Jamie Foxx and Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spider-Man 2THE 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.

Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in GravityGRAVITY

Alfonso Cuarón's space thriller Gravity opened this past weekend, and if you haven't seen it yet, you really should. Like, now. I'm serious. Step away from whatever electronic device you're using to read this and get in line at the cineplex - or, if the cineplex isn't currently open for business, drive over there and wait. Don't be one of those people who procrastinates until the movie hits home video and then whines about missing it on its initial release. Because I'm telling you: You're gonna want to catch Cuarón's latest on the big screen, and preferably on the biggest screen possible with your 3D glasses firmly in place. No kidding, folks: This thing is going to blow your mind.

Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes in The Place Beyond the PinesTHE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES

You may not remember this if you're 25 or younger, but between the mid-'70s and mid-'90s, we were sometimes treated to Very Special Episodes of long-running sitcoms. These episodes, which were usually twice as long as their shows' 22-minute standard, found beloved characters momentarily wrestling with Weighty Themes and tackling Important Issues, and were frequently showered with critical praise and awards despite, or maybe because of, their general self-consciousness and bloat. (Michael J. Fox and Helen Hunt surely owe several of their Emmys to VSEs.) They're mocked now, and they were kind of mocked then, and so it might seem like a particularly condescending insult to say that director Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines feels like nothing so much as a Very Special Episode of a gritty, edgy indie drama.

Dane DeHaan in ChronicleCHRONICLE

Part superhero (and -villain) origin fable and part teen-angst melodrama, Chronicle concerns three high-schoolers who venture down a mysterious hole in the Earth and emerge with telekinetic powers, and the best thing about the movie is that its leads subsequently behave just as high-schoolers likely would in such a situation.