Danny Trejo plays the title character, a bladewielding badass who spends his time seducing women when he’s not chopping off bad guys’ heads. With machetes. The movie makes you wonder where his love for machetes came from. His dossier says his name is Machete Cortez.

1. In Thieves’ Highway, Valentina Cortese plays tic-tac-toe on Richard Conte’s bare chest with her fingernails. 2. A heartbreaking four-minute montage through the entirety of a marriage at the beginning of Up. 3. A soldier finds himself staring at the shelves in a stateside supermarket, utterly adrift, in The Hurt Locker. 4. “What is time? Swiss manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians squander it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Do you know what I say? I say time is a crook.” Peter Lorre in Beat the Devil.

Its spring break in Lake Victoria, Ariz., and Sheriff Julie Forrester (Elisabeth Shue) and her deputy (Ving Rhames) have to deal with an influx of 20,000 drunken kids. Her problems are made considerably worse when an earthquake opens up a passage to a subterranean lake beneath Lake Victoria that frees a species of prehistoric super-piranha.

Scott (Michael Cera) is a 22-year-old slacker living in Toronto. He doesn’t have a job, but spends most of his time and energy dodging adulthood. He plays bass in a decent but unremarkable band called Sex Bob-omb. He mooches off his gay roommate, Wallace (Kieran Culkin).

In buddy-cop movies, there are always Riggsand-Murtaugh-type supercops storming around all over the place, getting into high-speed chases, blowing things up and causing truly egregious amounts of property damage.

Despite what its title might suggest, the new comedy Dinner for Schmucks contains surprisingly little truly objectionable behavior. The film is a remake of a French film, Francois Veber’s The Dinner Game, and it falls prey to the worst tendencies of Hollywood films, removing any sharp edges from the humor in search of a boring warm-and-fuzzy feeling that doesn’t make for very good comedy.

The movie jumps forward in time a couple of years to find her back in Washington working a desk job for the CIA. She is on her way out the door at the end of the day, ready to celebrate her wedding anniversary with Mike, when a Russian defector walks into the office and needs to be debriefed.

Birmingham was born out of iron. "The Magic City", so called because it sprang up out of nothing, seemingly over-night, fueled by the fertilizer of convenient and strategic location to industrial necessities.

So often these days, when talking about blockbusters it seems that even the ones you like have to be excused as silly fun, empty calories. Director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Memento) is one of the few filmmakers working who is able to make spectacles of this scale that also contain ideas. With his new action film/head trip Inception, Nolan taps into a fear of the growing lack of control in our lives. In an age of such rampant identity theft, it wouldn’t be surprising if even our minds weren’t secure anymore.

The movie opens with Adrien Brody falling through space, unconscious. He wakes up, naturally perturbed to find himself in free fall. He discovers a parachute, but it won’t open until it’s programmed to.