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.

DRAFT 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?

March 24, 10:30 a.m.-ish: After several days spent visiting friends in Ohio - among them, now, my hosts' adorable 17-month-old daughter - I return to my movie-reviewing duties filled with fresh perspective and hope for the future. Then I see Divergent, which earned $54.6 million over the weekend, and is already green-lit for two follow-up films. Well, the feeling was fun while it lasted.

NON-STOP

Every Academy Awards season, the idea of adding a Best Casting category appears to gain some traction among film journalists and professionals. (This past autumn saw the limited release of a documentary - Tom Donahue's Casting by - devoted to the subject, and Woody Allen, whom one would've thought indifferent to the Oscars at best, even wrote an open letter to the Hollywood Reporter in support of a casting trophy.) I'm personally fine with restricting the ceremony to the two dozen categories we do have, but if such recognition were to be included, voters could do worse than to consider Amanda Mackey and Cathy Sandrich Galfond - casting directors for the enjoyably ludicrous Non-Stop - for the prize. To be sure, it doesn't take much wit to suggest that Liam Neeson play a grieving alcoholic with a bad temper and a gun. But casting, as two beleaguered flight attendants, 12 Years a Slave's abused slave Patsey opposite Downton Abbey's rigid Lady Mary? Now that's witty.