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Weekend Movie Forecast: <em>Thor</em> Vs.<em> The People Vs. George Lucas</em>

With this weekend's release of Thor, that other patron saint of carpenters, the gates of the summer movie season hell have officially swung open. Thor is the latest humongoid Marvel superhero film, an hors d'oeuvres for next summers blockbuster The Avengers movie; it's also the first of several other comic book movies (X-Men: First Class, Captain America, Green Lantern) that are sure to dominate the box office. But does Thor the movie have as much magic as the Norse God's special hammer, Mjolnir?Thor is already seemingly a cut above the average popcorn flick, since it's directed by Shakespearean enthusiast Kenneth Branagh, and includes Oscar winners Anthony Hopkins and Natalie Portman. The movie tells the origin story of Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the prince of Asgard and God of thunder, who is thrown out of his world by his father Odin (Hopkins) and sent to Earth as a punishment, wherein hijinks, love stories, and epic battles of course ensue. If you're a fan of superhero movies, or just want something fun and huge in 3-D to see on the screen, you really can't go wrong here. But the movie, which has a 58 cumulative score on metacritic, has already raised the ire of several critics. Dana Stevens of Slate slammed it: "I experienced three brief bursts of pleasure during Thor...The screen time taken up by these three surprises must have totaled about six seconds. All the rest of Thor's 113 minutes felt so synthetic and overfamiliar that those brief flashes of spontaneity stood out like Morse code messages from another, better movie."Keith Phipps of The AV Club was more forgiving and praised Hemsworth: "Hemsworth plays Thor as an uncomplicated man of action with the moral clarity and love of derring-do of a â40s swashbuckler and the toned physique of a 21st-century underwear model. Heâs also the embodiment of the big, loud, relentlessly entertaining film around him, the sort that should remind moviegoers why they used to get so excited about comic-book movies in the first place."But AO Scott, who was "dazed" after his viewing, gets the KO punch in: "The thing is, though, that the kind-of-O.K. aspects of Thor have the effect of making it more depressing, rather than less. The movie cannot be an interesting, appalling train wreck because it lacks the spoiled grandeur of ambition gone off the rails...On the contrary, the absolute and unbroken mediocrity of Thor is evidence of its success. This movie is not distinctively bad, it is axiomatically bad." — Gothamist

Published May 6, 2011

Modified May 6, 2011

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Click through on the film stills for more details and reviews on this week's new releases and repertory screenings, which include Thor, The People Vs. George Lucas, Last Night, An Invisible Sign, Jumping the Broom, There Be Dragons, Daydream Nation, Caterpillar, Something Borrowed, Under the Boardwalk, Hobo With a Shotgun, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, and Blue Steel.