What the hell is this crap? No, seriously... what the hell is it? A Good Day to Die Hard may carry the Die Hard name and feature Bruce Willis back in the role of superhero cop John McClane, but it's about as far from the spirit of the original Die Hard as you can possibly get. That this utterly disposable, entirely generic piece of action movie mayhem is allowed to advertise itself under the Die Hard banner is a travesty. Really, the title should be Bruce Willis Blows Shit Up in Russia, which is a far more accurate reflection of the film's content, not to mention its sheer contempt for the audience.

I find few things more frustrating than wasted potential and director Seth Gordon (Horrible Bosses) has such a mess on his hands with Identity Thief, despite committed leads Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy, that Wasted Potential may as well be the alternate title for this movie. Even the premise seems straightforward enough of a vehicle to get us to the raunchy jokes and slapstick humor we're to expect of this kind of comedy -- a mild-mannered Colorado-based businessman, Sandy Patterson (Bateman), travels to Florida to confront Diana (McCarthy), the psychotic woman who has stolen his identity and maxed out his credit card -- but the set-up is held back with so many inconsistencies that asking us to suspend disbelief for the first 30 minutes of the film (and intervals of ten minutes throughout) in order to get Bateman and McCarthy on a cross-country road trip that serves as an inward journey for them both is too much to bear.

Steven Soderbergh has been threatening to retire from filmmaking for some time now, but with Side Effects, he really means it. This is the last theatrical feature that the director of some of the finest movies of the past twenty-five odd years (if forced to choose, my Top 5 would probably look something like King of the Hill, Out of Sight, Che, The Limey and The Informant!, but that's leaving out a host of other great films, including sex, lies and videotape and Contagion) will helm for the foreseeable future, as he instead turns his focus to other artistic pursuits, painting and theater among them. (Soderbergh's does have one last narrative feature in the pipeline, the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, which is scheduled to premiere on HBO later this year.) As a swan song, Side Effects -- which stars Rooney Mara as the pill-popping wife of a disgraced Wall Street turk (Channing Tatum) fresh out of a prison stint for insider trading -- won't join the ranks of Soderbergh's finest achievements, marred as it is by a third act turn into thriller territory that, while entertaining, suffers from a series of too-convenient coincidences and a reliance on one very unfortunate stereotype. Still, the film does effectively encapsulate what has made him one of America's leading directors for almost three decades now... and why he'll be missed now that he's (at least temporarily) gone.

I generally try not to be too persnickety when creative types take liberties with long-established mythologies. Vampires that sparkle in sunlight instead of burn to a crisp? Kinda stupid, but okay. Peter Parker gains his web-shooting abilities organically rather than through invention? Not ideal, but I'll run with it. So I went into the new zombie rom-com Warm Bodies with an open mind, not thrilled about the improbable idea of watching a member of walking dead fall in love with a living, breathing human, but willing to be persuaded that such a thing might be possible. Unfortunately, not only did Warm Bodies -- which writer/director Jonathan Levine adapted from a book by Isaac Marion that, full disclosure, I haven't read -- fail to convince me of its central conceit, but the movie's general depiction of zombie life is shoddy, inconsistent and often downright dumb. As silly as I felt muttering to myself "But a zombie couldn't/wouldn't do that!" at every turn, that's how much the movie got on my nerves and made it almost impossible to enjoy its few modest charms. Here are the most irritating changes Warm Bodies makes to zombie lore.

Leave it to a pair of old pros to teach all those young whippersnappers out there how to make a crude, violent, racist, exploitative, T&A-filled and altogether brainless action movie. Dumb as a bag of rocks and as blunt as a... well, a bullet to the head, Bullet To the Head brings director Walter Hill and star Sylvester Stallone together for the first time in their respective careers. It proves to be a fruitful collaboration, with the two of them bringing out the best in each other. Now, that's not to say that movie itself is any good, because it's not... at least, not in the typical definition of "good" where elements like storytelling, character development and thematic subtleties are taken into account. No, this particular brand of "good" is more sensory in nature; while watching Bullet To the Head you're acutely aware of how stupid and pointless the whole enterprise, yet at the same time the movie successfully delivers a steady stream of short, sharp shocks to your system that keep you engaged. Put another way, it's bad, but it's never, ever boring.

If you've ever dreamed of seeing Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin together in the same movie, well... keep on dreaming. Because whatever deranged feature your mind conjures up while you're sleeping will almost certainly be better than Stand Up Guys the painfully bad crime comedy that finally unites these three acting legends under the guidance of director Fisher Stevens. (Yes... that Fisher Stevens). Not since Pacino squared off against Robert De Niro in Righteous Kill has a single movie so thoroughly blasphemed a set of Acting Gods.

Forget the Schwarzenegger dud The Last Stand; the most authentic, ridiculous and overall entertaining '80s action movie throwback in theaters right now is Parker, the Taylor Hackford-directed, Jason Statham-starring big-screen version of the crime novel anti-hero created by Richard Stark (a.k.a. Donald E. Westlake). Although the character has been brought to the screen several times before -- including the 1967 classic Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin, and the compromised 1999 Mel Gibson-led Payback -- this is the first film that has been able to legally use the Parker name. And unlike those movies, it's not an adaptation of Parker's 1962 debut The Hunter, but rather a more recent installment, 2000's Flashfire (although the plot, once again, involves the character being betrayed by his fellow crooks and then embarking on a mission of revenge). But even though it takes place in the period of iPhones and Google, Hackford is very much working in the tradition of seedy Reagan-era crime pictures like John Frankenheimer's 52 Pick-Up and William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A.. Here are five ways in which the mostly satisfying Parker clearly loves the '80s.

Sure, The Last Stand may look like a brainless, pumped-up action movie that only exists because ex-politician Arnold Schwarzenegger decided he wanted to be a movie star again. But in actuality, the film -- which casts Arnie as a border town sheriff tasked with preventing an escaped drug kingpin (Eduardo Noriega) from crossing back into Mexico -- has a number of valuable lessons to teach audiences. Here are just a few of the things I learned from this contemporary treatise on heroism, honor and killing bad guys real good:

If your goal is to make a contemporary version of Roman Polanski's Chinatown, complete with an anti-heroic private eye and a shady land-grab deal overseen by corrupt politicians and businessmen, you'd best bring your A-game. It's too bad then, that the creative forces behind Broken City -- including director Allen Hughes, screenwriter Brian Tucker and star Mark Wahlberg -- only came to play with their B-game. But hey, even second-string teams can eke out a victory now and then and Broken City turns out to be a solid, if unexceptional, urban crime yarn that updates the Chinatown template from 1930s Los Angeles for 2010s New York, although the movie's version of the Big Apple feels a heck of a lot closer to the '90s than today.

With Mama, horror movie maestro Guillermo del Toro continues to give back to his favorite genre, using his significant influence within the film industry to give new directors the opportunity to freak audiences out. Mama, the feature filmmaking debut of Spanish director Andrés Muschietti, is the third scary movie to be released under the "Guillermo del Toro Presents" banner after 2007's The Orphanage and 2010's Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. It's also the first horror movie for dramatic heavyweight (and current Best Actress Oscar nominee) Jessica Chastain, who gets a Goth makeover to play the edgy rocker chick-turned-reluctant guardian of two little girls recently returned to civilization after five years spent living like animals in a cabin in the woods, with only the ghost of a long-dead mental patient for company. Even if del Toro's name by itself is enough to lure you into the theater, here are five additional things you should know about Mama: