While Fast & Furious is far from a masterpiece, it’s the film that the original–The Fast and the Furious–wanted to be. The race scenes actually seem compelling, and the music and attitude mesh together to create a high-octane world where drivers live to race and race to live.

The fourth entry in the franchise, Fast & Furious technically takes place between the events of the second and third films. Picking up five years after undercover cop Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) allowed street racer/thief Dominic “Dom” Toretto (Vin Diesel) to escape justice, the movie finds Toretto and crew hijacking petroleum tankers outside the borders of the United States…

From early films like The Pope of Greenwich Village to later works such as Double Team and Get Carter, I’ve long been a fan of Mickey Rourke. Always one to bring a rugged honesty to his roles, Rourke was poised for superstardom in the late ‘80s, but it never quite materialized thanks to personal demons and a stab at a pro boxing career.

By the mid-to-late ‘90s, Rourke the boxer was no more. All that remained was Rourke the actor, hungry to reestablish himself as a box office contender. And so began his long walk down the comeback trail. At first, he took small but important parts in low-budget films such as Animal Factory and Buffalo ‘66, then graduated to more prominent roles in Spun and Sin City.

With the original cast members either dead or elderly, and shows like Voyager and Enterprise not even worth mentioning as possible successors, the suits at Paramount contacted director/producer J.J. Abrams and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. Not only were they asked to help re-launch the Star Trek franchise, but there was also the added pressure of taking a long-stale product and making it palatable to the general moviegoer (sorry Trekkies, but they already know they’ve got your money). The end result, while far from perfect, is an entertaining exercise in revisionist history.

I say “revisionist history,” because several things about the Star Trek universe have now been changed thanks to the film’s villain, a vengeful, time-traveling Romulan by the name of Nero (Eric Bana).

Here’s a piece of advice: Never play Trivial Pursuit with Robert Langdon, the hero of the Ron Howard-directed Angels & Demons. You’ll lose, and you’ll lose badly. That’s because Langdon is a walking catalogue of obscure scraps of lore, no matter how insignificant. He even makes Vatican officials look like first-year seminary students when discussing the history of the Catholic Church. Think the intellectual equivalent of Chuck Norris from, well, any Chuck Norris movie ever made. Too bad the movie isn’t as brilliant as its hero.

Based on the novel of the same name by Dan Brown, Angels & Demons picks up an undetermined length of time after events in The Da Vinci Code (even though the book actually served as a prequel)

I can sum up Terminator Salvation in one rather perfect word: BOOM. Throughout its 115 minutes of screen time, this film delivers a deafening cacophony of explosions, gunfire, and music blasted for dramatic effect. Shakespeare nailed it in Macbeth: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Director McG would have to receive the idiot label, as he somehow manages to disrupt the course of a franchise which has been chugging along steadily for a quarter of a century. As for the sound and fury thing, well, it’s a whole lotta sound and not much fury.

The movie begins in the year 2003 when a death row inmate named Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) is approached about donating his body to science (the consent form lets us know it’s the Cyberdyne Corporation).

The original Land of the Lost was a serious television show for kids created by Sid and Marty Krofft, the same minds behind The Bugaloos, Wonderbug, and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. The Will Farrell remake is anything but serious, so anyone hoping for the tone of the old show runs the risk of being disappointed. If, however, you’re looking for a briskly-paced comedy filled with absurd humor, dependable special effects, and plenty of action, then you might want to give this latest version a try.

Dr. Rick Marshall (Will Ferrell) is a paleontologist specializing in the study of tachyons. He believes that by learning to control them, mankind can travel “sideways” in time and space and solve the world’s energy crisis. When his funding runs out, and he nearly attacks a skeptical Matt Lauer on the set of The Today Show, his credibility in the scientific community is destroyed.

Talk about a disaster of Biblical proportions.

“Year One” falls flat from its genesis to its outtake-filled credits scene, never moving beyond obvious set-ups or jokes that have been as beaten to death as Abel. The one person who’ll be happy after walking out may be Will Ferrell, since “Land of the Lost” is no longer the only turkey around.

In a land before time, hunter Zed (Jack Black) and gatherer Oh (Michael Cera) offend their tribe and set out to walk to the end of the Earth. Then Zed, after eating some glowing fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, has what he thinks is an evolutionary leap and decides the planet isn’t flat. (He does wacky ninja moves and boomerang eyebrows all the time, so it’s hard to tell if he’s advanced.)

Soon they’re loping through a kind of Old Testament theme park that includes run-ins with Cain (David Cross) and his unfortunate brother (Paul Rudd), Abraham (Hank Azaria) and his would-be sacrificial son Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and a Roman King (Xander Berkeley) and centurion (Vinnie Jones) who turn burly Zed and girly Oh into orgy slaves, along with the loinclothed honeys they love.

To compare the inane “Year One” to a Monty Python comedy like “Life of Brian” is like saying a Natural History lecture is as thrilling as Raquel Welch in a pelt. It isn’t that coasting was the sole intent of director Harold Ramis (who’s always welcome when he wants to make something as fun and anarchic as “Caddyshack,” “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” or the undeniably great “Groundhog Day”). At times it seems that he, Black and cameo actors like Azaria really want to put on a good lark.

But, Holy Moses—what’s wound up on the screen is more like an amateur improv show, full of mugging, pokes in the ribs and bits that Mel Brooks would have rejected even in his most uninspired spoofs.

Making matters worse is that Cera and Black are poor choices to tie it all together. No one’s idea of a classic comedy team, Cera sing-songs his way through his stammering-victim moments while Black—whose performances have become so arch and flip we should worry he’ll break his back the next time he shows up—is insufferable almost from his first scene, his every line spoken with air quotes around it. He can do better than this.

During all of the film’s oh-so-long 97 minutes, “Year One,” barely earns a snicker. Anyone wanting as much as a sustained chuckle will feel as if they’re frozen in time.

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen takes all the good things about the first movie and makes them bigger and better… the CGI special effects are incredible, along with a collection of explosions which could only be delivered by Michael Bay.

But, it also exagerates all the confusing and poorly thought out parts of the first movie too. I would like to comment on the movie’s plot, but I’m honestly not a hundred percent what was going on from scene to scene.

The dialouge, acting and sheer length of this movie could have been done a bit better, but overall, there are great special effects, exciting action and fighting scenes, and plenty of explosions to go around.

I give this movie an 8 out of 10.