Salt works for Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber) and is married to arachnologist Mike Krause (August Diehl), who knows she's a CIA agent but ignores the ever-present danger, focusing instead on hunting spiders for the Smithsonian.

Salt opens with Jolie prisoner in a North Korean detention camp, being beaten and tortured to force a confession that she is indeed a CIA spy. Sound like Quantum of Solace?  It's very similar, and we flash forward to present day, but then bounce back and forth in her timeline as the story unfolds.

When I wrote in my review of Inception that I thought it was the best film of the summer and possibly of 2010, I didn't realize it'd strike a nerve with my friend and fellow critic Christian Toto. It did, and we started debating the merits of the film, the end result being this back and forth that I hope you'll find interesting and entertaining. No spoilers, don't worry!

Christian Toto: I wanted to love Inception as much as most critics. The summer movie season has been a big disappointment, so who better than the mind behind The Dark Knight to save the season? But Inception taxes our brain without delivering a story to engage our emotions. The film spends so much time explaining itself there's precious little time to engage in character development or a lucid narrative.

Dave Taylor: I disagree, of course. I think that DiCaprio's Cobb was an interesting, troubled man who had some extraordinary gifts (i.e. the ability to go into people's dreams) and a complex, half-buried back story with his wife Mal, children and such. But I suggest that the lack of lucidity is consistent with the entire storyline and as Cobb says to Saito (Ken Watanabe), part of the self-referential nature of the film was that there were "half-remembered dreams".

I will say that I think Ariadne (Ellen Page) brought up some interesting ethical dilemmas that were quickly glossed over in the film, but then again, I don't expect a deep philosophical treatise or indie film from Chris Nolan, but a visually stunning action film that has more of a story than the usual banal dreck that we have to sit through. And I think he delivered with Inception.

The story takes place in a near future where companies send agents to steal secrets from within people's dreams and the military are trained in artificially constructed dream worlds where they feel pain, worlds indistinguishable from reality, but from which they wake up if, in the dream, they die or are killed.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a rogue dream extractor who believes that in addition to exploring other people's dreams, it should be possible to plant ideas in their subconscious too. Called "inception", it's highly controversial, if even possible.

He's hired by Japanese industrialist Saito (Ken Watanabe) and assembles a team to plant an idea in the mind of competitor and troubled conglomerate heir Fischer (Cillian Murphy). Cobb brings together an unlikely group: Ariadne (Ellen Page), a young "architect" who creates the dream worlds, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), his point man and long-time collaborator, Eames (Tom Hardy), a likable, sarcastic forger and Yusuf (Dileep Rao) as a chemist.

In a world where dreams can be embedded in other dreams, nothing is ever quite what it seems, people aren't who they seem to be, and the very fabric of reality can bend and distort without warning. It makes for one heck of a movie, and is one of the first I've seen this year where I'm ready to see it a second time to ensure I understood the layers of what was happening on screen. It's that good.

Despicable Me is a surprisingly violent animated movie that suffers from being released within a few weeks of the film Toy Story 3. Where Toy Story 3 has warm characters who seek to do well by each other, Despicable Me is populated by characters who constantly hurt each other as the filmmakers clearly sought a cheap laugh and tried to string together a series of hit-or-miss sight gags.

The story has Gru (voice of Steve Carell trying to sound Russian) as an evil mastermind, ensconced in suburbia with his black Victorian house and huge metal jet car. Beneath his house is a vast subterranean lair where he's plotting to (insert evil laugh) commit the perfect crime. He's created little yellow creatures known as minions, and while there are amusing scenes where hundreds of them congregate to hear his evil plans, they generally treat each other in a slapstick violent manner that really got on my nerves and was far too aggressive for a children's film.

The Great Pyramid of Giza has been stolen by the up-and-coming evil genius Vector (voice of Jason Segel), as shown in an amusing opening sequence. Gru is determined to regain the title of most evil criminal and comes up with a plan to steal the moon. To fund his efforts, he goes to the Bank of Evil seeking a loan, just to bump into Vector and the Spy-vs-Spy competition is on. Gru's plan to bring down Vector?  Adopt three little girls Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Elsie Fisher) and use them to break into his lair.

There are a lot of fun sight gags in the film and the story, while predictable, isn't that terrible. What really upset me was the non-stop level of violence that the characters exhibited towards each other. I realize that's part of the story, the "comic book slapstick violence", but I was startled how each time a character would punch, kick, push, shoot or otherwise hurt another that the audience would laugh. That's not my idea of a good kids film, but if you disagree, you might well find Despicable Me a good diversion.

Predators immediately jumps into the action with Royce (a terrific, pumped up Adrien Brody) in freefall without having a clue how he got there. He deploys his parachute at the last possible second and slams into the earth. When he rises, he finds he's been dropped into the jungle with a cast of killers including Central American guerilla fighter Isabelle (Alice Braga), Russian Spetsnaz soldier Nokolai (Oleg Taktarov), Mexican enforcer Cuchillo (Danny Trejo), Sierra Leon death squad soldier Mombasa (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali), escaped death-row convict Stans (Walton Goggins) and odd-man-out doctor Edwin (Topher Grace).

After evading some vicious traps and an attack from strange and unknown boar-like creatures, they realize that they're not on Earth at all, but instead have been transported to an alien game preserve with strange, alien creatures seeking to hunt and kill them, purely as sport.

Most man-against-nature films get derailed with back story, narrative devices and a desire to build sympathy for the characters. Predators doesn't waste the time, it's an action genre picture boiled down to its essence, and it's thrilling and suspenseful, even with the occasional plot hiccup.

M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender is a film that amply demonstrates the adage that everyone outside of Hollywood understands: special effects do not a movie make.  The brilliant effects by Industrial Light & Magic are all there is to this incoherent mess of a movie, and it's too bad, because there could have been a visually stunning story. Unfortunately Shyamalan has demonstrated in every post-Sixth Sense film he's made that he just isn't a very good storyteller.

Then there's the issue of race. I'm not concerned about issues of whether actors of the appropriate ethnicity are cast in ethnic roles (most recently this debate flared up over Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia) but The Last Airbender pushed that suspension of disbelief out the window. In the story, the world is split into four races, the four elementals of earth, wind, water and fire. The ostensible hero, Aang (Noah Ringer), is the last airbender, while the main characters are actually Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) of the water tribe.

The dissonance comes from the entire Northern Water Tribe living in the frozen north in an Aleutian village, dressed in Eskimo furs, but the lead actors are caucasian. It was bizarre and was never explained in the film. Were there no Asian actors available to take the brother-sister roles of Katara and Sokka?

That's just the tip of the proverbial iceberg with the problems throughout The Last Airbender. If you can stomach an incomprehensible movie with stilted self-conscious dialog because of some cool special effects, go see it. Otherwise it'll be on Nickelodeon soon enough, just wait and save the ticket price.

The story revolves around misfit Bazil (an appealingly simple Dany Boon), who grows up in a wealthy, but fatherless house: his father has been killed while trying to defuse a landmine. Bazil is somewhat of a slacker who happily wiles away the hours of his life working in a video rental shop in Paris. One night a car chase and shootout transpires in front of the shop and through happenchance he ends up with a bullet lodged in the front of his brain.

As the surgeon explains to the nurses in the operating room in a wryly amusing scene, "If we operate, he could die. If we don't, it could go "boom!" at any moment and kill him." They resolve the dilemma in a startling manner and Bazil gradually recovers, just to find he is homeless and without work.

Bazil meets up with a troop of fellow misfits, discarded people who scrape a living out of salvaging discarded items and reassembling them to be useful and interesting. The theme of the film, it's simultaneously powerful and a terrific launching pad for lots of comic situations. Bazil eventually wreaks his revenge on the two corporations that were responsible for the land mine that killed his father and the bullet lodged in his skull in a complex series of cons and tricks reminiscent of The Italian Job and House of Games.

Micmacs is a delightful, witty, engaging film that I'll highly recommend, one of my favorite movies of 2010 to date!

There are some movies that are good date films but are really "guy films", then there are guy films that are really just for men and would most likely go down in the annals of bad dates if you, a guy, were to bring a gal with you. Yeah, that's sexist, but think of The A-Team as the guy version of Sex and the City 2 and you'll understand what I mean.

Based on the 1980s TV series of the same name, The A-Team starts with a backstory that explains how the team was formed by a group of former Army Rangers during a crazy adventure in Mexico. 80 successful missions later, they're tricked into a new mission that involves stolen US Mint plates that need to be recovered before a flood of counterfeit $100s destroy the American economy.

The team fails at its mission, is framed and each A-Team member is subsequently thrown in separate high security prisons scattered throughout the Western hemisphere. No worries, they break out through an unlikely sequence of events and have the dual task of recovering the stolen plates and clearing their names.

Or, at least, the plot seems to be something like that, but this is the kind of film where it's really not much about the story line at all, and somehow, that's okay. The film is still entertaining and the cast (Liam Neeson as Hannibal, the group leader, Bradley Cooper as Face, the handsome woman-crazy group member, Quinton Jackson as tough guy B.A. Baracus, a role made famous by Mr. T. in the original series, and District 9 standout Sharlto Copley as the crazy Murdock) works well and has an appealing chemistry even as the scenes often make no sense.

Unfortunately, Splice is none of these things, and when you finally get to the scary scene, it's about ten minutes from the end of the film, after a build-up that left me bored and had most of the audience laughing at what were supposed to be the tense scenes.

The fundamental problem with Splice is that the three writers, Vincenzo Natali, Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor, couldn't decide if they were creating a thoughtful docu-drama about the ethical dilemma posed by genetic manipulation or a straight-out horror film, and instead created a film that's boring and unfocused, with two of the stupidest "scientist" roles ever committed to screen.

Splice takes place in the R&D facility of Newstead Pharma, run by cliché money-grubbing CEO Joan Chorot (Simona Maicanescu in a startlingly bad performance). The genetic engineering lab, known as Nucleic Exchange Research & Development, is run by husband and wife couple Clive and Elsa (Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley) and also employs Clive's brother Gavin (Brandon McGibbon), a character who seemed like he should have been cast in the next Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure instead.

They're doing genetic splicing to create creatures that can produce medicinal proteins that will be worth billions and Elsa wants to add human DNA to the stew to work towards cures for altzheimers, cancer, and a laundry list of other ailments. The result is a weird quasi-human called Dren (played, with some CG assist, by Delphine Chanéac).

The result is that Splice is an unfrightening mess of a film that could have been a thoughtful exploration of the moral and ethical dilemmas associated with genetic manipulation or could have been a "look what we've unleashed on the world!" film in the mold of Frankenstein, but instead it's neither and ends up a slick looking but pointless cinematic experience.