Side note to parents: Anyone who thinks 'Dude, Where's My Car' is more appropriate for children than 'American Pie' because it obtained a PG-13 rating needs to stop trusting the MPAA.

Live Free or Die Hard may work better for an audience that doesn't know much about the series is than it will for Die Hard die hards, who will be wondering who that impersonator is and what he did with the real John McClane. The original Die Hard came out of nowhere to blitz the 1988 summer box office. The fourth installment arrives with a weight of expectations that Atlas would have trouble shouldering and, when the dust settles in September, it's unlikely that Live Free or Die Hard will be one of this year's big success stories.

This is as brain-dead as a movie can be and it assumes the audience will have the I.Q. of a rutabaga.

Those who delight in bad movies and enjoy producing their own unfilmed versions of Mystery Science Theater 3000 may gain a measure of semi-masochistic enjoyment out of Van Helsing . There are quite a few unintentionally funny moments, although the overall experience was too intensely painful for me to be able to advocate it as being "so bad, it's good."

John Wick is a rousing action thriller of the sort rarely encountered in theaters these days.

Being snarky and smug doesn't equate to providing insight, and there's more than one occasion when the filmmakers lose sight of this in their zeal to spread the Gospel According to Maher.

For the most part, however, Lady in the Water comes across as a movie that's too bad to be good, and not bad enough to be so bad that it's good.