THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2

The biggest problem I had with 2012's The Amazing Spider-Man was that director Marc Webb's superhero-origin tale - with its "let's get this tiresome exposition over with" vibe and general lack of personality - felt merely like the setup for more interesting web-slinging adventures to come. The biggest problem I have with Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is that it feels almost exactly the same, like a character- and conflict-building preamble that we have to endure to get to the eventual good stuff. Things certainly happen in Webb's latest cinematic comic book, but they appear to happen solely because its surviving characters need to be positioned properly for their roles in The Amazing Spider-Man 3, the inevitable outing in which maybe, finally, the series will start living up to the imposed adjective in its title.

HEAVEN IS FOR REAL

So far this year, audiences for faith-based films at the multiplex have been treated to Son of God, God's Not Dead, and Noah, and now there's director Randall Wallace's Heaven Is for Real to add to the mix. Have the Hollywood powers-that-be heard something about an imminent Rapture that the rest of us haven't? Should I now be feeling awkward and guilty about my raucous laughter at This Is the End?

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

Generally speaking, I'm not one to argue for the inclusion of more foul language and bloody violence in a director's oeuvre, and feel especially awkward doing so a mere week after being bored silly by the endless profanities and exploding squibs in the latest Schwarzenegger flick. But I'll happily make an exception in the case of Wes Anderson, at least based on his most recent outing, The Grand Budapest Hotel. Like all Anderson efforts, this one, too, could be filed in the "precious comic bauble" category, given its deliberately artificial production design and obsessively controlled compositions and overall suggestion of an improv-free zone. Yet this endlessly inventive and funny new work might boast more interior life than any of the writer/director's other live-action achievements, and for that I'm afraid we have to thank the forcible removal of Jeff Goldblum's fingers, and Ralph Fiennes' tendency to drop the F-bomb into every other sentence.

BAD WORDS

It's not impossible to make a comedy centered on an angry, sullen, emotionally inaccessible bastard, as Oscar Isaac recently proved in Inside Llewyn Davis. In that film, however, Isaac had a Coen-brothers script and a bunch of sensational folk songs to help carry him through. In Bad Words, director/star Jason Bateman merely has a half-workable comic conceit and access to unlimited profanities. The anger, sullenness, and inaccessibility, I'm sorry to say, win out.