In The Dictator, perhaps defeated by his own growing notoriety, Sacha Baron Cohen turns away from the Candid Camera gimmick that made Borat, Bruno, and the TV show that spawned them such thorny, polarizing sensations. It seems like a shrewd move: the logistical challenges aside, pranksters have a short shelf life, and Bruno had already begun to show diminishing returns. But it also leaves a void that Baron Cohen can’t seem to quite fill.

Say what you will about Borat, but it took tremendous courage and fortitude to stage a naked wrestling match in a room filled with bewildered conventioneers, and so forth. Baron Cohen’s ability to keep a straight face during some of the escapades was awe-inspiring. And the often conciliatory, sometimes even conspiratorial responses of the real folks with the misfortune to run into the gleefully racist, sexist, and homophobic Kazakh added a productively uncomfortable dimension to the shock comedy.

All of that is gone, and it’s not clear how much use there is for what’s left. The Dictator unveils a character who’s more than a little similar to Borat: another delusional, anti-Semitic Middle-Easterner on a whirlwind tour of the States. Where Borat was a destitute farmer, Alladeen is a luxuriantly bearded autocrat from a fictional oil-rich nation, but the two have many of the same ideas about women, Jews, and western culture. The plot finds Alladeen stripped of his trademark facial hair and shoved onto the sidelines as his scheming vizier (Ben Kingsley) works to enrich himself and — horrors! — bring democracy to his homeland at Alladeen’s expense. Our hero has to thwart the evil plot with the help of only a feminist liberal hippie (Anna Faris) and an old associate whom Alladeen had tried to have executed.

The first half hour of the 85-minute film is miserably unfunny (Baron Cohen and his director, Larry Charles, have zero facility with set-up and exposition), and I dug in for a lengthy slog. Matters improve significantly once The Dictator finally gets to the stuff we came for — viz., the increasingly outrageous and deliberately offensive comic set pieces,  several of which are very amusing indeed. Some of the best jokes are blindingly obvious, and work because of how far Baron Cohen takes them; others, such as one involving a woman in labor (Kathryn Hahn, always a welcome sight), work because they were clearly devised by a madman. Either way, when The Dictator is on, it can be a pretty singular experience.

One problem is that this doesn’t happen often enough: the film’s sketch-like structure dictates that when something’s not working, all we can do is stare at it glumly. Another is that the more conventional narrative format reveals a fundamental confusion. What isThe Dictator about, exactly? Baron Cohen is equally mean-spirited toward everyone, but to what end? The last 10 minutes hedge and reverse course a good half dozen times to ensure that the film doesn’t take any sort of honest position on any of the issues it lampoons — American foreign policy, Islamism, democracy in the Middle East, etc. The Dictator having been stripped of the attention-grabbing reality-show dimension of its predecessors, we are left wondering just what it is that this supremely gifted comic is trying to express.

Nicholas Sparks destroys everything. Scott Hicks is a real filmmaker, and no one can blame him for not taking a shot at salvaging something from the typically turgid and idiotic sap bucket that is The Lucky One, but the material defeats him handily. Hicks approaches the film with his typical lyrical elegance and even, at first, some impressive attempts at narrative economy.  It’s no use. Every single moment of this romance between a PTSD-addled Marine (Zac Efron) and an adorable single mom with an abusive ex-husband (Taylor Schilling) rings so glaringly false that it’s impossible to believe that anyone who’s ever picked up a book would fall for this crap. At least Twilight has vampires, and some subtext.

The bill of goods Sparks is trying to sell here is that the titular soldier finds a picture of a pretty lady in some rubble in Afghanistan, thereafter survives a series of close calls and, upon returning to the states, walks (yes!) from Colorado to Louisiana to find her. When he does, and learns that the photo belonged to the woman’s now-deceased brother, he doesn’t tell her why he’s there (and she doesn’t ask), instead initiating a romance with her and a friendship with her young boy. Meanwhile, her ridiculous asshole of an ex-husband lurks menacingly and threatens to take her kid away for no plausible reason at all.

Put aside the inherent stupidity of all this and consider what a dramatic black hole it is. The set-up takes about twenty minutes, after which we are waiting for precisely three things: (1) the sex scene; (2) the fight scene between the Marine and the ex-husband; and (3) the scene where she finds out about the photo and confronts him tearfully. It takes over an hour of clunky dialogue and endless golden sunsets and nothing else whatsoever to get to these meager payoffs. It doesn’t help that Schilling and Efron are a far cry from The Notebook’s Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling; Efron, in particular, has grown up to have Keanu Reeves’ vacant good looks, without the latter’s shred of an oddball personality.

I’m also kind of offended at Sparks’ appropriation of PTSD and the military experience in Afghanistan for his latest moronic wish-fulfillment fantasy. Can’t he write the same damn book over and over without  bringing in gravely serious subject matter that many people want to see treated with some thoughtfulness and dignity? Two days before watching this movie, I re-watched Titanic, currently back on the big-screen, and saw how this sort of thing is supposed to be done. The Lucky One seems so feeble, so miserable in comparison.

The rule for reviewing The Cabin in the Woods appears to be that you do not talk about The Cabin in the Woods. A series of long-lead press and festival screenings gave birth to a full-bore internet campaign to protect the film’s secrets, encourage avoidance of its marketing campaign, and heap shame on anyone who would dare leak spoilers. The irony is that while I’m always a proponent of knowing as little as possible in advance, The Cabin in the Woods is actually fairly hard to spoil – it doesn’t rely on shocking plot twists, and the contours of what’s really going on are clear from the beginning. And it’s hard to say much of substance about the film without touching on what it’s about. But the rules are clear. We’ll plod on in darkness.

One harmless thing to know is that the film was written by Joss Whedon – he of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly/Serenity, and the forthcoming (allegedly terrific) Avengers film – and co-written and directed by long-time Whedon collaborator Drew Goddard. And his presence is felt from the get-go. Whedon has a distinctively snarky, smart-alecky writing style that has earned him legions of fans, and it is certainly on display here: the dialogue is full of knowing, sarcastic asides, and an aggressive pop culture awareness that recalls Scream. I am generally somewhat allergic to this – Whedon has always seemed to work a little too hard to show that he’s smarter than his own stories. But it’s hard to argue with his approach when the movie is itself one big pop culture riff.

The genius of the film is how well that riff is constructed. Scream was a parody that worked pretty well as an example of what it was parodying. The Cabin in the Woods toes the line between parody and deconstruction, but it transcends its subject matter rather than just subverting or co-opting it. While poking fun at the horror genre, it becomes something else and something more.

The starting point is the enduring genre cliché: a bunch of teenagers retreat to a cabin in the woods to party, and are promptly picked off one-by-one by zombies/hicks/slashers/vampires/mutants. Except this time, there’s more to the story than just some kids being hunted by monsters. Because the cabin – and everyone and everything in it – is a front for something significantly more sinister.

The film tips us off to that fact in the opening scenes. It’s the precise nature of who or what is behind the events in the cabin that the film has so much fun slowly revealing. The answer is deliriously clever, and attempts to say something profound (and vaguely Michael Haneke-ish) about the nature and enduring power of the horror genre. It also leads to one of the most insanely entertaining horror climaxes in years.

There are some problems. The Cabin in the Woods dispenses information a bit inelegantly; there’s an extended sequence, just before all hell breaks loose, where the film essentially delivers the same revelations for a second time. The ending, though gutsy and inspired in conception, is utterly botched in the execution; what should have been an awesome stinger has all the impact of an “ACME” bomb exploding in a Looney Tunes short. And the film’s essentially Whedon-y nature inherently means your mileage may vary. But the hype is mostly justified. The Cabin in the Woods is surprising, kind of brilliant, and loads of fun.

A world in which 21 Jump Street exists may not have room for the American Pie franchise. It’s hard to get far with gross-out money shots these days, and mainstream comedy has grown so self-aware that while the first American Pie film may have been my generation’s Animal House, I get the sense that the current crop of teens don’t need or want their own. And those of us who actually grew up on American Pie seem perfectly happy devouring the shrewder work of Apatow, McKay, and the like.

Or maybe I’m just in a lousy mood because American Reunion, the Pie franchise’s zombie-like lurch from the grave nine years after American Wedding, is so brutally terrible. Aimed squarely and almost exclusively at those nostalgic for Jim, Oz, Kevin, Finch, and Stifler in their pie-fucking heyday, the film is an interminable parade of lazy callbacks. Look, there’s Stifler (Sean William Scott), still a horndog asshole, now plodding through a menial office job. And Jim (Jason Biggs) is still a slightly bumbling nice guy, now a little slack-jawed and paunchy, still having awkward “talks” with his dad (Eugene Levy), his sex life on the rocks after the birth of his son. And Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas), who – oh, I don’t even know – he’s married now but still pining after Tara Reid, I guess. (Reid truly looks like a reanimated corpse.) And they’re all headed to their high school reunion, which means that all the minor players (Sherman! Nadia! The MILF guys!) get to take their perfunctory bows.

The movie is 115 minutes long, and it’s not funny. It’s just not. There’s no plot or comic hook beyond having these characters appear on screen a decade older. The screenwriters, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, simply rehash the stuff that worked 10 years ago, but can’t recreate its charm. The only character that seems to have had the benefit of a moment’s thought from the screenwriters is Oz (Klein), who is now an oily, obnoxious sports anchor, shouting the nightly sign-off “Play on, playa!” and trying to live down in an embarrassing appearance on a celebrity dance reality show. But that doesn’t go anywhere remotely clever either. Oz’s big scene is a truly embarrassing teary reunion with his old flame Heather, played by Mena Suvari, while his new girlfriend gets slut-shamed.

Maybe most distressing is how retrograde the film feels. American Wedding had the lovely scene where Stifler does a dance-off at a gay bar. American Reunion is wall-to-wall gay panic jokes. Overweight people and women who enjoy sex are mocked mercilessly. Stifler triumphantly gets revenge on his boss by informing him that though he may be rich, “you’re still a nerd, and I can still kick your ass.” Great.

No doubt there’s an audience for another edition of this hugely popular property, but I can’t imagine they’ll end up happy with American Reunion. It’s so shapeless, so witless and cheap and offensive. It’s strictly dominated by so many better recent films. There’s another comedy in theaters now, a hilarious and profound one, about going back to high school and discovering the eerie disconnect between your generation and the next. It’s called 21 Jump Street, and you should go see it.

Mirror Mirror tries to be an amiably goofball spin on Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. The problem is that it doesn’t have a spin. It casts Julia Roberts as the Evil Queen, affording us the rare opportunity to see Roberts play mean and rude. It turns the dwarves into a mildly disgruntled bunch of forest-dwelling bandits, like diminutive Merry Men, which, whatever.  There are some isolated hijinks involving malfunctioning love potions and so forth, a meta-joke or two, and a dead-end subplot concerning how the Queen keeps her subjects in check.  But this isn’t exactly a new vision of Snow White. It’s more like a disorganized, ineffectual riff.

The best part of the film is Armie Hammer as the Prince, mostly because he’s the only one here who seems to have a clear sense of what he’s after – a gentle spoof of the straitlaced fairy tale hero, noble and seeking adventure. He’s funny and effortless, mocking his own square-jawed good looks and baritone; at one point, a magic spell turns him into a dog, and Mirror Mirror’s shrewdest and most interesting move is to eschew any effects and just let Hammer playact it.

Everyone else is at sea. Lynn Collins’ Snow White is a total non-entity, and on the strength of this and Abduction, I am prepared to declare Collins the most tedious human being on the planet. The dwarves are mystifyingly unfunny, to the point where I’m not clear on what the screenplay was attempting to do with them; they seem to each have a “quirk” of some sort (one of them really wants a girlfriend; another is named “Wolf” and seems to be a shaman maybe), but that’s about it, and I couldn’t even say if that’s true for each of the seven. (At one point, someone regards the dwarves and tells them that “You’re short, and it’s funny,” so maybe that’s the joke.)  Julia Roberts is amusing and appears to enjoy playing against type, but she’s at best worth a chuckle or two. There’s also Nathan Lane as the Queen’s lackey (doubling as the Huntsman), and he has a couple of funny lines but not much else to do.

Director Tarsem Singh, too, is neutered. Singh’s entire filmography – consisting, before now, of The Cell, The Fall, and Immortals – is premised on his elaborate surrealist visions, and while a fairy tale seems suited to this m.o., the visuals in Mirror Mirror are plasticky and sterile, hardly resembling the gonzo canvasses for which he’s known. (I did like the dream world to which the Queen retreats by passing through her magic mirror; maybe Tarsem needs a world within a world, as in The Cell and The Fall, to really let loose.) There’s a climactic appearance of a CGI beastie that’s so generic it’s almost distressing to watch.

While the closing credits play, the cast, led by Collins, performs a splashy Bollywood-style musical number called “I Believe in Love.” (There’s a story behind the song.) It’s energetic and infectious, and I thought: now here’s a take on Snow White I want to see. The rest of Mirror Mirror is vague, noncommittal nonsense.

I actually sort of agree with Roger Ebert on this one, except that I share neither his misplaced outrage nor his total disregard of the virtuosic craft required to bring this non-stop, head-spinning martial arts assault to the screen. The Raid: Redemption (the pointless and inscrutable subtitle was added by Sony Classics in anticipation of a trilogy) is a stunning technical achievement by any measure, and contains some of the most fluid and forceful fight scenes in cinema history, flawlessly shot and edited by Welsh-Indonesian savant Gareth Evans. (This is his second collaboration with The Raid‘s photogenic martial arts powerhouse Iko Uwais; the first, Merantau, received mixed reviews, and I haven’t seen it.) The genre community has gone absolutely nuts for its take-no-prisoners brand of mayhem, and not unjustifiably; it’s impressive stuff.

Except two things. First, it seems to me non-trivial to point out that, even more than most movies of this sort, The Raid is really about nothing. It’s a technical showcase, straight-up; a demo reel. (I don’t know if I prefer this film’s total and intentional vacuity to the ridiculous mystical mumbo-jumbo of something like Ong-Bak, but there at least it feels like they tried, you know?) Like Ebert, though not to the same extent, I fall into the category of those who want a little bit more. Second, and more importantly, while the martial arts action is impressive, it’s not terribly exciting, if that makes sense; I winced in pain and was duly awed at the athletic talent involved, but never found it particularly suspenseful or pulse-quickening. (This is not entirely unrelated to the first point.)

The Raid is all the rage right now, and while I feel like wet blanket in refusing to get fully on board, I really think it’s too fundamentally hollow to be remembered a couple of years down the road. In the meantime, the film is pretty much exactly what you think it will be, and you probably already know whether or not you’ll check it out.

I really just want to know one thing: where’d they get that kid? Funeral Kings has a lot going for it, including a funny script, an expertly calibrated rhythm, and a whole slew of charming, believable performances from child actors who appear to actually be roughly the same age as the characters they play. But if the film takes off and launches writer-directors Kevin and Matthew McManus to a long and storied career, they’ll owe several fruit baskets to their ridiculously charismatic star Alex Maizus, who has no other IMDb credits but who, if this charming coming-of-ager has any life after SXSW at all, will soon have plenty. Blessed with pitch-perfect comic timing, a refined and hilarious facility with the McManuses’ profane screenplay, and the sort of easy, confident screen presence money and acting classes can’t buy, he elevates what might have been a solid but fairly ordinary festival flick into something to seek out.

The movie itself puts on a brash exterior, giving its 14 year-old protagonists absurdly vulgar dialogue (that’s nonetheless clever enough that it doesn’t devolve into trying to use cussing kids to get cheap laughs), and setting their exploits to a propulsive hip-hop soundtrack.  But it’s surprisingly low-key in content, stirring up some intrigue with a mysterious suitcase and some local drug dealers without really building to much more than a series of energetic vignettes. The plot’s head-fakes are a little bit frustrating, but Funeral Kings compensates with moment-to-moment cleverness and a slew of wonderfully specific little details; it’s one of the most purely entertaining films of the festival.

Killer Joe is brought to life by its characters’ faces. Working with legendary cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, director William Friedkin composes his shots so that the light bounces off the actors’ eyes, beguiling us to stare into them and see what we can see: Thomas Haden Church’s eyes, slack and weary; Matthew McConaughey’s, focused and cold; Juno Temple’s, naive and expectant; Emile Hirsch’s, darting, nervous, and scheming. At one point, a corpse shows up in the trunk of a car, and again the eyes are the first thing we notice, sad and resigned, as if their owner’s fate were just as well, and death not all that different from what came before.

The film is an astonishing high-wire act, improbably positioned somewhere along the axes of comedy, horror, and despair. It is the second consecutive collaboration between Friedkin and playwright Tracy Letts, whose memorably gonzo Bug has attained some measure of cult status after a swift disappearance from theaters in 2007.  Killer Joe offers a similar orgy of mutual self-destruction, but it is far more complex and — in its own strange, dark way — satisfying. Friedkin takes what could have been a case study in trailer-trash miserabilism and produces something riveting, compassionate, and truly singular.

It begins, at least, as familiar (if uncommonly profane) blue-collar noir: it’s pouring rain, and a young man named Chris (Hirsch) arrives at the trailer park home of his father (Church), his stepmother (Gina Gershon), and his sister (Temple), asking for money. It seems that Chris’s biological mother swiped his cocaine stash and used the proceeds to fix her car, and now he’s into some local Texas mobsters for a few thousand dollars that he most emphatically does not have. He hatches a plan: he’s heard tell that his mother has a fifty thousand dollar life insurance policy, and that his sister Dottie is the beneficiary. There’s a local hitman named Joe who will do the job for twenty thousand (or is it twenty-five?).

Joe is played by Matthew McConaughey as a quiet, calculating sort — a man whose genteel politeness morphs into steely menace at the drop of his black cowboy hat. (It’s easily the best performance of McConaughey’s career.) He’ll do the hit, but he gets paid in advance — no exceptions. Though he might agree to take some sort of non-monetary retainer if something were to strike his fancy.

What makes this work is the specificity with which the characters are drawn. They’re dirt-poor, and they’re not nice people, but nor are they repellent — Friedkin is not interested in a freak show. Church is physically unpleasant, with patchy chin hair that makes you want to hack at him with a set of clippers, but the hillbilly facade conceals a sad, reasonably shrewd man who has resigned to the world’s perception of him as a dumbass hick. Hirsch is intense and seemingly amoral, but we sense that Chris’s willingness to be vicious is how he’s stayed alive and sane. (The actor is outstanding here, frantic and desperate and hanging by a thread.) And Juno Temple’s Dottie, a little slow and thoroughly repressed, is in some ways the film’s Macguffin, and in other ways its heart.

The film is beautiful — stark, immersive, and otherworldly. The story ends up in a pretty extreme place (the cut I saw received an NC-17 rating, and very much deserves it), and there’s an argument that Letts’ screenplay gets a bit too self-consciously outré in the final scenes. But Friedkin never blinks, or suggests that any part of the movie is a joke. Killer Joe could have been disgustingly exploitative, but it’s not — because what happens here matters deeply to these characters. They convince us of this. You can see it in their eyes.

Andrew Stanton’s John Carter carries a germ of greatness. It’s a grand fantasy adventure and an elaborate interplanetary yarn that deliberately recalls Star Wars. It’s a poignant story, told with subtlety and even hints of grace, about a Confederate soldier in search of a cause he can actually be proud to fight for. Stanton, trained in the halls of Pixar Studios, has a sense of humor and rhythm; his CG action scenes feel painstakingly constructed and thought-through, not like an onslaught of noisy effects. It should have been a highlight of the spring; perhaps of the year.

It isn’t quite, and that’s sad. The problem is a murkiness that plagues both John Carter‘s dusty 3D visuals and the details of its mythology. The film peddles a lot of ideas it can’t quite sell; its worldbuilding details seem piled on top of each other rather than arranged in such a way as to suggest something greater than is shown. And a day later, it plays in my mind’s eye as a hazy brown blob, not as the vivid, colorful adventure it so clearly wants to be.

Carter, played by chiseled Friday Night Lights heartthrob Taylor Kitsch, is transported to Mars — or, as it is known to its unexpectedly numerous inhabitants, Barsoom — after  stumbling into a mysterious cave while hunting for gold in the Utah desert. So far so good (and it’s preceded by a lively and intriguing prologue featuring former Spy Kid Daryl Sabara as Carter’s nephew Edgar Rice Burroughs). Upon arrival in Barsoom — endlessly beige and dusty — he finds that, thanks to the lighter gravity, he can leap way in the air, bouncing around like a tennis ball. He is promptly captured by a species of betusked, four-armed locals who, misunderstanding his English introduction, take to calling him Virginia. (I never quite got tired of that joke.) The weird, 12-foot-tall beasties have some sort of civil strife going — battles to the death and everything — and Carter, of course, finds himself smack in the middle of it.

Okay. But then it also turns out that there are two battling cities of humanoids on Barsoom, one called Helium and another called Zedenga, and for some reason the chief (or “Jeddak”) of Zodanga, played by Dominic West, has been given a powerful destructive tool by some godlike robed creatures called Tharks and told to threaten Helium with destruction unless Helium’s princess, Dejah (Lynn Collins) agrees to take his hand in marriage. And Dejah of course will have none of this so she runs away, is chased, and rescued by Carter in a daring feat of leaping. And then they go off together and Carter has to decide whether he will fight to protect Helium or try to get back to Earth. And there’s still intrigue with the four-armed creatures he met originally, too; their leader’s daughter and her loyal Barsoomian dog follow Carter around like C3PO and R2D2, only fleshier.

You get the idea. John Carter is delirious with elaborate mythology and jargon — the dialogue starts to sound like gibberish after a while. But there’s not a ton of conviction behind it; none of it seems real, or compellingly unreal. They’re just words. We never see any actual people in these cities going about their lives. It’s not clear what’s at risk, beyond the fact that — we’re told — the bad guys are “mindless brutes.” Princess Dejah does a lot of pleading and begging (and she’s the love interest, of course), but we don’t really believe it, and the movie doesn’t seem to much care. John Carter tosses out a great deal of story, but very little of it sticks. And the 3D filter renders the monochromatic color palette drab and ugly; the film is not much fun to look at, which is a serious problem for purported eye candy.

Still, Stanton is an interesting enough director to make John Carter worthwhile. I liked the early scenes in the wild west, which have a sense of humor and a brisk pace. Stanton intercuts a fight scene on Barsoom with a poignant flashback from the protagonist’s past; it’s the climax of an uncommonly thoughtful character arc. The Earthbound prologue and epilogue have an urgency that’s missing from the jumbled, exposition-heavy midsection. There are more than a few moments that hint at the fantasy classic this might have been. See it in 2D.

The horror genre has become lind of an arms race ni formal gimmickry lately, with the Paranormal Activity films setting off a found-footage bonanza, and now with Open Water‘s Chris Kentis and Laura Lau offering a Russian Ark take on the haunted house flick.  Shot in what looks like a single 85-minute take (actually a small handful of shorter ones) and presented in “real time,” Silent House is well-engineered and reasonably spooky. It is also sorely wanting in the story department; an express train from vague to trite making no intermediate stops.

The film’s scares are mostly of the “What the hell is going on?” variety — Kentis and Lau’s handheld camera whirls madly around its teenage protagonist (Elizabeth Olsen) as she investigates mysterious bumps and noises in her large, stuffy childhood home. Mysterious shapes appear in the blurry background, then vanish; an unknown man with a flashlight seems to be prowling the basement. A supporting character turns up bloodied and apparently dead. You know the drill — except that Silent House is so wishy-washy that it’s not clear even what manner of threat our hero is facing. It doesn’t feel, sadly, like a plunge into the terrifying unknown; instead, it feels like a gimmicky horror flick that doesn’t know what it wants to scare us with.

Silent House‘s one-take choreography is impressive (if also a stunt screaming for attention), and a couple set pieces (such as a scene illuminated only by occasional camera flashes) are undeniably fun. But the real-time gimmick and the film’s refusal to commit to being about anything make it hard to be drawn in. And the ending, which stupidly rehashes the hoariest horror movie revelation known to man, is insulting nonsense. Formal gimmick and all, Silent House reads far better on paper than it plays on the screen.