G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA

Anticipating that the movie would suck, a friend extended a challenge prior to my screening of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra: Try making it through the whole movie without thinking of Team America: World Police.

NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM: BATTLE OF THE SMITHSONIAN

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian is to its precursor what Ghostbusters II is to Ghostbusters: the less-novel offering, sure, but a follow-up of surprising wit and great throwaway touches, and one that, in many ways, improves on source material that was pretty terrific to begin with. Despite its titular locale, no one is going to mistake director Shawn Levy's adventure comedy for a work of art, yet when this follow-up is really working - which is surprisingly often - it provides a giddy, giggly rush, and it's filled with comic bits that you could probably watch three or four times in succession and laugh at every single time. The movie is scrappy, silly, and a load of fun.

FAST & FURIOUS

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the viewers who are really, really dying to see Fast & Furious - like the guy ahead of me in line for tickets, who said to his buddy, "I want to sit as close to the screen as humanly possible" - will already have seen it by the time this review is published. So there's probably little harm in telling you that while the original stars of 2001's The Fast & the Furious do return for this fourth (if you can believe it) installment in the fossil-fueled franchise, Michelle Rodriguez's character gets killed off before the end of the first reel. Lucky lady.

CORALINE

Employing extraordinarily supple, nearly tactile stop-motion animation and 3D effects, the children's film Coraline is filled with visual magic, and just about corners the market on unsettling imagery. A grinning pair of parental doppelgängers, with buttons sewn into their eye sockets, serve a dinner composed of mango milkshakes and chocolate beetles. Two morbidly obese British dowagers unzip their skins and emerge as lithe trapeze artists. A feral alley cat talks, and a theatre full of mutts attends a vaudeville, and it's all strange and clever and tantalizingly designed. Is it ungrateful, if not downright senseless, to admit that I could hardly wait for this movie to end?