TED 2

Every fan of Family Guy knows that when he wants to, Seth MacFarlane can be really offensive. (I am in no way a fan of Family Guy, and even I know that.) But the biggest problem with MacFarlane's Ted 2 - which is likely to at least occasionally infuriate anyone who isn't a white, straight alpha-bro - isn't that it's offensive; it's that it's too often sincere. This is a movie in which Morgan Freeman, as a benevolent civil-rights attorney, invokes the 16th Amendment and the Emancipation Proclamation when arguing for the rights of a talking teddy bear, with the scene's moved onlookers and swelling score matching him in earnestness and integrity. My audience, meanwhile, watched and listened to Freeman's impassioned oration in what felt like stunned silence. Can MacFarlane possibly be serious about this - that his foul-mouthed teddy's rights are equal to those of hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised human beings? And if he's not serious, why isn't this scene in any way funny?

LOVE & MERCY

Receiving a wide national release on the same weekend as Inside Out's debut, director Bill Pohlad's Love & Mercy is also an exploration of the brain - specifically, the brain of Beach Boys wunderkind Brian Wilson, alternately portrayed by Paul Dano (during the film's Pet Sounds-era 1960s sequences) and John Cusack (during Wilson's heavily-, and incorrectly-, medicated period in the late 1980s). And rather astonishingly for a work of its type, it boasts numerous scenes in which it really, truly feels like we're allowed to roam around in a legendary musician's head, feeling what he feels and, even more importantly, hearing what he hears.

SPY

Writer/director Paul Feig's Spy opens with an incredibly funny gross joke involving a sneeze, closes with an incredibly funny reveal involving a one-night stand, and somehow manages to stay incredibly funny - in addition to smart and clever and sweet - for most of the two hours in between. It's an action spoof about a gifted yet timidly self-conscious CIA desk jockey (Melissa McCarthy) who finally gets to release her inner Jane Bond, but the numerous vehicular chases and shoot-outs and danglings from helicopters are practically beside the point. Here, the comedy is the action.

TOMORROWLAND

To the credit of Disney's marketing team, the intriguingly vague previews for Tomorrowland provided just enough (a grizzled George Clooney, "directed by Brad Bird" in the credits, no number at the title's end or colon in its middle) to make the film appear promising without explicitly stating what it was about, or whom it was meant for. Having now seen Bird's futuristic adventure, I know what it's about - mainly because, from its first seconds, Disney's latest live-action endeavor keeps spelling out its themes in big block letters. Whom it's meant for, however, remains a mystery.