South Korean director Kim Jee-woon’s new film I Saw the Devil opens to a young woman (Oh San-ha) driving on a deserted highway, as her car stalls in the snow. She calls a tow truck, while her fiancé Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun), a Korean intelligence agent, risks the ridicule of his colleagues by sneaking into the bathroom of the hotel room they’re doing some secret mission out of to sing her their song. It’s sweet.

Take Me Home Tonight sputters along on the time-tested nerd-lust for beautiful, unattainable blondes that lent itself to hundreds of 80s teen movies. These films were essentially designed for writers to tell crass jokes, show plenty of breasts, and nail home the idea that fun is wrapped up in nose candy and kegs of flat beer, all under the guise of having “fun.” But it would be difficult to point to anything remotely fun during Take Me Home Tonight.

The gist of happythankyoumoreplease is summed up within the first five minutes. A potential publisher tells Sam (Josh Radnor), an aspiring novelist and leading man, that he’s unsure if he’s expected to identify with the protagonist or if he’s supposed to dislike him. The character, he says, is kind of charming and kind of an asshole, and the whole novel is “just kind of.” It’s a telling bit of foreshadowing, and by the transitive property of filmspeak, we can assume that the publisher is also referring to the film itself.

Drive Angry seems to have been misleadingly marketed as a modern entry into the exploitation film subgenre of “the muscle car movie,” recently rendered homage by Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse segment, Death Proof. But it bears a far fainter resemblance to the high-performance automobile-fetish porn of Vanishing Point and Eat My Dust! than, say, the Fast and the Furious movies, falling, as it does, in line with the more recent cutesy, “self-consciously stupid” action-porn movement best exemplified by 2007’s Shoot ‘Em Up.

It may be easy for critics to alternately dismiss or applaud a film like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives by describing it as a “dreamlike” collage of “weird” images or, better still, an “interesting” meditation on metempsychosic “themes.” But a film as potentially gush-overable-but-then-summarily-forgettable as the 2010 Palme d’Or winner might necessitate a slightly more considered (attempt at a) reading.

On the first night of my buddy’s Cape Cod bachelor party, the best man bought him a cookie cake with the message, “It’s never too late to say, ‘No.’” I thought of the cake as I watched Hall Pass, the latest comedy from Peter and Bobby Farrelly, because it also questions the merit of fidelity in a New England setting. The unofficial kings of gross-out humor, the Farrelly brothers hit new lows with their story of two perverted man-children who re-explore single life.