‘SCREAM 4’

★★★ (out of four)

From the opening scene, it’s obvious that this sequel is even more obsessed with breaking the fourth wall than any of its predecessors. In the first scene, we see the usual pair of pretty young girls being tormented over the phone by Ghost Face before the knife-wielding maniac slaughters them. This is quickly revealed to be the opening sequence of “Stab 6,” a fictional movie franchise based on the “real-life” events of the first three “Scream” films. It is being watched by two other pretty young women (Anna Paquin and Kristen Bell, echoing Drew Barrymore’s cameo in the first outing) who talk at length about the state of modern horror cinema before, once again, things turn bloody.

‘YOUR HIGHNESS’

★★ 1/2 

“Your Highness” tells the Medieval tale of Thadeous (“Eastbound and Down” star Danny McBride, who also co-wrote the film’s screenplay), a doughy and unkempt failure of a prince who lives in the shadow of his heroic brother, Fabious (James Franco, in all his smoked-out, squinty-eyed glory). When Fabious’ bride-to-be (Zooey Deschanel) is abducted by the evil wizard Leezar (Justin Theroux), Thadeous is forced to join Fabious in his quest to rescue her. They are helped along by Isabel (Natalie Portman), a woman-warrior and fellow traveler on her own revenge quest. Of course, all this is largely irrelevant, and serves primarily as a crudely fashioned launching pad for the biggest barrage of obvious toilet you’ve ever seen.

‘SUCKER PUNCH’

★

“Sucker Punch” is not just a “bad movie.” We see bad movies every week, and we forget about them and move on. “Sucker Punch,” on the other hand, will live on in infamy long after you and I are dead. Beyond just wasting your time and boring you out of your skull, this is a film of such mind-bending awfulness that it could conceivably change how you approach the very art of filmmaking. It is bad on a very fundamental, very rare and almost theoretical level. I cannot recall the last time a film actually made me feel as though I had just been violated.

‘RANGO’

★★★★

Imagine if Quentin Tarantino decided to make a Western-themed, animal-populated, animated reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” by way of Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what “Rango” is all about. Like a kiddie-friendly version of “Pulp Fiction,” the movie approaches its story from a deep-meta, borderline-postmodern perspective, and successfully filters an entire genre through the lens of pop consumerism. This is the Western reinvented as interactive entertainment, tailored to an audience that has been inundated since birth by the romantic myths of pop culture.