Courtesy of Universal

One nice thing about Public Enemies (there are more of them, but not enough) is that Johnny Depp palpably loves being a movie star and loves wearing wide-brim fedoras and long black coats and spats and firing tommy guns at G-men. And I ask you, friends: Who wouldn’t? It’s a happy confluence of actor and role, since Depp’s John Dillinger palpably loves being a gangster and hiding among the people, who regard him as a folk hero. (Without the threat of America’s Most Wanted, Twitter, or Gawker Stalker, the fugitive Dillinger travels the Midwest with relative nonchalance.) Depp also gets to woo a luscious Marion Cotillard (whose attempt at an American accent sinks somewhere in the mid-Atlantic) with a killer comeback — She: Boy, you’re in a hurry. He: If you were looking at what I’m looking at, you’d be in a hurry, too. So smooth. Yes, half his face is sometimes shadowed to suggest that Dillinger has a dark side, but Depp is so jaunty you could easily dub him “Sunny John.”

Photo: Courtesy of Paramount

Although it’s endless and eardrum-buckling, the Hasbro-sanctioned toy-tie-in Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen will pack them in, because guys all over the world dream of manipulating those amazing parts. And that’s just Megan Fox — there are also those cool robots. Actually, the camera lingers more lovingly on the Fox than the ‘bots, which transform so cartoonishly fast that any pretense of reality is instantly vaporized. Much of the movie is computer-generated hash, weightless even with nonstop BOOMS and METAL GROANS and THUDS. Fox’s jugs, in contrast, have verisimilitude — and heft.

Photo: Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox

X-Men Origins: Wolverine stars a buff but much too nice Hugh Jackman as the talon-sprouting future X-Man and Liev Schreiber — preening entertainingly — as his evil, fanged half-brother. The first half-hour moves like a wolf out of hell and makes you think the dire advance word — based on millions watching the leaked work print — was nuts. It’s witty and well staged (if you don’t mind that every time someone so much as breaks into a run it turns into CGI): What do those fanboys want? Then the action shifts to Canada and the bloat creeps in: The twists and double-crosses come too fast to absorb, and Jackman and Schreiber — now at war — impale each other and regenerate so many times that you can’t wait for someone, anyone, actually to die. A little catharsis, please! But few of the main characters bite it for good because, you know, there’s a Marvel franchise to maintain. Wolverine is the lucky one because he ends the picture with amnesia.

Photo: Courtesy of Dreamworks

Saw The Soloist last night (I’ll reserve judgment on the movie for now), and it’s easier to see why Robert Downey Jr. bristled when asked what his character in Tropic Thunder would say about Jamie Foxx’s performance as the brilliant, schizophrenic cellist Nathaniel Ayers — easier to see and easier to excuse.