If a bunch of inebriated film school half-wits on the brink of expulsion got together to produce a sex farce in under a week, the results might be comparable to Tom Vaughan’s What Happens in Vegas – one of the most unbearable Hollywood comedies of recent years.

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The curtain rises on Marvel Comics’ first in-house production to rousing results as their metal man of iron introduces himself to enthralled moviegoers everywhere. Just as billionaire playboy Tony Stark utilizes his technological know-how to fight evildoers, so does director Jon Favreau use his bag of cinematic tricks to lay the groundwork for yet another top-caliber franchise starring one of the biggest icons of the printed page. Delivering laughs as well as leaps of wonder, this comic-book fantasy gets it right across the board, with its buoyant tone never diluting the grounded dramatics of the story. For the flick to work, though, one needs an exceptional cast -– something this production has in spades. Sure, it’s an origin story, but to the cast’s credit, none of it ever seems tedious.

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David Mamet’s Redbelt is a kind of Karate Kid for the intellectual, philosophical set; a sober, action peppered drama that asks what value there is in honor when one’s opponents - and even adversaries - are willing to deceive and destroy lives in order to make a quick buck. It’s a cynical meditation on the themes of nobility, integrity, and truth that successfully sidesteps the clichés of the typical action drama, while still managing to deliver everything that audiences love about those films – the struggling underdog, the serpentine villain, and the knockout final brawl – all in ways that are sure to pleasantly surprise.

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It would be hard for any sequel to live up to the precedent set by what turned out to be one of the best stoner comedies ever made, but Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is thankfully, as funny as the original. It’s just as raunchy and wild — extolling the virtues of weed and female genitalia at every opportunity — but where the first one largely concerned itself with the message of slackerdome, this one is surprisingly subversive, taking unexpected shots at the hypocritical political establishment and the ignorance that perpetuates both sides of the culture wars.

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Stories about young men unable to get over the girl who left them are as old as movies themselves. What sets Forgetting Sarah Marshall apart from the pack are the flesh and blood characters. For a first time screenwriter, Jason Segel aptly demonstrates a deep understanding of a cardinal rule in writing that everybody is flawed – capturing this in both his script, and in his performance as the severely heartbroken Peter. The movie expertly plays with stereotypes about aw-shucks good guys, horny superstars, and seemingly perfect new lovers, but it also pushes deeper into where those clichés come from. A savvy observer of human behavior, Segel treats his characters with empathy and compassion. He distills why specific romantic relationships happen, why they go on too long, and why they sometimes don’t happen when they should. Had he wanted to dig a few layers deeper, Segel could have crafted a serious story about the inability of twentysomethings to commit – the evidence suggests if he wants to try he might have a great drama in him. Thankfully, he has just as much skill as a gag writer, allowing him to wring more laughs than tears out of the pain.

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The duo at the center of Baby Mama - Tina Fey, as a corporate climber with a loudly ticking biological clock, and Amy Poehler, as the uneducated slob hired to be her surrogate mom — are to comedy what Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were to dancing. They trust each other, and they know each other’s rhythms so well they can trade off who gets to be the straight man and who gets to deliver the laugh lines. If the film were just the two of them, it would be worth recommending, but writer/director Michael McCullers likes to share the comedic wealth - he knows that giving the supporting characters good lines pays great rewards.

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Something must have been lost in the translation with this fantasy-tinged Tunisian effort from 1984, issued on video for the first time by Typecast Releasing – which hit video store shelves on March 25th. The barely intelligible premise has to do with an instructor (writer-director-star Nacer Khemir) who arrives at an eccentric community in the middle of the desert. His mission involves teaching the students of a crumbling, decrepit old town populated by a nearly indistinguishable cast of Arabic characters. Unfortunately, that’s about as exciting and as lucid as this opus gets. The bottom line: Wanderers of the Desert is the kind of foreign film that gives foreign films a bad name.

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Leave it to the French to usher in the next great wave of horror cinema. As youth riots once again send bourgeois suburbanites running for the safety of their middle-class compounds, the prevailing culture of fear and uncertainty has proven the flashpoint for some of the most genuinely frightening shockers of the new millennium. Now, on the heels of such relentlessly tense new-classics as Calvaire, Haute Tension, and Them comes a grisly home invasion flick that offers a pitch-perfect balance of grinding tension and inventive gore. Newcomers Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury may not have enough credits to distinguish themselves as masters of the genre just yet, but as Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur before them, they’re certainly on the right track.

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