Review: "Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters"

When 20th Century Fox made Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief in 2010, it was just another in a long line of youth fantasy films for the studio -- including franchise non-starters Eragon, The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, and City of Ember -- that was designed to cash in on Potter-mania. As you can imagine, it was quite a coup for them to get Chris Columbus in the director's chair; Columbus had helmed the first two Harry Potter films, and was instrumental in bringing J.K. Rowling's beloved books to life on screen for Warner Brothers. His involvement with Percy Jackson lent a legitimacy and creative weight that none of Fox's other Young Adult projects had. The end result was a well-produced, well-cast movie, with a tone that was a bit more lighthearted and campy than the Potter movies -- perfectly suiting a series that is meant to hark back to classic Ray Harryhausen monster movies like Sinbad or Clash of the Titans.

Review: "2 Guns"

Hollywood has certainly gone crazy with the comic book adaptations in recent years, and I'm not just talking superheroes like The Avengers and Man of Steel. Most people don't realize that Road to Perdition with Tom Hanks, RED with Bruce Willis, and AMC's hit television show, The Walking Dead, are adaptations of popular comic book stories, too. This week's I-didn't-know-it-was-a-comic-book release is 2 Guns, based on the Boom! Studios series by Steven Grant.

In the film, Bobby (Denzel Washington) and Stig (Mark Wahlberg) are swindlers working both sides of the Texas/Mexico border to move drugs and money and anything else they can, in order to make some dough. After getting stiffed on a deal for some cocaine by cartel boss Papi Greco (Edward James Olmos), the two decide to rob a bank where Papi keeps $3 million in drug money, but somehow end up with $43 million that doesn't belong to Papi at all. It quickly becomes clear that the two men are not who they're pretending to be, and as the heat comes down from every direction -- with Papi, the CIA, and rogue military officers all wanting the money for themselves -- Bobby and Stig will need to trust each other and stick together in order to survive.

Review: "RED 2"

Staying retired and leaving his old life behind hasn't exactly been easy for ex-CIA operative Frank Moses (Bruce Willis). Of course, it doesn't help that the government keeps trying to kill him for things that he did -- in the service of his country -- decades ago. This time, it's a Cold War era mystery-project called "Nightshade" that has him marked for death once again.

Picking up a few months after the events of the first film, RED 2 reunites Frank and his girlfriend Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker) with their paranoid brother-in-arms Marvin (John Malkovich). The three of them are on the run from a trio of dangerous agents: Jack Horton (Neal McDonough), a government spook assigned to tie up loose ends from "Nightshade;" wetwork specialist Victoria (Helen Mirren), an ally from the first film, has been given a contract by MI-6 to eliminate them this time around; and Han Jo-Bae (Lee Byung-Hun), a world-class assassin who's also hot on Frank's trail for both personal and professional reasons. Along the way, the gang will need help from some over-the-top characters: an information-dealing Brit nicknamed The Frog (David Thewlis); Edward Baily (Anthony Hopkins), a formerly-brilliant scientist locked in a London nut house; and Katja (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a Russian ex-KGB agent who shares a past with Frank.

Review: "Man of Steel"

The granddaddy of comic book super heroes is back on the big screen in director Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, starring Henry Cavill as the last son of Krypton. After 75 years of history with the character, we all know the basic story: Sent from his dying home world as a baby, Kal-El crash lands in Kansas and is raised under the Earth name Clark by farmers Jonathan and Martha Kent. As an adult, Clark goes to work for the Daily Planet in the great city of Metropolis, where he falls for plucky Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Lois Lane, and defends humanity as "Superman." While this incarnation hews closely to that, the film stands confidently as a singular new vision for modern moviegoers.