The less-good stuff: the pirates, who are so blandly and predictably drawn that they sap all the personality out of Peter Dinklage (as an ugly ape skipper), which isn't easy. And the plot, which just barrels forward with very few surprises.

The film is its own beast, and it's a rare one.

Half of one song is performed with a speck of saliva on the camera. More casual fans will twist in their chairs uncomfortably, wishing that a roadie would walk up and wipe it off. Neil Young die-hards will cherish the spittle.

Nobody Else But You takes a novel concept and a willing leading lady and squanders both through drab, lifeless storytelling.

As it stands, her music gets under your skin and makes you feel good - and the movie makes you feel good about Katy Perry.

So. What part of this is boring? All of it.

Suffice it to say, the issues here are bigger than one woman's story.

This is the second-best Spider-Man movie yet made. In the previous trilogy, only "Spider-Man 2" surpasses it.

If it falls short of greatness, it's not by much - and it could end up growing with the years. At the very least, it is exceptional and one of the best and most original pictures to come along in 2012.

Yet here's what's strange: As awful as To Rome With Love is - and the awfulness is unmistakable - it is, as an experience, not unpleasant. You will probably see several better movies this year that you will enjoy less. It's a mess, but it's Rome. It's a mess, but it's Woody Allen.

No matter how well made, well acted and well intentioned, Lying Dingbat Procrastinator movies are excruciating to watch. Case in point: People Like Us, a film hell-bent on dragging its protagonist (and, sadly, us) through the LDP narrative playbook.

For all of its transgressive plush-toy sex and screw-'em humor, the plot is pretty standard stuff.

Goodbye First Love doesn't badger the viewer into drawing conclusions. It's interested in showing, with great compassion, how Camille comes to a fuller understanding of the world and herself, without the sort of prefab lessons more often found in films than in real life.

The film's sense of intimacy, its closeness to real people and painful events, allows it to reach a deeper place than more conventional pieces of political rhetoric.

The impressive thing that Oslo, August 31st does is that it somehow relates what Anders is going through to the city of Oslo in general. Anders is not a metaphor for Oslo - that would be cheap and silly. Rather, he is just one more story in the naked city, and we see him against the backdrop of other people, having quite different lives.

Make no mistake, this is advocacy cinema; interviews with Defense Department and military officials notwithstanding, there's not much effort, on Dick's part or anyone else's, to consider any point of view besides the victims' and those who love or speak for them. That's what makes it difficult to watch. And that's what makes it necessary.

Sweet and serious as it is, the second chunk of Seeking a Friend is the lesser of the two - and hard to reconcile with the more acidic comic outlook in the film's first half. The obvious movie referent is Lars von Trier's "Melancholia," a much nastier film in a much lovelier wrapping: This one lacks an eight-minute Wagner montage.

In terms of story and emotional power, Brave comes up short.

Instead of getting smirky and campy and blowing out the joke in the first few scenes, Grahame-Smith and director Timur Bekmambetov straight-face it. They ask themselves, well, what would it be like if the main struggle of Lincoln's life were with vampires intent on taking over the new world? And they answer the question as realistically and soberly as they can within this loony framework.

The Art of Rap was made by a hip-hop fiend for hip-hop fiends. I fit the description, and it's difficult for me to approach the film as an outsider. But if novices can make it through the barrage of interviews with artists they don't know, they'll learn plenty about a craft still grossly misrepresented by the mass media.

This movie is not recommended for people who need to know what's going on. The Woman in the Fifth, an English and French language film from the Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, is watchable and enjoyable, but it's fairly impenetrable, and it gets more peculiar as it goes along.

The script is as bland as they come.

The film's editing and pacing are appealingly straightforward, not to say blunt, and the humor runs from dry to bone-dry to parched.

Lister is quite funny and engaging. It's just too bad that some of that screenwriting wit couldn't have been shared with the movie's protagonist.

It's brisk and assured and never begs the audience's indulgence. No time is wasted. The movie is, at every moment, either funny or pushing the story forward, or both.

It's monumentally coarse and vulgar, aimed at the mentality of a 14-year-old locked inside his father's liquor cabinet, and nothing about it is funny, least of all Adam Sandler.

Doesn't require anyone to love metal, or even like it. It only requires us to laugh at it - and other exemplars of bloated '80s pop, from Starship to Journey - and it does so with a campy and attitudinous spirit that's hard to resist.

There's no music to tell you what to think. It's just three good actors and one director's merciless powers of observation.