Capsule reviews of 'John Carter,' other new movies

"Friends With Kids" — Jennifer Westfeldt seems interested in exploring the complications that come with pondering parenthood with a mix of candor and heart. She touches on the stages so many of us find ourselves going through in our 30s: steadfast reluctance, vaguely nagging interest, strong yearning and, eventually, the what-the-hell-have-we-done? realism of it all. Unfortunately, as writer, producer, star and (for the first time) director, Westfeldt takes a topic full of complex emotional shadings and turns it into something that is, for the most part, reductive, cliched and even sitcommy. You want to believe that she means well, that perhaps she has experienced some of these stages herself. She's so adorably neurotic here (as she was in her acclaimed screenwriting debut "Kissing Jessica Stein"), and she's amassed such a strong supporting cast, including her real-life romantic partner Jon Hamm, that you wish "Friends With Kids" were better, truer. Westfeldt and Adam Scott co-star as Julie and Jason, best friends since college who decide to have a baby together to avoid the romantic baggage that burdens their married friends (Maya Rudolph, Chris O'Dowd, Hamm and Kristen Wiig). R for sexual content and language. 102 minutes. Two stars out of four.

— Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic

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"John Carter" — Yes, there is life on Mars, and it's deadly dull. These are not words you would expect to use in describing a film from Andrew Stanton, director of the Oscar-winning Pixar favorites "Finding Nemo" and "WALL-E," who's making his live-action debut. And yet there they are, and they're inescapable. Except for a strong cast, a few striking visuals and some unexpected flashes of humor, "John Carter" is just a dreary, convoluted trudge — a soulless sprawl of computer-generated blippery converted to 3-D. It's the unfortunate film that's loaded with exposition and yet still ends up being massively confusing. It probably will also seem rather derivative, but that's because the source material, Edgar Rice Burroughs' classic pulp tale "A Princess of Mars," has been so influential on pop culture in general and science fiction specifically for the past century. Glimmers of "Star Wars," ''Superman" and "Avatar" are evident, but the uninitiated may still find it impenetrable. "Friday Night Lights" star Taylor Kitsch plays the title character, a Civil War veteran who's suddenly transported to Mars (or Barsoom, as it's known here) and finds himself in the midst of a different kind of civil war as well as an interplanetary romance. Lynn Collins, Ciaran Hinds, Willem Dafoe and Mark Strong co-star. PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action. 131 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.

— Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic

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"Silent House" — Let's just get something out of the way off the top: "Silent House" creates the illusion that it's a haunted-house thriller crafted in one long, continuous shot. The camera follows "Martha Marcy May Marlene" star Elizabeth Olsen around a creepy, creaky lake house that's under renovation, and we're right there with her for every bump, jump and thump of her heart. This isn't exactly the case, and husband-and-wife directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau acknowledge as much — they actually pieced together several long takes to create one seemingly seamless feature-length film, a process that must have required a great deal of planning, choreography, breath-holding and prayer to pull off in its own right. But once you realize that what you're watching is a trick — albeit one that's beautifully executed from a technical standpoint — with a final twist that's really a gimmick, its novelty loses a bit of its luster. Still, Olsen always makes the movie watchable. She has to — she appears in nearly every single frame. Olsen plays Sarah, a 20-something who's helping her father and uncle fix up the family's summer home, which is boarded up from the inside. Claustrophobia and paranoia ensue. R for disturbing violent content and terror. 88 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

— Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic

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"A Thousand Words" — Eddie Murphy starts out with his back to the camera then turns to reveal a strip of duct tape over his mouth. A very good idea, if the once hip fast-talker of "Beverly Hills Cop" is going to continue using hollow comedies such as this as his mouthpiece to the world. The notion of taking away motor-mouth Murphy's ability to spew words sounds like some bad filmmaking until you encounter the obnoxious clown he plays here, a boorish literary agent and inattentive family man. He's so annoying you'll be aching for the moment when the action comes around to that opening image when the duct tape gets slapped over Jack's mouth, so he'll hold his tongue after a bodhi tree magically appears in his backyard and begins losing leaves each time he utters a word, and he learns through a guru's mystical guesswork that when the last leaf falls, he'll die. Oh, yeah. About that plot. What left field did this senseless story come out of? Murphy and director Brian Robbins strain to sow laughs out of this thin, pointless idea with dumb slapstick and a lot of wordless mugging by Murphy, who proves he can be just as insufferable when he's not talking as when he is. Kerry Washington, Ruby Dee and Allison Janney co-star. PG-13 for sexual situations including dialogue, language and some drug-related humor. 91 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.

— David Germain, AP Movie Writer