The Green Lantern

The Green Lantern

Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard

Directed by Martin Campbell

Don't let that brat Judy Moody tell you this is a not bummer summer. Has the kid seenHangover II or Pirates 4? And wait till she gets a load of Green Lantern, a new primer on how not to make a comicbook movie unless you want to screw shit up. Flat FX, smirky acting, clunky writing and clueless direction. WTF?

Ryan Reynolds is all surface as Hal Jordan, the reckless test pilot recruited by the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps to protect the world from evil, in this case the many-tentacled Parallax, a former Lantern who went power-mad. Adapting the DC Comics franchise are four credited screenwriters who, besides deserving no credit, falsely indicate that Hal is the corps' first human inductee. Huh? Back in 1940, artist Martin Nodell and writer Bill Finger created the first human Lantern as railway engineer Alan Scott. Hal didn't show up on the page till 1959.

Peter Travers reviews The Green Lantern in his weekly video series, "At the Movies With Peter Travers"

Pesky details. Listen, I wouldn't give a damn if this screen Lantern had its own energy source. But not even director Martin Campbell, who worked wonders intro-ing James Bond in 2006's Casino Royale, can get this cinematic corpse on its feet. Here's what's shaking. Hal gets off on playing with his green ring, which gives him powers limited only by his imagination. He goes galaxy-flying, meeting up with 3,600 peacemaking Lanterns, including fishlike Tomar-Re, voiced with welcome sass by Geoffrey Rush, and Sinestro (Mark Strong), a honcho from the guardian planet Oa, who threatens to fire Hal's ass if he doesn't start shaping up.

The 12 Must-See Summer Movies — Plus Five Unheralded Gems and Five More to Skip

So Reynolds replaces his patented grin with square-jawed purpose, stops playing cutesy with his pilot sweetie, Carol Ferris (Blake Lively is decorative — no more), and realizes that his romantic rival, nerdy scientist Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard), has been co-opted by Parallax, causing Hector's eyes to turn yellow, his head to expand and his rage to explode. It's an impossible role, but Sarsgaard plays it for real and gives the movie a touch of gravity. Nothing else sticks to the mind and heart. Hal claims that a Lantern's only enemy is fear itself. The thought of a sequel to this shamelessly soulless Hollywood product scares me plenty.

Page One: Inside The New York Times

Page One: Inside The New York Times

Directed by Andrew Rossi

Is print in ashes? or have reports of its death been grossly exaggerated? Page One, a potent and provocative documentary from Andrew Rossi, looks at the carnage done to newsprint by the rise of the Internet, the plunging of ad revenues and circulation, and the firings that left blood on the walls of old media. Granted rare access for more than a year to the newspaper of record, the great Gray Lady called The New York Times, Rossi operates out of the media desk established in 2008. We see media editor Bruce Headlam confer with reporters, including new-media recruit Brian Stelter, Tim Arango and especially David Carr, the gravel-voiced exjunkie whose attack approach — backed up with scrupulous reporting — makes him the hottest print poster boy since Woodward and Bernstein. No one in the Green Lantern Corps can match Carr's takedown of Vice magazine staffers who think they're reporters, the hubris of Tribune Co. chairman Sam Zell and CEO Randy Michaels, or even the iPad ("You know what this reminds me of? A newspaper").

The 12 Must-See Summer Movies — Plus Five Unheralded Gems and Five More to Skip

Rossi lucked out by being around when Wikileaks whistle-blower Julian Assange brought the Times secret documents about the war in Afghanistan, recalling Daniel Ellsberg leaking the Pentagon Papers to the Times in 1971. One difference, says executive editor Bill Keller: "Ellsberg needed us. Wikileaks doesn't." Rossi does tweak the Times for its arrogance and the internal- fraud scandals involving Jayson Blair and Judith Miller. But seeing the Times enter a future geared to compromise its standards is scarier than any horror film. For those of us who read — on smudgy paper or a battery-powered screen — Page One is a vital, indispensable hell-raiser.

Super 8

Super 8

Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, Joel Courtney

Directed by J.J. Abrams

What happens when a kid with a camera finds reality rocketing beyond his eeriest alien fantasies? For answers, catch Super 8, a retro monster mash with a child's heart, a prodigy's unstoppable imagination and FX dazzle to spare. Writer-director J.J. Abrams and producer Steven Spielberg have tapped their youthful cellu­loid dreams to craft the ultimate home movie, a creature feature built to scare you silly and maybe save the world.

It seems fitting that the director of the Star Trek prequel would unite with the master behind Close Encounters of the Third Kind and War of the Worlds. Abrams was only 15 when Spielberg, two decades older and impressed by the kid's Super 8 films, hired him to organize the 8mm movies he himself made as a teen. In a sense, they both come from outer space, an obsession with sci-fi embedded in their DNA.

Peter Travers reviews Super 8 in his weekly video series, "At the Movies With Peter Travers"

Set in an Ohio steel town in the summer of 1979, Super 8 blends the fun vibe of The Goon­ies(story by Spielberg) with the parallel-universe thrills of Abrams' Lost and Fringe. The film's teen misfits are bonded by hormones and a need to connect. Newcomer Joel Courtney is stellar as Joe Lamb, 14, a boy reeling from the death of his mother and the emotional absence of his dad (Kyle Chandler), the deputy sheriff.

Filmmaking provides a harbor for Joe. But he's not the driving force behind the Super 8 camera. That would be Charles (feisty Riley Griffiths), the perfectionist auteur of their zombie movie (loved the crude footage of nails driven into the skull of the undead). Joe handles the special effects. Martin (Gabriel Basso), Preston (Zach Mills) and braces-wearing Cary (expert scene-stealer Ryan Lee) pretend to follow the leader.

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New to this boys' club is Alice (Elle Fanning), a dream girl Charles recruits for the female lead. His instincts for talent are spot-on. Alice, a tomboy about to blossom, has grown a backbone from coping with her dad (Ron Eldard), who hit the bottle after Alice's mom split. Fanning, so luminous in Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, shines brighter here. No wonder Charles and Joe fall hard. Fanning delivers a shooting-star performance that takes you places you don't see ­coming.

The "Whaaat!" moments start with a fireball of a train wreck that explodes with sound and visual fury. Later, we'll see the same scene as recorded by the primitive Super 8 camera. The contrast is illuminating. Can you spot a monster crawling out of the wreckage?

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Abrams and Spielberg don't always bring out the best in each other. The clichéd shot of children staring skyward in wonder should have died with 1991's Hook. And Abrams has a propensity for adding plot twists that go nowhere (hello, Lost). Still, Super 8 kicks in where it counts. Pulses will pound and palms will sweat. But nothing works without a human connection. The monster that ate Manhattan in Cloverfield, which Abrams produced in 2008, lacked a soul. In Super 8, Abrams makes us care. This movie, a true beauty, will put a spell on you.

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Movie Riview: X-Men: First Class

X-Men: First Class
Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence
Directed by Matthew Vaughn

Just when you wanted to lighten the memory load on your personal hard drive by deleting the X-Men franchise (yes, The Last Stand and Wolverine sucked that bad), along comes this primal blast of a prequel, a potent reminder of what jazzed us about Bryan Singer's first two X-Men and the Marvel comics that spawned them. X-Men: First Class, the fifth in the series, is directed by fresh hand Matthew Vaughn, and as Kick-Ass proved, he's a live wire. In this cheerfully perverse origin tale of Magneto, Professor X and their mutant team, Vaughn delivers a fireworks display of action, smarts and fun, plus a touch of class from actors who can really act.

Peter Travers reviews X-Men: First Class in his weekly video series, "At the Movies With Peter Travers"

James McAvoy as telepathic Professor X and Michael Fassbender as the metal-bending Magneto are both dynamite. They take roles created, respectively, by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen and give them an exuberant jolt of youth and flawed ambition. As Oxford brainiac Charles Xavier, McAvoy isn't bald, in a wheelchair or a stuffy utopian. He has one eye on a hot CIA agent (Rose Byrne) and the other on creating a society where young mutants can harness their powers and coexist with humans. This doesn't sit well with Fassbender's Erik Lehnsherr, a Holocaust survivor and the future Magneto, who'd like to see humans heel to mutants. That kind of thing can put a kink in a friendship. Luckily, the boys unite against the film's Dr. Evil, Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon spewing hellfire). Set in 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the prequel dances to an irresistible James Bond vibe that Fassbender runs with in high style (Daniel Craig, watch your back). Did you know the X-Men played a key role in the Cuban Missile Crisis? You will now.

Trouble spots? Too many young mutants means that too few register. But Jennifer Lawrence, Katniss in the upcoming Hunger Games, defines bombshell as Raven, Xavier's adoptive sister, who shape-shifts into the blue-skinned Mystique or anyone else she fancies. Catch her in Magneto's bed – yowsa! Props to Nicholas Hoult for giving a deep-well gravity to the cerebral Hank McCoy even as he morphs into Beast. And January Jones spins her Betty Draper cool into diamond-hard ice shards as Emma Frost, Shaw's accomplice. So who cares about plot holes and a few tacky effects? Go, mutants! You just made this summer movie the badass place to be.