ENOUGH SAID

It should go without saying that romantic comedies are generally more enjoyable if you enter them with already-fond feelings for their leads, which is why it was more fun to sit through, say, one of Tom Hanks' and Meg Ryan's 1990s outings than the ugly one that transpired, in 2009, between Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler. But until writer/director Nicole Holefcener's Enough Said - which finally landed locally at Moline's Nova 6 Cinemas two months after its original nationwide release - I'm not sure I'd ever seen a rom-com with quite this much built-in goodwill before. Then again, no one until Holefcener had designed a rom-com for Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the late, great James Gandolfini before, either.

THOR: THE DARK WORLD

As the comic-book demigod Loki, the nefarious thorn-in-the-side to the Avengers and adopted brother to Thor, Tom Hiddleston, in the Marvel Studios movies, exudes a teasing, seductive malevolence. With his sharp, angular features and chilling gaze that suggests he might prefer eating you to killing you, he's a wonderfully unstable and hypnotic screen creation. Yet the brilliance in Hiddleston's interpretation is that his Loki is also so damned charming. The character may forever be planning destruction or plotting revenge - specifically against the golden-haired preferred son with the red cape and hammer - but Hiddleston's bearing is so smooth and relaxed, and his wide grin so infectious, that you almost can't help rooting for him, especially because he also, generally, gets his movies' best jokes.

JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPA

This might surprise a grand total of none of you, but Bad Grandpa - which also goes by the more telling title Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa - isn't much of a movie. The first Jackass release to feature an actual narrative, and actual characters, in place of the usual parades of comically vile, violent challenges and stunts (though there are a few of those, too), director Jeff Tremaine's road-trip slapstick is mostly shapeless and certainly obvious, and nowhere near as hilarious as you want it to be.

Yet it's also a continually interesting and, in the end, rather sweet sociological experiment reminiscent of Borat, but a Borat without the mean-spiritedness. If Sacha Baron Cohen's outing, with its Candid Camera-style employment of "real people" clearly not in on the joke, reveled in displaying how crass and ignorant Americans could be, Tremaine's suggests just how tolerant and polite we can be - and given the circumstances presented here, that's apparently mighty tolerant and polite indeed.

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS

We've all seen movies that begin spectacularly well but seem to slowly, sadly lose their inspiration as they progress, leaving you to wonder, by their finales, what it was that initially had you so jazzed about them. Paul Greengrass' dramatic thriller Captain Phillips, I'm happy to say, is not one of those movies. Actually, it might be the exact opposite of one of those movies: a work that starts out distractingly shaky yet gradually morphs into something utterly spectacular - so spectacular, in truth, that you can barely remember how off-put you were by the comparative bummer of its early scenes.