‘YOUR HIGHNESS’

★★ 1/2 (out of four)

“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. 

‘HALL PASS’

★★ 1/2

“Hall Pass” is easily their funniest, most charming and most genuinely heartfelt comedy since their 1997 magnum opus. Many of the funniest gags involve raunch-flick staples like pot brownies and public masturbation, but the filmmakers often get a surprising amount of mileage out of familiar material. The story moves along at a brisk place, and the Farrellys resist the temptation to turn their buddy flick into a mere reworking of “The Hangover.”