The Dark Knight is brilliant. It’s intellectually challenging. It’s psychologically terrifying. And there’s a damn good chance it’ll scare the living daylights out of your 13-year-old.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to those who saw Batman Begins. The movie hews close to the comic books, which have run to the dark side ever since 1986’s The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller. Miller’s re-imagined Batman lived in a brutal, gritty world in which hope was a distant dream rarely realized. It’s a tradition that continued in some of the best Batman stories since then, such as Batman: Year One and The Long Halloween.

Don’t watch The Mist. You may think you know how things go, having read Stephen King’s short story of the same name. You might like horror and think, "tentacled monstrosities from beyond the edge of time? I can deal with that."

But trust me. If you’re a geek dad or mom, and the kind of person who’d fight to the very end to protect your family, you don’t want to watch this movie. Hell, I watched it, and I wish I could unwatch it.

Yeah, it’s that disturbing.

When Bryan Singer left the X-Men franchise to direct Superman Returns, I couldn't help but feel a little dread. The first X-movie got off to an uneven start (mutagenic wave? killing off Senator Kelly?) but was ultimately satisfying. X-Men 2 succeeded on all fronts, evoking the comic books, introducing new characters, and telling a satisfying story.

And now we have X-Men: The Final Stand, a movie which struggles mightily with an ever-larger cast and myriad plots meant to satisfy diehard fans and newbies alike. Unfortunately, the plots and the characters caught up in them never managing to gel cohesively, ending with a movie that's the cinematic equivalent of one of veteran X-scribe Chris Claremont's rambling, multi-year, never-quite-explained plots.

King Kong is every 12-year-old boy's dream -- an epic, larger-than-life adventure tinged with horror and managing to make the silver screen look too small to contain it. Plus, it's got a 25-ft tall gorilla fighting dinosaurs.

The story of King Kong is well known, and the surprises in this film come from execution rather than plot. The question is not what will happen uat what new wonders Peter Jackson will show us, and oh, what wonders there are!

• X-Men 2: X-Men United
• Director: Bryan Singer
• Starring: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart
• Running Time: 132 minutes
• Buy it from Amazon.com

X-Men 2 surpasses its predecessor by telling a tight, fast moving story while simultaneously giving fans almost everything they wanted.

The story picks up shortly after the end of the first film. The X-Men are back at Xavier's mansion, dabbling with normalcy. Rogue, life-force absorbing, power-stealing teenager, has a boyfriend in the form of the ice-wielding Bobby Drake, and both are happy that their biggest problem in life is figuring out how to kiss without Rogue knocking Bobby into next week. Wolverine is off doing loner-type things, namely tracking down his lost history, while Jean Grey, Cyclops and Storm have settled back into their roles as teachers to the next generation of mutants.

The movie should have been a half-hour longer.

I want to throw that out first, because almost every review I've read of the movie has gushed over its new, darker, more adult demeanor, and utterly ignored the gutting of the novel's climax.

Underworld is the story of the secret war between werewolves and vampires, a war that humans have been blissfully unaware of for years, but which now threatens to erupt into our consciousness.

It was also the subject of a lawsuit by White Wolf Games, who claimed that the vampires-vs.-werewolf storyline infringed on its copyrights. Having now seen the movie, I have to disagree with White Wolf -- this movie doesn't actually contain any vampires, so how could it possibly infringe on their copyrights?

A handful of humans struggle to survive in a world ruled by dragons.

The SCI-FI Channel reimagines Battlestar Galactica with mixed -- but ultimately enjoyable -- results.

Nuketown dissects John Carpenter's 1988 sci-fi left-wing manifesto.