Title: Man of Steel

Will You Believe a Man Can Fly? Depends on the man: Kal-El? Sure. R. Kelly? No.

Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: Four and a half Kansas Jayhawks out of five.

Brief Plot Synopsis: Handsome alien battles less handsome aliens for whatever's left of the planet after they're done beating the crap out of each other.

Tagline: None. I guess they figured a character called "Superman" is pretty superlative.

Better Tagline: "If you go a million miles away, I'll track you down, girl."

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Delusions of Grandeur by Iris Almarez

Texas's first all-Latina film festival, Señorita Cinema, returns this Friday for a weekend run with a variety of short and long flicks, all illuminating the female experience. Past installments in the festival have all been short films, founder Stephanie Saint Sanchez says, but this year, past SC winners return with their first full-length feature films, with entries from LA, Chicago and Puerto Rico, "and they are dynamite!

"Each screening has its own unique feeling to celebrate the diversity of the Latina experience," Saint Sanchez adds. "Friday night is a little wild," she says, with Delusions of Grandeur, a coming-of-age story about a girl who stops taking her psychiatric medication in San Francisco. Delusions filmmaker Iris Almarez provides her own homemade sangria for the screening. Houston poet laureate Gwendolyn Zepeda joins filmmaker Fanny Veliz at Sunday's screening of Homebound, filmed in El Campo.

See Delusions of Grandeur at 6:30 p.m. on Friday Rice Media Center, 6100 Main. Events continue at various locations through June 9. For information, visit the festival's website. $10 to $50.

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Juliet Stevenson literally bristles as the wronged woman in The Politician's Wife. A British predecessor to The Good Wife, the three-episode mini-series starts at the same place as its American counterpart - a woman is shocked and humiliated to find out that her politician husband has been having an affair. When the scandal becomes public, there's pressure from all sides for her to to appear by his side, as his loving, understanding and forgiving wife. That's where the similarity ends.

More of a floormat than Julianna Margulies's Alicia Florrick, Stevenson's Flora Matlock is completely undone by the news of her husband's indiscretion. Thanks to a "friend" she has tape recordings of her husband having phone sex with his mistress (played by Minnie Driver). Flora listens to segments throughout the series, devolving as she listens.

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At the risk of having all the book snobs reading this look down on me I will confess the following: World War Z is one of my favorite books. I'm aware of its problems- why do people from different walks of life all talk the same in an oral history?- but I like the world it builds so much that I look past that.

You would think that having admitted that I would follow up by talking about how excited I am about the upcoming film version, but that's just not the case. The more I see, including the new trailer released today, the more disappointed I become.

Oh, they may call it World War Z, but World War Z it ain't.

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Machete started out its life as a trailer in the middle of the Rodriguez/Tarantino love letter to the exploitation films of the '70s known as Grindhouse. As a trailer it was pretty cool- a one note joke that didn't overstay its welcome.

The Machete that hit theaters as a full feature was well cast but not particularly well executed. You could say it was too much of a good thing, but whether or not it was a good thing to begin with is up for debate.

Which leads us to the release of the trailer for Machete Kills, which, while awesome, has us wondering if we're about to fall for the same trick again.

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World War Z, Man of Steel, The Lone Ranger - all kind of big movies in a summer ahead that promises more blockbusters than obscure indie films.

To help you plan your dance card we've outlined what's coming up from late May to mid-August including films such as Monsters University, a prequel to Pixar's Monsters Inc. and Pacific Rim where Guillermo del Toro has giant monsters fighting giant robots (which means it'll be easier to tell the good guys from the bad, unlike in the Transformers movies).

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We like The Numbers Station with John Cusack as a black ops agent who's on the rebound from making a serious mistake in the field. He's been assigned to guard a code operator (Malin Akerman) at a secret CIA outpost. Things get complicated when the outpost comes under attack by an unknown force. Cusack, in his usual less-is-more style, nicely underplays his role as agent. He's enjoyable on screen and offers viewers a refreshingly intelligent take on being the hero of the world. Yes, the future of humanity is at stake, but that's no reason to get crazy, is it?

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Comedy fans will find the documentary Mel Brooks: Make a Noise irresistible. Part of the upcoming American Masters series on PBS, Noise is more than just a retrospective of Brooks' career. He gives new interviews to filmmaker Robert Trachtenberg, as do many of his cohorts including frequent partner Carl Reiner, Nathan Lane and Joan Rivers, Rob Reiner, Cloris Leachman and Barry Levinson. Each of them sit at a simple table, nothing much in the way of a set around them, looking straight into the camera and recalling highlights (and insider jokes) about Brooks' career. There are, of course, some film clips: Young Frankenstein, The Producers and Blazing Saddles among them. Interviews with the late Anne Bancroft (the second Mrs. Brooks) and Madeline Kahn, two of his favorite collaborators, round out the portrait we see of Brooks.

Brooks plays down his own talent, insisting he got some lucky breaks but never tried to engineer his success. He says he played to an audience of one: "I've got to admit something, I don't really do anything for the audience ever. I do it for me, and most of the time the audience joins me." We've been among the many happy fans to have joined him on what's been one of comedy's most prolific and influential careers.

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The second biggest mystery in Into Darkness: Why does Alice Eve strip to her underwear in this scene?

Before we get in to the nuts and bolts of Star Trek Into Darkness, let us take a moment to see what the studio behind the film wants us to believe the movie is about:

When the crew of the Enterprise is called back home, they find an unstoppable force of terror from within their own organization has detonated the fleet and everything it stands for, leaving our world in a state of crisis. With a personal score to settle, Captain Kirk leads a manhunt to a war-zone world to capture a one man weapon of mass destruction.

Now, because this is a J.J. Abrams flick, we all knew that we were going to have to take this synopsis with a grain of salt. At least it gave fans something to spend the run up to the movie debating about: who is this "one man weapon of mass destruction?"

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Earlier this week public pressure managed to convince Disney to drop its make-over of Merida from the Pixar release Brave as she was being prepared for induction into the official 11 princesses in the Disney universe. Her princess model featured a more slender waist, slightly larger bust, make-up, tamer hair, and no appearance of her trademark weaponry. This led to calls of objectification and overly prissing up the girl we can all agree is the most assertive and badass of the royal female heroines in Disney.

Personally, it didn't bother me. Yes, I know, I'm a guy and I don't understand. I am, however, a father to a three-year-old daughter who loves Merida (Even if she sometimes confuses her with Amy Pond from Doctor Who) and the son of a woman who taught him to ride horses, rope cattle, shoot, drink, swear, and punch in the head those who so desperately need punching in the head. I consider myself more of a male tomboy than anything else.

I recognized the make-over for what it was... a unified marketing strategy meant to make all the princesses look like part of the same universe. Merida didn't just change for her inclusion in this weird, decorative stable that Disney created, every single princess did. All of them, from Snow White to Rapunzel. Click that Jezebel link up above, and you can see a side-by-side comparison of all the girls, everything from boob jobs to making Tiana slightly less black.

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