Watch a clip of "Larry Crowne" starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. 
 
 Tom Hanks may not be America's finest screen actor, but he's got statuettes that say otherwise. When he won his back-to-back Best Actor Oscars in 1994 and 1995 for "Philadelphia" and "Forrest Gump", respectively, he became the first actor to do so since Spencer Tracy (in 1937 and 1938), who was always considered the gold standard of classic Hollywood. Mr. Hanks has been compared repeatedly to James Stewart over the course of his three-decade career. He's a distant relative of Abraham Lincoln's mother; he fought long and hard to get a World War II memorial built on the Mall in Washington, D.C.; if he were running for something, it would be National Treasure. 
 
 But as difficult as it is to dislike Mr. Hanks, it takes no effort to all to develop an aversion toward "Larry Crowne," the alleged comedy being perpetrated today by Mr. Hanks; his director, Mr. Hanks; his producer, Mr. Hanks; and the co-writer, Mr. Hanks. It is a distinctly painful experience: On one level, the story pushes all the Recession-Era buttons—Larry (Mr. Hanks) has been laid off from his manager's job at a Wal-Mart-style budget store because he never went to college, and he never went to college because he joined the Navy. That the film opens the same week as "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" could only have been a marketing calculation, "Larry" being intended as the perfect counterprogramming to Hollywood's most callous exercise in soulless commerce. 
 
 But so little effort has been exerted toward making "Larry Crowne" more than a class-warfare cartoon that the film generates its own sense of cynicism and the distinct sense that "Larry Crowne" is simply a sop to certain disgruntled theatergoers. Some may see it as a movie that strives to restore emotional warmth and simple human values to a medium that could certainly use a little more of both. But unlike the freshly matriculated Larry himself, "Larry Crowne" gets a flunking grade in every discipline. 
 
 Reuniting Mr. Hanks and Julia Roberts for the first time since the grossly underappreciated "Charlie Wilson's War," this is the first feature film directed by Mr. Hanks since "That Thing You Do!" (1996) and establishes Larry immediately as the quintessential U.S. worker: He's enthusiastic, hardworking, honest, cheerful and, we have to guess, trustworthy, brave, clean and reverent. He's the antithesis of the very corporatized ethos that cuts him loose so brutally and nonsensically—since his educational shortcomings mean he can't advance in the company, he must therefore be let go. It turns out to be a blessing, of course: Larry goes to community college, where he's introduced to modern America, the comic basso profundo of his weirdly disassociated economics professor Dr. Matsutani ("Star Trek" vet George Takei) and Mercedes Tainot (Ms. Roberts), a leggy professor so weary and disillusioned she seems capable of extinguishing the spark of even the most eager, knowledge-hungry student. But not, of course, Larry Crowne. 
 
 The script by Mr. Hanks and Nia Vardalos ("My Big Fat Greek Wedding") is one of those wonders of the cinema: You wonder who thought any of this was funny. The fractious scenes between Mercedes and her stay-at-home husband (Bryan Cranston) are painful, although they do give Larry the opportunity to provide a romantic palliative. Larry's adoption by a group of younger students—all of whom ride eco-friendly motor scooters—is cloyingly, comically clueless; Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who plays Larry's style tutor, Talia, is positively adorable, but as directed by Mr. Hanks seems to be auditioning for her own Disney Channel program. The direction is generally awkward and given the coarsely written role Ms. Roberts is assigned to play, the burden of charm is placed squarely on Mr. Hanks well-intentioned but sagging shoulders. Even a national monument will collapse under too much pressure. 
 
 Watch a clip of Paramount Pictures' "Transformers: Dark of the Moon". 
 
 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon' 
 
 A black hole of technology, talent and time, "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" is a symptom of many things, chief among them the fact that summer blockbuster movies don't really matter anymore. What matters is the propaganda. The sound and fury surrounding director Michael Bay's third Hasbro-inspired sci-fi hallucination has been cranked up to such a volume that no consumer of any media can ignore it, and no mere movie can possibly live up to it. And it doesn't matter: Audiences won't come to "Dark of the Moon" to see it, but to have seen it. The hype has outpaced the product. 
 
 None of which is to say that "Dark of the Moon" isn't also a genuinely bad movie. Special effects, god love them, are intended to bridge the plausible and the fantastic. Yet at virtually no time, amid the clinking, clanking, clattering collection of caliginous junk that rattles through "Dark of the Moon," is there the sense that such a gap has been spanned. Certainly, there are well-defined worlds created by Mr. Bay and his scores of highly skilled craftsmen and other high-profile personnel (including the prolific producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura and executive producer Steven Spielberg). These include the quasihuman reality of Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), the unemployed college grad who can't get a job because he can't tell anyone that he's saved the world two times before. Parallel to Sam is the world of Sam's intergalactic allies, the mechanically mutating Autobots, and their foes, the Decepticons, who some time earlier destroyed the planet Cybertron and will proceed to do the same to Washington and Chicago. Adjacent to these disparate universes is the world of erstwhile Victoria's Secret employee Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who plays Sam's girlfriend Carly, and represents a species that may have originated on the planet Supermodeltron. 
 
 And, of course, there's the action—the gleeful, wholesale, wanton, relentless destruction that reduces entire U.S. cities to smoldering ruins and, like Nascar, sings the siren song of the morbidly amused. 
 
 There is, however, no integration of these various elements, no sense of immersion in consolidated fantasy and hence no suspension of disbelief. Hence no emotional engagement. Hence, boredom. At 157 minutes, "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," isn't just a movie. It's a sentence. 
 
 Enlarge Image Close Paramount Pictures The Autobot Bumblebee in 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon.' 
 
 Dragooned into the service of this film are not merely the living, but the dead. The conceit, not a bad one, is that the entire NASA space program was established to get to the moon and investigate the crash of an alien spacecraft in 1961: John F. Kennedy, disinterred via Mr. Bay's computer, announces the effort; Richard Nixon, similarly resurrected, continues it. (The real-life Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin even shows up, giving a rather sad validation to the entire enterprise.) What crashed on the moon those years before was a ship carrying the Cybertronian poobah Sentinal Prime (voice of Leonard Nimoy, fittingly enough) and the key to world domination. What ensues, or re-ensues, is a battle led by the series' principal Autobot, Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen), who will go metal-to-metal with the head Decepticon, Megatron (voice of Hugo Weaving) furthering the ongoing effort to enslave the earth and establish a New Cybertron. It's all so very engaging. And, unlike a good story, requires too much detail in the telling. 
 
 There's barely a spark of humanity in "Dark of the Moon," although there are, scattered about, some very entertaining contributions made by actors not normally associated with alien space epics: John Turturro, repeating his role as the unctuous Agent Simmons, is having his own fine time of it; John Malkovich, used sparingly, is delightful, too. Ms. Huntington-Whitely, making her first movie, acquits herself admirably enough. You hate to point out how mechanical they are, but the worst actors are the robots. One sounds like Bob Hoskins, one sounds like the janitor on "The Simpsons" and Optimus Prime, should he ever retire from the rubble, could have a shining future narrating NFL highlight films. 
 
 Enlarge Image Close ATO Jacob Wysocki as another title character, this time in 'Terri.' 
 
 'Terri' 
 
 The disarming, original "Terri" is a wry, low-key comedy from director Azazel Jacobs ("Momma's Man") that constantly monkeys with our expectations. An overweight loner, a goofy sidekick, the school siren—you can write the script yourself, all about an insecure teenager adrift in a sea of adolescent anguish, blahblahblah. And yet, that's not quite what happens. It's true that Terri (the terrific, touching Jacob Wysocki) has some not-quite-standard-issue problems, including a demented uncle (Creed Bratton), absentee parents and a propensity to wear pajamas to school. But Terri also has a sense of himself that belies all the assumptions we make about kids in movies or, for that matter, kids. He knows he's strange, but if someone doesn't like him he assumes it's their problem. He's also generous with his affections: When a classmate (Olivia Crocicchia) gets caught in a rather public and compromising position, Terri comes to her rescue. The other delight is John C. Reilly, who, as Terri's attentive school principal, may finally have found the perfect role for his peculiar and often misdirected gifts. 
 
 'The Perfect Host' 
 
 The less one knows about this perverse thriller from debuting director Nick Tomnay the better; a full appreciation of its delights lies in its revelations. Still, it should be noted that baggage can be an advantage: David Hyde Pierce, who has proven his versatility and range in a number of Broadway successes, remains for many that persnickety noodge of TV's "Frasier," Niles Crane. And having Niles in your head only makes Mr. Pierce's performance as Warwick Wilson richer—a virtuouso turn that requires at least two personalities, maybe more. Preparing dinner for an intimate group at his home in the Hollywood Hills, Warwick is intruded upon by a fugitive bank robber named John Taylor, played by Clayne Crawford, who imbues his character with memorably authentic—and psychopathic—desperation. 
 
 DVD FOCUS 
 
 'Charlie Wilson's War' (2007) 
 
 It's all about timing, and the timing was all wrong for this first pairing of Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. Based on a book by George Crile, the often hilarious political comedy had a script by Aaron Sorkin ("The Social Network"), was directed by Mike Nichols and co-starred Philip Seymour Hoffman (in a flat-out funny performance as a dyspeptic CIA agent). But the subject matter was too volatile: In the 1980s, the real-life Congressman Wilson had pushed U.S. efforts to aid the same anti-Soviet Afghan rebels who eventually morphed into the Taliban. All of which was bad box-office juju in 2007, and everyone more or less ran away from the movie. But it remains a gem, ripe for rediscovery. 
 
 'The War of the Roses' (1989) 
 
 Danny DeVito directed this bleak black comedy starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, about a divorce so harrowing the film might have served as couples therapy. When they decide to part, both Barbara Rose (Ms. Turner) and her husband, Oliver (Mr. Douglas), decide to keep the house and each begins a campaign to force the other out. How far will they go? The teaser for the movie: "Once in a lifetime comes a motion picture that makes you feel like falling in love all over again. This is not that movie." 
 
 'The Secret War of Harry Frigg' (1968) 
 
 Paul Newman is the incorrigible U.S. Army private who allows himself to be captured by the Italians during World War II so he can free five captured Allied military bigwigs (French, British and American). All the POWs are one-star generals who refuse to take orders from each other; Harry is given two stars, so he can wrangle the brass to freedom. Inevitably, Harry gets involved with the Italian countess who owns the castle where they're all being held, but he still wins the war. "Harry" is perhaps more curiosity than classic, but it's hard not to be charmed by Mr. Newman. 
 
 —John Anderson ||||| After you've seen the movie, listen to Dana Stevens and John Swansburg's Spoiler Special about Transformers: Dark of the Moon or with the player below: 
 
 The colossally destructive, almost comically long final battle sequence of Michael Bay's Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Paramount Pictures) culminates in at least a temporary vanquishing of the earth-invading Decepticons by the more human-friendly Autobots. But the entirety of the film stands as proof of robotic life's inevitable triumph over Homo sapiens. Faced with this quantity of hardware, this degree of technical sophistication, this goddamn many robots, organic life doesn't stand a chance. We might as well amuse ourselves with tales of the war between two fictional robot races, now that Michael Bay has taken over the world. 
 
 It's been a slow colonization, with each of the three successive Transformers films ratcheting up the onslaught. In the first, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), a high-school kid in love with his car, discovers that the black-and-yellow Chevy Camaro, Bumblebee, is really a giant sentient robot from the mechanical planet Cybertron. Sam gets drawn into the war between the planet's two exiled races, who eventually trash downtown L.A. in their struggle for intergalactic domination. In the second film—well, pretty much the same thing happens again, except that Sam is now a college kid who's definitively landed his dream girl (Megan Fox, who was fired from the franchise after jokingly comparing Bay to Hitler) and the monuments sacrificed to cosmic war are the Great Pyramids. 
 
 With Dark of the Moon, Bay takes the more-is-more aesthetic of the first two movies up another several notches. Forget about critic-proof; this movie is critic-obliterating. It's a tank that flattens everything that gets in its way, including the audience. There is something awe-inspiring about Bay's sheer commitment to scale—augmented now by that state-of-the-art anti-audience weapon, 3-D. But marveling at its grotesque gigantism doesn't make this two-and-a-half-hour-long movie any less dull. 
 
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 The dullness kicks in almost immediately after the appealingly loopy cold open, which posits a paranoid alternate version of the moon landing. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin have secretly been sent to investigate an alien spacecraft that's crashed on the lunar surface. (The real Aldrin appears in a cameo later in the film, somewhat surprisingly given the astronaut's history of run-ins with moon-landing conspiracy theorists.) The craft's occupant is Sentinel Prime (voiced, pleasingly, by Leonard Nimoy), an aged Autobot leader thought dead in the war that destroyed their planet. The alien is brought back to Earth, where he eventually meets up with his successor Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen, who's been voicing this character ever since his early days as a TV-cartoon hero.). After some nattering about who should possess the Matrix of Leadership (which is not a managerial manual but a kind of airborne power-conferring crystal), the two Primes join forces to foil what has to be one of the worst-thought-through evil schemes in movie-villain history: something about towing the planet Cybertron close to Earth and enslaving the human population to rebuild it, as if it were an offshore oil rig? 
 
 Sam, now a recent college graduate, has been unable to find a job, so he's living off the ample salary (and other ample gifts) of his English girlfriend, Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, a Victoria's Secret model whose blank moue recalls Guess? Jeans model and onetime Mickey Rourke paramour Carré Otis). Carly works for a car-collecting billionaire (Patrick Dempsey) who may have even more nefarious plans afoot than just stealing Sam's girlfriend. John Malkovich, Ken Jeong, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, and Frances McDormand also mill in and out as … people who react to the giant battling robots and, less often, to one anothers' lines. 
 
 Call me carbon-based, but I can't for the life of me keep straight which of the warring vehicle-based automatons is which: Megatron, Starscream, Ironside, Ratchet, the millionaire, his wife. (Do female machines exist on the planet Cybertron? Never mind; don't answer that.) These massive machines duke it out in the foreground while tiny people—some in high-tech wingsuits, some in high heels and tight jeans—scurry through the wreckage at their feet. The endless action climax includes a falling-skyscraper scene that casually plunders 9/11 for visual references (floating scraps of paper, falling office chairs) without paying the obligatory tax of pathos or political allegory such scenes usually demand. At one point, a character refers to downtown Chicago, where the alien battle is taking place, as "Ground Zero." Ten years after the fall of the Twin Towers, the attack, like the moon landing, has become a source of stock historical references. 
 
 Occasionally, a nifty action idea bobs to the surface, like some business involving the leads' slide down the outside of a sharply canted glass building. (In this movie, even a brief nod to the laws of physics counts as subtlety.) But everything is soon pounded to rubble under the Volkswagen-sized fists of Bay's mechanized heroes and villains. Somewhere deep into the perhaps 40-minute-long crescendo of action that ends this movie, I began to experience a dazed sense of submission, a cowed respect for our new CGI overlords. Other sci-fi franchises—the Terminator series most notably—pit vulnerable but canny humans against soulless time-traveling robots in a struggle for supremacy. Transformers takes the struggle to the next, posthuman level. On Earth as on Cybertron, and certainly at the box office, the robots have already won. 
 
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 Like This Story Follow Slate's Movies ||||| The midtown-Manhattan crowd  real people, not movie reviewers, except for this one  stood patiently in line for a 12:15 a.m. screening of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the third in Michael Bay's ear-, eye- and block-buster series based on the line of Hasbro robot toys. When the feature began, a half hour late, the audience showed its fondness for the material by saluting each appearance of the friendly yellow car-bot Bumblebee, not with rowdy shouts but with courteous applause, as if after a sharp volley at Wimbledon. A few whoops greeted the 3-D IMAX leveling of Chicago. And when the movie ended, about an hour before dawn, the admirers let out a few decorous cheers. They sounded less like red-meat fanboys than connoisseurs at a wine tasting. 
 
 The critics' reaction has been more tentative. They decried the first Transformers (2007) and its sequel Revenge of the Fallen (2009), which together earned more than $1.5 billion at the worldwide box office. They charged Bay with failing all conventional (perhaps archaic) tests for coherence of storytelling and mise-en-scène. He sends the camera scampering in virtually every shot, even those lasting a split second, and he seems to think that matching them  locating a fixed point of view, a law that directors have followed since the earliest features  is for wimps. Reviewers of the first two films got so vexed by Bay's eroticized violence, his car lust and carnage, his nonstop aural and cinematic assaults, that they saw his success in apocalyptic terms, as the end of movies as we once loved them and the triumph of a virulent new strain: robotulism. T3 screenwriter Ethan Kroeger mimics the typical critique of a Bay film when he has John Malkovich, as the hero's epicurean boss, say, "You fall into a life-sucking abyss. It's a visual and therefore visceral betrayal." (See the 25 All-TIME Best Animated Films.) 
 
 With T3, many reviewers have retreated from their previous horrified stance to baffled resignation. I'm with them. I acknowledge that, for good or ill, Bay is the soul of a new machine, the poet of post-human cinema, the CEO of Hollywood's military-entertainment complex. T3 is the movie equivalent of an '80s thrash-metal concert (not Megadeth but Megatron), with bits of spoken exposition inserted into the action scenes like the lead singer's mumbled comments between songs. And yes, for Bay to give Optimus Prime and the other good Autobots blue eyes and Megatron's evil Decepticons red eyes smacks of aesthetic fascism, but in a helpful way: how else are novice viewers to tell them apart? It's all part of the director's grand, lubricious vision  what we might call Bay-watch. 
 
 Plot synopsis: Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), blah blah, Optimus and Megatron knocking heads again, new Autobot named Sentinel (voiced by Leonard Nimoy), secret government project run by a bossy woman (Frances McDormand, more or less playing Hillary Clinton if she ran the CIA, and if you hate Hillary Clinton), new girlfriend Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, whose generic blond sexiness makes her both a fembot and Playboy Femlin), big bot battle that devastates downtown Chicago (notably the aptly named Wacker Drive), blah blah, bring in the U.S. military and somehow let Sam command them to save the world  if he can first get Carly out of that Decepticon car that is trying to fondle her with its grabby tentacles. 
 
 See TIME's video "The Top 10 Animated Movies of All Time." 
 
 See the All-TIME 100 Movies.
– Negative reviews are like Energon Cubes to Michael Bay—they only make him stronger. His first two Transformers movies were universally trashed by critics, and the latest—Transformers: Dark Of The Moon—is no different according to its 37% rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But it's not like Optimus Prime will ever give Colin Firth competition at the Oscars. While some members of the press see the movie as a popcorn flick that's at least better than Revenge Of The Fallen, others wish it would have changed into something more interesting. John Anderson of the Wall Street Journal calls it "a black hole of technology, talent and time. Transformers: Dark Of The Moon is a symptom of many things, chief among them the fact that summer blockbuster movies don't really matter anymore." Slate's Dana Stevens sees a glimmer of a silver-plated lining. "There is something awe-inspiring about Bay's sheer commitment to scale—augmented now by that state-of-the-art anti-audience weapon, 3-D," Stevens writes. "But marveling at its grotesque gigantism doesn't make this two-and-a-half-hour-long movie any less dull." Richard Corliss of Time is a bit more accepting. "T3 is the movie equivalent of an '80s thrash-metal concert (not Megadeth but Megatron), with bits of spoken exposition inserted into the action scenes like the lead singer's mumbled comments between songs." Tom Charity of CNN might be the most realistic in his resignation. "It's a lousy movie, but at least it's a lousy movie with a serviceable story, killer CGI and an action climax that goes on forever," he writes. "An awful lot of people like that kind of thing—my kids included."