Movie reviews: 7-14

Summaries are condensed from Blade reviews and reflect the theater schedule starting Friday. Films are rated on a scale of 5 stars (best) to Bomb (worst). The reviewer's name, movie running time, and abbreviations of the theaters where the movie is playing are at the end of each summary.

Bad Teacher. Cameron Diaz gets in touch with her bad side in this raunchy comedy about an alcoholic, drug-using party animal marking time as a teacher as she tries to snare a wealthy husband. Diaz is funny, but she can't erase the movie's slow spots or uneven tone. R ** 1/2 89 min. (Wire review) (FP, FT, LC)

Cars 2. Lightning McQueen heads to the first-ever World Grand Prix race. On the way, his best friend, the tow truck Mater, is mistaken for a secret agent. Though by no mean a wreck, this Pixar sequel is a disappointment, putting the spotlight on Mater as a country bumpkin bumbling his way through a sophisticated world. G ** 113 min. (Baird) (Fox, FP, FT, LC, SDI)

Horrible Bosses. While not the breakout comedy of the summer, Horrible Bosses delivers laughs, along with a foolproof premise of bad people getting theirs and big-name actors ensuring it all works. Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, and Charlie Day play the put-upon employees who plot the demise of their vile bosses played by Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell, and Jennifer Aniston, who steals the movie as a profane and sexually aggressive dentist. R *** 98 min. (Baird) (FP, FT, LC)

Larry Crowne. Tom Hanks directed, co-wrote, and stars in this mess of a comedy about a middle-aged guy forced to reinvent himself after a divorce and job layoff. He enrolls in a community college, where he meets an instructor (Julia Roberts) who is merely going through the motions of her job on top of marriage issues of her own. Corny jokes abound, including gags about cell phones, scooters, and Star Trek. PG-13 * 99 minutes. (Baird) (FP, FT, LC)

Midnight in Paris. Woody Allen's romantic comedy is a tale of Americans who travel to Paris for business and have their lives transformed by the magical city. With an appealing cast, it is Allen's warmest, mellowest, and funniest venture in far too long. PG-13 **** 94 min. (Wire review) (LC)

Mr. Popper's Penguins. Jim Carrey stars in this adaptation of the 1939 Newbery Award-winning children's book about a businessman who has lost sight of the important things in life. When he inherits six penguins, they turn his swanky New York apartment into a winter wonderland and the rest of his life upside-down. The film is little more than another slice off a very stale loaf, but it's earnest, benign, and sometimes funny. PG ** 95 min. (Wire review) (FP)

Monte Carlo. Three gal-pals (Selena Gomez, Leighton Meester, and Katie Cassidy) go on vacation to Paris, where Gomez is mistaken for a famous British heiress. Instead of telling the truth, the friends decide to see how the other half lives. The old-fashioned mistaken-identity comedy is filled with cliches and leaden humor, and Gomez, supposedly the star, is too young to compete with the grown women who are her costars. PG * 1/2 109 min. (Wire review) (FP, FT)

Rio. Jessie Eisenberg, Anne Hathaway, Jane Lynch, and Wanda Sykes provide the voices for this animated tale about a domesticated macaw that travels around the world to chase down the love of his life. The film bursts with big images and vibrant colors, and the use of 3-D is surprisingly effective. So much is so appealing for so long that you can almost forgive the fact that the story is ultra-thin. G *** 96 minutes. (Wire review) (MIT)

Super 8. This monster movie masquerading as an early Steven Spielberg work is set in 1979, when a train wreck lets something mysterious loose on the fictional town of Lillian, Ohio. First the military shows up to investigate the accident, then residents begin to vanish, leaving a group of teens who filmed the wreck scrambling to uncover the truth. Writer-director J.J. Abrams is a gifted storyteller, but he's no Spielberg (who produced), and Super 8 lacks the magic of classics such as Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. PG-13 ** 112 min. (Baird) (FP, FT)

Thor. As the movie debut of the mythological god with the hammer of thunder, Thor falls somewhere in the middle of the pack of comic-book adaptations. Chris Hemsworth excels as the title character, having the look of a Norse god and the sly wink to pull off some of the film's surprising comedic moments. His impressive work on camera, though, is often upstaged by director Kenneth Branagh's clumsy failure behind it. Thor is a should-have-been superhero film of mostly unrealized potential. PG-13 ** 1/2 130 minutes. (Baird) (MIT)

Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Shia LaBeouf again stars in and Michael Bay directs the third Transformers film, and shock of shocks, it's fun. There are enough holes in logic and plot to drive an Autobot through, and dialogue is meaningless, but the movie delivers where it counts -- action and effects -- and is unrelenting in its goal to be this summer's biggest, baddest crowd-pleaser. PG-13 *** 1/2 157 min. (Baird) (Fox, FP, FT, LC, SDI)

Water for Elephants. During the Great Depression, a veterinary student (Robert Pattinson) lands a job treating animals in a traveling circus, then falls in love with the wife (Reese Witherspoon) of the circus' owner (Christoph Walz). This handsome adaptation of Sara Gruen's 2006 best seller balances the colorful glitz of a three-ring spectacle with the atmospheric realism that a rich drama demands. The sideline characters are hokey stereotypes, but the main trio is well-developed. PG-13 *** 1/2 122 minutes (Wire review) (MIT)

Zookeeper. When an animal-loving caretaker (Kevin James) realizes he's more comfortable in the company of a lion than that of a woman, he decides he must make a career change and quits his beloved job. But the animals at the zoo (voiced by Cher, Adam Sandler, Nick Nolte, and Sylvester Stallone) try to get him to change his mind by teaching him the ways of courtship -- jungle style. James may not make audiences believe animals can talk, but with slapstick and sincerity, he makes the film work anyway. PG ** 104 minutes. (Wire review) (FP, FT, LC, SDI)