Rating: 3.5 stars

There are very few super heroes you’d actually want to hang out with. I mean, Batman is all dark and gloomy, and Superman is a bit of a stiff, and Spiderman is way too angst-ridden. However, I’d hit the town with billionaire inventor and playboy Tony Stark, a.k.a Iron Man, anytime. You see, Tony Stark, as played brilliantly by Robert Downey Jr., is a hipster, he’s sexy, he’s resourceful—in short, he’s like one of the Ocean’s Eleven guys, if they were inclined to strap on an armored suit and kick some terrorist ass.
As the film begins, Stark, an arms manufacturer who took over the business from his daddy, is flippantly confident that he’s doing the patriotic thing. It’s only after he’s kidnapped by Afghan warlords who are using his weapons to kill innocent villagers, that he realizes his company is doing more harm than good. He escapes from his captors by creating an ersatz fighting and flying suit. When he gets back to his laboratory in the states, he sets out to perfect it.
Along for the ride are Gwyneth Paltrow in a doting Girl Friday role that is beneath her abilities...

Rating:3]

Hope and Crosby. Abbott and Costello. Martin and Lewis. What do these comedy teams all have in common? Well, they’re all dudes, for one thing. In fact, I can’t think of a single all-female comedy duo for the ages. Until now.
Okay, so it may be a bit premature to suggest that Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are the next Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, but so far, these funny ladies are two-for-two. They were, of course, brilliant together on the set of SNL’s Weekend Update—the two smartest girls in the back of the class, cracking wise, throwing verbal spitballs, and making the boys swoon. And now they’re at it again in Baby Mama, playing an odd couple thrust together under unlikely circumstances.
Fey’s Kate Holbrook is an over-achieving VP at a natural food company. She is single, her biological clock is ticking, and a doctor has just blithely reported that he doesn’t like the looks of her uterus. So she hires Angie Ostrowiski (Poehler) as a surrogate mother to fertilize her eggs and bear her child.
Fey, very much to her credit, is playing Felix Unger here: She’s a little uptight, a...

Rating:2.5]

Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle was really less of a stoner film and more of a clever sendup of cultural stereotypes (okay, and a stoner film). Throw in a now-legendary Neil Patrick Harris cameo, and you’ve got all the makings of a cult classic. (Indeed, while the film did middling box office, it cleaned up on DVD.)
Very much to the producers’ credit, they don’t stray far from the formula with the sequel, which has the boys being mistaken for terrorists and sent to (and escaping from) Guantanamo Bay, crashing a Klan rally, accompanying Neil Patrick Harris to a whorehouse, and talking daddy issues (and smoking some kind bud) with the Commander-in-Chief. John Choo and Kal Penn make for enormously likeable leads—and while some of the jokes fall flat (a fantasy sex sequence involving Kumar, a hot chick, and a giant bag of weed should’ve been filed under: “Bad ideas conceived while high”), many more hit their targets. What’s more, the film is slyly smart about racial profiling and the war on terror. A stoner film with a brain? Duuuuuuude.

It’s hard to say what’s more glaring: Al Pacino’s fake tan or the enormous plot holes in this inept thriller.
Pacino plays Jack Gramm, a cocksure forensic psychiatrist who specializes in the serial killers. The film starts with a bit of torture porn—a masked killer slowly slices up one scantily clad twin while the other watches in horror. Fast forward to Gramm taking the stand, confidently telling the court that they’ve got their killer, Jon Forster. Forster, of course, maintains his innocence. However, the fact that Forster is played by Neal McDonough, whose preternaturally pale blue eyes pretty much limit him to villainous roles, is one clue that the guy might be guilty. The next clue? When convicted, he smiles a malicious, bad-guy smile, turns to Gramm and says, “Tick tock, Doc.”
Now it’s nine years later, the eve of Forster’s execution, and Gramm gets a phone call on his cell: “Tick tock, Doc. You’ve got 88...