What went wrong with Man of Steel? The early teasers promised Terrence Malick. The finished film is more Michael Bay. Henry Cavill as Kal-El, a fugitive from a dead planet who gets god-like powers from our sun, is easily the best actor to ever play the role, pensive and thoughtful in spots, furious and heroic in others. There’s a lot going on behind his eyes. In smaller roles, Russell Crowe fares better than Marlon Brando did as Jor-El, who can communicate with his son from beyond the grave, and Michael Shannon seems like the perfect maniac to play General Zod, a power-mad despot who shares Kal-El’s powers.

This Is the End is a marvelously sustained, high-wire goof – a movie so nutty and daring, so crazy and out-there, that it feels like a low-budget independent except with big stars and a sizable budget. The movie marks the directorial debut of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who had previously collaborated as writers on Superbad and Pineapple Express. Their new movie has that same brash, did-they-just-say-that? attitude, only this one takes it to apocalyptic extremes – literally.

According to the what-if? scenario of The Purge, in the near future government will shut down for 12 hours one night each year — no police, no hospitals, no 911 — and people will be free to do whatever they want, even commit murder, without legal consequence.

Director Zack Snyder and producer Christopher Nolan collaborated to revive the iconic figure.

One thousand years after mankind abandoned Earth, a spaceship crashes on the planet, killing everyone aboard except the commanding officer Cypher (Will Smith) and his teenage son Kitai (Jaden Smith), who is trying to live up to his father’s legendary military record. As Cypher’s leg is broken, he can’t walk, so Kitai must venture outside by himself, find the tail of the shattered vessel and obtain a homing beacon that will send help.

The Austrian divorcee Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel) is 50, overweight (bordering on obese), lonely and in dire need of a vacation. She drops off her sullen, cellphone obsessed daughter at the home of a relative and heads off to Kenya, where she quickly learns that all the young men on the beach selling bracelets and tchotkes are also available for sex. They’re not prostitutes — they don’t talk about prices or time frames — but they willingly jump into bed with women like Teresa and make them feel, at least for a moment, desirable and happy and attractive.

There’s exactly one good scene in all of The Hangover Part III, a hilarious bit of business halfway during the end credits that reminds you what made the original film so good. The rest of this odious, mean-spirited movie — the crassest cash-grab to come out of a Hollywood studio in recent memory — appropriates the title and the characters from the previous pictures and sends them on a would-be adventure involving gangsters, gold bars and decapitated giraffes.

Noah Baumbach’s playful, effervescent comedy Frances Ha is the story of a young woman’s quest to find an apartment in New York. That’s an arduous task for most ordinary, gainfully employed people. But Frances (Greta Gerwig) is neither ordinary nor employed. She’s a relentless optimist who always believes success is just around the corner, even though she’s an apprentice for a dance company that refuses to hire her full time and her longtime roommate Sophie (Mickey Sumner, daughter of Sting) announces she’s moving out of their Brooklyn apartment to live with her boyfriend.

The protagonist of Simon Killer wanders the streets of Paris alone, often shot from the back so we see what he sees, the City of Lights never having looked this seedy and dangerous and menacing. Simon (Brady Corbet) has just graduated from college and broken up with his longtime girlfriend, so he decides to take a European vacation and clear his head. France is his first stop. He’ll stay there a lot longer than he anticipated.

The protagonist of Simon Killer wanders the streets of Paris alone, often shot from the back so we see what he sees, the City of Lights never having looked this seedy and dangerous and menacing. Simon (Brady Corbet) has just graduated from college and broken up with his longtime girlfriend, so he decides to take a European vacation and clear his head. France is his first stop. He’ll stay there a lot longer than he anticipated.

Director J.J. Abrams steers the USS Enterprise in a surprising direction in ‘Star Trek Into Darkness.’

At the start of Iron Man 3, the usually loquacious billionaire Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is off his game. Having learned of the existence of aliens and alternate universes in The Avengers, Stark is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. He’s had his mind blown, and he’s having trouble readjusting. For Christmas, he buys his girlfriend Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) a stuffed rabbit the size of a small building. When a terrorist known as The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) starts making threats on live TV and blowing up bombs, Stark gives his home address to a news crew and challenges the villain to attack him — which he does.

I can pinpoint the exact moment when I mentally checked out of Terrence Malick’s torturous To the Wonder and started thinking “Wankage!” It was the scene in which Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams are standing in the midst of a bison herd and nuzzling romantically, like love-struck horses. “What if the animals suddenly started to stampede?” I thought. “Are they being careful where they step? What are they doing in the middle of a herd of bison, anyway? Wouldn’t it stink to high heaven there? Couldn’t they get a room?”

Sequels, giant robots and superheroes are hurtling our way.

The documentary ‘Room 237,’ which explores the bizarre theories surrounding the 1980 horror classic, is being screened as part of a Stanley Kubrick retrospective at O Cinema Wynwood.

For its first hour or so, Oblivion is a visually mesmerizing, intriguing picture that doesn’t feel like the same-old: It engages your eyes and piques your curiosity. Then, gradually, the novelty wears off, the clichés start to pile up and we’re back to Post-Apocalyptic Dystopia 101. In his follow-up to TRON: Legacy, director Joseph Kosinski, with the aid of Oscar-winning cinematographer Claudio Miranda (Life of Pi), crafts some dazzling images and beautiful designs (the movie was shot using 4K cameras and enormous rear projections instead of green screens; see it in IMAX if you can). He also teases you with the story, letting you know right from the start things may not be what they seem.

Director Michael Bay uses humor to recount an incredible story involving bodybuilders, drugs and murder.

The Place Beyond the Pines, the new film by the director of Blue Valentine, does not lack for ambition. Beginning with its bravura opening shot — an uninterrupted take of Luke (Ryan Gosling), a motorcycle stunt rider, as he dresses in his tent and walks through a carnival to the stage where he’ll be performing — director Derek Cianfrance lets us know he’s working on a larger canvas. But while the scope of the movie is bigger, its impact is smaller. Blue Valentine was a precise, heartrending portrait of a marriage coming apart at the seams. The theme of his new movie is a lot harder to discern.

One person believes The Shining was Stanley Kubrick’s commentary on the Holocaust. Another points out clues that reveal the film is really about the genocide of Native Americans.

Where The Artist paid loving homage to the past with a wink to the present, Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves, a radical reimagining of the Snow White fairy tale, is the genuine article: a black and white silent film, set in 1920s Spain, that uses the camera tricks and effects of the era and almost never cheats. What’s more, unlike Hollywood’s recent plunderings of classic fables for modern audiences (Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, Snow White and the Huntsman, Red Riding Hood), Blancanieves is a true adaptation and not an appropriation. The film uses the Brothers Grimm story as a foundation for an original story, although most of the iconic elements are accounted for (the wicked stepmother, the poisoned apple, etc.).

When The Evil Dead invaded movie theaters in 1983, it detonated an atomic bomb on a stale horror-film genre overrun by masked killers and teen slashers. Made on a tiny budget, sporting Stephen King’s personal seal of approval and released unrated for its violence, the movie launched the careers of actor Bruce Campbell (Burn Notice), director Sam Raimi (Spider-Man) and producer Robert G. Tapert (TV’s Spartacus: War of the Damned). Watching it in a theater was a riotous experience: The audience screamed and laughed and gasped in shock at the situations these unknown filmmakers had conjured up, making Freddy and Jason and Michael seem like schoolyard wimps.

Original director Sam Raimi and producer Bruce Campbell took a hands-on approach to the remake, directed by Fede Alvarez.