After breaking out in Rome, Ray Stevenson played thugs in a slew of bad movies, from Punisher: War Zone to Cirque du Freak to The Book of Eli. He'll elevate his tough-guy game slightly in Thor and The Three Musketeers later this year, but anyone looking to see him step outside his goon-shaped box would do well to check out Kill the Irishman. The real-life character he plays is still basically a thug, but he's an intelligent, quirky thug with a fabulous mustache, and he holds his own against a huge cast of some of our greatest crime-movie actors. The film itself isn't great art, but it's a fun way to learn about a little-known period in our history, with a lot of explosions in it.

Los Angeles has been defeated. Yes, there were aliens involved, but that doesn't matter. The Marines at the center of Battle: Los Angeles could have been fighting the Girl Scouts of America, and they still would have fallen prey to the three classic villains of Hollywood: bad writing, bad acting and poor cinematography. Actually, Girl Scouts would have been an improvement over the alien invaders of B:LA (pronounced "blah") because I would actually have to give a writer credit for daring to pen a battle between Marines and Girl Scouts. Plus, I would understand the limitations of child actors, and I wouldn't be so disappointed in the movie's inability to clearly show me what a Girl Scout looked like. Also, the Girl Scouts probably would have been much scarier and more effective opponents than the bumbling, yet somehow successful ETs in this film.

Does this ever happen to you? Ever see a movie that is widely panned by not only critics, but by everyone else of sound mind and body that you know, and yet you still kind of loved it? Even though you know it's a manipulatively pandering piece of opportunistic garbage? It's embarrassing, but it happens sometimes, and it happened to me with I am Number Four. I'll attempt to explain why now.

You've got to hand it to Seth Rogen: the guy wanted to make a superhero movie, so he found a hero nobody was doing anything with, one that he could conceivably play, and he wrote a script (with collaborator Evan Goldberg) that successfully hybridized the Green Hornet's atypical origin story with a slacker buddy comedy. When his director and co-star backed out, he found another director and another co-star, and the end result, the 3-D, Michel Gondry-directed, visually stunning Green Hornet, is unlike any superhero movie I've seen. It manages to take Rogen's idiotic, confrontational comedy shtick and make it a seamless part of the story of a hero's rise. Because what kind of idiot puts on a mask and goes out looking for a fight?

Remake Total Recall? Blasphemy. Granted, Paul Verhoeven's 1990 re-imagining of the Philip K. Dick short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" wasn't exactly faithful to the source material, but then, neither was Blade Runner, and both are masterpieces in their own way. With Colin Farrell stepping into the lead role in the film, which will take place entirely on Earth, they might as well change the name entirely, and leave Recall's legacy untainted. Or, better yet, remake these other Arnold Schwarzenegger films that could stand to be updated for the new century.

In a college dorm somewhere, a Resident Advisor has put her head on this movie's poster and modified the title in an attempt to seem cool. It will fail.

Like all Coen Brothers movies, True Grit is a solemn blend of comedy and murder, populated by more quirky, funny characters than you can fit in a woodchipper. Obviously, each of their movies is a unique snowflake, and has a slightly heavier balance of one than the other, but it's amazing how they consistently manage to deliver a similar mix of subject matter, or, rather, are drawn to material that has that mix. You could call it formulaic, but when the formula is so delicious, and you drink a big glass of it every time it's put in front of you, all you're doing is calling yourself a big baby. I must be such a baby.

With two glamorous actors in the lead roles, an exotic locale and the vague theme of international intrigue, it seems like The Tourist is trying to be an old-fashioned type of movie, in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, or The Man Who Knew Too Much. It's got all the right elements -- a mysterious woman, a train ride, a case of mistaken identity, sexless longing -- but Jolie and Depp are basically acting as placeholders, waiting for the plot to be fixed and decent dialogue to be written so they can actually start making the movie. And how director Florian Maria Georg Christian Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck got involved in this mess, I have no idea.

Dwayne Johnson's return to action films is long overdue. Aside from his awesome (but tiny) role in The Other Guys, he's been mainly stuck in Disney territory, babysitting kids and flying around on fairy wings. Faster takes him back to his strike zone -- movies like The Rundown, where he can get in knife fights while surrounded by explosions. Except the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. Faster is ridiculous, but no fun. It's violent, but in the least creative way possible. People run and drive fast, but it's usually just because they need to get somewhere. And when they drive backwards, it's not clear why. Basically, the story is as monochromatic as the film's palette, which seems to use only two colors, tan and brown.

Regardless of whether you felt Zack Snyder's 300 was spectacular art or mindless drivel, or that his Watchmen was too faithful or not faithful enough, or whether you think he's a good choice to direct the next Superman movie, you have to admit you're intrigued by Sucker Punch. Sure, the latest trailer is chock-full of his overused slow-motion, but it's also packed with more geektastic imagery than any movie we've ever seen before, leading one man to call it Things The Internet Likes: The Movie, and numerous others to compare it to Inception due to its dream-state storyline. So is it actually Nerd Inception? Let's use what we've learned from the new trailer to take a closer look.