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Rob Marshall's philosophy for shooting action sequences seems to be roughly equivalent to his approach to musical numbers: give 'em as little as possible. Just as the danceless “dance” sequences that polluted the director's Nine were assembled a posteriori in the editing room, thus obviating the need for choreography, the numerous fight scenes in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides feel cobbled together from hundreds of disparate snippets. No scorched-earth Greengrassian postmodernist, Marshall imbues his sword fights and chase scenes with a semblance of visual coherence, but he's careful not to linger on any single bit of action long enough for viewers to register the significance of the image they've just witnessed. It's an enervating approach that marks the film as more exhausting than enthralling, and its m.o. of nonstop clatter is one that Marshall applies to almost every aspect of the production. Everything is pitched so high in terms of loud exclamations, dramatic music, and frenetic activity that one would reasonably expect the film to be a compendium of juicy thrills, but the uniformity of tone instead renders the whole thing uniformly dull. When the characters aren't fighting each other, they're making solemn threats or, in the case of Johnny Depp's Captain Sparrow and Penélope Cruz's Angelica, exchanging caustic but flirtatious barbs, all of which is about as sexy as watching Richard Griffiths frump it up as a boorish, overweight King George II. This fourth installment in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, the 18th-century-set On Stranger Tides has as its central narrative the search for the Fountain of Youth and the accompanying paraphernalia that allow its powers to be harnessed. In its overly convoluted plotting, three groups of explorers set out to follow the trail of the late Ponce de León. While Sparrow flits between the parties of gone-straight buccaneer Barbossa's (Geoffrey Rush) British contingent and that of the unrepentant pirate Blackbeard (Ian McShane) and his daughter (and Sparrow's love interest) Angelica, the Spanish set off to stake their own claim for the fountain. After the overlong setup (which admittedly contains the film's best action sequence, the only one to successfully incorporate a measure of humor into the staging), it's off to sea for a series of set pieces that have a distinct time-marking quality, riding out the duration until the three groups finally arrive at their destination. There are no shortage of film-padding subplots devised by screenwriters Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, ranging from the dull to the ridiculous (a romance between a missionary and mermaid has to represent some kind of new low for screen amour) and some half-baked discussion about faith toward which the movie can't be bothered to develop a coherent attitude, but mostly the filmmakers rely on a rather perfunctory use of 3D to endow the whole thing with an (ironically) surface-deep patina of thrills. But give or take a sword or two being thrust at the audience or a barrel rolling toward the viewer and the stereoscopic process serves mostly to extend the foreground image while leaving the background flat. Its use of 3D as uninspired as its staging, plotting, and characters (and its weak stabs at humor), On Stranger Tides proves its title to be a patently false bit of advertising. There's nothing strange—or in any way extraordinary—about this dim-witted bore.

Given it's origins as a theme park ride, it's apt that Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy has experienced a trajectory not unlike that of a rollercoaster: an initial high, followed by repeated plummets to nauseating lows. At World's End completes the story begun by last year's Dead Man's Chest, and features all the cacophonous action and paper-thin drama that helped sabotage its deflating predecessor. Aesthetically speaking, there's virtually nothing differentiating these films, as both boast Gore Verbinski's spatially incoherent battle scenes, Dolby-customized sonic bombast, and lavish special effects so lacking in fine detail that they're deliberately shrouded in murky darkness. Yo Ho Ugh, it's merely more of the same, and I do mean more; at a whopping 168 minutes, so much happens in At World's End that it's nigh impossible to keep up with all the various machinations and conflicting motivations crammed into Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio's script. Such overkill, however, is simply a tool of distraction aimed at diverting attention away from the fact that the film's existence is driven not by overarching narrative demands (there's barely enough substantive material to warrant even a 90-minute runtime), but by an insatiable corporate bottom line. Previously on Pirates: Smash, bang, boom, and other loud, meaningless hijinks led fey rascal Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) to be imprisoned in Davy Jones's locker, and insipid lovebirds Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) to team up with newly resurrected Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) to help rescue Jack so he, in turn, could aid their quest to defeat squid-faced Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) and his new master, East India Trading Company bigwig Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander). That mouthful of a synopsis pales in comparison to the one necessitated by At World's End, whose myriad convoluted storylines involve most principal characters making promises to their mates, then engineering duplicitous back-room arrangements with their enemies (to further their own selfish ends), and then coming around and doing the right thing in the end because, well, it makes for a happier, safer, less morally complicated ending. Countless cross-purposes are simultaneously at work and yet, throughout, amount to naught, with the resultant plot muddle—made up of thinly sketched characters who are chiefly defined by their relationship to each other, and whose issues are dealt with in bite-size portions to make room for distended combat sequences—stinking like a pile of discarded corpses. The film's primary thread concerns the historic convening of the Brethren Court (made up of the nine pirate lords, two of whom are Sparrow and Barbossa), providing At World's End with an opportunity to indulge in outlandish stereotypes (among them: the screaming Japanese pirate queen, the stuffy French pirate fop, and Chow Yun-Fat sporting a Fu Manchu as Singapore's stilted English-spouting Captain Sao Feng). Crass, to be sure, but no less laughably objectionable than the script's underlying clash between British capitalism (“It's just good business,” is Cutler's be-all excuse for treachery) and pirate “honor,” a concept Verbinski and company don't even bother trying to explain. In essence, we're meant to root for Jack and his plundering cohorts purely because they're the funny and/or hot ones. It's a strategy that might have been more tenable were it not for Bloom's enervating blandness, Knightley's counterfeit badass posturing and Braveheart-ish “Freedom!” speech (as well as her comical ability to keep her tanned face smudge-free), and the unavoidable sense that what was once unique and inspired about Depp's Sparrow has, at this point, become calculated and dull, his prancing and lisping and flailing about emitting the odor of a stale routine. Absent rhythm or even basic narrative uniformity, the film careens clumsily, occasionally hitting upon a quirky moment—such as Jack's hallucinatory escapades in Davy Jones's locker and in the Flying Dutchman's brig—but mainly propping up its watery scenarios with recycled imagery (including three shots of boats bursting out of the ocean), pedestrian swordfights, and a dreary cameo from Keith Richards as the elder Sparrow. From beating aortas and heart-shaped lockets to enchanted compasses and cipher-laden maps, talismanic crap abounds, yet because the film's mythology carries no weight, these trinkets' supposed momentous value is nil; they're just so much costume jewelry. Meanwhile, limp romantic dilemmas are reconciled during a climactic showdown in which two battleships chase each other around a whirlpool in some bizarre (and immensely tedious) version of Pirate NASCAR. At World's End—a spectacle composed of intangible CG, superficial performances, and twists and turns that are vapidly resolved—it's clear that the statement also pertains to this empty vessel of a Hollywood blockbuster franchise.

Even for a sequel, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest takes the practice of double-dipping to extreme depths, its guiding principle—as was the case with its predecessor's third act—being that once is fun but twice is nicer: in this case, two villains, two love triangles, two self-sacrificing fathers, two CG centerpieces involving a leviathan, and two bustling sequences in which characters dash down a tropical forest mountainside in/on round contraptions. It's the last of these that most accurately exemplifies Gore Verbinski's follow-up to his 2003 blockbuster, his newest swashbuckler something of an awkwardly constructed Disney World ride that begins listlessly and gradually gains momentum as it dispenses with all non-action-oriented concerns. As with its antecedent, Dead Man's Chest finds Johnny Depp's flamboyantly foppish scoundrel Jack Sparrow being hunted by both human and inhuman foe alike, the former an East India Trading Company heavy named Beckett (Tom Hollander) who desires Sparrow's magical compass, and the latter the legendary locker-keeper Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), who wishes to collect on a soul-debt owed to him by the roguish, dreadlocked pirate. The film's regurgitating modus operandi extends to its tongue-in-cheek (gallows) humor and set pieces' spirited rowdiness, as well as to the fact that noble Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and spunky Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley)—whose wedding ceremony is rudely postponed by the malevolent forces of the British Crown—remain the leaden anchor of this Mouse House franchise, their spick-and-span goodness a woefully feeble counterpoint to ne'er-do-well Sparrow's deceptiveness. With its narrative course plotted along familiar routes, Dead Man's Chest lacks a needed spark of novelty and inspired, devil-may-care gusto. But even more problematic is that it fails to appreciably expand upon the original's sturdy template, exhibiting only a passing interest in its latent themes—regarding love, honor, patriarchy, and colonialism's taming of the savage world (and the subsequent consequences for iconoclastic rebels like Jack)—and never yielding, with the squid-faced Jones and his barnacled, crustaceous Flying Dutchman crewman, a fantastically magical moment on par with The Curse of the Black Pearl's exquisite first shot of moonlit skeleton swabs. Verbinski's extravaganza nonetheless reaps modest rewards from rambunctiousness, its skirmishes featuring the many-tentacled Kracken orchestrated with thunderous intensity and a scene (seemingly set on Skull Island) in which a Colonel Kurtz-ish Sparrow flees his stereotypically ooga-booga minions enlivened by giddy pole-vaulting acrobatics. Moreover, for all its duplicative tendencies, Dead Man's Chest ultimately stays just afloat thanks to Depp's uniquely idiosyncratic scalawag, the actor imbuing his preening, loose-limbed pirate with a drunken dancer's grace and a combination of colorful Walt Disney charm and rascally Chuck Jones mischievousness. As befitting his position as this high seas adventure's sashaying center of attention, Sparrow is, at film's cliffhanger conclusion, given one marvelously valiant composition that rightfully elevates the duplicitous, selfish character beyond mere cartoon caricature and into the realm of anti-heroic icon. And thus it comes as little surprise that the story's soggiest element turns out to be its attempted romantic tension between Sparrow, Turner, and Swann, an endeavor doomed by the charisma-imbalance of its three leads and the obvious fact that Sparrow's devious appeal lies, first and foremost, in his boundless self-love.

One would think it's a curse to have to transform a theme park attraction into a summer cinematic spectacle, but shiver me timbers, the only hex that burdens Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is its unwieldy title. This rollicking adventure from director Gore Verbinski is in love with the sights and sounds of pirate movie tropes—sailors swinging from ship ropes, sword fights, cannon balls flying through the air, glistening pirate bounty—and benefits immensely from both the filmmaker's successful fusion of arch comedy, swashbuckling action, mild horror (a trick neither his execrable The Mexican, nor his leaden The Ring, could pull off), and his willingness to let Johnny Depp overact his heart out. Depp, dressed up in a variety of colorful scarves that only partially contain his unruly tangle of dreadlocks and beaded hair, plays infamous pirate rascal Captain Jack Sparrow with limp wrists, a prancing gait, and a lilting British drawl that turns every “th” sound into an “f.” An androgynous king of the high seas, Sparrow is a gracefully asexual fop who, by embodying both feminine prettiness and masculine brashness, seems well aware of how to bend it like Beckham. Flashing his gold-toothed smile with a roguish delight that playfully hints at the naughtiness being concocted inside his scraggly head, Depp commands the screen so forcefully that it's difficult to sustain interest in the film when he's not front and center. During such lulls, one is forced to contend with the de facto love story between blacksmith Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and governor's daughter Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley), who is kidnapped by the undead crew of the legendary Black Pearl for possessing a piece of their cursed gold. Swann's abduction and Turner's quest to save her (which involves enlisting Sparrow's help) is the plot's catalyst, but since Pirates' greatest asset is Depp's uninhibited antics, things tend to drag when the puckish Sparrow is confined to mere supporting player. Bloom does an admirable job looking like a mini-Errol Flynn, and Knightley's delicate features clash winningly with her character's unladylike feistiness, but both are regularly upstaged by Depp, Geoffrey Rush as the decrepit Captain Barbossa, and a gaggle of peripheral characters (pirates and British alike) who contribute to the richness of Verbinski's theme park-inspired tapestry. Narrative repetition muddles up the film's second act, in which the adventurers find themselves visiting, and then revisiting, the same locales and skirmishes, but the occasionally monotonous escapades are bolstered by some playful Harryhausen-esque CGI villains—the Black Pearl's pirates, when caught in a blade of moonlight, are revealed to be walking, talking skeletons—and the director's eagerness to embrace, while slyly poking fun at, the hoary clichés his film must dutifully adhere to. Like the hidden stash of Caribbean rum that Sparrow and Swann enjoy after being stranded on a remote island by the **** Captain Barbossa, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is an intoxicating delight that abounds with woozy charm and delectable spiciness.

Young Jefffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is on the brink of manhood in Lumberton 1986—David Lynch's mise-en-scène is also readying to leave its Leave it to Beaver façade behind. In a town overwhelmed by bright white picket fences, blood red fire trucks, and carefully pruned roses, there's something especially grotesque about a man having a heart attack on his front lawn while his cocker spaniel laps spraying water from the hose still clinging to his hand. Blue Velvet is a film about the reality and streams of subconscious desire seething beneath a preposterously idealistic vision of America. Jeffrey discovers a severed, ant-infested human ear near a grassy trail (Lynch's homage to Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou), bringing it to the attention of the local police chief. With the help of Sandy (Laura Dern), a voyeuristic girl-next-door who emerges hauntingly from the shadows and promises her devotion to his mission, Jeffrey breaks into the apartment owned by an emotionally frayed chanteuse, Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rosselini, doing her best impersonation of a living china doll). Forget for a moment that MacLachlan is Lynch's doppelganger here. Lynch is less concerned with self-reference than he is with charting the uncomfortable crawlspace between boyhood and manhood. The many rooms of Blue Velvet are fascinatingly representative of internal moods: the white walls of the virginal Sandy's home; the garish blues and **** pinks of Dorothy's kitschy modern apartment; and the cluttered, homely look of the Beaumont home. Jeffrey innocently woes Sandy with an okey-dokey “chicken walk” before the officer's daughter speaks of a dream where darkness fell upon the face of the earth because there were no robins. It's all set to the sounds of Angelo Badalmenti's brilliant TV-noir score, which evokes everything from the wide-eyed glee of '50s pop (Roy Orbison and Bobby Devlin, whose “Blue Velvet” was the inspiration for the film) to divine religious hymnals. In a town where Awake magazines are readily associated with Jehovah's Witnesses, Dennis Hopper's Frank becomes a kind of satanic assault on normalcy. He's a rapist and kidnapper and if Dorothy's desire to be physically hit by Jeffrey is any indication, Frank's perversion easily spreads. But, then again, Lynch seems to suggest that love is as potent in Frank's fetishistic strange world as it is in Sandy's happy-go-lucky one. Even when the robins do return to Lumberton, Lynch still forces his characters to acknowledge the grotesque backside of their idyllic worldviews.

Strip way the abstract concept of love and what's left is primal desire fueled by need. But human beings don't like being told they're animals, so they allow their imaginations to construct fantasies to help them justify those needs. J.G. Ballard's novel Crash was pornography for philosophs, with technology as the illusion of choice. A secret society indulges in car sex, leading to accidents as erotic set pieces. The novel and David Cronenberg's film adaptation implicitly state that crashing cars during intercourse allows us to feel genuine sensations as opposed to the numbness of society, jobs, and conversation. It's a far out, all or nothing premise. What's disturbing to audiences isn't that Crash condemns such amorality, but that its characters are stretching their battered and scarred bodies into something new. Very little is discovered about these people besides their extreme proclivities. To give you an idea: the character named Ballard (James Spader) winds up sticking his **** into the serrated leg wound of a crash survivor (Rosanna Arquette) and walks away happier for it. Anyone willing to go along for the ride may feel repulsed, but Cronenberg has used grotesque images in his work to show mankind's ability to transform itself. If it weren't automobiles, which summon up the right metaphor for full throttle sex, it would be computers (eXistenZ) or television (Videodrome). Cronenberg has made frequent claims that his work has little to do with technology, but he continually returns to the concept of a “new flesh” forged from manmade industry. Whether you see the fusion of Flesh and Other in his movies as a blessing or a curse pretty much sums up your definition of 20th Century Disease: Are we so bored with life that we resort to self-mutilation to define ourselves, and is that really any better? Cronenberg seems to think so. His final image of two crash survivors groping each other and whispering, “Maybe next time, darling,” while an overturned automobile rests beside them is an optimistic one—a happy ending for a married couple that's communicating better now than they ever have before. The three sex scenes that open Crash show how desperate this modern husband and wife are at the start, having extramarital sex in public places, then coming home to sadly **** each other and describe their increasingly banal affairs. Since we're given almost zero insight into Ballard or his wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger), with no hobbies or defining characteristics, we're left with blank slates. That's 20th Century Disease for you: marriage, perfect clothes, a lovely house, affluent but non-distinctive jobs (he's a commercial filmmaker), and sex devoid of mystery. The characters are treated with all the sympathy of amoebas seen through a microscope, and are less important than the sensations they pursue. Vaughan and Catherine fondling each other in the back seat while Ballard drives through a car wash, gazing at them in the rearview mirror, feels like a head trip back to the womb. When they stop, minutes later, to visit a car accident that's all hunks of smoking metal and busted-up, non-communicative survivors, Vaughan rages through taking photographs—and somehow his gum chewing seems the sleaziest thing here. It'd be grotesque if Cronenberg weren't viewing it all dispassionately, with that passive, obsessive, strangely Canadian voyeurism. It doesn't feel icky because it asks the question, “Let's see how it all works,” and that these weird beings are forging some sort of new community out of their collective desires. The minimalist storytelling feels hermetically sealed, somehow. As if giving the characters any passion outside of what Cronenberg is interested in would humanize them and make them vulnerable to our judgment as audience members. Instead, we're told that this is the world they're in, without excuses or pity. The cinematography and score, by longtime Cronenberg partners Peter Suschitzky and Howard Shore, respectively, feel distant and tinged with an unusual combination of grayish metal and sensual longing. This provides the essential soulful quality of Crash, and elevates it above a story of sick individuals resorting to the most primitive mating rituals as fantasy or escapism. Cronenberg takes them seriously, and if he takes himself and his thesis a little seriously too, at least he parcels out a certain kind of egghead intellectual humor. When Ballard questions Vaughan about “the reshaping of the human body by modern technology,” Vaughan snickers that his B.S. theory was a clever ruse to get curiosity seekers through the door. In other words, psychobabble is cheap. Just shut up and **** me.