Probably the last good sci-fi movie of the summer. Sigh.

Fie on the critics who called the third X-Men movie, X-Men: The Last Stand flawed.

It delivers everything you loved about the previous two X-Men films:

• Awesome visual effects.
• Teenagery outsider/rebel angst. Loved the tatooed, gothy mutants in Magneto's army. The rebel mutant convergence space looked like an anti-globalization protest in Seattle.
  
• Allusions to social and political battles over race, sexual orientation, and other xenophobic concerns that would seem heavy-handed if not delivered via a live action comic book. ("Yeah, I remember that conversation," said a gay friend of mine as we watched the scene in X-Men United when Bobby comes out as a mutant to his parents.)
• Patrick Stewart.

The problem is that movie critics rarely seem to take comic book adaptations in the spirit in which they are intended.