"Remember Me" *1/2 (out of four): Angst-ridden, wanna-be tear-jerker - featuring Robert Pattinson as another tortured, brooding James Dean-type - doesn't come close to earning its big payoff.

The romantic drama "Remember Me" has a very clear agenda. Actually, it has two. The most obvious is as a star vehicle for Robert Pattinson (let the "Team Edward" supporters rejoice). Mr. Pattinson serves as co-executive producer, for very obvious reasons; he is given the role of a modern James Dean and it taps directly into his currently hot brand of extreme brooding. You see, Mr. Pattinson's Tyler, a directionless NYU student, had a tragedy in his past, and his family doesn't understand him, and he just feels everything so deeply. He lives in a tiny Manhattan apartment (kudos to the filmmakers for getting it right) with his wise-acre roommate (Tate Ellington, the only smile in the film). Out carousing one night, Tyler ignores an easy female conquest in favor of a bar fight (rebel!). He then mouths off to a cop and gets thrown in jail only to rail against being bailed out by his wealthy father (with a cause!).

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"Alice in Wonderland" ** (out of four): The most wondrous thing about director Tim Burton's take on the Lewis Carroll classic is how lacking in wonder it all is.

Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, "Alice in Wonderland". Yep, I'd see that. Who better to bring to life Lewis Carroll's classic fairytale - about a girl who famously falls through a rabbit hole into a skewed world of disappearing cats, smoking caterpillars and mad hatters - than the director of "Edward Scissorhands", "Sweeney Todd" and "The Nightmare Before Christmas". And who better to play the aforementioned haberdasher than the man who has partnered with Mr. Burton to create some of the more memorably zany characters of the last twenty years (the ill-conceived Willy Wonka collaboration excluded, of course). It turns out that this umpteenth version of "Alice" (the imdb.com list requires scrolling) does not equal the sum of its parts. In fact, the most wondrous thing about it is how lacking in wonder it all is.

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"Cop Out" * (out of four): Desperately unfunny, tone-deaf homage to 80s buddy cop movies from director Kevin Smith - just one of the many who should have known better.

Tracy Jordan - the character played by Tracy Morgan on TV's "30 Rock" - sums up his show-business success by confiding to his wife: "we're lucky people laugh when I say things". Judging by his performance in "Cop Out" - director Kevin Smith's dud of a buddy movie - Mr. Morgan seems to be hoping the same can be said about his career. The opening (interminable) minutes of the film feature Mr. Morgan's detective Paul Hodges interrogating a suspect by screaming quotes from other (far, far superior) movies at him. The moment is meant to be hilarious in a he-so-crazy sort of way, but it ends up being noisy and - worse - not at all funny.

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"Oscar Mired" - Once again, Joe tries his hand at picking this year's Oscar winners.

With typically impeccable timing, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided to pad out the Best Picture Oscar category to include ten nominees in a year when I was hard-pressed to find a single four-star movie. Last year, people were up-in-arms over the exclusion of "The Dark Knight" from the Best Picture race (and rightfully so). But that snub was only amplified by the fact that other, less-qualified, movies were included ("The Reader" for Best Picture? I'm still hurting from that one). Expanding the category isn't the solution; making better movies is.

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"Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief" *1/2 (out of four): An interesting take on the young hero saga, made eye-rollingly tedious by the ham-handed direction of Chris Columbus.

Oh hey, it's that movie from the book series about the ordinary kid who discovers he has supernatural powers. The latest installment of "Harry Potter"? "The Twilight Saga"? No, those titles aren't nearly long enough. It's "Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief". Based on the books by Rick Riordan and directed by occasional "Potter" helmer, Chris Columbus, "Percy Jackson" is kind of like "Harry Potter", but with Greek gods instead of wizards, and cheap gags instead of wit.

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"The Wolfman" ** (out of four): This been-there-mauled-that monster movie gets points for being loud and rather bloody, but it still hasn't found a way to make werewolves interesting.

Ah, werewolves. In the pantheon of great movie monsters, the lycanthropes have always played second-fiddle to vampires. Just look at the "Twilight" series for one recent example. Still, Hollywood can't resist giving the fanged ones a shot now and then. From a marketing standpoint, it makes sense. If vampires play well to your target audience, why not try werewolves? Well, a couple of reasons: (1) like the Hulk, werewolves are simply not that interesting once they transform - they're just snarling beasts; (2) the transformation sequences - so memorable in "An American Werewolf in London" - usually look cheesy. But hey, vampires are still en vogue (if you haven't checked out "Daybreakers" yet, Netflix it), so it was only a matter of time before their hirsute brethren got a big screen make-over.

The time is now, in the form of the simply-named "The Wolfman". And, while it gets points for being loud and rather bloody, the film still hasn't cracked the code of making a great werewolf movie.

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"Legion" * (out of four): An archangel rebels against God's plan and falls to Earth - stirring up an unholy mess of a film and squandering an unexpected mix of dedicated actors.

"Legion" seems to offer an intriguing premise - an archangel rebels against God and intervenes in His plan to exterminate all mankind because He has given up hope for His creation. Sadly, the film is a mess. It squanders an unexpected mix of actors - who could have anticipated Paul Bettany, Dennis Quaid, Kate Walsh, and Charles S. Dutton in the same film?? - on an incoherent script that lacks even a basic internal logic. Horror films can sometimes get away with playing a bit looser than straight dramas in the areas of storyline and exposition, but "Legion" asks the viewer to accept way too much on faith, without a strong corresponding payoff.

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"The Book of Eli" ** (out of four): Another lone traveler wanders another post-apocalyptic landscape. This time, he carries a book. Who is this man and what's with the book? If that question is enough to keep you interested for two hours, you're all set.

Those of you who have read my review of the recent Cormac McCarthy adaptation, "The Road", know how I feel about the term "post-apocalyptic". But here we go again. "The Book of Eli" takes place in a (sigh) post-apocalyptic wasteland. All we know is that it's been thirty years since "the war" when "the sky was ripped open" and there was "the flash". Is it me or do these dystopic visions of the future give screenwriters an excuse to be lazy? What happened to civilization? We'll never find out. Are the survivors plagued by radiation? Fall-out? Who knows. While details would be nice, the script by newcomer Gary Whitta (former editor of "PC Gamer" magazine) adheres to the "less is more" philosophy. In this case, less ends up being exactly that.

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BigPictureBigSound's annual top five films of of the year.

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"Daybreakers" *** (out of four): I'm as surprised as anyone, but this clever vampire movie from the Spierig Brothers proves the genre still has some bite left in it.

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If you're going to make a vampire movie nowadays, you better have a gimmick. "Daybreakers", the latest in the blood-sucking genre, proposes the following twist: everyone's a vampire already. And they've all gone back to their normal routines - CEOs, advertisers, car washers, stock brokers. They're all still at it, and they're all now vampires. They even retain their 9-5 hours, thanks to a series of underground "subwalks" and tinted windows. The problem, however, is that humans are all but extinct. So, with a dwindling food supply, and no viable blood substitute on the horizon, the future is looking bleak for the vamps. It's all fairly clever and, I never thought I'd be saying this but, it works out to be a good, new vampire movie.

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"Sherlock Holmes" **1/2 (out of four): Guy Ritchie's frenzied, over-long "reimagining" of the much-adapted Conan Doyle character isn't quite the blasphemy you'd think, thanks to a solid cast and Robert Downey Jr's inherent likability as the title.

In a way, a lot about Guy Ritchie's "Sherlock Holmes" adaptation makes sense. I know, I'm as surprised as you are to hear me say that. But think about it. Long before he was the former Mr. Madonna, this director made his name plumbing the depths of London's gangland underbelly in cheeky crime stories like "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, "Snatch" and "RocknRolla". So it stands to reason that he might want to go old-school and take a crack at crime in the Victorian era through the eyes of its most famous detective. For the lead role, Mr. Ritchie has cast Robert Downey Jr. At first, that choice may raise an eyebrow, particularly to those familiar with the Basil Rathbone incarnation of the character. But if you need an actor who can portray the type of rapid-fire mental acuity of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famed "consulting detective", Mr. Downey has that in spades. And as for Warner Bros. Pictures, well, I smell franchise. In fact the film's plot appears to be little more than a setup for subsequent movies. But more on that later.

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"Avatar" ***1/2 (out of four): James Cameron's long-awaited, unspeakably expensive 3-D epic may not change the way we watch movies, but it's undeniably beautiful, engrossing, and sets a new bar in computer-generated animation. Not bad for the King of the World.

You have to hand it to James Cameron. The man doesn't do anything halfway. The self-proclaimed "King of the World" - who might more accurately be called "King of Hyperbole" - boasts that his new 3-D extravaganza "Avatar" will do no less than "change the way we watch movies." Well, no. It's still all about sitting in a theater, facing front. And, if Mr. Cameron's marketing machine has done its work, it's still all about standing in hair-pullingly annoying lines waiting for the privilege. The 3-D also still requires those silly glasses (though the new ones are far more stylish than the cardboard variety of the past). All that being said, there's no denying that Mr. Cameron is a fine storyteller with a vivid imagination - plus, he could teach Michael Bay a master-class in the art of filming an action sequence. His long-awaited, unspeakably expensive (literally, you can't get anyone to talk about it) epic may not change the way we watch movies, but it's undeniably beautiful, engrossing, and sets a new bar in computer-generated animation. Not bad for a once and future King.

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"Invictus" *** (out of four): If the fascinating true story of Nelson Mandela and the 1995 Rugby World Cup isn't enough to make you see Clint Eastwood's solid new movie, Morgan Freeman's pitch-perfect portrayal of Mandela should be.

At this point, it's all but redundant to say that Clint Eastwood is one of our finest directors. Since 1992's landmark "Unforgiven", Mr. Eastwood has continually created the type of cinematic gems that typical inspire the phrase, "they don't make 'em like that anymore". Most recently he excelled with 2006's World War II one-two punch, "Flags of Our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima", as well as his return to the front of the camera in 2008's "Gran Torino" (2008's "Changeling" is a forgivable misstep). Now pushing 80, the former Man with No Name shows no signs of faltering. His latest, "Invictus", is the fascinating true story of Nelson Mandela and the 1995 Rugby World Cup. As usual, Mr. Eastwood tells his story with a quiet grace and reverence.

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"Up in the Air" *** (out of four): Based on the novel by Walter Kim, "Up In the Air" manages to succeed at different altitudes, addressing the absurdity and poignancy of human connections.

Ryan Bingham flies across the country firing other companies' employees, as a kind of outsourced pink slip specialist (imagine filling out that Customs form). He spends most of his days "up in the air," and director/co-writer Jason Reitman ("Thank You for Smoking", "Juno") gets a lot of metaphorical mileage out of the expression.

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"The Road" *** (out of four): Oppressively, but appropriately, bleak adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's end-of-the-world novel about a father and son wandering a post-apocalyptic landscape. Points for strong performances from the two leads and the film's unyielding view of the end of days

I seem to be writing the term "post-apocalyptic" a lot lately. From the stitch-work creations that wander an animated wasteland in "9" to the tendon-chewing undead that terrorize the survivors in "Zombieland", the end-times genre is alive and well in theaters this year. The latest entry is an oppressively but appropriately bleak adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road", about a father and son struggling to survive in a devastated, yes, post-apocalyptic landscape.

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