It's impossible to avoid the comparisons, so we may as well just get them out of the way early so we can move on. “The Amazing Spider-Man” (蜘蛛人：驚奇再起) — a reboot? Prequel? New chapter? It's hard to decide what to call it — is pretty much different in every way from the staggeringly successful Marvel Comics-inspired trilogy that preceded it.

The look and the energy of 'Snow White & the Huntsman' are what keep it engaging, if a bit overlong

There's a moment early on in “Men in Black 3” when Will Smith's Agent J sits down next to his longtime partner, Tommy Lee Jones' Agent K, and bemoans the fact that he's too old for this sort of thing — for running around New York in matching dark suits, chasing down aliens and zapping them with their shiny metal weapony doo-hickeys.

The cheap visual effects are so bad that you'll be wondering if you misplaced your 3-D glasses.

Filmmaker selectively leaves enough bad guys standing for no apparent reason other than the prospects of a sequel — no, please

Despite any irony behind the film's title, Marvel was right to play it safe with the moral twists and turns of “The Avengers.” But Joss Whedon, who both directed and wrote the film's screenplay, must have gotten a kick out of smashing up his hometown in the process.

The film speed of 24 frames-per-second barely outruns the relentless pace of pummeling that thumps through the Indonesian martial arts flick “The Raid: Redemption.”

Inspired by Hasbro's classic board game, “Battleship” is essentially a lavish but inconsequential diversion. For the film, the fact that aliens do exist, have responded to our radio signals, and have landed on Earth for possibly colonizing it is mainly an excuse for thrilling battleship action, and for slacker Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) to go through his coming-of-age.

It was only a matter of time before the popularity of reality TV would lead to reality movies. This scary new genre is not the same as a documentary, which looks at real people doing real things to tell a story. Reality movies take real people and put them in a fictional story,

“John Carter” is to action movies as eggs, milk and flour are to a cake. All of the elements are there but they just haven't come together to make a sweet treat.