t believe what they left on.

The failure of “Thor” begins at the story level, with a screenplay that essentially links special effects. Some of the dialog is mock heroic (”You are unworthy of your title, and I’ll take from you your power!”) and some of it winks ironically (”You know, for a crazy homeless person he’s pretty cut.”) It adapts the original Stan Lee strategy for Marvel, where characters sometimes spoke out of character.

The story might perhaps be adequate for an animated film for children, with Thor, Odin and the others played by piglets. In the arena of movies about comic book superheroes, it is a desolate vastation. Nothing exciting happens, nothing of interest is said, and the special effects evoke not a place or a time but simply special effects.

Thor to begin with is not an interesting character. The gods of Greek, Roman and Norse mythology share the same problem, which is that what you see is what you get. They’re defined by their attributes, not their personalities. Odin is Odin and acts as Odin and cannot act as other than Odin, and so on. Thor is a particularly limited case. What does he do? He wields a hammer. That is what he does. You don’t have to be especially intelligent to wield a hammer, which is just as well, because in the film Thor (Chris Hemsworth) doesn’t seem to be the brightest bulb in Asgard.

The land (sphere? state of mind? heaven?) known as Asgard is described in Norse mythology as being near Troy, or perhaps in Asia Minor. In the movie, as nearly as I can gather, it is not of this earth and must be elsewhere in the universe. It consists of towering spires and skyscrapers linked by bridges and buttresses and betraying no sign of a population, except when untold thousands of Asgardians are required to line up at attention like robotic Nazis to receive dictates from the throne of Odin (Anthony Hopkins).

Asgard’s ancient enemies are the Frost Giants, whose home is Jotunheim. I believe, but cannot promise you, that Jotunheim and Asgard are linked by a bridge, although this bridge also seems to be the way Thor reaches Earth, so perhaps it’s more of a gateway through time and space, which would explain why Asgardians hurtle across intergalactic light-years and land in New Mexico without a hair out of place.

Thor is the first to arrive, and encounters three human scientists. Whether he is human himself is a question the film sidesteps. We know from mythology that gods sometimes mated with humans, which is a hopeful sign. The humans are astrophysicist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), her friend Darcy (Kat Dennings) and the distinguished Dr. Erik Sevig (Stellan Skarsgard). I mention she’s an astrophysicist because behaves more like a Storm Chaser, cruising the desert in a van and peering into the skies, which won’t get you far in astrophysics. Their van hits Thor after he unluckily lands in front of it. This is not a Meet Cute for the gods. Later there’s a meteoric event in which Thor’s hammer hurtles to earth and becomes embedded so firmly that it can’t be pulled lose by a pickup truck or even the federal government.

So now Thor is on Earth, his hammer is stuck, and I am underwhelmed. Thor luckily speaks English and Jane and her friends take him to the local diner, where he eats lots of Pop Tarts and, when he finishes his coffee, smashes the empty cup to the ground. “We don’t do that,” Jane explains as if to a child, and advises him to simply order another cup, after which he apparently absorbs human behavior and the movie drops the Taming of the Thor angle.

The three scientists are thin soup. Jane flirts demurely with Thor, Kay stands next to her and does nothing very important, and Dr. Sevig regards them gravely and looms slightly above a low-angle camera while looking on with wise concern. There is also a government agent (Clark Gregg), whose every action is the remedy to an immediate requirement of the plot.

Superhero movies live and die on the quality of their villains. “Thor” has a shabby crew. The Frost Giants spend most of their time being frosty in their subzero sphere of Jotunheim and occasionally freezing their enemies. Thor’s brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is dark-haired, skinny, shifty-eyed and sadly lacking in charisma. He might as well be wearing a name tag: “Hi! I can’t be trusted!” These villains lack adequate interest to supply a climactic battle, so the movie fabricates a Metal Giant, sends him to the New Mexico town, and has him blast fiery rays that blow up gas stations real good but always miss his targets. He is apparently killed by a sword through his spine, but why does he need a spine since when his mask lifts we can see his head is an empty cavern?

And what about that town? It seems to be partly a set with two interiors (the diner and Jane’s office) and partly CGI. It seems to go for a few blocks and then end abruptly in barren desert. Not even any suburbs or strip malls. I know aliens from other worlds are required to arrive in New Mexico, but why stay there? Why can’t the Metal Giant attack the Golden Gate Bridge or scale a Trump Tower somewhere? Who cares he if turns a 7-Eleven into a fireball?

Here is a film that is scoring 79% on Rotten Tomatoes. For what? The standards for comic book superhero movies have been established by “Superman,” “The Dark Knight,” “Spider-Man 2″ and “Iron Man.” In that company “Thor” is pitiful. Consider even the comparable villains (Lex Luthor, the Joker, Doc Ock and Obadiah Stane). Memories of all four come instantly to mind. Will you be thinking of Loki six minutes after this movie is over?

The director given this project, Kenneth Branagh, once obtained funding for a magnificent 70mm version of “Hamlet.” Now he makes “Thor.” I wonder with a dread fear if someone in Hollywood, stuck with a movie about a Norse god, said “Get Branagh. He deals with that Shakespeare crap.”

I don’t think you can take two mid-size sedans, chain them to a bank vault and haul it behind you on a high-speed chase through the streets of Rio de Janeiro while being chased by the cops. I think the traffic would be too bad.

I also don’t think you can steal cars from a speeding train by driving a truck beside the tracks, cutting the side out of a freight car with an acetylene torch, flipping the cars onto the truck bed, tilting the bed, letting them roll to the ground and then driving them away. I think there are more practical ways to steal cars.

I also think that while Houdini might have been able to make a bank vault disappear from the stage of the New York Hippodrome (and escape from it in the process), bank vaults in general tend to be hard to mess with, as may occur to you during “Fast Five.”

But you know what? It sort of doesn’t matter. The movie is made of sheer, preposterous and nonstop impossible action, muscular macho guys, hot chicks and platoons of bad guys who are eliminated by the dozens while the leading characters escape certain death so easily, it gets to be a habit.

This is the third of the “Fast and the Furious” series starring Vin Diesel, Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster, and here they’re joined by Dwayne Johnson, making it a sort of convention of reckless drivers. Apparently some of these characters have had, in the past, long conversations about their goals, dreams, abilities and values, saving time at the present for terse verbal shorthand. When you hear as many as six words in a row, you suspect it’s a tagline for a trailer (”We need to assemble a team”).

Justin Lin is emerging as a first-rate director in this second-rate genre, having shelved, temporarily I trust, the ambition suggested in his remarkable “Better Luck Tomorrow” (2002). Unlike a certain other maker of Crash-Crash-Bang-Bangs, whose name I trust you to summon effortlessly, he devotes attention to a storyline that devises ingenious new things to do instead of obsessively blowing up things.

He storyboards his impossible actions sequences, instead of editing them with incomprehensible speed. And he hauls in fresh faces (played by such as Tyrese Gibson, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Matt Schulze, Sung Kang, Gal Gadot, Elsa Pataky and Joaquim de Almeida) gives them a specialty and a chance to demonstrate it. You couldn’t say the supporting characters are developed beyond their defining labels, but at least they’re in the mix.

The villain (de Almeida), a Rio drug kingpin, makes the usual error of ordering his flunkies into hot pursuit and then following them into danger. There’s a reason generals don’t fight in the trenches. His character, Reyes, is set up as a criminal tycoon, but $10 million is not, after all, very much drug money to have in a bank, not when Wachovia Bank was recently revealed to have laundered drug money equal to a third of the Mexican GNP. One thing you know is that the U.S. law authorities will spend less time trying to put those bankers behind bars than the Brazilians do here, and lose many fewer squad cars in the process.

But facts will get me nowhere in reviewing a movie of this sort. What you want is advice about your genre expectations. The 2001 movie was sorta fun with its energy and ambition, placing Diesel and Walker in a Los Angeles street-racing story. The 2009 film, which made an impenetrable leap from the plot of the first one, was much more routine. Both made plenty of money.

The “F&F” titles got confusing with the unrelated “Fast and Furious: Toyko Drift” and John Singleton’s “2 Fast 2 Furious,” which is why, I suppose “Fast Five” drops the “furious.” But it isn’t technically the fifth “F&F” unless you count the outliers. So I don’t know what “Five” refers to. That doesn’t bother me.

What it all comes down to is a skillfully assembled 130 minutes at the movies, with actors capable of doing absurd things with straight faces, and action sequences that toy idly with the laws of physics. That can be amusing for some people, not so much for me. What I missed were laughs, although I got a good one right at the end, when we were warned that the driving in the movie was done in a controlled environment by professionals, and we shouldn’t try those stunts ourselves. Someday I would like to meet a driver who was planning to race his Hummer into a reinforced concrete wall before being persuaded otherwise by the closing credits.

In Paris, a young employee in the office of the US Ambassador hooks up with an American spy looking to stop a terrorist attack in the city.

Intrigued by his new acquaintance’s far-fetched stories, Bob impulsively decides to accompany him on the search. When the pair tracks Django to a clandestine training camp run by renegade psychic Larry Hooper (two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey), the reporter is trapped in the middle of a grudge match between the forces of Django’s New Earth Army and Hooper’s personal militia of super soldiers. In order to survive this wild adventure, Bob will have to outwit an enemy he never thought possible.

“This Is It” will offer Jackson fans and music lovers worldwide a rare, behind-the-scenes look at the performer, his career, and the stage spectacular that would have been. The film will provide moviegoers with an unforgettable front row experience compiled from extensive footage that shows Jackson’s meticulous preparation for his 2009 London shows.

16-year-old Darren (Chris Massoglia) was like most kids in his suburban neighborhood. He hung out with his best friend Steve (Josh Hutcherson), got decent grades and usually stayed out of trouble. But when he and his buddy stumble upon a traveling freak show, things begin to change inside Darren. That’s the exact moment when a vampire named Larten Crepsley (John C. Reilly) turns him into something, well, bloodthirsty.

Newly undead, he joins the Cirque Du Freak, a touring sideshow filled with monstrous creatures from a snakeboy and a wolfman to a bearded lady (Salma Hayek) and a gigantic barker (Ken Watanabe). As Darren flexes his newfound powers in this dark world, he becomes a treasured pawn between the vampires and their deadlier counterparts. And while trying to survive, one boy will struggle to keep their brewing war from devouring what’s left of his humanity.

Originally released by Walt Disney Pictures in 1995, “Toy Story” was the first feature film from Pixar Animation Studios and director John Lasseter. The film went on to receive Oscar® nominations for Best Original Score, Best Original Song, and Best Original Screenplay, and earned Lasseter a Special Achievement Award (Oscar®) “for the development and inspired application of techniques that have made possible the first feature-length computer-animated film.” The 3-D version of this landmark film is being personally overseen by Lasseter with his acclaimed team of technical wizards handling all the necessary steps in the conversion process.

In true St Trinian style the girls are in a league of their own; smart, fearless and determined to defend the school they love to the end. They need to unite the warring girl gang cliques and come up with the cash fast to save the school.