Part of the fun of watching a Scorsese film is being surprised by the brio with which he stages and edits his sequences; his camera roams fluidly or the composition pops like a flashbulb perhaps the narrative even takes an unexpected turn that doesn’t feel like a prosaic “twist.” Shutter Island, however, looks and feels exactly like you’d expect it to for any film with this synopsis: “U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his partner arrive at an isolated psychiatric facility for the criminally insane in the mid-1950s to investigate the disappearance of a patient who murdered her children. As ominous clues are raised that suggest a deeper, darker mystery, Teddy begins to question the motives of everyone around him, and perhaps his own sanity…” Guess the twist. Go ahead. Guess.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a film that assumes its target audience actively desires to have no taste or aesthetic standard. It assumes that the viewer’s reservoir of self-awareness tops out at the recognition that all they want out of life is a big, stupid movie about stupid characters and big robots that beat the shit out of each other. It is a movie so big and so stupid and so damn long that it very nearly forgets about halfway through that it is a movie whose sole purpose for existence is to sell toys and entertain people with big, stupid robot battles and exquisitely rendered explosions. How do you forget something that elementary?

What if the movie a person credits with turning him- or herself into an authentic film buff is the single most influential film on that person’s aesthetic taste? It may be that a person is unable to cite a specific motion picture — after all, one’s passionate love affair with cinema isn’t usually something that occurs overnight. Real, lasting love grows over time. So arbitrarily picking your current all-time favorite just won’t do for this thought experiment. No, if you can’t recall a specific film, I suggest that the pentecostal movie is the one that you loved most as a child. For me, Disney’s The Black Hole, for all intents and purposes, is my own personal Rosetta Stone of aesthetic taste.

Though something of a nostalgia trip, Adventureland never falls into the traps of over romanticizing or sentimentalizing a bygone era. Inspired by the events of his own post-adolescence in the 1980s, Greg Mottola writes and directs this surprisingly tender film about confused and loveless young adults. Though beginning on a similar note as many films of its type — a party where the protagonist, James, is introduced as a virgin — the film takes an unusual path from there. He returns home to find out his summer plans are dashed …

To me, the Chronicles of Prydain were a revelation. Until then, I had never been enthusiastic about reading, seeing it more as a chore than as a pleasure….It wasn’t until my dad came home from a library sale with that battered copy of The Book Of Three that I discovered not only a true passion for reading, but for all things fantasy.