Super 8

RATING:***** (5 stars)

In the summer of 1979, a group of young boys filming an amateur movie witness a train crash that might not have been an accident after all, and might also explain some of the strange disappearances and phenomena happening in their small Ohio town.

The latest to come from the imagination of producer/director/writer J.J. Abrams is a must-see thriller for the summer of 2011. Taking strong cues from Steven Spielberg, prepare to be thrown back to a strikingly good portrayal of late-1970's middle America... and then watch the mystery unfold.

The relatively unknown cast (the only face I recognized among the major roles was Kyle Chandler) gives a surprisingly good performance, but the real beauty of the film is in the depth of the characters and the sets themselves. Super 8 is not a film that is going to have you on the edge of your seat the whole time or that will have you overcome with emotion--but you will be involved the whole time and you'll love every second of it.

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X-Men: First Class

RATING:**** (4 stars)

In the early 1960s, Charles Xavier forms a group of people with wondrous genetic mutations that give them amazing powers. Among them is his closest friend, Erik Lensherr...

Hopefully if you are a serious X-Men fan, you have thrown classic canon to the wind by now with the X-Men films. That being said, X-Men: First Class is a rather good film easily on par with the first X-Men movie that hit theaters just over a decade ago. Expect some well-done special effects, but you can also plan to expect very little in terms of character depth from anybody in this film with the exception of our three main mutants.

Professor X (James McAvoy), Magneto (Michael Fassbender), and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) are the focus of the story here--at least, they are the only characters who we get to see any kind of growth from and get even a vague idea of what makes them tick. First Class is really the origin story for the two leading men, and don't be at all surprised when you see Fassbender powerfully commanding the screen more often than not--look to see him in more roles henceforth.

Long story short, if you can happily (or blissfully) ignore some of the standard X-Men canon, you are in for a real treat of a film with X-Men: First Class.

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The Hangover Part II

RATING:**** (4 stars)

Shortly after their adventure in Las Vegas, Phil, Stu, Alan, and Doug jet to Thailand for Stu's wedding. Despite precautions, mayhem ensues when they wake up the next morning and try to piece their night back together.

If you are looking for something wildly different from the first outing with the "Wolfpack", you won't find it here. What we get is actually not that different from a number of TV shows actually--something that is very formulaic but still enjoyable. In fact, you might even be able to match up the timeline between The Hangover and The Hangover Part II and find events happening at a similar time (the blackout, the twist, eureka moment), but it really should not detract from your enjoyment of the film as a whole.

Perhaps what the film does a great job is showing off many of the locations for the film. It also does a great job of *not* re-using much material from the first film. Plan on some serious laughs with the same kind of adult humor you got the first time around, and prepare for another set of memes to creep into pop culture for the rest of the year.

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Priest

RATING:*** (3 stars)

A priest disobeys an edict from the church and goes out to hunt down the vampires who kidnapped his niece.

Priest is actually a pretty solid post-apocalyptic science fiction thriller, despite the lack of love from critics across the country. Paul Bettany and Karl Urban are the big players in this one, and both do a respectable job in their roles--Bettany as a man who has seen more and sacrificed more than most, and Urban as a confident, almost snarky villain. You might recognize a face or two among the rest of the cast (like Stephen Moyer of True Blood fame), but generally there are going to be a lot of faces you won't recognize.

Which isn't to say that this film is all blah. On the contrary, the soundtrack is quite good and the storyline is something between a comic book action plot and more conventional science-fiction fair. Despite the lack of anything thoroughly amazing, Priest offers an entertaining 90 minutes of good, old-fashioned popcorn cinema.

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Thor

RATING:*** (3 stars)

When the mighty Thor is cast out from Asgard and sent to live among humans on Earth, he turns into one of humanity's most valuable defenders.

Starring Chris Hemsworth in the title role, Thor sets up another of Marvel's heroes with an origin story before giving us The Avengers in 2012. The Norse god of thunder's story is fairly straight-forward, with both timeline and character development alternating between light and extremely quick--which keeps his story as a single film instead of two.

Visually there is nothing not to love about the film. From the costumes to the backdrops to the action scenes themselves, you can tell the crew had fun working on the film and poured some love into the details. If the screenplay was as good that would have been nice too, but the love interest between Thor and Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) just seems too forced, and that is probably the fault of the pacing of the film more than anything else.

Because of the visual elements alone I would suggest catching Thor in theaters (if you don't mind the 3D surcharge), but otherwise there is nothing here that cannot wait until it hits DVD.

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