This comic-book adaptation about a blind lawyer who spends his nights as a masked vigilante teeters on the brink of ridiculousness – just watch Ben Affleck, as the title character, amble about with sunglasses and a walking stick. But a lighthearted tone and spirited supporting turns by Colin Farrell and Jennifer Garner coax the movie

Sorry special effects – the title character looks mostly like a very angry avocado, a new Veggie Tales character, perhaps – are the main problem with this comic-book adaptation, but hardly the only one. Eclectic director Ang Lee wastes his mythic, dreamy style; this is less like watching an Ang Lee movie than like watching

As someone who used to dress up in Spider-Man Underoos and literally try to climb walls when I was a kid, the highest praise I can give this high-flying adaptation from director Sam Raimi is to say it made me want to be Spider-Man again. True to the original 1962 comic book, the movie grounds

Partly an extravaganza of fireballs, partly a modern interpretation of the biblical Tower of Babel and partly a coming together of one of cinema’s most random casts (Fred Astaire rubs shoulders with O.J. Simpson), The Towering Inferno has the can’t-look-away quality of a car wreck. To celebrate the completion of the world’s tallest skyscraper in

George Lucas’ first film is a curious counterpart to his beloved space saga, at least in form if not in tone. If the Star Wars movies are adolescent joy rides, this is a joyless exercise in cinematic precision. For this director’s cut, Lucas has left the basic narrative intact – Robert Duvall plays the title

This remake of The Poseidon Adventure is an homage to the disaster movies of the 1970s that captures the genre’s awfulness all too well. Those pictures were usually pretty bad and Poseidon is, too. Josh Lucas anchors the ensemble cast as a former sailor turned professional gambler aboard a gargantuan cruise liner that is capsized

This politically charged adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel takes place in an England in which a fascist government has exploited fears of terrorism to put an oppressive vise grip on the nation. Arbitrary imprisonment, military torture, civilian surveillance – it’s all here except for Cheney’s hunting accident. This is ultimately a pulpy parable, though,