It's as slick and fun as summertime entertainment should be. Downey is still an arresting presence, glib to the nth degree and supremely confident that he's smarter than anyone else.

It's the nicest Mother's Day gift available at the movies this weekend.

Mother and Child is depressively interesting, with characters constantly ruining their best chances at happiness.

Somewhere, Wes Craven is laughing up his sleeve, and Robert Englund is grinning. It's nice to know that you're irreplaceable.

When the fadeout comes, viewers may feel as unsatisfied with the movie as these characters are with their lives.

Without previous knowledge of Andy Diggle's comics, The Losers looks like every other globetrotting gunpowder flick in which good guy bullets never miss and bad guy bullets never hit their targets.

Even stock characters -- Zoe's tirelessly supportive friends and relatives -- get style points for giving jobs to old pros Klein, Linda Lavin (Alice) and "Mr. C" himself, Tom Bosley. Of course, the babies are adorable.

Kick-Ass is a rabid puppy of a movie, energetically bounding off the screen and into your lap, where it proceeds to chew off your face.

Except for slipping on a third-act soapbox, The Joneses is a deft allegory of the greed and coveting that led to the recession. At times, you wonder if something like this scam could really happen, or does.

I seriously doubt that it happened this way, with such convenient strife and truncated solutions. The movie is about baseball but plays like T-ball, with each situation teed up for easy swings.

The movie grabbed me and wouldn't let go during a bravura set piece at a soccer game when Campanella's camera glides into the stadium, finds Benjamin's face in the crowd and doesn't stop moving (with only a couple of edits) for six breathtaking minutes.

Date Night is really just another example of what happens when funny sitcom stars are lumped together in a movie, believing that laughter exponentially increases with screen size.

Clash of the Titans redefines 3-D but in the wrong way; the movie is dull, dingy and, well, let's just say dull again.

The movie maintains its posture of mystery long after the solution is evident, and the best suggestion is to just smirk with the flow.

There's much more to the adventure, a deft balance of fantasy and teen angst that never loses its contemporary sense of humor.

None of these complaints would matter if The Bounty Hunter possessed even a smidgen of inspired comedy. It doesn't.

Rapace is a magnetic presence in a far-ranging mystery requiring such a solid character to orbit around.

Nothing much happens in Greenberg, yet Stiller and co-star Greta Gerwig make inconsequence tolerable with solid performances.

The Runaways isn't just about rock 'n' roll; it IS rock 'n' roll, as loud, sexy, sometimes sloppy and ultimately exhilarating as the music can be.

The only memorable aspect of She's Out of My League is Eve's performance. Not that it's good, but it does possess the hypnotic quality of a flicker ring.

Our Family Wedding should embarrass Whitaker and each of his co-stars, perhaps except Carlos Mencia, whose chief attribute as an actor is that he's a so-so standup comedian.

If he made The Ghost Writer under a pseudonym, it might be roundly hailed as the classy white-knuckler it is. But it's Polanski's name above the title, with his own ghosts haunting each frame.

The new, vastly improved Star Trek moves at warp speed through a marvelously reinvented sci-fi franchise, reverent to the past and firmly entrenched in the now.

Wolverine is a solid start to the ever-lengthening summer movie season, when all that matters is the bang and the bucks paid for it.

Quantum of Solace bends whatever rules 2006's Casino Royale didn't break, presenting more action in less time, with a world domination scheme based on natural resources rather than unnatural gadgets.

We've seen plenty of sword-and-sandal epics, full of robustly virile men fighting like real men against other men. But we've never seen those hyper-macho mechanics presented with the brutal beauty and thrilling finesse of 300, clearly the best film of 2007 so far.

Casino Royale mostly succeeds as an introduction to a badder Bond than ever.

The IMF workings are still complex, but without Brian DePalma's artistic indulgences (Part 1) and John Woo's poetic distractions (Part 2). Abrams cuts to the chase whenever the option arises, and the results don't leave much time to question logic or motive. [4 May 2006, p.6W]