Vin Diesel in Furious 7FURIOUS 7

Under ordinary circumstances, if you'd missed the first six installments in a particular film franchise, I'd never suggest starting your introduction with the seventh. But the circumstances surrounding the Fast & the Furiouses, including the series' new outing Furious 7, are hardly ordinary - and not simply because most film franchises don't have seven installments.

Kevin Costner and Jennifer Garner in Draft DayDRAFT DAY

Draft Day casts Kevin Costner as the Cleveland Browns' general manager on the titular day in which his professional and personal crises reach their boiling points. And 20 minutes before its climax, director Ivan Reitman's pro-football saga lands on what is simultaneously its most ironic and most perverse moment, which finds a roomful of executives and analysts bickering about a potential trade, and Costner's Sonny Weaver Jr. ending the squabble with the incensed directive "Just give me a moment of silence so I can think!" The moment is ironic because, to this point, the movie has already been flooded with silence. The moment is also perverse because, after 90 minutes of pause-heavy introspection and hushed build-up - with the audience all but slavering for a scene of biting, fast-paced bickering - now is when Sonny demands some quiet?

Patrick Wilson, Lili Taylor, Vera Farmiga, and Ron Livingston in The ConjuringTHE 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.