Step Brothers Is Harmless Fun

Vampire's Assistant has an identity crisis

(NEWSER) - Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant isn't particularly freaky, and it sure could use some assistance. Some critics' takes:

• Peter Travers doesn't deign to explain the film's loose ends. "All you need to know is that the movie is a setup for sequels that I hope never come," he writes in Rolling Stone. It also "commits the cardinal sin for a vampire movie: It’s bloodless."

Will Ferrell not enough to save picture

(NEWSER) - Land of the Lost remakes the 1970s TV series, sucking Will Ferrell into a parallel universe that mushes past, present, and future together. Keep this flick out of your own future, critics say:

• “The only marginally interesting, if unsurprising, thing about the pricey movie spinoff is that a lot of money has been spent on yet another cultural throwaway,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Not that I didn’t sometimes laugh anyway.”

Despite being a little uneven, Judd Apatow parody provides lots of laughs

(NEWSER) - Judd Apatow's Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story "is less thoughtful satire and ... more the distant cousin of Airplane!," writes Brian Orndorf of OhMyNews.com. Starring John C. Reilly as a blues prodigy who ultimately experiences success, failure, and redemption, it plays like "an extended riff on the likes of severely mediocre Oscar-bait" such as Walk the Line and Ray, Orndorf says. 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."