THE CONJURING

I was about halfway through my screening of The Conjuring when I noticed that I was having a most unusual reaction to director James Wan's haunted-house opus: For the life of me, I couldn't stop smiling.

THE LONE RANGER

Youll have to wait more than two hours for it, but in director Gore Verbinski's The Lone Ranger, you'll finally be treated to a scene that makes sitting through this hugely budgeted action-adventure-Western-comedy totally worth your ... .

Oh, who am I kidding? The movie still isn't worth your time. But as the scene in question is the only truly exhilarating one in the whole of this wildly over-produced and exhaustingly frenetic outing - an updating of the beloved radio and television serial that famously asked, "Who was that masked man?" - I might as well give it the praise it deserves.

WORLD WAR Z

Beginning with the fact that it's directed by Marc Forster - a competent-enough craftsman whose previous works (including Finding Neverland, The Kite Runner, and the deadening James Bond entry Quantum of Solace) have hardly been known to quicken one's pulse - practically everything about the suspenseful and exciting zombie chiller World War Z feels a little bit off, and that's what I liked about it.

BEFORE MIDNIGHT

Richard Linklater's Before Midnight - the third and possibly final installment in the director's ongoing screen romance that began with 1995's Before Sunrise and continued with 2004's Before Sunset - climaxes with a half-hour-long fight. You could, of course, say the same about most every superhero or Transformers picture released nowadays. The big difference, however, is that this particular battle royale takes place in the confines of one room and involves all of two characters. The bigger difference, speaking personally, is that this is one 30-minute screen fight that I actually wished would go on forever - though an eternal loop of the movie's first 70 minutes wouldn't have been unwelcome, either.