THE WATCH

A buddy and I caught a Friday-morning screening of The Watch along with roughly a dozen others, and before the end credits rolled, only four of us were still in the auditorium. Professional obligations were keeping me at director Akiva Schaffer’s comedy and I was my friend’s ride, but for the life of me, I can’t fathom what prevented those other two patrons from bolting. Lethargy? Politeness? Morbid curiosity?

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

The Dark Knight Rises, as you’ve perhaps heard, is the concluding chapter in Christopher Nolan’s series of grandly scaled, intensely serious-minded Batman adventures that began with 2005’s fittingly titled Batman Begins and continued with 2008’s The Dark Knight. It is also, as you perhaps hoped, a terrifically satisfying wrap-up to the trilogy – flawed, at times distractingly flawed, but powerful and resonant and deeply emotional. After my lukewarm responses to The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man, I would’ve been relieved to exit this summer’s latest superhero blockbuster merely content. Instead, I left Nolan’s 165-minute comic-book epic simultaneously jazzed and sated, and more than ready to see it again.

ICE AGE: CONTINENTAL DRIFT

With Ice Age: Continental Drift, we are now four movies into the apparently never-ending 20th Century Fox franchise, and it might finally be time to ask: Has there ever been a less animated animated lead than Ray Romano’s woolly mammoth Manny?

TO ROME WITH LOVE

After Woody Allen’s rather staggering success with Midnight in Paris – personal-best box-office, the man’s first Academy Award in 25 years – I guess it was inevitable that critics, as a whole, would greet the filmmaker’s follow-up project with a collective “meh.” And that’s certainly happened with Woody’s new To Rome with Love. (Not that it matters, but the comedy is currently sitting with a “45-percent fresh” rating – i.e., “not fresh at all” – at the review aggregator RottenTomatoes.com.)

But I’d argue that the movie’s less generous critics have picked entirely the wrong picture to be indifferent toward, because the To Rome with Love that I saw was sensational – charming, hilarious, imaginative, and, in its offhanded way, enormously adventurous. As Woody’s latest is composed of a quartet of frothy comic vignettes set in the Eternal City, all of them reminiscent of the short fictions he occasionally writes for The New Yorker, it’s easy to see how the film is being perceived as slight. Yet that description, while somewhat accurate, doesn’t begin to suggest the masterly finesse and intelligence that Woody and his tremendous cast demonstrate here. If Midnight in Paris remains the writer/director’s finest achievement of the past two decades, To Rome with Love easily lands in the top five, and with more than 20 releases to choose from, that’s hardly something to sniff at.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN

The Amazing Spider-Man is, without question, the absolute best superhero movie to be released this week. Of course, I say this not having seen Katy Perry: Part of Me yet, but I also say this because it’s polite, whenever possible, to begin a review with words of high praise, and in this instance, I’m going to have a tough time coming up with others.