The 90-minute, needlessly 3D documentary Katy Perry: Part of Me is a fantastic document of how guarded our superstars come in 2012. There's more revealed about Madonna in a single snort or eye roll in 1991's Truth or Dare than there is Katy Perry in the entirety of Part of Me. We learn that being a famous singer is Perry's childhood dream come true, that her goal is to make people smile, that she's not yet ready for kids. The biggest revelation is that she looks fantastic out of makeup, and if the words in her Proactive commercial are true, even that shouldn't come as a surprise. No warts at all.

I was once like you. I didn't think we needed another Spider-Man origin story, especially one that comes so soon after the perfectly serviceable last one. Sam Raimi's Spider-Man came out just 10 years ago and kicked off the trend of sensitive, thoughtful superhero fare that the film's parent company has undone with recent entries like the boneheaded Thor, the brain dead Captain America and the overrated but ultimately rewarding The Avengers. If we don't need another hero, we certainly don't need the same one twice.

Metrosexuality had to live and die for us to get to this new, at-ease, intimately homosocial era of masculinity, at least as it is depicted in pop culture. It's a time of bromance, of straight dudes getting drag-queen makeovers on reality TV, of straight soldiers lip-synching like drag queens on YouTube, of Chris Brown and Justin Bieber intimately duetting, of Drake and Justin Bieber intimately duetting, of rappers implicitly endorsing gay marriage. And no film has better encapsulated the new masculinity zeitgeist that values self security over rigid, external notions quite as definitively as Steven Soderbergh's male-stripper saga Magic Mike.

You want an unadulterated, neatly packaged expression of pride? See Beasts of the Southern Wild. And even if you don't want that, you should still see Benh Zeitlin's arresting first film. Gorgeous, poignant and plainspoken in its achievement of both so as to come off as humble, this movie exists to make adverbs modify the word "original." "Boldly original" says Movieline. "Strikingly original," says Entertainment Weekly. "Fiercely original," says Hitflix. "Dazzlingly original," says the Sydney Morning Herald.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is not racist, per se. No hatred is palpable. Abraham Lincoln's abolitionism is his heroism, and it's made literal as he uses his gun-powder-packed axe to off slave-owning vampires in this historical fantasy from the mind of Seth Grahame-Smith (author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). Early on, we see a young black kid separated from his slave family and then nearly get beaten to death because of the color of his skin. Abe adopts him as a friend for life, much to the benefit of both. To watch this film is to root for Abe is to root for the dignity of the lives of slaves.

Rock of Ages is so stacked with clichés and tropes that it feels like a comprehensive overview of American mythology, as dictated by pop culture. Set in a backdrop of L.A. that looks very much like a backdrop, the film tells a story about an aging rock star attempting to resurrect his career. By the end of the film, he's done so, courtesy of American pop culture's most relevant song of the past decade — Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'." As sung by Tom Cruise.

Ridley Scott's Prometheus makes a huge production of not having very much to say. Either that or it just doesn't say it very well. It bestows itself with the impossible task of exploring the meaning of life, faith and the inextricable bond of creation and destruction – a storytelling endeavor of sci-fi proportions in itself.

John Carter, the instantly infamous Disney bomb and possible co-assassin of Taylor Kitsch's career, sees its home-video release this week. It's kind of worth checking out just for the disastrous spectacle of it all, but if you're busy and don't want to watch two-plus hours of a multi-pronged civil war on Mars (aka Barsoom), which a white man crashes and then out-indigenouses the indigenous people, I've distilled everything you need to know about it. The video above is every instance of people saying the titular character's name throughout the film. They say it a lot. It's branding gone bad.

Snow White & the Huntsman has several cool tricks up its ornately designed sleeve, but the coolest one of all is its focus on its wicked queen's existential crisis. That is, after all, what's always driven the action of this oft- and increasingly told tale – the aging queen's savage jealousy of younger beauty is what forces Snow White away from her rightful castle, into the cabin of seven dwarves. It's what almost kills our protagnoist and it's what unites her with her true love, a prince.

The setting of Wes Anderson's seventh full-length feature, Moonrise Kingdom, couldn't be more crucial. The film takes place on the fictitious New England island of New Penzance in the 1960's. This is a place and time tucked away from harsh realities that understands them only vaguely. The two pubescent children at the center of the story, Suzy (Kara Hayward) and Sam (Jared Gilman), have problems with fitting in and acting out, but the closest anyone gets to putting a label on it is "troubled" (as seen on a book Suzy confiscates from her parents, Coping with the Very Troubled Child). That only scratches the surface of the alienation that comes from his being orphaned and the rage that provokes her to set things on fire and injure people.

As if they aren't inherently bad enough, my recent Mondays have been exceptionally unpleasant. Three Mondays ago, I spent my night interviewing shady and unengaged drag queen contestants of the most recent season of RuPaul's Drag Race. Two Mondays ago, I was shoehorned into a sceney party thrown by a sceney magazine featuring loud, unblended music and a limited spread of mean-making alcohol. But my least pleasant Monday night of recent memory was this past one, when I spent over two hours in a theater getting my eardrums violated by Peter Berg's film adaptation of a board game.

Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator is the picture of an equal-opportunity offender, but don't expect it to be taken as such. Racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, anti-American sentiment, anti-Arab sentiment, anti-celebrity sentiment — they're all key to the film's ruthless humor, but there is one breed of jokes that may affect delicate sensibilities above all the others: the rape joke.

Tim Burton's riff on the ‘60s/'70s vampire camp soap opera Dark Shadows joins a subset of TV-to-movie adaptations redundantly obsessed with the fish-out-of-water trope. These include The Brady Bunch Movie (great), The Addams Family (sequel's superior) and The Coneheads (sound the screeches of objection). The plots of these films serve to emphasize the transition of media by having their characters marvel at and bumble through a new, unfamiliar environment. It's novelty with a side of novelty. It revels in the supposed dearth of modern invention that fuels remake culture. It's as honest as it is regrettable.

People didn't get Gremlins 2: The New Batch when it was released in the summer of 1990, six years and a week after its blockbusting predecessor. It grossed less than a third of the original's box-office take ($41.4 million versus Gremlins' $148.1 million). Horror-hater Roger Ebert, who actually liked Gremlins and gave it three stars, gave Gremlins 2 two and a half and wearily wrote, "[Gremlins] was a superior B movie and a lot of fun. Gremlins 2 The New Batch is a meditation on sequels and, like most sequels, it's a faded imitation of the original." Its IMDb score (6.1) is a whole point behind Gremlins' (7.1).

People with disabilities made me laugh more times than I could count last weekend when I attended the 10th annual Sprout Film Festival. There was Lauren, an Australian student profiled in The Ball, who while cuddling her dog noted that he had the same eye and hair color as her. "My parents will think I'm a Labrador!" she exclaimed. There was the narrator of Stepping Out, who had an unspecified disability and said of her boyfriend with Down syndrome, "I'm trying not to laugh at him. But it's just so hard when he gives you that lovely look!" There was Jonathan, an actor with Down syndrome who got his start several years ago on Sesame Street. His most recent work is a narrative short called The Wing Man, in which he has brunch with his Brooklyn hipster brother.

One of the biggest surprises of last year was Midnight in Paris' ability to breeze in during the summer and emerge as Woody Allen's highest-grossing box office hit (that's if sleepers like Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters aren't adjusted for inflation). The film is charming and Owen Wilson is beloved, but the real shock is that Allen was able to sell the public on subject matter centered on a dying industry: literature. To delight in that movie is to delight in revisiting figures like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as their work. Cinema's relationship to literature is inherent and, in the case of book-to-movie adaptations, dependent, but rarely is it so blatant. The success of Midnight was a little ray of hope that people might still care about the culture of reading.

In pop culture, we often take for granted the Adonis (so many visible abs dull the senses) and overlook the waistline of a funny or straight man. Strangely, the everydude build of Jason Segel is a frequent topic of fascination. He made it that way when he dangled his half-fluffed cock in front of the country in 2008's Forgetting Sarah Marshall, his male lumps taking a backseat to the taboo.

There is a small, but palpable sense of disgust for gay men in Tim Story's Think Like a Man, which is based on comedian/self-styled love expert Steve Harvey's inane self-help book with a slightly longer title, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man. The only explicitly homo dude we ever see is in a pink polo, swishing his shoulders as he attempts to fight women shoppers from grabbing the book he's about to buy ("For me!" he says with several S's). Gayness is otherwise relegated to the taboo: the group of six men the film follows routinely freak out when they are in the presence of a shirtless or under-dressed buddy (this mild gay panic ensues in kitchens and locker rooms). Sentiments like violin-playing proving that one's son is gay and that one must qualify his Oprah-watching with, "No homo," are expressed. A guy buying a book for his mother's book club is deemed "kinda gay" by a female character, and after dazzling a pretty woman (played by Kelly Rowland) at a bar, Romany Malco's character, Zeke, tells her confusingly, "I'm gonna walk away like a fairy now." Um, bye.

Hollywood's latest Nicholas Sparks adaptation, The Lucky One, is out today. It is not a good movie. The flashes of weirdness—like the protagonist walking from Colorado to Louisiana and stopping in every town along the way to ask people if they know the person in a picture found during a raid in Afghanistan—are all undermined by the film's insistence of reiterating each plot point at least five times (it takes place at a kennel, so you'll quickly get bored of dog play).

This year's Disneynature's Earth Day documentary offering, Chimpanzee, is the latest in a rash of documentaries about the emotional lives of animals to emerge in the past year or so. Project Nim, One Lucky Elephant and The Whale (my favorite of the bunch because it was responsible for one of the most moving cinema experiences I've ever had) dissect and bemoan humans' complicated relationship with those whom we share Earth with – the good, the bad, the exploitative. Those three movies present stories of direct human interaction and, more specifically, how human interruption can severely fuck up innocent animal lives.