Back in December, when critics everywhere were lavishing praise upon Natalie Portman's performance in "Black Swan," she appeared to have a lock on the best actress Oscar. But then the trailer for "No Strings Attached" was released, and a chill wind blew through Hollywood. Suddenly, pundits everywhere were calling this Ivan Reitman-directed romantic comedy "Natalie Portman's 'Norbit' " and predicting that Portman's award season fate would parallel that of Eddie Murphy in 2007, when the "Dreamgirls" star had his award dreams shattered by the trailers for him in drag and in a fat suit. (The double death!)

So now that "No Strings Attached" is out and in the wild, how is it faring among critics? Is it the atrocious train wreck that Portman supporters feared it would be?

Well, it's bad. But Portman's awards team can rest easy: It's not nearly as bad as "Norbit."

The problem, at least according to The Times' Betsy Sharkey, is that "an obsession with raunchy one-liners trips everything up, turning a clever conceit into something closer to a sleazy, cheesy affair."

Sharkey makes sure the blame is spread evenly, with the burden not landing too heavily on any one player. But she does bring up the specter of "Norbit," however subtly, when she writes, "this will not be the performance that Portman is remembered for (though it does make for some interesting coupling comparisons coming as it does amid the Oscar push for "Black Swan.")"

Talk about an odd pairing of talent and material: a French filmmaker known for his visual style,  making a superhero action comedy based on a 1930s pulp character, co-written by and starring a guy known mainly for smoking a lot of pot, and featuring a Taiwanese pop star. So how did Michel Gondry, Seth Rogen and Jay Chou fare with their updating of "The Green Hornet"?

A split decision, according to the critics. The film is rating 49% positive reviews according to Movie Review Intelligence. So, if the movie is good for anything, it gives normally mild-mannered film critics a chance to excercise their ability to draw blood (rhetorically, anyway).

The Times' Kenneth Turan doesn't mince words when he calls it "an anemic, 97-pound weakling of the action comedy persuasion" and "a boring bromedy that features mumblecore heroics instead of the real thing." That's the critical equivalent of a Kato-style chop to the neck.

Just when it seemed like Nicolas Cage had managed to take his gonzo acting for the back-row style of performance in ever-schlockier productions and turn it into a career asset, "Season of the Witch" comes along and throws a curveball at everyone expecting another goony hoot fest.

Hard as it may be to believe, Cage appears to be taking this story of 14th century knights escorting an accused witch to a monastary totally seriously. Or at least in a more muted manner than his nicely packaged YouTube highlight reels would lead you to expect.

Now it's the critics who seem to be having a Cage-level freakout on Cage himself, who most say is reason No. 1 why this swords-and-sorcery romp is a collosal waste of time.

And not since "The Social Network" or "Toy Story 3" have the critics been this united in a single opinion on a film. Unfortunately for "Season of the Witch," that united opinion isn't positive.

"What's most disappointing, though, is how Cage seems to be sleepwalking through so much of it," writes Times reviewer Mark Olsen. "There are only occasional glimmers of Cage's singularly eccentric line-readings or moments when he turns conventional reaction shots on their head. Mostly they crop up just enough to serve as a reminder of their absence."

Disney's original "Tron" may or may not be one of the great underrated movies of the 1980s. Current debates about the movie's merits are not easy to conduct because it's hard to find on DVD -- a mysterious situation Disney (never one to shy away from a chance to make a buck) noticibly isn't rushing to correct.

So with only collective hazy memories of the original to guide them, how do the critics rank the long-in-the-works follow-up, "Tron: Legacy"?

Not well. At least not in the categories people usually care about in their movies, stuff like plot and character and action. But boy, oh, boy, does it sure look good.

The Times' Betsy Sharkey sums up "Tron's" problem at the end of her lukewarm-to-negative review: "The film arrives in an age populated by a generation or more who have spent great portions of their days obsessing over increasingly sophisticated video games built around labyrinthine challenges. They are masters of this universe, one in which 'Tron: Legacy' turns out to be just an average player."

What would Oscar season be without a boxing movie? In 1976, there was "Rocky," a best picture winner. In 1980, there was "Raging Bull," which topped multiple critics' lists that year. In 2001, there was "Ali," a bit of a disappointment. But then in 2004, we got "Million Dollar Baby," which went on to win the award for best picture.

This year, we have "The Fighter," director David O. Russell's third collaboration with star Mark Wahlberg and the first time the director has made a film not based on his own script. And though those who have only seen the trailer may wail, "Another boxing movie?," the critics are nearly  unanimous in their assurances that this one is worth seeing.

Take The Times' own Kenneth Turan, for instance. His distaste for some of the colorful characters in the life of "Irish" Mickey Ward (Wahlberg) left him initially thinking this would be another turkey. But by the final bell his mind had been changed. He cautions would-be viewers, "the film is developing strong reasons for doing things this off-putting way but it makes for heavy going in the early days."

"Faster," Dwayne Johnson's return to grown up action fare after several family-targeted outings, has been an underperformer since its release Nov. 24. To date it's grossed just $18.2 million domestically. But as director George Tillman Jr. explains, "Faster" wasn't as expensive as you'd expect. That owes a lot to Tillman's early indie experience and his exhaustive preparation before filming even begins.

The film's notes say you made a really impressive presentation to the studio to land the director job on "Faster." What was in that presentation?

As the director, I try to go in and know as much as I can about the material. I really try to go in and understand what all the characters are about, what the movie’s going to look like. I go in and storyboard as much as I can, even though I don’t have the job, just so they can see the visual presentation and how it’s going to look, what it’s going to sound like. I’m always giving them a lot of music, storyboards of how the major scenes are going to go. Sometimes I’ll direct some of the scenes and show them how the scenes will be acted out. I’ve done that before on "Notorious." When I was getting ready for that movie, I wanted to show them as much as I could what it was going to look like, what it was going to sound like, how it was going to feel. That’s my job as director and the studios these days are taking a risk on movies and they want to know exactly what they’re going to get before they even start. So that’s how I like to present things. It’s almost like I’m in pre-production.

You don’t leave a lot to chance or middle of the night inspiration?

Exactly. They’ll know right away whether they want me or not. [Laughs]

Have you done this amount of work and then not gotten the job?

Yeah, but that’s part of the job of director. You’ve gotta invest in the job and what you do. When I did "Soul Food" for Fox 2000, I remember going in there and presenting a lot of food. Talking to them about the food and what it really meant and the history of family and how much the film means on a universal level. At that particular time, I loved a Barry Levinson movie called “Avalon,” and me just showing some clips of that movie, it showed that it was universal. You’re not just talking about how the movie is going to be creatively, but also from a financial standpoint and how I can hit the audience on a universal level.

Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan" isn't your typical ballet movie. It's got as many jump scares as a horror flick, lots of blood and yes, dirty, explicit sex with Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis. It's bold and extreme and in order to convey the experience, critics are combing back through their film memories to paint a picture of comparison and provide enough comparable films to fill a Netflix queue.

The Times' Kenneth Turan sounds like he would rather be at home watching "Great Performances" (or cleaning his septic tank) than enduring Aronofsky's intense take on the arts. He writes, "When you experience ballet the Aronofsky way, you count yourself lucky that the dancers don't have easy access to staple guns." And no, that's not a compliment.

Perhaps because the movie turned him off so intensely, Turan's mind seems to have wandered off to other films he liked better. In the course of his review he brings up "The Red Shoes" and describes Portman and Kunis' sex scene as "soft-core antics that will remind those with long memories of Radley Metzger's mostly forgotten 'Therese and Isabelle' and 'Camille 2000.'"

The critics have all had their say and most find "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1" a generally satisfying adventure, if a tad unwelcoming to the uninitiated. But that's the critics. Now that the film has been seen by the general public (or at least those willing to stay out until after 3 a.m. on a school night), it's time to assess the response of the true heart of the "Harry Potter" franchise — the fans.

Below, we've grouped responses into lovers and complainers. Which one are you?

Beware: some spoilers follow.

— Patrick Kevin Day

It's still early, but "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 1," the latest installment of the fantasy franchise, is not exactly casting a spell on critics.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the movie has garnered an 81% fresh rating, lower than ratings for all of the "Potter" films except for 2001's "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and 2007's "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." (Most of the movies scored closer to the mid-80s, with Alfonso Cuaron's "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" holding the high score of 90% fresh.)

For New York Magazine's David Edelstein, the magic is missing. “'Hallows’ first hour is deadly, all right,” he quips.

The Times' Kenneth Turan isn't hugely enthusiastic either.  “What's the latest Harry Potter film like? If you've seen the previous six, you already know. If you haven't there's no point in trying to catch up now.” But instead of feeling a sense of excitement as the series nears its conclusion, Turan believes director David Yates plays things too safe. “To be fair to ‘Deathly Hallows,’ the filmmakers have tried hard to fill the proceedings with battles and chases and debilitating curses. Genuine filmmaking excitement, however, is harder to provide.”

Roger Ebert doesn’t classify himself as a "Harry Potter" fan (he expresses a lack of interest in knowing, say, what expelliarmus does) but finds himself in a Muggle-ish fog for much of the film, describing the movie as "completely unintelligible for anyone coming to the series for the first time." He still manages to give it three stars and describes the film as "handsome and sometimes harrowing."

The movie has managed to win over a few critics. The Independent’s James Mottram gives the movie four stars out of five, and the Orlando Sentinel’s Roger Moore’s review reads like he was sitting down front wearing his own striped scarf and shoe-polish lightning scar. “Alternately funny and touching, it’s the best film in the series, an ‘Empire Strikes Back’ for these wizards and their wizarding world."

Audiences will no doubt eat up the latest installment; the movie has been gathering fans along the way, and the two-part structure gives the new release an event feel. But for a franchise that has long been able to unite both audiences and critics, it's an open question whether it can finish with that same kind of flourish.

— Steven Zeitchik and Patrick Kevin Day

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 1," with Daniel Radcliffe, left, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson. Credit: Warner Bros.

Forbes just named Will Ferrell Hollywood's most overpaid actor, but the star has a chance to make those editors immediately eat their words with the release this weekend of his animated film, "Megamind." DreamWorks Animation scored a major critical and box office hit earlier this year with "How to Train Your Dragon"; will "Megamind" follow the same path?

The Los Angeles Times' Betsy Sharkey seems to think so. She treats the crowd-pleasing family comedy with surprising seriousness in her positive review, writing "the larger question the filmmakers are soon onto is what happens to the bad guy when the good guy is out of the picture. What is the price of media adulation? Why do we always expect someone else to solve our problems? Well, it's complicated but so au courant."

The critics are almost evenly split in their opinion of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival offering "Welcome to the Rileys." Despite the "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man" appeal of seeing Tony Soprano paired on screen with Bella Swan (OK, James Gandolfini and Kristen Stewart) under the direction of Ridley Scott's son, Jake, reviews have been mixed to negative.The story concerns a grieving father (Gandolfini) who travels far from his suburban Indiana existence to New Orleans and takes a wayward stripper named Mallory (Stewart) under his wing. The actors, including Melissa Leo, are mostly getting good reviews, but it's the story that appears to be taking a drubbing.

Los Angeles Times critic Betsy Sharkey, one of the film's defenders, has many nice things to say about  Gandolfini and Stewart, writing that "much of the pleasure of the film is watching Gandolfini and Stewart navigate a minefield pocked with stopped toilets, no electricity, arrests and even angry johns." She's less tolerant of Leo's scenes, noting "sometimes three's a crowd." But despite her fondness for the film as a whole, she's not as impressed by Scott, whom she says "is still too tentative with his actors and hampered by a script that keeps trying to fix too many of Mallory's problems with new clothes and clean sheets."

One of the most effective tricks in the original "Paranormal Activity's" ghoulish arsenal was surprise. It was a low-budgeted -- some would say micro-budgeted -- shocker with no stars and approached familiar material in a new, unsettling way. The problem with surprise, however, is that you can only pull that off effectively once. (Unless, of course, you're a character in a horror movie, in which case your ability to be surprised by the expected is near-limitless).

"Paranormal Activity 2" has some things working against it that would be great strengths in most any other film -- more experienced actors, a bigger budget and sky-high anticipation. In other words, if "Paranormal Activity 2" doesn't cause critics' hair to turn to white, is it a worthy follow-up to the original?

Writing for The Times, reviewer Robert Abele doesn't see much new or original about this follow-up, but that's A-OK with him. "Call it a case of skilled sameness, of something fine-tuned rather than overplayed," he says. Much credit is given to director Tod Williams, who finds some creative ways to play with the tropes established by original director Oren Peli. "The new scenario's sextet of security-cam coverage — the front of the house, the pool, the kitchen, the living room, the stairs and finally (gulp) the baby's room — allows for cross-cutting tension... Which means, one might have to sit through plenty of successive shots of grainy wide-angle stillness, but when the jolting thud or a frisson of movement comes, it can only feel like a warning shot straight from hell."