Production: Infinitum Nihil, GK Films, Zanuck Company

Cast: Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Eva Green, Jackie Earle Haley, Jonny Lee Miller, Chloe Grace Moretz, Bella Heathcote, Gully McGrath, Ray Shirley, Christopher Lee, Alice Cooper

The latest '60s/'70s TV show to get all dressed up as a fancy, big-budget feature film, Dark Shadows sinks its teeth half-way into its potentially meaty material but hesitates to go all the way. With an oddball premise that's right up his alley, director Tim Burton has stylish fun with a morally-and-time-warped family visited by an undead 18th century relative, as does Johnny Depp in the role of the antique British-accented vampire. But the humor slithers between the clever and the sophomoric and the film too often seems willing to settle for mild humor at the expense of hippie-era mores instead of pursuing the palpable temptation to become genuinely twisted. Still, with its central bloodsucker vs. witch rivalry and Depp in one of his patented bizarre roles, this has all the ear and tooth marks of an early summer winner for Warner Bros.

Reportedly, as a child Depp's obsession with the elegant, well-spoken, romantically haunted central character, Barnabas Collins, was deep to the point of being all-consuming. Unsurprisingly, the teenaged Burton was also a devotee of Dan Curtis's daily afternoon show, which ran on ABC from 1966-71 and amassed 1,225 individual episodes. This eighth collaboration between the actor and director affords Depp the opportunity to once again don unusual makeup and hair styles to become the white-faced, plaster-maned vampire who rejoins the living in 1972 after having been entombed for nearly 200 years.

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Director: Scott Hicks

Writers: Will Fetters, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks

Starring: Zac Efron, Taylor Schilling, Blythe Danner, Riley Thomas Stewart, Jay R. Ferguson

Release Date: May 4, 2012

The Lucky One is the latest Nicholas Sparks novel to make it to the big screen, following such heart-tuggers like The Notebook, Message in a Bottle, and most recently, 2010’s Dear John with Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried.

Directed by Scott Hicks (Snow Falling on Cedars, No Reservations, Shine), the latest offering fits perfectly into the Sparksian cinematic repertoire: It features a young, good-looking couple—this time played by Zac Efron and Taylor Schilling—who are kept apart by life’s circumstances.

The film opens with Iraqi war scenes that focus on 24-year-old Sgt. Logan Thibault (Efron), who narrowly escapes insurgent attacks, RPG fire and snipers, while others close to him don’t. He ascribes his luck to a photo—of a woman standing in front of a lighthouse—found on the desert floor. He believes that she’s the reason he makes it out of the war alive.

Logan returns stateside after his third tour of duty, but has trouble re-adjusting to civilian life. Rather than seeking help for his PTSD symptoms and depression, he decides to combat the ennui, inner conflict and restlessness by finding the girl in the photo.

Eventually, Logan finds his talis-woman in Hamden, La., but doesn’t tell her why he’s in town, fearing she’ll think him a crazy stalker. (He is, technically, but that’s besides the point.) Beth Green (Schilling) has misgivings about the stranger applying for a job at her family’s dog kennel; it’s her grandmother Ellie (Blythe Danner) that gives the former marine a chance.

Along the way, we meet Beth’s precocious, chess- and violin-playing son, Ben (Riley Thomas Stewart), and her ne’er-do-well ex-husband, who happens to be a good-ole-boy sheriff in town. Guess which of the two doesn’t take a shine to the mysterious stranger?

There are a number of similarities to previous films based on Sparks’ novels. It’s a given that a love story is the heart of his books, but we couldn’t help but think about Dear John and the role the Iraq war plays in each film. As we watch Logan renovate a fixer-upper and tickle the ivories on a neglected piano, we’re reminded of Ryan Gosling’s character in The Notebook. And in Message in a Bottle, Robin Wright’s character finds love letters in bottles washing up on shore and tracks down the author of the notes—without revealing the reason why she’s come to town. Sound familiar?

Efron takes on a role that’s a stretch from his teen heartthrob roles in the High School Musical TV movies. He still looks like a kid, but then again, most of the soldiers fighting our wars are kids. His Logan is stoic, but perhaps too much so, as his acting at times comes off as expressionless and one-dimensional. Schilling fares better, but in key scenes, the chemistry between the two leads feels forced.

The Lucky One’s plot becomes unnecessarily muddled with secondary plot twists and turns. One could rattle off a checklist of clichés found in the script: a best friend and a brother killed in war; parents lost in a car crash; domineering fathers and sons who seek their approval; a rescue in the middle of a raging storm; good-ol’ boy law enforcement; and, of course, lovers who are destined to be together.

Though underutilized, Blythe Danner commands the screen, and her young co-stars would be wise to watch how she does it. We liked the banter in scenes where she teases Beth about her growing attraction to Logan; in some ways, that pairing worked better than the Logan-Beth relationship.

Though we’re loathe to use the term, The Lucky One falls into the “chick flick” category. Efron and Schilling are a toothsome couple to watch, but unfortunately, this film will only appeal to those on date night or diehard Sparks fans.

Story: Mei (Catherine Chan) is wanted by all -- the Triads... The Russian mob... The NYC super and corrupt cops. Why? She has the secret code to the safe. Enter Luke Wright (Jason Statham), her protector... and the one who ultimately gets access to the safe.

Movie Review : It's a Jason Statham movie where the actor is once again seen paving his way to victory while sorting the good from the bad. So no prizes for guessing what lies in store: gun firing in loads and fist fights in aplenty. Add to that some Statham-ism and there's no looking back. Now, how many actors do we have out there who pick up call girls in NYC, pay them plenty of that dollar, get an entry into a sizzling restaurant and ask them to leave immediately. Or for that matter, how many Medowlands (New Jersey) ex-fighters do we have dressed in an executive suit breaking tracheas of the bad guys. Statham fans, there's enough of the suave in here.

But then, Jason Statham has competition in Safe. And this competition is a pretty tough one for it comes from the little Catherine Chan. With hardly any dialogues (in English) to herself, Chan actually keeps you asking for more each time she (or Statham) are missing in action. In fact, it's not just her computerised memory that helps her remember all important bank transactions in the Chinese world, it's her ultimate understanding of the big bad biz world (she excels in distinguishing between good business and the bad one) that takes you by surprise. Make sure you catch Catherine's Mei calling the shots - in every way - in the last sequence.

Of course, the two (Statham and Catherine) together make this gang war for the green bills in the bustling narrow bylanes of New York's China Town worth a watch. The action, on the other hand, is crispy and smart. As for the storyline, guess it was always meant to tread on safe ground... nothing that you have never seen before.

The families we most associate with Martin Scorsese are the five criminal ones that make up the mafia in the United States, and both they and Scorsese's films deal in violence involving pain and death. His new film, however, aims to entrance every member of every family, and it centres on the great art form that over the past century became the great family entertainment: the cinema. A dramatic pursuit many see as essentially violent and once described by the art theorist Herbert Read as "a chisel of light cutting into the reality of objects", it is created with a demand for "Action!" and ends with the order "Cut!". Based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a beautiful book, half graphic novel, half prose tale, by Brian Selznick, the movie is a delightful fable. Its various subjects include magic, tradition, respect for the past and affection between generations, all bound up in the history of the cinema and the machinery invented to capture images on strips of film and project them on screens.

Hugo is set in Paris in 1931 and begins with a breathtaking shot of the city, as the camera swoops down on to a busy railway station. It flies along a narrow platform between two steam trains, crosses a busy concourse and ends up on the 12-year-old Hugo, who is peering at the world from behind the figure "4" of a giant clock. Hugo (Asa Butterfield) has inherited a love of tinkering with machinery from his late father, and has quite recently taken over the job of superintending the station's clocks from his drunken uncle. The boy lives in the hidden tunnels and passageways of the building, where he's repairing a 19th-century automaton. He's a crafty Dickensian orphan, a benign phantom of the opera, a blood brother of Quasimodo, a cinematic voyeur looking out on the world like the photographer in Hitchcock's Rear Window. Fate has brought him there, and it then draws him into the orbit of a querulous old man, Georges (Ben Kingsley), who runs an old-fashioned shop on the station selling toys and doing mechanical repairs, assisted by his 12-year-old god-daughter, Isabelle. Hugo becomes involved with the old man when he's accused of theft and has a cherished book of drawings confiscated. He is then assisted by Isabelle in retrieving the book, and in turn, when he discovers she's forbidden to go to the movies, he takes her on a great "adventure", a visit to the lost world of silent movies at a season of old films. She is overwhelmed.

The literate Isabelle is a great admirer of Dickens, and a succession of clever Dickensian twists ensue as the labyrinthine plot takes the pair on a journey into a mysterious past. They discover the origins of the movies in the late-19th-century careers of the Lumière brothers, who put on the first picture show in Paris in 1895, and Georges Méliès, the professional magician, who became obsessed after attending this historical screening. The Lumières photographed the world as it was and didn't believe the cinema had a future. Méliès turned his theatre into a picture palace, built his own studio and became a prolific producer of fantasy films that merged life and dream, before his business tragically collapsed and he disappeared into obscurity.

Here's the best thing I can say about The Avengers (and no, I will NOT refer to it as Marvel's The Avengers, because the branding is implicit):

It offers a couple of the biggest laughs in recent memory, including a slapstick gag worthy of Chuck Jones in his Looney Tunes heyday.

Thankfully, there are other nice things to say about The Avengers, a Marvel mash-up featuring a group of superheroes who (almost) all have had their own movies. Don't think of this as a sequel to the others; it's its own thing unto itself.

And, thanks to writer-director Joss Whedon, that thing is veined with wit, even as it offers exactly the kind of action that fanboys and normal movie-goers alike want out of something like this. The wisecracks and bulls-eye one-liners aside, The Avengers offers big mouthfuls of action, at a scale that tickles the imagination.

Yet Whedon also realizes what the real attraction is here: It's not the moment when these various troubled superheroes put their own issues aside and band together to fight off a horde of invading aliens (although that's a moment that's worth the wait). Rather, it's about the sturm und drang -- the personal demons that goad these differently abled creatures into battling each other.

Those, after all, are the comic books that were always the best -- the ones that pitted superhero against superhero. You always know that the superhero will defeat the villain. But when it's hero vs. hero, well, anything goes.

Or so it seems in this movie. You've got Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) vs. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor vs. Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Hulk against Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Black Widow taking on Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). And that's not to mention the trash talk, the best of which is offered by Downey as the ever-flippant Tony Stark.

Watch American Pie Reunion Trailer: