John Carter (a rugged Taylor Kitsch) is an American Civil War soldier who has deserted his regiment to quest for gold and treasure. He's imprisoned for deserting, but is more interested in his quest than in the needs of his country and refuses to return to his regiment. He escapes the brig and is mysteriously transported to Mars, where he finds himself in the middle of a massive worldwide war between the residents of Barsoom, as they call their planet. Because of the lower gravity, Carter finds that he has amazing, superhuman powers and can't help but get caught up in the situation. When the beautiful Dejah Thoris, Princess of Mars (Lynn Collins), entreats him to help, will he?

The film adaptation of this first book in Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoom series, A Princess of Mars, is a difficult task, with its hordes of 12-foot creatures, massive structures and barren, alien landscapes, but director Andrew Stanton and his production team have done an amazing job with John Carter (originally John Carter of Mars). Not since Star Wars can I remember feeling such delight as I watched the sweeping epic of John Carter unfold on the screen.

The story is ultimately about both Carter finding himself and a love story between him and Princess Thoris, who finds him irresistible as the strange off-planet ruffian with odd ideas and extraordinary strength, and it's neither deep nor profound. This isn't Tree of Life: Martian Edition. Instead, it's a film in the sweeping action adventure vein of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, a wonderous, joyful adventure with a number of surprise twists, including an unusually satisfying surprise ending that had theatergoers laughing and clapping, clearly enjoying themselves.

The Green Lantern Corps is an intergalactic police force that utilizes the green energy of Will and serving is considered an extraordinary honor. The universe, we learn, is split into 3600 sectors  and the Green Lantern who is assigned to our little galaxy has a disastrous encounter with the evil creature Parallax and it's his ring that selects ne'er-do-well test pilot Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) as the next Green Lantern.

Jordan is a cocky daredevil in the Top Gun vein, but he runs from difficult situations, including his unresolved emotions about the death of his fearless and beloved test pilot father. His on-again, off-again girlfriend is Carol Ferris (Blake Lively), daughter of Ferris Aircraft president Carl (Jay O. Sanders) and a superb test pilot in her own right.

Meanwhile, back in Green Lantern intergalactic headquarters, Sinestro (Mark Strong) leads the Corps and debates the threat of Parallax (who is powered by "yellow fear" rather than "green will" energy) with the council of Guardians, an immortal circle of wise puppets who look like rejects from E.T.'s prop department. Sinestro doesn't believe humans are good enough to be in the Corps and tells Jordan quite bluntly on their first meeting, in what was intended to pass as some sort of interpersonal tension.

If you guess that Parallax is the evil bad guy creature that the Corps can't stop but new Green Lantern Hal Jordan can because of his new-found courage, you'd be right. But it's all so extraordinarily predictable that's not a spoiler, just a statement of the obvious. And that's the core problem with Green Lantern, that the story is so asinine, so rife with cliches that it was boring and completely unengaging, a factor exacerbated by the fact that the majority of the special effects look like they were done for a high-budget kids cartoon, not a full-blown big screen flick. My advice is for you to skip it, this'll be on TV soon enough.

Like director Ridley Scott's last outing with Crowe, Gladiator, Robin Hood is a dirty, gritty movie with so much mud that you'll begin rooting for the invention of washing machines to help brighten up the landscape. Crowe plays the same character he plays in all his films, the troubled, misunderstood rebel who just wants to be loved, with grimaces and tough looks aplenty. Perhaps he needs to extend his range a bit in his next project?

Considering this as a medieval war film leads to the question of whether it actually makes sense, and in many ways Robin Hood feels like it's two movies, the first exploring the experience of a military man returning to a decaying England after a decade pillaging Europe on the Crusades, and the second where the writers suddenly realize that they have an end point less than an hour away and need to have created the entire Robin Hood backstory and mythology. What is Maid Marion's (Cate Blanchett) relationship to Robin? Why is Robin the sworn enemy of the Sheriff (Matthew Macfadyen)? Why does Friar Tuck (a delightful Mark Addy) turn his back on the church and join a rebel band?

It's the second part, with Robin leading the English against a half-hearted invasion by the foppish French King Phillip, where the action gets exciting but the story - and storyline - get left in the ever-present dust. Reminiscent of Guy Ritchie's recent Sherlock Holmes (read my review of Sherlock Holmes), Ridley Scott's Robin Hood is a darn good movie but has almost nothing to do with the story we all know. If that bothers you, skip Robin Hood. If you can look beyond it, you might just find this an exciting knights and serfs film.

The Holmes canon is extraordinarily rich and directors as talented as Billy Wilder and Barry Levinson have tackled it with varying levels of success. There are more than 200 Holmes films and TV shows spanning more than a century (the first Holmes film was the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, released in 1905). It's also quite rich in detail, as any Holmsian will tell you, including when and how Holmes met and interacted with his one true love, Irene Adler. 

And so it was quite a challenge for director Guy Ritchie to reinvent Sherlock Holmes on the big screen, transforming him from the fastidious Jeremy Brett and overbearing Basil Rathbone to the scroungy, intense Robert Downey Jr. who plays Holmes as a sarcastic ruffian who earns supplemental income as a warehouse pugilist, and Jude Law as a sophisticated and alarmingly violent Watson.

The result is a highly entertaining, visually stunning movie that doesn't quite fire on all cylinders and reduces one of the best and most memorable fictional detectives in history to just another member of CSI:Victorian London or one of the Usual Suspects or any number of similar gritty, tough, unorthodox detectives.