Mr. Brooks Dressed up as a glossy Hollywood production professing to present Kevin Costner in a whole new unheroic light, this thriller actually is a sloppy, sleazy trifle of chaotic storytelling about a community leader who moonlights as a serial killer. Costner plays a seemingly pleasant businessman with a bloodthirsty alter-ego (William Hurt) that urges him to kill. Demi Moore’s the cop on Costner’s trail and Dane Cook’s a witness with a bizarre blackmail demand. Director Bruce A. Evans and writing partner Raynold Gideon pile on more and sillier plot threads, suffocating the story with a jumble of forced connections and coincidences among the characters. If there’s a marginal saving grace, it’s Hurt’s gleeful mugging and cackling as Costner’s phantom friend. - Little Theatre

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer>- Director Tim Story and his “Fantastic Four” gang have managed to top the 2005 original - and still make a bad movie with this superhero sequel. The new movie exceeds the first mainly by the less-is-more approach, offering fewer random displays of superpowers that characterised its predecessor and keeping the action brisk, running 15 minutes shorter. This time, our mutated superheroes (Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans) face the Silver Surfer, an interstellar envoy of destruction leading a hungry space entity to chow down on Earth. The Fantastic Four are forced into alliance with their archenemy (Julian McMahon), a villain with superpowers and an agenda of his own. The performances are stiff, the dialogue shallow and silly, but the action’s a slight step up, and the whole thing flows by quickly, if brainlessly. - Liberty Theatre

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s E$> — It’s way too long and massively convoluted and ultimately just plain silly. But still, it’s a lot of fun a lot of the time. The third movie in the freakishly successful “Pirates” franchise feels substantial and looks impressive and fulfils the hype surrounding it in a way the other thirds — Spidey and Shrek — haven’t so far. Having said that, it is, of course, a giant meandering mess that leaves you feeling as if you’ve been tossed about on the high seas for three hours, but theoretically that’s also part of the allure of these movies. And yet, within the enormous action sequences, there are enough individual “wow” moments that make you appreciate just how inventive and complicated an achievement this was. As for the plot — not that it ever matters — this one’s more confusing than ever. Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) and Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) must rescue the wily Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) from the purgatory of Davy Jones’ Locker, where he wound up last year at the end of “Dead Man’s Chest.” They also must round up the Nine Lords of the Brethren Court, sort of a UN of unsavoury behaviour, hoping that their combined power can stop the Machiavellian Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander) from ridding the world of pirates. — Neptune Theatre

Shrek the Third — It begins with a death, and from there the movie itself steadily dies. This third instalment in this monster of an animated franchise still subverts the fairy tales we grew up knowing and loving, but it’s smothered in a suffocating sense of been-there, done-that. Thankfully, as the films go along, they rely less on gratuitous pop culture references. And visually this “Shrek” is more dazzling than ever, especially in the realistic background details. But it also lacks the zip of its predecessors; it feels draggy and, at the same time, rushed. This time, the lovably cranky ogre Shrek (voiced reliably as always by Mike Myers) struggles with the prospect of becoming king of Far, Far Away after the death of King Harold, father of his wife, Fiona (Cameron Diaz). (Why Fiona can’t take over in a fairy-tale land where all the other rules have been upended is never addressed.) So Shrek sets out with chatty Donkey (Eddie Murphy) and the suave Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas, still a scene-stealer) to find the only other possible heir to the throne: the nerdy, insecure Artie (Justin Timberlake). — Southside Cinema