OZ THE GREAT & POWERFUL

As numerous effect-heavy entertainments have proved over the years, few film actors, and even fewer good ones, look altogether comfortable performing in wholly pixelated landscapes opposite wholly digitized characters. Yet I'm not sure I've seen any star look less connected with his artificial environment than James Franco does in Oz the Great & Powerful, director Sam Raimi's mega-budgeted and intensely disappointing prequel to The Wizard of Oz.

FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS

Modern romantic comedies are in such generally dismal shape that I feel ungrateful for wishing that Friends with Benefits were better than it actually is. But while it's impossible to fully dislike any movie that finds a nitwit shrieking "John Mayer is our generation's Sheryl Crow!" or features a couple making a solemn vow on the Bible app of the woman's iPad, I left director Will Gluck's latest thinking that the film had just missed its mark. And that, after two frequently hysterical features in a row (2009's Fired Up!, Gluck's directorial debut, and last year's Easy A), its helmer had just missed his trifecta. Damn it.

BLACK SWAN

In director Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, the first words we hear are uttered by professional ballet dancer Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), who tells her mother, "I had the craziest dream last night." And for the next 105 minutes, the movie unfurls like a crazy dream itself - a crazy, fascinating, terrifying, exhilarating dream that you have no desire to wake from. You can label the film a psychological drama, or a hallucinogenic thriller, or an art-house horror flick, and each would be appropriate. But none of those tags really hints at how much delectable fun Black Swan is. As with a dream that you want to return to the moment you wake up, you want to experience the intoxicating, rapturous weirdness of Aronofsky's vision all over again the minute the end credits start to roll.

ALL ABOUT STEVE

It's one thing for a movie to present its audience with hateful characters. It's quite another when the movie itself appears to hate its characters, and in the depressingly, almost sadistically unamusing All About Steve, very little reads beyond the filmmakers' contempt for the "lovable" whack-job they're purportedly championing. I've seen stupider movies this year - at least two or three of them - but I don't think I've endured one that annoyed me more than this new Sandra Bullock vehicle by director Phil Traill, which humiliates its star at every turn, and humiliates you for spending 100 minutes trying to make sense of it.