Watch a clip from the film "The Amazing Spider-Man 2." Starring Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx, Dane DeHaan, Paul Giamatti, Felicity Jones, and Sally Field. (Photo/Video: Sony Picture)

Two years ago, when the "Spider-Man" franchise was rebooted with a new actor in the spandex suit and goggles, "The Amazing Spider-Man" defined amazement sharply downward. Still, Spidey remained a brand, if not the stuff of sturdy tentpoles, so there was a commercial argument to be made for "The Amazing Spider-Man 2." Even bad movies can succeed in the international market, where audiences continue to consume action eagerly. How bad is this one, though? Amazingly so. Villainy abounds, but the villains are strident contrivances. Spider-Man flies, but does so dutifully, without joy. (And often without web juice or even webs, which show up willy-nilly.) By the same token, a number of New York City police cruisers perform impressive cartwheels after epic collisions. That, too, is amazing, for sheer repetitiveness. It's like a default setting for the ragged script. When all else fails, cop cars take flight.

The current incumbent of the title role, Andrew Garfield, has an easy charm that the movie sensibly seeks to exploit. "You know what it is I love about being Spider-Man?" says an exuberant Peter Parker early on. "Everything!" Yet Marc Webb's direction is so coarse, and the production's tone is so variable, that the Marvel hero soon comes off as a wise guy, then as bipolar, at the very least. "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" has a surfeit of tortured characters, and Spidey is one of them. Every time he flashes back to his childhood he suffers mortally, though not as much as his old friend Harry Osborn, aka Green Goblin (now played by Dane DeHaan), who suffers hideously from retroviral hyperplasia, the Osborn family's curse. And Harry's suffering is kids' stuff compared to that of Jamie Foxx's doomed Max Dillon, who, transformed into Spidey's adversary Electro, suffers amped-up agonies that Nikola Tesla never dreamed of. (Was it only last month, with "Captain America," that a Marvel movie turned out to be great fun?)

Electro's plight yields the film's best sequence, as well as its worst, and they're one and the same. He's a power junkie, so he goes to blindingly bright Times Square at night for a megawatt fix, and a battle with Spidey ensues. The visuals aren't just spectacular, they're eerily memorable: Electro's blue image fills every Jumbotron from Father Duffy's statue to 42nd Street. Yet the beauty of these digital effects is overwhelmed, and our senses along with it, by the hyperfrenetic pace and the intensity of the audio surround, which booms with Electro's paranoid ravings. The movie's curse is a head-banging gigantism that crushes any semblance of humanity.

Many such semblances pop up in the screenplay that's been pasted together by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Jeff Pinkner, but there are few traces of inner life. Sally Field's Aunt May has become an embarrassment; enough, already, of May's maudlin domesticity. Felicity Jones is fleetingly appealing as Felicia, a bright-faced employee of the Osborn empire's OsCorp, but the movie loses track of her all too soon. Then there's the problem of Peter's girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, who wouldn't be a problem if she weren't played by Emma Stone.

That is to say, Ms. Stone is so endearing, and engaging, and all sorts of good things movie stars are supposed to be, that she keeps tempting us to see her character as something more than the silly prop Gwen inevitably is. Yes, this vivacious young woman has something resembling a life, an outer life in which she's about to be graduated from high school (don't bother to do the math; Ms. Stone almost gets away with it), and she goes back and forth with Peter (whom she knows, antidramatically, to be Spider-Man) about whether they have a romantic future. But Gwen has little to do until, absurdly, she gets to save the day by resetting the city's electric grid. This franchise needs more than a reset. It's ripe for retirement.

Watch a clip from the film "Ida." Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski. Starring Agata Kulesza, Agata Trzebuchowska, and Dawid Ogrodnik. (Photo/Video: Music Box Films)


Pawel Pawlikowski's "Ida," a compact masterpiece set in Poland in the early 1960s, gets to the heart of its matter with startling swiftness.

The film opens in a convent, on the touchingly plain features of a young novice named Anna. As she cleans the face of a statue of Christ with a soft brush, her concentration is complete. Raised in an orphanage from infancy, with no knowledge of her past, Anna (played exquisitely well by a first-time actress, Agata Trzebuchowska) is a week away from taking her vows. Suddenly, though, she is stunned to learn from the Mother Superior that she has an aunt named Wanda Gruz. "You should meet her before you take your vows," the Mother Superior says. "She is your only living relative." Then the one thunderclap is followed by another. Moments after meeting her niece, Wanda (a remarkable performance by Agata Kulesza) observes coolly, almost sardonically, "So you're a Jewish nun."

Anna's real name, her aunt tells her, is Ida Lebenstein, and her Jewish parents perished during the darkest days of World War II. Thus do the two women, one as angry as the other was previously serene, begin an exploration of family history—who killed Ida's parents? where are they buried?—of national history and, before and after everything else, of the nature of faith.

Such a revelation near the start of a relatively short narrative—the running time is 80 minutes—might seem to risk diminishing dramatic impact, rather than heightening it. But it's only a catalyst for the journey to come. Or the journeys, concrete as well as spiritual, since Mr. Pawlikowski, who wrote the screenplay with Rebecca Lenkiewicz, takes us on a road trip like no other—bleak horrors intertwined with quiet pleasures—in a film that looks like no other.

First you're enthralled by the look, which invites intense seeing with almost every gorgeous shot. The images are black-and-white, soft and supple, stripped of all clutter, and contained within a frame that's almost square—as if some early filmmaker like the great Danish director Carl Dreyer had pioneered some precursor of Instagram. (The film was shot digitally by Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal.) More striking still, much of the life of the film unfolds near the bottom of the frame. It's an unusual aesthetic, but a fascinating one that emphasizes the physical spaces people live in.

Then you're caught up in the heroine's fate. As someone who has lived her whole short life in a sheltered space, Anna, née Ida, may well be terrified by what she's been told, but she is determined to learn everything she can about her lost family in the company of her aunt, who has lost her own way quite spectacularly. Once a passionate Marxist, and a famously ruthless state prosecutor, Wanda is now a lush and a self-loathing wanton. Still, she continues to wield shaky influence as a provincial judge, and she wants Ida to have at least a taste of life—and carnal love—before taking her final vows. "Your Jesus didn't stay in a cave," Wanda tells her. "He went out into the world." Whether Ida will stay out in the world or return to being Anna is the most obvious question the story poses, but far from the only one. For Wanda as well as for her newly beloved niece, the world is seductive and appalling in equal measure.

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"Boy A" (2007)

Andrew Garfield gives a phenomenal performance as a young Englishman who calls himself Jack Burridge. In fact, Jack was the infamous Boy A, convicted of murdering a child when he himself was no more than a child. Now, released from juvenile prison, he's told by his devoted caseworker, Terry (Peter Mullan), that the past is moot and the present is all that matters. But the story makes the opposite case. The young man's past is always with him; the question is whether it will overwhelm him. John Crowley directed, brilliantly.

"Easy A" (2010)

The movie that made Emma Stone a star. The last time I recommended it was two years ago, and I did so for the same reason I'm plugging it now—because this wonderful comedienne was so shamefully wasted by "The Amazing Spider-Man." She plays Olive Penderghast, an Ojai, Calif., high-school student who goes to class in a bustier emblazoned with the scarlet A of an adulteress. How she reaches this point is a convoluted story, and a hilarious one. Suffice it to say that Olive identifies intensely with Hester Prynne, the outcast heroine of "The Scarlet Letter."

"Like Crazy" (2011)

Since Felicity Jones gets such short shrift in "The Amazing Spider-Man 2," here's a plug for her too. In Drake Doremus's wise and beautiful little film, she is Anna, a vivacious young Englishwoman in her senior year at a California college. Anna falls in love with Jacob (Anton Yelchin), a touchingly tender young American. The outward impediment to their romance is bureaucratic; Anna overstays her student visa by a couple of months. But her offense, and the complications that ensue, are only pretexts for a heartbreaking study of lovers falling from a state of grace.