Captain America: The First Avenger - The Summer Blockbuster that delivers the goods!

Steve Rogers, a kid that has been rejected for military service on a number of occasions, volunteers for a top secret program which seeks to turn the average soldier into a superhero. This program successfully turns him into Captain America, a hero dedicated to the truths, ideals and defense of the American way of life.

In this summer of blockbuster sequels and comic book adaptations it might be difficult to sell a film like Captain America to the movie - going public, but there are a number of reasons why they should not skip over this tale of The First Avenger.

The story gave the audience the necessary nuts and bolts of the good Captain's origins to draw them in without overwhelming them in miniscule details that could derail it. Director Joe Johnston effectively mixed solid action sequences along with properly timed bits of humor to give the film an almost "Indiana Jones -esque" quality. But what set Captain America apart from those other lackluster sequels or comic book films was the performance of Chris Evans as the title character. When the audience is first introduced to Captain America, he is a skinny kid from Brooklyn named Steve Rogers who has been rejected by the Army four times due to his poor health and other medical problems. One got the sense that Steve had been picked on most of his life, but that did not stop him from standing up to bullies or taking on challenges that stronger men shied away from. He was the prototypical underdog and if Johnston had just jumped straight into showing Captain America cracking skulls and kicking Nazi butt without showing the audience who he was before, the film would have lacked the depth to story and character that it exhibited throughout (a trait sadly missing in the bulk of films released this summer). The humanity and heart that Evans endowed Steve with at the beginning not only made him the perfect subject for the Army's Super Soldier program, but also gave the audience a hero that they could relate to on an emotional level.

It was easy to stand up and cheer for Captain America for it was the first summer blockbuster of 2011 to deliver the goods (and make sure you stick around after the credits for a special surprise, you'll be glad you did).

Grade: B

Insidious: Genuinely scary!

Soon after they move into a new house Josh and Renai's son Dalton falls into an unexplainable coma. Not only that but his comatose starts to attract malevolent forces, forcing the family to move into another home in order to escape the torment. But when the malevolent forces follow them to their new house, the family decides that they must fight these evil forces if they want to live a normal life.

It is hard to find horror films nowadays that do not automatically resort to using excessive gore, violence or other exploitative measures to "scare" an audience. And given director James Wan's previous horror outings (Saw and Dead Silence) it is easy to understand why the audience might have expected the same kind of results with his latest effort, Insidious.

Surprisingly enough though, Insidious was able to not only scare the audience without the blood and gore but keep them involved in the story/plot as well. Wan was able to keep the audience on edge by slowly building the tension, giving away just enough story-wise  to make the audience wonder what was keeping Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai's (Rose Byrne) son Dalton in a coma or why he and the family were being plagued by evil spirits while at the same time making them scoot just a little closer to the edge of their seats whenever they thought they saw a shadow or Renai thought she heard a noise. It's those kinds of scares/jumps that are legitimately effective as they are things an audience member could experience and maybe even wonder, "was it just the wind or something else?" There were some scares/jumps that could make even the most harden horror film viewer shiver, including one particular scene which was shown in the trailer for the film but still caused goose pimples to run up and down one's spine. Beyond the things that went bump in the night the cast was successful in drawing the audience in emotionally and making them care about what was happening on screen (another rarity for a horror film).

Insidious was a good old-fashioned horror film that did not require buckets of blood or other nastiness to deliver some genuine scares.

Grade: B-

Transformers: Dark of the Moon: Action, yes...Story/Plot....not so much

When the Autobots learn that a secret Cybertronian spacecraft was discovered on the Moon by the United States back in the 1960's, they race to recover what was on the ship before the Decepticons can.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon delivered the kind of breathtaking and grandiose action one would expect for a summer blockbuster. The finale of the film (where the Autobots attempted to retake downtown Chicago from the Decepticons) in particular was superlative not only for the robot on robot fights, but also the action taken by the human cast members (or their stunt doubles), including some very cool "flying" suites and a sequence in which a high-rise building collaspsed on its side with Sam Witwicky and the rest of the human heroes still trapped inside.

What was missing from the film was any semblance of plot, story or character development. After the credits started to roll and even upon reflection the following day after seeing Dark of the Moon, the audience will probably find it hard to remember just why Sam was running around again trying to save the world. Although this is Shia LeBeouf's third turn as Witwicky, he seems to have lost his edge or even credibility with the part (the inferior script from Ehren Kruger didn't help). He has a new girlfriend in this one in Carly (a shoddy Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) whom he is trying to keep around by getting and holding down a job but that was all the audience was given to work with as the rest of the screen time was spent following Optimus Prime and the other Autobots around as they attempted to save humanity (again). The only time there have been believable/relatable characters in this film series was in the original Transformers, when director Michael Bay had to give the audience Sam's backstory in order to establish his character. The story for Dark of the Moon lured the audience in at the beginning with the whole U.S. Moon landing that doubled as a chance to uncover the Cybertronian ship which crashed but shortly thereafter Bay develled into his old tricks of lame jokes, useless characters and an over-abundance of scenes which served no other purpose but to kill time until the next big action sequence. It's not like an audience goes into a film like this expecting to see Shakespeare but it would have been nice to have something more than what Bay and the rest of the crew delivered.

Brainless, summer blockbuster entertainment, they name is Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

Grade: C