• The Hangover, Part III: If you squint, you can see what remains of Zach Galifianakis's self-worth and dignity.

While it's true that The Hangover, Part III doesn't exactly duplicate the plot of the original Hangover, the way the atrocious Part II did, it doesn't bring anything much new to the screen, either. Doug (Justin Bartha) is kidnapped by a mob boss named Marshall (John Goodman), in order to convince the Wolfpack (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, and Zach Galifianakis) to chase down Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong), who has stolen millions of dollars' worth of gold bars from Marshall. It gets more implausible from there, with a series of heists and stunts and a chase scene or two, all around Tijuana and Las Vegas. I laughed out loud a couple of times—is it telling that the best jokes in the movie have to do with cocaine, I wonder?—but mostly, I just wanted it to be over.

The problem is that it's the same humor as the other two Hangover movies, over and over again. Ken Jeong acts batshit crazy, Zach Galifianakis is inappropriate to just about everyone, and Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms get all the "can you believe this shit" lines, playing the fussy adults who have to chauffeur the hyperactive kids from one set piece to another. But they're not even given character arcs this time, unless you count bugging your eyes out and shouting "ALAN!" over and over again as a symbol of emotional growth.

None of this would matter if there were a lot of crazy humor in The Hangover, Part III, but there just isn't.

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• The Gang's All Here: "What is this, a table? I can't drive a table!"

I don't think the financial success of the Fast & Furious franchise is entirely attributable to fast cars and cheap thrills. I think a great deal of the movie's appeal at the multiplex comes from the fact that it's the only major summer movie franchise that features a truly multicultural cast. Not only that, these movies are totally blasé about the fact that they star a multicultural cast; nobody is a token character, none of the characters spend time dwelling on their differences. These are highly unrealistic movies—about which more soon—but the cast may be the most realistic set of faces you'll see in a blockbuster all year, if you live in a major American city. Part of the appeal of a Fast & Furious movie, I think, comes from that recognition.

Which is good, because even the most unrealistic movie needs to have some sort of a base of realism on which it can build. And Fast & Furious 6 is one of the most unrealistic movies you'll see this summer. Director Justin Lin, now on his fourth Fast & Furious film, has taken a fairly unassuming street-racing series and made each movie crazier and crazier until finally, with what might be his final entry in the franchise, he has given birth to a whole new genre: Car-fu. Using absolutely no 3D and plenty of what appear to be practical effects (with lots of CGI tossed in for good measure), Lin has become the John Woo of the demolition derby, tossing what feels like a good-sized mall parking lot full of cars around his sets until it becomes a kind of surrealistic ballet. You've got cars crushed by debris. You've got cars skidding daintily on their bumpers, perpendicular to the ground. You've got cars lashed to each other, flying through the air. They pirouette, they dance, they dive, they leap. They fold like origami, they roar, they butt into each other like rivals during mating season.

And the automotive violence rubs off on Fast & Furious 6's human cast, too. When The Rock, as a law enforcement officer named Luke Hobbs, tosses a bad guy around a Moscow interrogation room, it's not a body doing violence to a body. It's one of Lin's automotive crashes, dolled up in human form. Hobbs sends the crook sailing through the air into ceilings and floors and walls, only to pick him up and chuck him again, until he becomes injured and so turns into some sort of a simpering, whining...pedestrian, begging for mercy. And Vin Diesel's Dominic Toretto only has one signature move: The flying head butt. Toretto leaps at his target with his whole body, bringing his gigantic, gleaming dome down square on the poor sap with a sickening bludgeoning sound effect. It's not so much a physical assault as it is a hit & run.

The plot—what little there is—calls back to just about every Fast & Furious movie that came before, and so it's a mess to explain.

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Don Jon is a new movie directed by, written, and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a porn addict who gets into a relationship with Scarlett Johansson, who disapproves of his porn consumption. It costars Tony Danza (!?!), and it's packed with New Jersey accents.

What do you think?