The Geat Is Good, Not Great

Anthony Hopkins, Michael O'Donoghue star in exorcism flick

(NEWSER) - Though it does a thing or two right, most critics are panning The Rite, the story of a young priest who heads to exorcism school and apprentices under Anthony Hopkins. Whatever your expectations, just don’t expect innovation:

• The film is an “overwrought thriller with a surfeit of solemnity and the devil's own sound design,” writes Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal . The screenplay is “ponderous enough to banish Oscar anxiety for all concerned,” and by the final battle, “you're ready to give the devil whatever due it takes to get The Rite over and done with.”
• The Rite has Lou Lumenick wishing for pea soup and spinning heads. Instead, "this threadbare and risible rehash of The Exorcist," presents "a donkey with glowing red eyes, a plague of frogs, a pregnant woman spitting up railroad bolts ... and a scenery-chewing Anthony Hopkins," he writes for the New York Post .

Film is a wild ride without much substance

(NEWSER) - If you're heading out to see the new Angelina Jolie flick Wanted, critics have some advice: Lighten up and enjoy it. "It’s trash, but I love it anyway,” writes Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. The story of a “nobody” office worker who winds up “a tight, muscled killing machine” in a team of assassins, the film’s got “passion as well as pow” without “a scintilla of redeeming social value,” Travers notes. More»

But Nicolas Cage seems to get it: critics

(NEWSER) - Critics agree: Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is ridiculous. But they're divided over whether the silliness of the sequel, once again starring Nicolas Cage as the devilish superhero, is funny or just bad.

• In the Merced Sun-Star , Roger Moore calls the movie "a profoundly silly mash-up of comic book and quasi-religious 'prophecy' about a motorcyclist who sold his soul to the devil." It beats the original: "This time around, Cage and everybody else on board are in on the joke," and that makes it "almost a great bad movie."

Movie reviews: Rachel McAdams, Channing Tatum can't save amnesia romance

(NEWSER) - In The Vow, Rachel McAdams plays a woman who must learn to love her husband again after amnesia wipes her memory. It's no surprise it was released ahead of Valentine's Day: It's pure mushiness, critics say.

• In the New York Daily News , Elizabeth Weitzman calls the film a "down-the-middle, by-the-numbers fantasy, in which no one is too quirky or interesting or challenging in any way." Still, "there’s no shortage of viewers ready to embrace an old-fashioned, guilty-pleasure romance."

Daniel Radcliffe makes post-Hogwarts debut

(NEWSER) - The boy wizard is back—but this time, he's a 19th-century gentleman. Daniel Radcliffe is generally successful playing a spooked lawyer in The Woman in Black, a throwback haunted house thriller. What the critics are saying:

• The film "makes the most of its old-fashioned virtues," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times . It "isn’t especially scary, but it keeps you on edge, and without the usual vivisectionist imagery." For his part, Radcliffe "has the haunted eyes of the eternal mourner."