Brian De Palma shelved the Hitchcock homages just long enough to ape another esteemed cinematic master — Stanley Kubrick — for a foray into big-budget sci-fi, Mission to Mars. The epic space odyssey aims very much to be another 2001 — the mystery is well in place; the pacing is deliberately slow; the feeling of reality is there.

And then he blows it at the end with a wholly unnecessary visit to Mars’ built-in planetarium and spook show, complete with crying aliens. It’s the same problem that plagued the endings of Robert Zemeckis’ Contact and James Cameron’s The Abyss. For God’s sake, when will Hollywood learn? Don’t show the mystic aliens!

But before all that, Luke Graham (Don Cheadle, Iron Man 3) heads an exploratory mission to the red planet that ends tragically, and only Graham survives. A rescue mission is deployed to save him, consisting of astropals played by Gary Sinise (sporting Maybelline MoistureLash), Tim Robbins, Jerry O’Connell and the delicious Connie Nielsen. Despite several obstacles — resulting, as expected, in the usual incredible De Palma set pieces — and even further tragedy, the team makes it to Mars. The scene in which Sinise stumbles upon a mentally unstable Cheadle in a makeshift greenhouse plays like something out of De Palma’s over-the-top Raising Cain, or some nonexistent film where the white man busts in on Bob Marley’s weed farm.

And soon this leads to the aforementioned Twin Peaks-esque trip to the “Golly Gee-Whiz” exhibit at the Mars State Fair, where all credibility is checked at the door for a laughs-aplenty sequence that clearly just should’ve been axed. But up until then, Mission is pretty damn good. It’s intelligent, well-made and looks fantastic. Too bad there’s That Goofy Ending, likely the culprit for the film’s punching-bag rep. —Rod Lott

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In a fairer world, Watchmen would be heralded as the one of (if not the) finest superhero movies ever made. Yet we (or at least I) simply must appreciate the miracle that it ever got made in the first place. Based on Alan Moore’s legendary graphic novel, the adaptation was never going to please everyone. Fans would complain about changes; the dim-witted, narrative complexity; the restless, length and pacing; the uptight, Manhattan’s big blue wang making them feel all squidgy inside.

But for the rest (an admitted minority), Watchmen is a treat, the Godfather of superhero flicks in length, density and atmosphere. Set in a world where America won Vietnam and Richard Nixon is still president, a group of outlawed heroes lives under an ongoing cold war that threatens global nuclear annihilation at any moment. Traipsing through timelines and POVs, director Zack Snyder (Man of Steel) chronicles the fall of the fascist Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the loneliness of sad-sack Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), the madness of Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), the objectification of Silk Spectres I and II (Carla Gugino and Malin Akerman, respectively) and the messianic aloofness of Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a naked, 7-foot-tall CGI blue god who counts as the only true superhero (and who beat the blue CGI characters from Avatar to the punch by a good four months).

Running through all storylines is Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), the maniacal heart of both iterations. A merciless dispenser of justice, Rorschach is both Batman and Joker, a psychotic vigilante unbound by moral compromise. In a movie of terrific performances, Haley is the standout (seriously, where’s his Oscar?), driving everything relentlessly forward as he investigates the death of the Comedian in the shadow of Armageddon.

Yes, there are quibbles. Gugino’s old-age makeup is atrocious. Neither Spectre is really given anything to do other than exist for the gratification of others (a problem shared with the novel). The music is too on-the-nose. The owlship sex scene does raise titters (even if it copies Moore’s work beat for beat). And yes, I miss the squid-alien monstrosity of the original finale.

Yet what remains is extraordinary (particularly in the four-hour cut, which expands much of the backstory and incorporates Moore’s comic-within-a-comic, Tales of the Black Freighter, in animated form). It’s refreshingly adult. The action is clean and vigorous. It’s morally ambiguous in a way The Dark Knight only wished it could be. There are images of absolute beauty. It’s broad and epic, yet intimate when it needs to be.

Finally, unlike many films, Watchmen gets better with each viewing. There’s a lot to catch. As much as I love The Dark Knight, the benchmark of modern superhero films, Watchmen is better. —Corey Redekop

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Big Ass Spider! needs a lesson in basic punctuation. Its title includes an exclamation point that is not needed, yet excludes the hyphen that is. After all, this is a movie about a big-ass spider, not an ass spider that also is big. (I do not know what an ass spider is. Oh, if only a porn parody existed to explain it!)

As an L.A. exterminator named Alex, Greg Grunberg (TV’s Heroes) gets the Bill Murray/Vince Vaughn role of the affable, dumpy slob who nonetheless saves the day and gets the girl (in this case, Bring It On’s Clare Kramer). With the aid of a hospital security guard named José (Candyman: Day of the Dead’s Lombardo Boyar, who makes not-that-funny lines funny in his scene-stealing delivery), Alex chases a deadly spider that gets exponentially larger over the course of one crazy day.

Even before this arachnid has grown large enough to scale the Deloitte office tower King Kong-style, the military is summoned. Immediately, it’s clear the troops have little to no experience dealing with giant spiders that spray some liquid with the power to melt your face like the Ark of the Covenant and take out a public park full of volleyball-playing bikini hussies in nothing flat. (That last part is the best.)

Working from a script by Centipede! scribe Gregory Gieras (I smell a trend), Mike Mendez (The Gravedancers) directs with such a featherweight touch, one practically can sense him smiling from behind the camera. The eight-legged freak’s utter CGI phoniness keeps Big Ass Spider! from venturing beyond a comic vibe into anything approaching fright; I doubt the giving of the willies ever was a goal. At times, the movie feels like you’re watching a video game — the Call of Duty-esque first-person shooter POV sees to that — and that sensibility ultimately seeps into an overall verdict of harmless.

After 75 fleet-footed minutes, the end credits begin. A few seconds later, a stinger suggests a sequel, presumably to be titled Big Ass Cockroach! Fine, boys, but let’s not neglect the hyphen again. —Rod Lott

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There are many thoughts that leap to mind while returning to Red Sonja decades after you’ve last seen it, but the one I kept focusing on was, “Where the heck did Brigitte Nielsen’s breasts go?”

Admittedly, I have a tendency to overfocus on this sort of thing and I should probably get some help and talk to someone about it, but I’m not wrong in noticing that the international ’80s Amazon’s dimensions here in her cinematic debut are somewhat less Amazonian than those found in her later films (Cobra included), which suggests to me a direct correlation between getting enormous implants and subsequently starring in a series of shittier and shittier movies.

I may be alone in expressing this, but I think Nielsen actually showed some (unmet) promise in this, her film debut. Sure, she’s often flatly unintelligible, but so is her co-star, and that didn’t stop him from starring in Batman & Robin or becoming the governor of California. As an action heroine, however, she’s entirely credible and was probably the only actress/model of the period with a build both substantial and sexy enough to take on the role of Robert E. Howard’s most famous female character. She was just missing the breasts, which she must have noticed and decided to correct for her future work (which sadly never included that proposed big-screen adaptation of She-Hulk, for which she was born).

The rest of the movie manages to serve as a solid example of the decade’s sword-and-sorcery silliness. Not as memorable as Luigi Cozzi’s two Hercules films, but still better than Conan the Destroyer and its many low-budget clones (none of which were foolish enough to copy John Milius’ superior original), Red Sonja is a serviceable time-waster lessened only by its distinct lack of a D-cup. —Allan Mott

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From Tron director Steven Lisberger slips Slipstream, which boasts an “all-star cast” of Mark Hamill, F. Murray Abraham, Ben Kingsley and Bill Paxton. It tries fairly hard, but can’t make the “science fiction spectacular” a movie that sits comfortably in one’s head.

Its story takes place in a post-something future in which cyborgs, bounty hunters and lowlifes symbiotically abide. There’s a “slipstream” or something, that somehow is supposed to indicate that the world and nature are out of sorts. A lot of scenes are thrown in that appear to be there to enhance characters, provoke emotion and induce laughs, yet none of them succeed.

Plus, there’s dialogue intended to make Paxton (Twister) the folksy, down-to-earth, Han Solo-type with whom we can all identify. After one of many awkward exchanges between his character and one of the female bounty hunters, he sarcastically quips, “The hospitality of women never ceases to amaze me.” What does that mean? That women are never hospitable? Has the gesture of hospitality always eluded Paxton in his dealings with women, thereby warranting such a response? No one knows!

Additional scenes and snippets make no sense, including a dancing (that’s right, dancing!) scene in which the male cyborg learns to love life, as well as some anonymous female character. It’s supposed to make our hearts swell and eyes tear. I think I held up my middle finger until the scene was over.

With nothing to work with but a beard, Star Wars vet Hamill actually acts fairly unshittily, but Slipstream is quite a mess. I surprised myself by sitting through it until the end. —Richard York

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