When is a drug movie not a drug movie? When its director says so.

In Gore Verbinski’s two-and-a-half-hour period-blockbuster take on The Lone Ranger, a layer of dust covers everything. The seconds trickle by slowly like sweat on a brow beaten by the deluding sun. Everything is ugly and uncomfortable. The main antagonist, with grime caked on his fuzzy face, appears and reappears during one of multiple runaway train scenes and start shooting and beating and heisting. I never catch his name.

There’s nothing like superhero flicks to make a moviegoer feel powerless. They are as inevitable as the changing of the seasons, and the changing of the seasons into summer triggers a bunch of them. Welcome to summer, here is your Superman.

If you want to wrap your head around the absurdity of celebrity in 2013, the New York Times Magazine's recent profile of Stalker Sarah is a good place to start. Sarah, 17, spends 40 hours a week hunting down celebrities so she can take pictures with them for little to no monetary profit on her end. From the profile:

Today sees the video-on-demand release of V/H/S/2, a sequel to last year's horror anthology. I really enjoyed this new entry (especially the bonkers short about the cult) when I caught it at the Tribeca Film Festival. It's an inventive entry in the found-footage horror, the rampant and cheaply made subgenere in which a character or characters in the film are filming the action we're watching (Paranormal Activity, the only blockbuster horror franchise standing, is an example of this format). As a result, the camera is part of the story and as a result of that, other characters frequently comment on it, at some point telling the operator to put it down or turn it off. From the found-footage grandaddy, 1980's Cannibal Holocaust, t0 the hit indie really responsible for igniting this trend, 1999's The Blair Witch Project, through virtually every other movie within the subgenre, there is at least one person threatening to subvert the format.

The tagline of the new Will/Jaden Smith movie, After Earth, is: “Danger is real. Fear is a choice.” The movie, which was directed by the inexplicably still-working hack M. Night Shyamalan and based on a story devised by the elder Smith, hinges on the ability of its young protagonist Kitai (Jaden) to rid himself of fear so that he can defeat a giant, blind monster mole that hunts humans by detecting their anxiety.

In my experience, the Hangover movies are mildly amusing when they aren't despicable. They are founded on a clever premise (retracing the steps of the blackout night before). They relish the joy and profound weirdness that stupidity can produce. They touch on relevant cultural practices and obsessions like eternal adolescence, bro culture, the mispronunciation of words and asshole-spotting.

J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot franchise performs several admirable balancing acts. Among them:

When people talk about the strengths of HBO’s Girls, they tend to mention how relatable and real it is. I enjoy that show, but I don’t see a lot of myself in it besides the sporadic human truths that punctuate these never unclever, coddled existences. Noah Baumbach’s seventh film, Frances Ha (opening this week) is similar in its focus—Greta Gerwig (who co-wrote the script) plays Frances, a 27-year-old dancer who lives in New York. Watching her struggle to eat while feeding her creative impulses and flailing to assert an identity while not quite fully formed as a secure human being felt like a trip back home to me.

We didn’t need another film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, but if someone had to do it, it had to be Baz Luhrmann. The kind of large-scale opulence that the book describes and critiques is the 50-year-old director’s wheelhouse. For a while, Luhrmann pulls it off, too: The first hour of his Gatsby is an ecstatic tear through '20s hedonism. The camera swoops and whizzes like it's just excited to be there. The music, which finds contemporary pop royalty marrying big-band with big-room house or just dipping into dubstep, blares. Bouquets of people dance in pools, spill out of convertibles, and cram into ample hallways. The words “chemical madness” and “kaleidoscopic carnival” are uttered. Luhrmann parks at the intersection of kitsch and hallucination, stumbles out of his Duesenberg and deliriously rolls all over in the road.

Nothing much is at stake in Iron Man 3. The explosions only affect the bad guys (all an out-of-iron Tony Stark needs to do to deflect one is hide behind the door of a bag-ice freezer). No one of any real importance to this franchise (or that of the bigger Marvel superheroes franchise that it’s part of) is going to expire.

The idea that there are no new ideas is an old idea, but a true one; there are no new ideas. For confirmation, look no further than the state of horror movies–remakes and a bunch of found-footage clones (in which the camera is part of the story, characters are doing the filming and the movie is supposedly assembled from what they shot) abound. The last notable major horror release was a reboot of Evil Dead, and the only standing franchise that provides a serious box office threat is Paranormal Activity. There were no real horror remakes to be found at the Tribeca Film Festival, but almost half of TFF's horror features (three movies out of eight) are found footage. All three account for the staleness of the subgenre, attempting to cut what is now a seemingly endless loop of POV clichés on top of tropes that date back even further. (Would you like a jump scare? OK, here are two dozen.) However, only one of them truly transcends the format's trappings.

"You don't sound like the ones on Bravo," says the blondest, hottest girl in the school, Fawcett (Sasha Pieterse), to the guy she is tying to woo, Tanner (Michael J. Willett). Tanner is freshly out of the closet and the coveted accessory of his school's three most popular girls, to whom he compares "warlords in a Third World country." Tanner is the titular G.B.F. – gay best friend — of Jawbreaker director Darren Stein's latest movie of high-school clique absurdity. Tanner is one of the most specific gay teens I've ever seen portrayed on screen.

"Sometimes in life you need to step into the unknown," says Dutch director Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Showgirls, Basic Instinct) in the beginning of Tricked, the half-documentary, half-movie that's playing at the Tribeca Film Festival. He's referring to the crowd-sourced script of the project at hand, for which he rifled through thousands of fan-submitted pages to assemble a cohesive, 50-minute narrative film.

Some spoilers follow.

Fede Alvarez's remake/reboot/reimagining of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead and Evil Dead II respects its source material in a manner that feels perfunctory at times. It flashes to references like it's ticking off a list. Sentimental necklace, check. Chainsaw, check. Necronomicon, check. Flying camera, check. Mirror scare, check. Possessed hand, check. Emotionally manipulative demons, check. Sexual assault by tree, check.

Dinosaurs!

Like the film that provides its source material, Rodney Ascher's new-media documentary Room 237 about Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror film The Shining, is a cinematic vise. However, 237 owes it tension not to the spiraling madness of its central character, but to discourse that threatens to spiral into madness.

Mountain Fiji, Colonel Ninotchka, Debbie Debutante, Susie Spirit, Spike, Chainsaw and their colleages were underestimated from the start. They were the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (or G.L.O.W.) and for four years that started in 1986 they were a day-glo staple of Saturday morning programming. No one expected them to catch on ("It was almost an infomercial!" recalls one of the wrestlers on the show's rampant product placement) or last as long as they did, but then when it was clear that they had (after 104 episodes), the show's primary backer Meshulam Riklis stopped funding it supposedly because his then-wife, camp icon Pia Zadora, forced him to.

K-11, the directorial debut of Kristen Stewart's mom Jules Stewart, is like a weird nightmare you just woke up from, in which you went to jail, watched someone shit out a balloon full of coke, stared at No.2 pencil-drawn chola eyebrows for way too long, heard someone howl, "I want a jailhouse fuck and I want it now!" while never quite grasping why anyone is doing what they're doing, ever. And did you get buttfucked? It's too fuzzy to be sure. It's the B-est, gayest, longest episode of Oz. It's madness, borderline camp and it seems to be aiming for something as sleazily quotable as Showgirls. It can't touch those debased heights, but any movie featuring an old, effete prisoner shouting, "I ain't leavin' here without my laxative! I'm in pain, god damn it!" either knows what it's doing or at least is wise enough to stay out of its own ridiculous way.