Summer screens in review...

Transformers: B
It had no pretensions beyond being a summer action movie with winsome teen stars and cool car effects, and as such was entirely successful. It scored bonus points by having an excellent supporting cast of hapless grown-ups, heroines with math and mechanical skills, and an exploration of how just plain inconvenient it would be to have giant car robots stomping all over your lawn and garden.

Becoming Jane: D-
The only reason this film doesn't all out fail is because of the casting potential and the fact that, since I walked out, I'm not really as fully informed as I should be. As a card-carrying Austen-o-phile, I was eager to see Austen receive the same treatment as Shakespeare and Beatrix Potter, but was utterly aghast at the poor writing, the shoddy story-crafting and the utterly inappropriate sex liberally sprinkled on her life. It's like the filmmakers saw a few Austen movies and pulled out the most common themes -- a party scene, a country house, people sniping at eachother, gossop -- and banged them together with a giant mallet. Yuck.

Death at a Funeral: B
For all Frank Oz's snippy renunciation of the very idea of a "British sensibility," this movie was chock full of it. A very over the top comedy featuring a mourning family, a blackmailing gay dwarf and Alan Tudyk doing a remarkable impression of a skittish guy on his first big drug trip, "Death at a Funeral" is hilarious as long as you're willing to go with the flow and just keep laughing as the debacle gets larger and larger. A lot of subtlety, despite the slapstick, is represented in the acting styles of pretty much all the main characters. Very funny.

Stardust: B
Fans of Neil Gaiman (of which I am not really one) will say the book's better, I say this was quite an enjoyable film, packed with homages to fairy tale after fairy tale, with a great cast (though the hero was overwhelmed by the considerable talents of, among others, Claire Danes and Robert De Niro as a Pirate Captain, Queer Eye For the Straight Guy edition). It doesn't compare to a fantasy classic such as "The Princess Bride," but it's quite pleasant, on the whole. The seven ghostly brothers are a particular treat of a running gag, and Michelle Pfeiffer is hilarious as an over-the-hill witch chasing her youth.

The Last Legion: B-
Colin Firth, Aishwarya Rai, Ben Kingsley, the kid from Love Actually ...great cast brought together to tell the story of the last descendant of Caesar who became Uther Pendragon and wielded Excalibur before, you know, it was immortalized by Disney. All in all, a weak distillation of Lord of the Rings-esque visuals with inconsistent speech patterns (the Romans might well have been walking down Main Street while the Goths were declaiming for the stage), unsurprising character development, many many shots of Aishwarya's eyelids opening to reveal those startling irises, Colin Firth in body armour giving what some screenwriter probably flatters himself is the heftiest battle speech since St. Crispian's day.... A lot of shoddy production values conspire with the lame writing to handicap what might have been a big adventure for all concerned. Whatever. I'd watch Colin Firth read Green Eggs and Ham if he wore a five o'clock shadow and sculpted armour to do it.


Nanny Diaries: B-
Not as much excruciating fun as "The Devil Wears Prada," but just what a 22-year-old college graduate needs to see to be reminded that compromising one's dreams and putting the journey of self-realization on hold for an "easy" gig as an Upper East Side Nanny...isn't all it's cracked up to be. I disagree with many critics who faulted Laura Linney's delivery as too polished to earn her moments of vulnerability; I thought her porcelain surface was clearly on the verge of cracking even as she pretended to be confident and assured. Scarlett Johannssen, always a favorite of mine, is good but not stellar as the nanny, and the kid is nowhere near as endearing as the one from "Love Actually," "Jerry Maguire" or "Finding Neverland." Still, lots of good swipes taken at the Upper East Side museum of Mommy Barbies.