This weekend At the Movies, Tom Hanks returns as Robert Langdon in Angels & Demons, the pseudo-sequel to what Rolling Stone movie critic Peter Travers called the "worst movie of 2006," The Da Vinci Code. Thankfully, Angels vastly improves on its predecessor, with Hanks ditching his silly Da Vinci haircut, director Ron Howard getting rid of all the long speeches and boiling down the film to make it "a ticking-bomb movie." While it's not anywhere near a quality popcorn flick like last weekend's Star Trek, it's not a "rancid piece of garbage," as Travers calls Da Vinci.

There's no need to surmise the plot as, if you're one of the millions who read Angels & Demons, chances are you know what you're getting in the theater. Ewan McGregor tags along this time around as the assistant to the Pope, while Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer plays the almost-Hitchcockian female lead. Travers' final judgment: "It's a load of hooey, but it's fun."

Travers also takes the opportunity to put the maligned Da Vinci Code in this week's Scum Bucket, having not had the chance to do so three years ago. Joining the film are a pair of new releases: Next Day Air, which stars Mos Def as a courier, but even writing that devotes too much print to this train wreck. Also, there's Little Ashes, starring Twilight it-boy Robert Pattinson as Salvatore Dali. Pattinson might be better off sticking to vampiring, as he completely butchers the Spanish accent so badly that the film gets Bucketed on that alone. So the moral of this weekend is see Star Trek if you haven't already.

Read this week's movie reviews:
Angels & Demons
Management
Summer Hours