There's a lot to like about the new science fiction film After Earth, directed by M. Night Shyamalan and starring Will and Jaden Smith. From the wonderfully organic feel of the far future world to the hazardous asteroid storm that damages their ship far from a safe planet, to the smart fabrics and tech the film should be a home run for us sci-fi fans.

But it's not.

In fact, the storyline ends up quite predictable, the juxtaposition of tech allowing interplanetary travel but unable to perform basic emergency medical care baffling, and the acting quality? It's some of the most lackluster acting I've seen in years. Even Will Smith, as legendary warrior Cypher, is so unengaged on screen it felt like they filmed a dress rehearsal rather than the cast actually performing for the camera.

The story is set a thousand years in the future where Earth has been destroyed by pollution (where have we seen that story before?) and mankind has colonized other planets. Turns out, however, that we aren't alone, and aliens called Skrel have bred vicious creatures called Ursas that have one purpose: to track down and slaughter humans. The Ursa can't see, however, they've been bred to sense fear. But that's a weakness: "ghosting" warriors who have completely control over their emotions are invisible to the Ursa and offer a way for the fearsome creatures to be destroyed.

The Star Trek TV show was an important step in the evolution of science fiction, a post-Cold War series that offered a hopeful future, a future where race, creed, religion and gender were irrelevant and that even aliens from other planets were accepted as equals. The TV show spawned additional series, along with ten feature films, but things had become rather grim and the campy humor and brash personalities of the Star Trek universe had become tired cliches held together with duct tape and old tropes.

That's why in 2009 when wunderkund director J.J.Abrams released the "reboot" film Star Trek, it was so well received. We all still want to believe in a future that's better then the present, we all hope that the human race is going to create harmony, even if there are weird alien races in the mix. The film did very well financially, with domestic grosses topping $250 million.

Star Trek Into Darkness takes place a few years after Star Trek ends, opening with a cartoonish sequence where Spock (Zachary Quinto) risks his life to prevent a nascent civilization being destroyed by a volcano. When he ends up stranded in the fiery caldera it's up to Kirk (Chris Pine) to violate the ever-important Prime Directive by revealing the ship to the locals in order to rescue Spock. But Spock has also violated the Prime Directive himself by interfering with the natural progress of the local tribe. Not good.

Back on Earth, Admiral Pike (Bruce Greenwood) later gives them the bad news: Kirk is suspended from Starfleet and Spock is reassigned to a minor space mission as consequence for violating the rule that Starfleet holds highest in its code of conduct.

In a sea of bland lookalike films, the brash, electric new production of F. Scott Fitzgerald's landmark book The Great Gatsby is an art deco dream of the 1920s, fueled by too much gin and too many sequins. It is an astonishing film, as much a reminder of the magic of cinema as it is an ultimately tragic love story.

The film follows young writer Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) during the passion and heat-fueled summer of 1922. He's rented a small cottage adjacent to the glorious mansion of the mysterious but popular Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio). Gatsby plays host to extravagant parties every weekend, hundreds of people reveling in orgies of music, alcohol and sex. It's the place to be, except the enigmatic Gatsby never seems to attend his own parties.

Directly across the bay from Gatsby's mansion is the estate of Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton) with its green dock light, a light that sears into Gatsby's heart every night. Daisy is Nick's cousin and he soon becomes swept up their social whirl, including an ongoing flirtation with languid tennis pro Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki). It's the 20s and morals are loose, jazz is king and relationships aren't what they were at the turn of the century.

Eventually Carraway learns that Gatsby has been in love with Daisy since they first met five years earlier, when he was in the Army. She's married to Tom, but does she still love Gatsby, and could she leave Tom to rekindle her passion with the man she swore she'd wait for, until Tom came along and bought her love with impossibly expensive glitter?

After the narrative train wreck that was Iron Man 2, I was curious where the story would take us with inventor Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) in the Marvel universe. Last time he was on screen was the terrific The Avengers, where his sarcasm and narcissism was balanced by having other characters share the screen, but in Iron Man 3, it's all about Tony.

Or is it?

Turns out that when James "Rhodie" Rhodes (Don Cheadle) donned the Iron Man suit on behalf of the US military in Iron Man 2, it was a harbinger of a big, albeit inevitable story twist, where the Iron Man suit and Tony Stark become independent characters. Indeed, in this third outing there are dozens of suits and all sorts of characters get to be inside them, even the President (William Sadler).

Rhodie gets his own "War Machine" suit painted a patriotic red, white and blue, Tony's faithful partner Pepper Potts (Gwenyth Paltrow) ends up wearing a "mark 46" prototype whose pieces can fly and wrap itself around a persons body in mid-jump, and of course the bad guys have suits of their own.

Which leaves a critical question: What's more interesting, the suit or Tony Stark? 

Iron Man 3 is definitely better than the second film in the series, but with so many suits flying around -- and a finale that features twenty or more autonomous, "Jarvis" (voice of Paul Bettany) computer controlled suits -- the message is clearly that Stark himself is obsolete and that it's the Iron Man suits that are important. Which leaves us with nowhere to go narratively. I surmise that the filmmakers are aware of this problem because the closing credits includes the teaser "Tony Stark will be back", presumably in the Avengers sequel. But will Tony Stark be inside that metal suit?

There are two fundamental problems with the action "comedy" Pain and Gain: First, Michael Bay is the wrong director for this sort of material, and second, whoever cast the likable Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson in the film made a terrible mistake. I like Wahlberg and Johnson, and that's the problem: In the film the criminal masterminds they portray are such losers that it's just wrong to have these two popular actors in these roles.

Pain and Gain is based on real life events: Sun Gym was a cut-rate bodybuilder's gym just north of Miami, marketed and mostly run by a self-aggrandizing personal trainer with a shady past. Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) trains all the rich and beautiful Miami denizens and has a buddy Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) who shares Lugo's dissatisfaction with the crummy deal they've got. "You ain't gunna be rich being a personal trainer" they repeat like a mantra.

Enter rich Jewish entrepreneur Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub) who taunts Lugo about his wealth, his cars, his houses and his women. Being poor is a state of mind, Kershaw keeps telling Lugo. When Lugo goes to a motivational seminar run by Johnny Wu (Ken Jeong) and affirms in front of a crowd that he's a DOER not a DON'T'ER, he hatches a scheme to kidnap Kershaw and force him to sign over money and property.

Add fresh-out-of-prison Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson) as the new muscle-bound trainer at the gym and we have our three stooges. When Doyle, Lugo and Doorbal kidnap Kershaw, they figure it'll be a breeze, maybe a day or two tops before Kershaw buckles and gives them everything they want. Except he doesn't and the kidnapping drags out for weeks. There's more to their criminal hijinks, and after Kershaw gets free and tells all to the cops, just to find they don't believe him, the forces of justice end up personified as semi-retired private investigator Ed DuBois (Ed Harris).

I knew going into the theater that Oblivion starred Tom Cruise. It's hard to miss. And there's something about Cruise movies, something about the fact that he's in every single scene and that whether he's supposed to be part of a team (as in the Mission: Impossible series) or otherwise, it's always narcissistically All About Tom. So there's that.

Then there are problems with the storyline itself. I won't spoil it but the trailers to the film suggest a scenario that might not be exactly what's going on as the film unfolds. The security drones are bad-ass hardware, definitely reminiscent of Robocop's ED-409, they're fast moving, intimidating as hell, and feature very cool on-board scanning and target identification systems. But if aliens can create these security drones, why can't they create robo-drone repair drones too?

With those in mind, however, Oblivion offers up a fascinating near-future but post-apocalyptic Earth where The Statue of Liberty's torch-bearing hand emerges from dirt (reminiscent of the great iconic scene from the original Planet of the Apes), then later Jack and Julia (Olga Kurylenko) zoom through what remains of the Brooklyn Bridge: only the top of the spans rising above the barren brown dirt. Another important setting is the observation area of the Empire State Building, except now it's at ground level (see photo later in this review).

There's no question, the visuals are incredibly well done and for that reason alone, I have to highly recommend Oblivion. I saw it on an IMAX screen and it's breathtaking, just incredibly cool and kinetic, everything you want from a modern sf/x-heavy sci-fi adventure film.

And there's more about the movie I liked too...

The "sins of the father becoming the sins of the son" is the heart of The Place Beyond the Pines, and the story begins with ne'er do well circus stunt rider Luke (Ryan Gosling) learning that he has a baby boy. The mother, Romina (Eva Mendes) has kept it from him and lives with another man, Kofi (Mahershala Ali), who is everything Luke is not: stable, level-headed, and fiercely protective of his step-child Jason

Luke is nonetheless profoundly moved to learn about his child and quits his job to stay in rural Schenectady, NY and become a father. In his desperation to provide for his baby, Luke falls in with garage owner Robin (Ben Mendelsohn) and soon finds himself robbing banks to raise money.

This first portion of the film is rather a modern retelling of Jean ValJean's turning to a life of crime out of desperation to feed his child. The Inspector Javert of The Place Beyond the Pines is Stanford-grad and politician's son Avery (Bradley Cooper). Like Luke, Avery also has a baby boy and difficulties with his home life, and like Luke, Avery has a difficult relationship with his own father.

In a Hitchcockesque transition, the film has a dramatic crescendo, a scene where the sins of both Avery and Luke are exposed, with fatal consequences. Avery is then blackmailed by bad cop Deluca (Ray Liotta) and driven by his own ego, decides to fight the rampant corruption in the police force. The results are ultimately good for Avery, but not for his boy AJ, who grows up with a father who is never present.

Some films require a specific demographic for full enjoyment, and in the action genre, it seems there are a lot aimed at teen boys. A prime example: Gone in Sixty Seconds. It's not that it's a horrible movie, it's just that the storyline is incoherent, the characters are all one-dimensional, the ending is obvious from sixty seconds past the opening titles and the performances are all uninteresting. And the male/female relationships? It couldn't be more cliche.

And yet, there's a certain sophomoric fascination in a film about cool guys stealing gorgeous cars and trying to score with the sexy gals. Really, it's a perfect film for a teen boy, even if his date's going to be distracted, wondering whether this means she can now convince him to see the latest Rom-Com with her next weekend.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation is in the same category, and if I could just shut down the mature, adult part of my brain, the boy inside would totally dig the tough guys, monosyllabic dialog, shiny toys, loud guns and non-stop action, while ignoring the completely muddled and confusing plot, terrible story arc, random scenes added based on exit surveys of screening audiences, and misunderstanding of world politics. But hey, it's the Joe's and they represent all that's great about America, right? Booyah!

The film opens with the G.I. Joe team -- led by Duke (Channing Tatum) -- sneaking through the DMZ fence separating North and South Korea to extract a prisoner from the North Koreans. All of whom apparently really need new glasses because even when the GI's are directly under a spotlight, the Koreans can't see them crouched on the edge of the fence. And the prisoner? Why he's there, who he is, what happens to him afterwards, that's all on the cutting room floor apparently, because the scene had no relevance to the film at all. And that sets the tone for the entire movie.

As has been widely publicized, actor Channing Tatum's popularity took the production team by surprise so they delayed release of G.I. Joe: Retaliation to add more footage with Duke. Unfortunately, it's all obviously a last-second addition that adds nothing to the film at all, even for the most die-hard of Tatum fans. Soon enough it's Roadblock (Dwayne Johnson likable as always) who is in charge of the Joe's and the squad's on the run, wanted for crimes against the United States, while bad guys have taken over the country and, soon, the world.

The previews looked cool. I mean, it's an audacious concept to have terrorists storm the White House and take the President of the United States hostage. What could go wrong with a fast-paced action movie that has that as the main plot device?

The answer is everything. In fact, Olympus Has Fallen has no redeeming qualities at all. From acting to dialog, set pieces to special effects, exterior shots to the pace of edits, just about everything the film attempts has been done better in other movies. Worst, disgraced Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is laughably indestructable, to the point where I thought perhaps he'd reveal that he was indeed the lost Avenger or an X-Man.

The plot itself is a messy mix of the thoughtful action flick In The Line of Fire, in which Clint Eastwood (a vastly better actor than Butler) plays a disgraced Secret Service agent who has to redeem himself and the cliché-ridden but highly entertaining Die Hard, where smartass über-hero John McClane (Bruce Willis) has to single-handedly thwart the nefarious terrorist Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) while demonstrating his tenacity and prediliction for obscenities.

In fact, there's so much that Olympus Has Fallen steals from Die Hard that it's more of an homage, a sort of alternative script for the tepid Die Hard 5, than a film of its own. There are even crude, sarcastic comments that Banning makes to evil North Korean terrorist Kang (Rick Yune) -- via walkie-talkie! -- that sound like they're lifted directly from the Die Hard script.

The difference is that Die Hard is a great movie. Fun, entertaining, satisfyingly black and white with its morality, and even mostly logical in how events transpire and resolve, while Olympus Has Fallen is just stupid. From the opening scene where Banning is buddies with First Son Conner (Finley Jacobsen) and head of President Asher (Aaron Eckhart)'s security detail, the film gets crushed under the weight of cinematic cliches and its own pretentiousness. When did I know that for sure? After a tragic accident on a bridge kills the First Lady (Ashley Judd, in a "starring" role that evokes Police Squad more than anything else), the President looks up at the sky and screams "NOOOOOOO!!!" which summed up how I was feeling about the movie. Ten minutes in. Yikes.

Magicians are a funny lot. Awkward, often unpopular kids who found a creative channel to gain popularity and hopefully reduce the daily pummelings from the school bully. It's tough to be a kid, and if you're dorky young Burt (played as a child by Mason Cook) it's a daily nightmare, sprinting home after school to unsuccessfully avoid your tormentor.

When his Mom leaves him a Rance Holloway magic set for his birthday, it's a revelation, and the next day equally awkward young Anton (played as a child by Luke Vanek) is impressed and volunteers to join the act, the Amazing Burt Wonderstone and Anton Marvelton is born.

But success can make you dull, and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is an oft-hilarious comedy about friendship and about reinventing yourself to keep up with the times. 

Burt (Steve Carell) has an ego the size of his Vegas penthouse, while Anton (the always-terrific Steve Buscemi) is fed up with being the sidekick and is well aware of how old and tired their act is. Twenty years as a Vegas headliner and they're still using cliché Steve Miller Band music to open their act. And no-one's coming to the show.

Stage magic is ripe for comedy and with the addition of twisted street magician Steve Gray (Jim Carrey), a character clearly modeled on edgy, goth Criss Angel, the proverbial stage is set for old versus new, traditional card tricks versus folded up cards appearing within skin wounds. And the magic gets worse -- and funnier -- as the film proceeds.