“But the one thing that has haunted me my entire life is finding the truth about my parents.” Honestly — how could Amazing Spider-Man screenwriters James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent and/or Steve Kloves have written a line this groan-inducing and on-the-nose? They’re not stupid. They know what they’re doing. There are obviously more skillful and subtle ways of conveying Peter Parker‘s angst. And yet they wrote it.

Directive from a dictator: “From this point on no one will be allowed to compose a shot in which a character drops off the side of a super-tall skyscraper and falls 40 or 50 or 60 stories before stopping the fall and swooping back, blah blah. All directors and screenwriters of all superhero movies will henceforth have to make do without them.”