“WALL-E,” Pixar’s latest animated spectacle, is a science fiction love story and social-ecological parable. The setup is simple but ingenious. Sometime in the next century, the people of Earth completely trash the planet in a consumer frenzy. After extinguishing all surface life, the mega corporation-cum-world government Buy ‘n Large loads everyone onto a giant resort/spaceship and takes to the stars, leaving robots with the menial work of cleaning the planet while they’re away.

Hundreds of years later, the last remaining WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) unit continues compacting and stacking garbage into towering heaps, but has developed a few quirks, like collecting trinkets he/it finds in the garbage. WALL-E spends his downtime hanging out with his pet cockroach and watching an old video cassette of “Hello Dolly.” Pining for love on a dead planet, WALL-E is a romantic klutz, the animated robot version of the Apatow schlub, here mercifully bereft of speech.

Love soon finds WALL-E in the form of EVE, a more advanced (shiny and feminine) robot sent to Earth to locate life. The two droids meet cute when EVE unleashes a torrent of rockets to destroy WALL-E. WALL-E’s obsession with Eve—I may be too jaded to believe in robot love—soon leads him into deep space and eventually to the human ship, Axiom. During all this, the two robots form a deep love-like bond, which plays out a little like “Hello Dolly,” but with lots of digital fanfare.

The scenes on Earth are pretty bleak despite WALL-E’s plucky charm, with dingy brown air, crumbling skyscrapers and a scorched desert surface. The film’s image of the future is as harrowing as any I’ve seen, utterly devoid of recognizable life. Green is a radical color in “Wall-E,” and the few times it surfaces amid the reds, oranges, blues and whites that dominate the palette, as in an early scene when Wall-E discovers a weed, it’s a jarring symbol of the planet that once was, loading a simple color with tragic meaning.

The computer animation (is there any other kind in feature films anymore?) is not only used effectively for color, but also comes in handy when presenting the humans, or what the humans have become: very round. The humans in Axiom have evolved (or degenerated) into obese blobs after centuries of low gravity combined with endless consumption of junk food and the sedentary lifestyle that comes with cars and ever-ubiquitous electronic media. Machines do all the work, including keeping the ship running on schedule.

I wouldn’t really call it capitalism—it’s more of a Brave New World scenario, where robotic underlings do all the actual work while humans eat, play and buy. It’s a consumerist ideology detached from labor and the market place, a dystopian pseudo-socialist society as envisioned by the marketing team at Wal-Mart. It’s the American nightmare fully realized, the complete atomization of society into isolated individuals seeking cheap entertainment. Of course, WALL-E and EVE crash the party, finding an unlikely ally in the ships’ well-meaning captain (Jeff Garlin), who has to struggle against the paternalistic machines designed to coddle and ensnare.

This is pretty smart stuff, even if questions of consciousness and gender (I can imagine a grad student hammering out “Gendered Robots in Love”) go unexplored. Our two enamored robots make for a great slapstick team, especially when interacting with the other laboring robots on the Axiom, but they don’t really have much depth. They’re cute so we naturally empathize with them, but even a cute robot is just a robot. Their apparent sentience doesn’t raise any eyebrows.

Everything more or less marches to a heartwarming, affecting, and yes, effective conclusion. But it’s a bit of a cop out. After sticking it to humanity with images of a ruined Earth and calling us a bunch of future fat asses, a little lesson (ecology rocks, consumerism sucks!) and robots in love doesn’t quite make it all better. The weight of the catastrophe isn’t supported by the eccentric, heartwarming story.

“WALL-E” might not have the courage to see its dark vision of the future to the end, but it has a brain and a heart, and in these By ‘n Large times, it’s a far better thing than the alternative.

“WALL-E” opened alongside the action film “Wanted,” which is supposed to be counter-programming. The irony here is that “Wanted,” a cartoonishly violent “adult” film, is unapologetically stupid and “visceral,” while the family film is smart, thoughtful and relatively believable. It’s tragic to think of children leaving “WALL-E,” full of ideas and wonderment, growing up to be the target audience of “Wanted.”

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After much hoopla, Harrison Ford returns to the screen in the belated fourth Indiana Jones movie. Not wanting to be swept up by the hype machine, I waited a few weeks for the fervor (and furor) to cool before finally sitting down and watching it. It’s a good action film but not a great one, coasting along mostly on the fumes of nostalgia. Ford still has the magic, but the film surrounding him creeks a little under the gigantic weight of its belabored premise and somewhat lackadaisical direction by Steven Spielberg.

Unless you’ve been hiding in Tora Bora, you’ll know the action has been moved forward more or less in real time to the 1950s, the decade of atomic cafes, greasers and Cold War paranoia. Indy finds himself attacked on two fronts: by anti-communist hysterics invading academia and the communists themselves, by way of fabulously athletic looking Spalko (Cate Blanchett, who wields a hell of a rapier). She leads a crew of Ruskie toughs in search of a sci-fi MacGuffin, sparring with Indy and friends in the Nevada desert, the jungles of Peru and elsewhere.

There are ample allusions to the Cold War, most of them packed tightly together in the first third of the film. Some are more compelling than others. A simulacrum of 1950s suburbia Indy stumbles into is both surreal and terrifying, especially its plastic populace and apocalyptic termination–Indy saves himself from a nuclear blast by hiding in a lead refrigerator. While ridiculous, the scene does hammer home the frenzied mood of the time.

In another 1950s twist, Indy finds himself without a job after anti-communists demand he quit. Indy’s no red of course and even manages to get off an “I like Ike!” before socking it to the Soviets. However, accusations of communist leanings don’t stop Indy from recommending Vere Gordon Childe to a student. Ultimately, the daredevil archaeologist seems unaligned, an anti-Soviet liberal fighting for generic good against generic evil. The Soviets for their part are curiously devoid of menace. Scientifically-minded atheists just don’t pack the pure evil pageantry of Nazis.

Indy is joined by a small militia of adventurers, including the double-crossing Mac (an unusually greasy Ray Winstone), Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen, making a celebrated return to the series), the rambling, crystal skull obsessed Harold Oxley (John Hurt, largely wasted), and Mutt (Shia LaBeouf), a young greaser into hair and bikes. Indy, Marion and Mutt comprise a nuclear family of sorts, whose chief dysfunction is a love for dangerous adventure—of course danger never really seems genuine this time out. The family reunion feel of the movie, as well as the inherent ridiculousness of man eating ants and digital monkeys, keeps it from ever being really hair-raising.

Naturally, the ultimate goal is a holy artifact, though this one comes packaged in the jet age sheen of technology. Without getting too mystical, the film’s premise is a hodgepodge of Maya/Inca chic, UFO religion and new age speculation. This means lots of savage Amerindians and very out-sourced pyramid building. Hollyood is not yet subtle enough to understand why indigenous people might find the whole idea of alien involvement in their advancements offensive. The movie’s not doing the Russians any favors either. But this is supposed to be fifties pulp and I would be almost disappointed if a little chauvinism and racism didn’t pop up.

Much fuss has been made about Ford’s age, but aside from creating a few melancholic moments, it neither diminishes nor adds weight to the character. Indiana Jones is a flat, archetypal pulp hero largely defined by his accoutrements, acerbic wit and sly grin, and age hasn’t really affected that. Ford still does a lot of his own stunts and still flashes some good shit-eating grins from time to time. Deft and funny, the rapport between Ford, Allen and LaBeouf is the best reason to see the movie. Well that and the sexy Blanchett, who sadly isn’t given much to do with her sexiness other than ham it up and fight.

My main problem with the movie, other than having more ridiculous plot twists than the Amazon has bends, is its superfluous nature. This is a film that did not need to be made. I could have lived happily into old age with only the original trilogy to look back on. The movie’s raison d’être is completely commercial, a transparent cash-in on eighties nostalgia, a cheap action spectacle with few redeeming qualities.

But what the hell am I talking about? Pulp is, by definition, inessential. What matters here is entertainment, and yes, despite having a ridiculous story, completely silly action sequences and containing both Roswell aliens and a nuclear explosion, the movie is very entertaining. In fact, it’s probably entertaining because it contains these things. It’s like an ice cream bar: completely inessential, but oh so tasty when it’s going down. Just please, no more.

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In the early 1980s, two small town English boys discover their first cinematic love, the opening volley in the long and bloody Rambo series, “First Blood.” Poor skinny Will (Bill Milner) lives in the confines of a conservative evangelical family where television and violent films are strictly prohibited. The other boy, Lee Carter (Will Poulter), a bully and notorious troublemaker from a broken family, lures Will into his video production of a no-budget Rambo sequel with a bootleg tape of the movie.

Will, who scribbles elaborate doodles and animations in his sprawling notebook to escape the stultifying, colorless existence of his home life, instantly takes to the film, his imagination exploding in a whirlwind of color and sound—rendered quite literally with imaginative special effects of bombs going off and evil scarecrows. The violence of “Rambo” might not seem the most fertile soil for engendering creativity in kids, but action films (”Conan,” “Aliens,” “Robocop” and “Commando” for example) certainly electrified mine.

Lee sets up the video camera, Will dons a pantyhose bandana and the two set out to shoot their own “Rambo” epic, complete with the kinds of idiotic impromptu stunts a couple of kids would attempt. As they shoot the film, the easy rhythms of juvenile male friendship begin to take hold. The more aggressive Lee bullies Will into submission, but it’s clear that the shy, quiet Will probably needs a kick in the ass to move his imagination beyond his notebook.

Their friendship is confronted with the usual challenges: other kids competing for their attention and parental authority. Other kids include an older French foreign exchange student, Didier Revol (Jules Sitruk), who casts a spell on the local girls and sets his sight on befriending Will at Lee’s expense. On the parental front, Will’s mom (Jessica Hynes) and her boyfriend also intervene in the boys’ friendship on religious grounds. The religious group they belong to, the Brethren, is not explored in any depth but simply stands in for vague parental authority.

Both young actors are uncommonly talented and obviously having a blast on camera, running through fields, falling from trees and filming it all for posterity. Lee, with his absent parents and estranged brother, is the more difficult role, requiring a double whammy of tough love and alienated dejection. Will Poulter does enormously strong work here with his open face and steely determination—I anticipate seeing him in future films. Bill Milner is his passive match, quiet most of the time but coming to life in scenes of manic energy, especially in his Son of Rambow role.

“Son of Rambow” is one of those slight, good-humored and knowing films about childhood that you smile at as it plays and find yourself adoring a few hours after it ends. While its direction by Garth Jennings (”The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”) is whimsical and ornately framed, the film’s best pleasures are those that are quite simply about being a kid. If you were an introverted, creative kid like I was, the film will resonate that much more. Even though “Son of Rambow” is a bit too taken with sub-Wes Anderson quirkiness, the film is always engaged with the underlying reality of its protagonists, children as they exist on Planet Earth.

Being a kid, even one in a position of relative privilege, is quite an undertaking. In retrospect the whole affair seems like one great adventure after another. What we often forget are the moments of boredom and pain and rejection, the times when we’re forced to shut our imaginations down and behave responsibly, and the painful stretches when our great friendships are challenged by other kids and encroaching adulthood.

What I like about “Son of Rambow” is how Garth Jennings seems to have remembered both the great unwinding road of barely contained enthusiasm for the world around us, and the reminders of encroaching adulthood, the time when most of us put away the bandana and succumb to the often boring business of being adults. “Son of Rambow,” despite its cute showiness, tries to reawaken the wonderment even while recognizing the letdowns, and it’s a great credit to Jennings that in certain inspired moments it does just that.

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“Iron Man” is the first wholly satisfying comic book adaptation I’ve seen since the original “Superman.” It perfectly captures the appeal of the character and the little corner of the Marvel universe he occupies, while adding ample satire and a twinkle of knowing humor to make it relevant to adults. It also addresses the tricky role capitalism plays in the depressing landscape of global warfare, and that takes some guts for an action-adventure spectacle.

Robert Downey Jr. plays the title character and the man inhabiting the suit, Tony Stark, a wealthy industrialist and super scientist extraordinaire. Stark is an unusual superhero, a narcissistic brainiac, douche bag womanizer, binge drinker—alcoholism was Iron Man’s kryptonite for much of the comic’s history—and war profiteer.

When the story opens, Stark is in Afghanistan showing off his latest toy, a guided missile system that he uses to obliterate a mountain. After the demonstration all hell breaks loose, and Stark is taken prisoner by an unusual multinational terrorist/mercenary group with unknown aims, the Ten Rings. In this humbling moment he meets another scientist taken prisoner, an Afghan, Dr. Yinsen (Shaun Toub), a pacifist who informs Stark that his captors want him to build a missile.

Stark has other plans, and begins using the “missile parts” to construct a suit of mechanical armor, blasting his way out of the cave in a scene of extraordinary carnage. As expected, Yinsen doesn’t make it and has a few parting words for Stark that shatters his other suit of armor: his outward narcissism. “Iron Man” is really about Stark’s growing empathy—even as he transforms himself into an augmented super soldier, he grows wiser and humbler.

When Stark returns to the States, he decides to take Stark Industries out of the weapons business, having realized that the very terrorists who captured him buy their weapons from his corporation. The company’s profits plummet overnight to the chagrin of his business partner and rising nemesis Obadiah Stane (played bald, bearded and icy by a decidedly un-Dude Jeff Bridges). Stark lets the weapons division fall to the wayside while he constructs his new suit of armor, employing all the fantastical technologies of the Jet Age, but with a contemporary twist.

The role is a tricky one that few movie stars could pull off. An actor first and foremost, Downey uses his considerable skill to bring complexity to a role that could easily slide into caricature. Strong and arrogant on the outside, Stark is a recovering man child who has, for the first time in his life, come face to face with his mortality and humanity. Downey isn’t playing a dashing millionaire womanizer, but a brilliant kid playing a dashing millionaire womanizer as a defense mechanism. Downey’s metamorphosis into Iron Man is believable because he imbues the character with genuine pathos even while charming the audience’s socks off with snide wit and good humor.

Downey is greatly assisted by the presence of Gwyneth Paltrow, playing Stark’s put-upon assistant and budding love interest, Pepper Potts. The role at first seems too archaic—the Money Penny role isn’t exactly contemporary or innocuous, but Paltrow brings a lot to it. Her chemistry with Downey is one of the best parts of the movie; there’s real heat between the actors. There are elements of screwball comedy in their relationship—director Jon Favreau (Swingers, Elf) is no stranger to comedy, and “Iron Man” is full of deft wit and pointed humor. Underlying many of the laughs though is the sad, unconsummated aspect of their relationship. The film is aware of the tricky ambiguity of their situation, male employer and female employee, even as it goes into full on superhero rampage mode.

Stark’s friend and military liaison, James Rhodes (Terrence Howard in the film’s most thankless Stepin Fetchit role) also provides assistance, keeping the Air Force off Iron Man’s back while he flies around in his weaponized suit, fighting the Ten Rings in Afghanistan, while Obadiah conspires behind his back, for what else if not money. Rather surprisingly, Favreau does not shy away from exploring the moral and ethical wasteland of military contractors, where money talks and bullshit—human rights, democracy, social justice, etc.—walks. Obadiah might be the nastiest super villain of them all, the greedy big business sociopath in the weapons market.

Besides exhibiting humorous political anger, “Iron Man” also gets pretty meta, especially towards the end when Downey cheerfully riffs on comic book clichés before happily indulging a crowd of onlookers. While undoubtedly more humane at this point, Stark still revels in the naked joys of celebrity. In the next film, I hope to get a dose of the nastier stuff with Stark’s descent into alcoholism and self-pity coming to the forefront. Despite its requisite superhero showdown and triumphant arc, the franchise has potential to delve deeper than “Batman,” the archetypal comic book about “complex things.”

The whole super science genre is skewered for laughs on “Venture Bros.” a Johnny Quest parody on the Cartoon Network that occupies some of the same space. “Iron Man” has some fun with it too, with Stark’s ridiculously supped up ultra-Modern home, robotic assistants and outrageously ridiculous weapons. The suit itself is a marvelous creation, a hot rod suit of armor that can fly to the upper atmosphere and shoots laser blasts from its hands. It’s a throwback to a time when people marveled at such things, instead of fearing their very real emergence in actual military hardware.

“Iron Man” might have some fun with its Jet Age outrageousness, but there is a distressing undercurrent that makes it a little more interesting than the usual comic book blockbuster. Stark is only human, and even with his genius for technology and superhero pretenses, seems vulnerable to the same failings and despair we all are. Under the swagger and smart ass quips, Stark is a man confronting a very real and very cruel world, handicapped by a bad heart and selfish impulses. Despite the predictable rhythms of the genre and the requisite climactic battle, Favreau and Downey deliver a first: a truly mortal superhero.
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“Smart People” is about highly educated people sorely lacking in wisdom and perspective. In a way, the premise resembles the film; despite containing much wit and affection, “Smart People” is a bit of a drag. It has its winning qualities—most notably, Thomas Hayden Church and Ellen Page—but the romance between its two leads, Sarah Jessica Parker and Dennis Quaid, is by turns awkward, unbelievable and anything but winning. And winning, as they say, is everything in romantic comedy.

“Smart People” bears more than a passing resemblance to its predecessors (”Wonder Boys,” “The Squid and the Whale” etc.), dealing as it does with a dysfunctional family of sorts lorded over by a fading, misanthropic academic. Quaid plays Lawrence Wetherhold, a professor of Victorian literature at Carnegie Mellon, a curmudgeon and snob who ignores his students and treats his own family with the cold respect of professional peers, enlisting them in his own selfish interests, but otherwise ignoring them.

In other words, he’s yet another bitter old professor in a long line of Hollywood academics going all the way back to “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” an insulated man-child with a permanent scowl and a grocery list of neuroses. While I’m sure this stereotype exists in the flesh, I am happy to report that I never encountered it in my seven years of college. But at least nowadays, crusty academics are allowed to learn “important life lessons,” and Lawrence learns quite a few. I’m sure you can guess which ones.

Lawrence’s family is a bit more interesting. Ellen Page plays his teenaged daughter, Vanessa, a cold, methodical and charmingly clueless Young Republican and future climber. Page plays her like a slightly more realistic Juno, a know-it-all snob with a confused adolescent interior, especially when it comes to sex, which her older brother and aspiring poet, James (Ashton Holmes), excels at. Vanessa idolizes her father, using all her million dollar words and New England affectations to impress him—but of course he’s as narcissistic as she is, and is taken to task for it by his adopted brother, Chuck.

Chuck is best described as the Hayden Church role, which means if you’ve seen “Sideways,” you’ll know exactly what to expect. Chuck shows up early in the film and plants himself on Lawrence’s couch with the pretext of driving him around after his car is impounded. He’s a well meaning slacker whose role is to annoy Lawrence while teaching him how to live. He attaches himself to Vanessa, lightening her up with a joint and some booze. Their relationship, which navigates some dangerous sexual waters, is really the best thing about a film.

Which brings me to what the film is actually about: the love story between Lawrence and Janet (Sarah Jessica Parker), a nurse and former student of Lawrence. If you want to kill a bittersweet romantic comedy, cast two people with bad chemistry and unlikable characters to work with. Between Lawrence’s scowling pretensions and Victorian hang-ups, and Janet’s dramatic bullshit and irrational disappearances—partly, and lazily, explained with some anti-depressants—the film is a total killjoy.

Without spoiling anything, there are decisions both characters make, especially when the film touches on sex, that make them excruciatingly unlikable and untenable as believably intelligent romantic leads. A film called “Smart People” shouldn’t require conventions that would appear unrealistic and contrived in an average romantic comedy. I don’t demand sympathetic characters, but I do like characters I can believe in, and I don’t believe in this couple. The characters are poorly written, wordy and pretentious in the worst possible ways. And they’re not particularly interesting—no offense to the Victorians.

The two actors’ lack of chemistry doesn’t help matters, but nor does the sappy (sappy in this context anyway) acoustic guitar music, composed and performed by Nuno Bettencourt, that tells us exactly what to think and feel every two minutes. Folksy guitar is fine and well, but not in every scene. On some level I want to be trusted with the material. Like a lot of these films about growing and becoming better people, the film makers don’t trust the audience to draw their own conclusions and feel the need to placate us with jaunty music.

Which is a shame, because there are some good reasons to recommend seeing “Smart People.” Ellen Page and Thomas Hayden Church have a wonderful rapport and real charm. I’d rather see a love story between these two, the middle-aged stoner and uptight Young Republican learning about love and life together. But then the passionless leads take over and the drama overtakes the human comedy. And the guitar, oh the guitar…

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Given its tough guy dialog, casually racist characters, ugly violence and overheated LA setting, it comes as little surprise that “Street Kings” was directed by David Ayer, the writer behind the brutally cynical “Training Day,” and was co-written by James Ellroy, patron saint of the LA crime novel. It’s exactly what you’d expect with the talent involved: gangland exploitation smartened up with a little commentary on racism and institutional corruption.

Keanu Reeves stars as Tom Ludlow, a one man LAPD hit squad, nominally working vice but really pushing vigilante justice. The head of his team, Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker spitting profanities and not taking any shit from no one) looks the other way while Tom drinks on the job, executes dangerous suspects, issues beat downs of minorities and alienates Internal Affairs and the press. Tom is the hardboiled cop archetype, cold, emotionless and predictably saddled with the memory of a dead wife.

When Tom walks into a house and unloads on a pack of heavily armed Korean sex traffickers, he finds himself under heavy scrutiny from both Internal Affairs, lorded over by Hugh Laurie (getting farther and farther away from Wooster every year), and an old partner, Terrence Washington (Terry Crews), who annoys Tom with his unimpeachable ethics and generally low opinion of targeting minorities. But Jack steps in and protects Tom every step of the way because he approves of his violent tactics.

This premise isn’t completely far-fetched; certain LAPD anti-gang units were pretty close to right wing death squads in the 1990s and that decade’s excesses inform much of the film’s jittery, paranoid atmosphere, steeped as it is in deeply entrenched police corruption and Wild West violence. When Tom approaches Terrance in a convenient store with the intent of pummeling him a bit in retribution, he ends up witnessing his murder at the hands of two apparent gang members armed with military grade machine guns.

Naturally, Tom wants revenge (he was supposed to issue the comeuppance!) and begins digging for the truth, which brings him into contact with the usual cast of colorful supporting characters: an officer investigating him (Chris Evans), a gun slinging tough (Common, convincingly tough), a couple of put-upon informants (Cle Shaheed Sloan and The Game) and Terrance’s widow (the always sexy and likable Naomi Harris). Tom also has a girlfriend (played by Martha Higareda) but she’s completely marginalized by the heaving macho script. All of these colorful characters lead him in one big circle, with a bad guy and a conclusion we can all see from light-years away.

“Street Kinds” ultimately totes the always fashionable noir dictum, “everyone’s corrupt,” an idea that has become increasingly less novel since the 1940s. Most large public institutions in this country probably do have their share of corner cutting and corruption, but I wonder how useful applying this idea to whole organizations like the LAPD really is, beyond fulfilling the somewhat lazy requirements of the genre.

Sure, the LAPD is corrupt and has a history of massive abuses, but is it really helpful to pump up the corruption to insurmountable noir levels? At some point you have to put away the convenient myths of fiction and try to see corruption as something neither inherent nor implacable in the culture. It’s not really productive to shrug our shoulders and accept the idea that every official or police officer is either corrupt or dead—it’s much more complicated than that. At some point you have to dismiss the fallen world idea as self-defeating.

“Street Kinds” also panders to the pro-vigilante crowd even while superficially condemning it. I’m all for anti-heroes, but I’m tired to films trying to make them palatable by ensuring that every one they execute or trample on in their mad dash for justice are as despicable and creepy as possible—they’re always rapists, child molesters and sex slave traffickers, designed to justify their abuse at the hands of authority. Yes, even sex traffickers should enjoy the protection of the law. Ayer, who wrote “Training Day,” should know better.

All that said, I’ll freely admit to loving movies like this. Even an average hardboiled police story can appeal to me if it’s competently wrought. I like films that take place on the fuzzy line between the law and criminality, and “Street Kings” delivers the requisite thrills, even with the cardboard presence of Reeves barely holding down the center. It all trickles down to the same shopworn clichés of violent revenge, but it’s diverting.

Despite its hard hitting premise, “Street Kings” is as light as a feather. Its main virtue, its only virtue in fact, is that it’s entertaining. Its observations on corruption were stale in the 1960s. The same topic could be handled and has been handled with considerably more nuance and sophistication, and it will be too soon if I ever see another “the world is evil” ending in a crime film. But for two hours of fun, skillfully executed distraction, good enough.

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Staff Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillipe) enjoys the love and respect of his soldiers, small town boys who’d follow him to the ends of the earth, or at least the dead end of an alleyway in Tikrit. His soldiers are mostly working class small town kids who spend the boring stretches of their tour shooting amateur rap and nu-metal videos, and singing patriotic country anthems. Things are boring but uneventful, that is until a car runs their checkpoint, drawing Brandon’s men into an ambush.

In the ensuing firefight, his men are pinned down in the alleyway, forced to fight up close and ugly as bullets and rockets rain down from the rooftops above. In the confusion, one of Brandon’s men enters a building to pursue some of the attackers; Iraqis, both insurgents and civilians, are killed and Brandon’s man is badly injured, with missing limbs and burns covering his body, but Brandon is able to pull him out of the wreckage.

When Brandon returns to the Texas cow town he calls home, he’s given a hero’s welcome, having served tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. But Brandon and the boys find it hard to readjust. The firefight in the alleyway lingers in their minds like an existential dead end. They turn to booze and fighting as a means of coping, the machismo of military life fusing with the cowboy bravado of rural culture. They go out to celebrate, but underlying the happiness of reunion is a dark, unresolved tension.

The first crack in the facade appears when, in a drunken rage, Brandon’s best friend Steve (Channing Tatim) hits his fiancé, Michele (Abbie Cornish). When Brandon arrives on the scene, Steve, still in solider mode, is digging a hole in his front yard to pass out in. As the film progresses, other friends slide into alcoholism and petty crime, especially Tommy (played with Edward Norton level intensity by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a good kid who has been irreparably damaged by his experience in Iraq.

Kimberly Pierce, who wrote and directed “Stop-Loss” during a long sabbatical after the brutally visceral “Boys Don’t Cry,” is not interested in the in and outs of war itself so much as the quiet dread and private suffering of veterans who come home in a PTSD haze, a condition that cripples some and leads others to violence. Contrary to popular conservative opinion, the film is not about all soldiers, and nor does it attempt to pathologize all veterans. It’s about a certain subset that should never have been subjected to multiple tours to begin with.

No one intends to go back to Iraq, but the military invokes stop-loss, the controversial policy that allows the military to call soldiers back to duty after their term of service expires. None too thrilled by the prospect of returning to Iraq, Brandon declares the policy a back-door draft, echoing John Kerry’s description of the practice. When his commanding officer invokes the president, Brandon’s reply is “fuck the president,” which is perhaps the best appraisal of the Bush administration in a fiction film to date.

Just when you think the movie is “Coming Home” for the Iraq generation, Pierce changes gears and sends Brandon on a road trip. Having escaped the stockades, Brandon hitches a ride with Steve’s girlfriend to Washington D.C. to fight the stop-loss. Their road trip is a generally dark, brooding, noir-inflected journey through the small towns and urban wastelands of the southeastern United States. Brandon has a few violent encounters with local color that Michele helpfully diffuses (the film mercifully leaves out a romantic subplot), as well as run-ins with other fugitive veterans on their way to Canada with their families.

At one point, Brandon visits Rico (Victor Rasuk), the solider he saved in Tikrit, in a veteran’s hospital. In the film’s most heavy handed scene and paradoxically one of its best, the two solider discuss their experience in Iraq. Although he has been maimed, blinded and burned by a grenade explosion, Rico is happy to have gotten out and supports Brandon’s desertion. Rasuk brings a lot of charisma to the role and some of the most painful and true dialog in the film. The scene in the hospital is probably the most overtly political, but Rasuk is able to deliver his dialog believably while standing away from the soapbox.

The road trip is a strange way to tell this kind of story, but in its convoluted way, it actually works. What better way to convey the dread of running away from or returning to war than a dark highway at night? The road trip is one of the classic metaphors of American film, and it can serve a lot of purposes. Here, it’s the seductive allure of hope and its termination in frustration, the dream of escape and the inevitability of failure.

The road trip’s dispiritingly circular course makes it unusually depressing and unsatisfying, which is probably about right for a story with PTSD and stop-loss as its central themes. “Stop-Loss” offers the false hope of escape, but is ultimately smart enough to know that for most soldiers, escape isn’t an option. Despite its inherent bleakness, Pierce enlivens the otherwise melodramatic story with lots of small town flavor, reminding me at times of “Boys Don’t Cry” which also confronted out of control machismo and the women who have to deal with it. Her treatment of it here is a lot more positive though.

“Stop-Loss,” despite its sometimes overwrought melodrama, mostly predictable character arcs and occasionally preachy politics, is probably the best of the Iraq movies, with one notable exception, the low-key “In the Valley of Elah.” It’s often loud and obnoxious because young people, especially when under stress, are generally loud and obnoxious.

A woman behind me in the theater thought she was smarter than the movie, providing her own color commentary throughout, and one of her loud hissing complaints was about the metal and rap on the soundtrack and the sometimes stupid tough guy antics of its characters, but clearly she hasn’t really engaged with the reality of the war in Iraq or its participants. Yes, believe it or not, military life can be a hyper-masculine experience.

*

Predictably, “Stop-Loss” has been attacked by pro-war commentators, especially over the issue of stop-loss itself, which they claim is laid out in the contract soldiers sign and completely fair. It is in the contract, but claiming it’s actually fair to place overworked soldiers in the line of fire after they’ve been through the wringer once or twice is pretty dubious, especially since the loudest commentators and biggest civilian advocates for stop-loss aren’t really putting anything on the line for the “good of the country.”

But this is beside the point because “Stop-Loss” has already met its demise at the box office, following in the footsteps of other Iraq War films. The general consensus among critics and box office pundits is that dealing with the war head on is unappealing to American audiences, and that we’re suffering from war fatigue. But this isn’t a failure of imagination or marketing, it’s a failure of this country and a sign of its incapacity to deal with the reality of war.

“Stop-Loss” is an entertaining and engaging film, one that should appeal to the coveted teen and twenty-something market, but without a draft, most Americans can and will choose to ignore films about the war right along with the war itself; it doesn’t really matter to those of us unaffected by it. Of course it does matter and all of us will feel its effects even with our heads tucked safely in the dirt, but for the time being it can be ignored.

A friend of mine, a veteran of the first Iraq War, will sometimes talk about a friend of his who died in Iraq a year ago. None of his other friends ever mention it. Here in liberal anti-war Seattle, no one can even discuss the death of a friend in the context of Iraq. It’s as though the entire country has put itself in a trance because it simply cannot deal with the ugliness of the war, a war they’re passive and complacent participants in. And why not? In the end of the day, it’s only the volunteers, the poor schmucks who signed up, who have to fight it.

Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park” takes its name from both a park in Portland (officially O’Bryant Square) and the state of mind of its protagonist, a teenage skater who visits the park at the invitation of a friend. It’s a gritty concrete block littered with gutter punks, skaters, druggies and homeless vagrants. Alex, a middle-class kid with recently divorced parents, is a little uneasy among the older kids and drifters that make the park their home, but he’s also enthralled by the transgressive otherness of the place.

He doesn’t want to skate there so much as take it all in, especially the gravity defying stunts of the outlaw skaters—seen here without gear or endorsements. But despite his efforts to remain a neutral observer, things take an unexpectedly gruesome turn. One night he finds himself on a railcar with an older drifter he met at the park and something goes wrong, horribly wrong, resulting in the accidental death of a security guard. Alex is not a murderer, but he finds himself saddled with guilt and deep paranoia resulting from the death.

Alex has a moody girlfriend, a cheerleader whose main relationship goal is to lose her virginity to him. But Alex is too distracted by his own problems to worry about his or her virginity, and too interested in attractive older boys—the story doesn’t beat us over the head with Alex’s sexual orientation, which seems pretty variable. We’re conditioned to see teenagers as horny sex machines, but Van Sant is content to give us a kid searching for an identity, unsure of his sexuality, and definitely not the sort of person to obsess about it.

In fact, he spends most of his time in the film trying to figure out what happened at Paranoid Park and coming to terms with having had a hand in someone’s death. Whether he’s at the mall with friends or alone on the Oregon coast, he stays in his head, observing and recording his feelings about the event. His parents and everyone else in his life, including a police officer investigating the death (Daniel Liu) are like specters, occasionally intruding into the foreground with desultory observations or chatter.

Alex is played by Gabe Nevins, a non-actor and a real teenager. It’s an important observation because having the right age and the right look is important for any film taking a grab at authenticity. Like the real hustlers appearing in Van Sant’s great “My Own Private Idaho,” the teenagers and the homeless in “Paranoid Park” have the imperfect, lived in look of real people. Van Sant often casts actors the same way he scouts locations, always looking beyond superficial types for their underlying reality.

Nevins looks and acts like a real teenager, without dramatic adornment. He’s an introverted, thoughtful kid, smart without being intellectual, thrust into an extreme situation. It’s right that he should amble through the film like a confused child, his eyes big and wide. This isn’t “Brick,” where kids talk in noir quips, but the real world where even smart kids usually can’t deal with heavy existential baggage concerning life and death.

The story, meandering and told out of sequence, is interrupted my moments of reverie at the skate parks where Alex spends much of his time. These skating scenes, free of the confinement imposed by gravity and everyday life, play in Alex’s head when he daydreams, providing moments of escape from his gruesome crime, the confusion caused by his girlfriend and her sexual demands, and his fragmentary middle-class existence, uprooted by divorce.

Since “Gerry,” Van Sant has employed a highly subjective, impressionistic style, using different film stocks, camera speed changes, slow dissolves and deeply textured sound editing to get inside his characters’ heads. Elements of the style first appeared in “Drugstore Cowboy” and “My Own Private Idaho,” but have lately become the driving force behind much of his work (”Elephant” and “Last Days” are prime examples). By using lean, stripped down stories, Van Sant can revel in incident, inaction and the intimate recesses of his troubled character’s consciousness.

When it works, the results are sublimely beautiful, as in one scene where Alex, weighed down by guilt and paranoia, sinks to his knees in the shower. The water pours over his head and the dark silhouette of his hair begins to resemble a tree in the low light, the water dripping off his hair falling like rain off its branches. The ambiance of real rain and birds chirping overtakes the sounds of the shower as the camera pulls away to reveal birds painted on the shower tiles. Alex’s solitude and troubled conscience weighs on him like the weight of nature, the rain and the trees of his Oregon surroundings.

At key moments Alex observes other characters, especially the beautiful skater boys his life largely revolves around, and the film slows to a crawl. The sumptuous soundtrack rises to envelop the scenes in a warm romantic glow. In scenes with his girlfriend, the schizoid score rapidly changes tempo and tone to suggest Alex’s unease at his girlfriend’s off-kilter mood changes and sexual advances. And of course there is the footage of skaters rising, falling, gliding in the air and sliding down sheer walls, all shot in dreamily stark Super 8.

“Paranoid Park” works. Like most films of its kind, individual moments stand out more than the superficial plot, which is understandably slight. It’s all about atmosphere, mood and the strange, sometimes fearsome beauty of isolated moments. It’s not easy to sustain an interior atmosphere for two hours; if it were more directors would make movies like this.

If the story sometimes sinks in the weightlessness of its world or occasionally navel gazes its way into murky nothingness, it’s not for any lack of skill or effort. I found Alex’s interior world interesting, but others will not, and that’s the only distinction that can be made about a movie like this. “Paranoid Park” is about the individual moments, some of them horrifying, others transcendent, that make up a human life. And for me, that’s good enough.

I’m confident that in some parallel universe, “10,000 BC” is called “10,000 BCE” and contains something like recognizable history. Oh, how lucky the denizens of this strange other world must be to live on a planet where science, history and genuine curiosity reign supreme. But we live in an imperfect world where the best a blockbuster filmmaker can do in tribute to our brave ancestors is create a work of unimaginative fantasy junk food. “10,000 BC” is about as historically accurate as “Conan the Barbarian,” wherefrom, along with “Apocalypto,” writer and director Rolan Emmerich lifts most of the story.

Steven Strait plays D’Leh, a mountain tribesman who may live in Africa or central Asia– since the geography and landscapes of the film are all over the map, it’s hard to say where exactly. His people live in the frigid highlands, hunting packs of mammoths that apparently mull around in the mountains, and sporting a look best described as post-apocalyptic Rastafarian. Think “Thunderdome” with dreads and peace pipes. A young man when the story first begins, D’Leh falls in love with a young blue-eyed girl Evolet (Camilla Belle), the lone survivor from a tribe killed by “four legged demons” (could these be horsemen?).

Naturally, there’s a prophecy involved, because all human history can be reduced to simple fate and destiny in the movies. D’Leh is destined to take up his exiled father’s cause, Evolet is destined for prophetic power, and he who carries the white spear will do great things etc.

After losing Evolet’s hand in marriage during a mammoth hunting contest (a great special effects scene that leaves us wondering how mammoths ever went extinct with these people hunting them), D’Leh’s mood takes a nosedive, and then sinks even further when the four legged demons show up to get their slaving on. Needless to say, Evolet is abducted along with most of the tribe, and D’Leh sets off to meet his destiny, accompanied by his mentor Tic’Tic (a well cast Cliff Curtis), who provides prophetic support and a good hand.

They cover a lot of terrain, including steaming jungles inhabited by giant man eating terror birds, arid wastes complete with saber tooth tiger that D’Leh can talk to telepathically ala Beastmaster, and Egyptian pyramids being built over a half millennium too soon with brick towing woolly mammoths. What amazes me about their journey isn’t telepathy or Egyptian architecture so much as how they cross what must be a continent on foot in a couple weeks.

Along the way they encounter dangers aplenty, especially when they arrive in Egypt and confront the slavers, all played by formidable looking guys, and an army of court eunuchs. Will D’Leh fulfill the prophecy?! Will he find his true love?! Will an empire fall?! Don’t read your history books to find out, for there are no spoilers there my son. The quest has a few scant moments of near inspiration, especially when it veers into the creature feature it really wants to be, but it’s mostly a failure, a failure of imagination and intellect, both laughably inaccurate and dull as a rock.

What astounds me is the complete lack of ambition and thought that goes into something like this. I would love a film that took its premise seriously and gave us the planet as it might have actually been, a movie that plunges the audience into a tangible world with practical problems (like hunting, contact with outside cultures, agriculture, sexual politics, division of labor, etc.), a “Quest for Fire” with a humungous budget and a foot in the science.

Or failing that, give us a fantasy worthy of the old pulp pseudo-history of H.P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard, something ridiculous and grand: ancient gods, colonization from the stars, warriors fighting dinosaurs. Instead of history or fantasy, we get generic ahistoric Egyptian pyramids and some vaguely racialist subtext—even 12,000 years ago, the Man was keeping the people down! Where’s the curiosity, the wonder at how we’ve come so far (or declined, depending on your perspective) in such a short amount of time? Who were are our ancestors and what were they actually doing?

But Emmerich, creator of such highbrow entertainments as “Independence Day” and “The Day After Tomorrow” isn’t very intellectually curious. His appreciation of human history can be reduced to: “wow, Egyptian buildings look so cool. Wouldn’t a fight with an extinct tiger be totally rad?” I used to get angry at the History Channel’s trivialization of ancient (and modern) history, but compared to this simplistic and mythologizing take on it, that channel’s popularizing is downright scholarly.

All of my complaints would be moot if “10,000 BC” was at least entertaining, but it fails on that most basic level by being a predictable and wholly derivative slog. How can so much money and so much creative manpower come together to create something so dull, unimaginative and condescending? Is this the culture industry or General Motors in the 1980s?

In “Military Intelligence and You!,” Seattle based director Dale Kutzera splices together footage from World War II propaganda and training films with scenes of Airplane style parody to mixed satirical effect. The aim here is to create a “Why We Fight” film that pointedly remarks on the idiocy of the war in Iraq. It occasionally lands a blow against jingoism and bad intelligence, but suffers from overworked analogies and a reliance on stock gag humor.

In an appropriate nod to “Starship Troopers,” a more effective repackaging of the “Why We Fight” films (though let’s be fair, “Starship Troopers” had an astronomical budget), Patrick Muldoon is cast as the good looking but empty-headed hero, Major Nick Reed. With a jutting jaw line, impeccable hair and an arsenal of brain dead nationalistic platitudes, Nick Reed embodies the arrogance of insulated officer elites, coolly sending men to their deaths over the radio while finding time to romance an old flame, Lt. Monica Tasty (Elizabeth Ann Bennet). Don’t look at me; I didn’t come up with the names.

The movie alternates between the control room scenes and stock footage of US fighter pilots taking on a German “ghost squadron.” Some of the pilots are captured and taken to a German fortress where they’re wined, dined and interrogated. Clive Van Owen summarizes the action in the deep booming voice of a WWII era narrator, offering ironic commentary and the occasional snide remark. Some of his best narration describes how Germans would really interrogate POWs, and needless to say it’s not the genteel treatment shown in the film. For an interesting comparison, consider the way the Japanese officers were portrayed during the war.

The film is largely one of contrasts, finding its humor and ideas in setting the inspiring and simplistic propaganda (which includes music by Richard Wagner) against the also simplistic hubris of the control room staff. Infantrymen and pilots soldier on, while inspiring speeches and romance keep the commanders pumped up on patriotism in relative safety, even as their mistakes and pigheaded insistence on staying the course rain death and destruction upon friend and foe alike.

The characters are all types taken directly from the films being satirized: the dashing officer, the beautiful female love interest, the nice patriotic officer who also wants the girl (since there has to be a love triangle), the aloof general, the heroic fighter pilot, the grunt. Everyone is set up with equal zeal; if an actor can’t be given cornball dialog, the narrator will do the job for them. While some of the jokes hit their mark, much of the humor is warmed over “Top Secret” jokes with an edgier satirical approach intended to remind us of the Bush administration and their own efforts at war propaganda.

It’s a cute film with occasional charms, but a little smug and not a little pat, reducing American patriotism to a simplistic and stupid ideology, and warfare to a simple result of patriotism. Often it is, but there’s a little more to it than that. The film ignores national security interests, economic and political power, and the sometimes genuine desire to do what’s right, usually intertwined, that often bring American into conflict with foreign threats, real or illusory—the chest thumping and marching music usually arrive sometime later. And really, it’s everyone, not just the brass that sends the country on idiotic military adventures.

While watching “Military Intelligence and You!” I kept thinking about “Starship Troopers,” which was actually reviled by most critics when it came out. It also took aim at World War II era propaganda, but brought it up to speed by framing it with science fiction action spectacle and charismatic stars (including Muldoon). It may have been cheesy and excessive, but it did a pretty good job at revealing the underlying idiocy of rampant militarism and propaganda in American culture, and did so with somewhat believable characters in completely off the wall situations.

“Military Intelligence” attempts the same feat, but with pure comedy. I think it shows a great deal of creativity on part of the film makers and is certainly a worthwhile endeavor, but I’ve gotten to the point where it takes more than gags and irony to make me think or care. In a way, by simply poking fun of propaganda, the film takes on the same simplicity, the same easy answers and the same one-dimensionality of the genuine article. Whether it works as a comedy is a question of taste (it has laughs), but as satire it never quite rises above parody.

“Vantage Point” is a political thriller powered by a gimmicky plot device worthy of Fox primetime. Occasionally entertaining but never smart or believable, the movie’s story is clever beyond its means. It’s set in Salamanca, Spain, beginning just minutes before a speech from an American president (William Hurt standing in for el Presidente Bush) joining the United States in an historic alliance with the Arab world against a presumably monolithic terrorist threat the likes of which we’re incredibly unlikely to see in our lifetimes.

As you have probably guessed, terrorists are present among the crowd of onlookers and protesters and quickly dispatch the US president live on the news (with producer Sigourney Weaver onsite), following their hit with a bomb attack in a public square, killing said onlookers and protesters.

If things were this simple, of course, there would be no movie. So the film rewinds twenty minutes and shows us the same event from the perspective of the secret service agent charged with protecting the president (Dennis Quaid). We watch as he observes some strange events leading up to the attack, including movement in a supposedly abandoned building.

A camera he momentarily confiscates belongs to an American tourist (Forest Whitaker), who gets his own twenty minutes. Another man, an undercover cop he tries to detain (Eduardo Noriega), escapes from custody and receives his own chunk of movie. So on and so on. Each time the films pulls us back, we get another facet of the action, another plot revelation, another narrative.

I won’t reveal the plot here, but it’s unnecessarily convoluted and riddled with idiotic problems and contingencies. Cobra Commander has executed schemes less ridiculous than this. If real Muslim radicals ever get this sophisticated they’ll need a secret island skull fortress and an army of giant robots.

“Vantage Point” is being marketed as a “Rashomon” story — Dennis Quaid has even invoked the Akira Kurosawa film by name in interviews — but whereas “Rashomon” attempts to illuminate, “Vantage Point” uses its narrative strategy as a thriller gimmick, wasting the potential of its premise on cheap thrills and “hair raising” revelations. “Rashomon” presents one story with divergent narratives, showing how different people can interpret a single event, a rape and murder in the film, in radically different ways.

The premise, which was novel when “Rashomon” came out in 1950, aimed to challenge the very idea of an underlying, knowable reality. It says, in effect, that any single event can shoulder several interpretations and that without an objective observer there is no objective truth. This was a neat idea that both post-modernists and philosophers could and did take to. However, “Vantage Point” isn’t even bold enough to borrow this now somewhat musty conceit, instead telling only one story from different vantage points, hence its inspired title (ha ha).

The film is curiously apolitical, presenting an alternative present where the president supports the war on terror but idealistically refuses to break the law to take down would-be assassins. Almost refreshingly, the film doesn’t attempt to understand political realities or underlying motives, taking its busily plotted mayhem at face value. The good guys (president, loyal bodyguard) and bad guys (freshly unloaded from “True Lies”) are clearly demarcated, and despite its cinematic pretenses, the story gets wrapped up neatly in a car chase and a couple of shootouts. Even the premise, a summit to end terrorism, is pure action hokum.

As I watched it, I kept expecting director Pete Travis to pull away one last curtain that would upend audience expectations, something brave, challenging, crazy, but the film isn’t hiding an Ace. The bad guys are exactly who we expect them to be, conforming to stereotypes that were stale in 1997, the story is the impossibly ingenious product of Script Writing 101, and the heroes are clearly identified right from the start. Nothing is unexpected, nobody challenges our preconceptions, and no event in the film makes us think its complex form is hiding a complex idea.

While it has its occasional cinematic pleasures, “Vantage Point” is as densely plotted and shallow as an episode of “24.”

On December 5, 2002, shortly after the US invasion of Afghanistan, a 22-year old farmer turned taxi driver named Dilawar was arrested by Afghan militia on the way to Khost. Falsely accused of aiding in rocket attacks against US forces, he was handed over to American military intelligence at Bagram Air Base, where he was detained for interrogation. But instead of being asked questions, he was repeatedly shackled to the ceiling of his cell, deprived of sleep and forced to stand for hours at a time. Six days after his detainment, he was found dead in his cell. His autopsy revealed that the cause of death was blunt trauma caused by multiple beatings. The US soldiers charged with his protection had pummeled his legs into pulp.

“Taxi to the Dark Side” is an ugly, close-up examination of the use of torture as an intelligence gathering tool since September 11, 2001, as well as the tortured logic used to justify it. As pointed as it is enraging, the documentary—written and directed by Alex Gibney, who co-wrote and directed “Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room—uses Dilawar’s murder at the hands of US soldiers as an entry point into the mindset that allowed US policymakers to treat the Geneva Convention like toilet paper and its “wartime” prisoners, especially those held without charge, like subhuman chattel.

Gibney builds his case with interviews, photographs and video footage, all of it difficult to stomach. We see Dilawar’s autopsy photos, his bruised and battered legs, as well as the tiny cell he was shackled in. We’re shown graphic pictures and video from Abu Ghraib, the feces covered Iraqis, the barking dogs, forced sodomy and masturbation, Lynndie England’s 15 minutes of fame pointing at a prisoner’s dick, prisoners on leashes, and the rest of the organized sadism that has characterized post-911 intelligence gathering. Uncensored on the big screen, these images take on a unbearably rank power.

Most of the soldiers charged with killing Dilawar are interviewed at length, and while they might rationalize their actions to a certain extent, they are honest and frank in appraising their part in his death and the role played by the chain of command. Inexperienced in interrogation and dropped into an alien situation, they could only fall back on orders. But who gave the orders? No officer was ever charged, and yet we know that someone approved their behavior. Their commanding officer, Captain Carolyn Wood, far from being charged, was actually promoted and went on to commit the same abuses on a larger scale at Abu Ghraib.

Gibney follows the chain of command to the Bush administration, focusing on Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the two neocon warriors responsible for the white house’s generally imperial tenor throughout the “War on Terror,” Fighting an unconventional war against inhuman fanatics, these two argued, required going beyond the limiting framework of the Geneva Convention. John Yoo, the man who designed the legal argument for torture, appears on camera, happily arguing against the concept of human rights and habeas corpus to what I’m sure must be an astonished audience.

You begin to think, while watching people like Yoo and Cheney on camera arguing against the Geneva Convention and for unlimited presidential power, that some Americans have never actually embraced the rule of law, due process or separation of powers, and in fact, spend most of their time trying to circumvent them. Their arguments fall far outside the scope of anything resembling civilized law or justice, echoing the Machiavellian reasoning of Lenin, telling us that we should forfeit the democratic niceties of the present for a presumably brighter future. Waterboaring in Guantanamo today, freedom and security in America tomorrow.

Gibney arrays several people against the pro-torture crowd, including an FBI interrogator, a JAG lawyer, military intelligence experts, disgruntled soldiers, the journalists who broke the Bagram story, and congressmen. John McCain comes off particularly well, with a lot of footage of his own interrogations of a nervous and sweaty Alberto Gonzalez. One of the more fascinating interviews is with an expert on CIA torture techniques, who presents the frightening fact that the CIA has been doing this stuff for decades and that their field manual has gradually found its way into military intelligence procedure.

This isn’t a partisan documentary despite what the crypto-fascist talk radio set might say about it—John McCain could run parts of it as a campaign ad. Rather, it’s a film that confronts us with difficult and unadorned truth, an unflinching, harrowing and affecting look at the facts, like an episode of Frontline without the brakes. Gibney achieves the trickiest of balancing acts, presenting his case as objectively as possible while still advancing a strong point of view. This isn’t just an opinion piece.

“Taxi to the Dark Side” convincingly argues that the United States went off the tracks after September 11th, hijacked by its worst Jack Bauer tendencies, latent sadism given a free pass because we were and are supposedly at war with a global network of anti-American terrorists. While I don’t share Gibney’s somewhat rosy view of our nation’s past, I do agree that the Bush administration has set a far nastier precedent, one that I desperately hope to leave behind, not just for the Dilawars of the world, but for the American people, because if this is how we’re willing to fight the war, we’ve already lost it.

Now here’s a film with a refreshingly matter-of-fact view of aging and death, its comic rhythm tied to the slow ambling tempo of declining middle-aged life. It is as sad as it is happy, as wistful as it is heartwarming. As I watched it, I thought about “Juno,” a comedy that also tried to inject dramatic weight into its comic premise, and it just seemed that much more contrived. “The Savages” might not be a perfect movie, but it earns the feelings it inspires, taking place in something like a recognizable reality, with the kind of deadpan humor you would actually find in real life under the same circumstances.

It stars Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman as siblings Wendy and Jon Savage, and Philip Bosco as their father, Lenny. The film opens in Sun City, Arizona, the sprawling sun scorched prototype of the master-planned retirement community, where Lenny has been living with his girlfriend. Lenny is sliding into the dark room of dementia—he writes “prick” in his own shit on a bathroom mirror—and is whisked away to a local hospital. With no one to take care of the old man, the hospital asks Wendy, who lives in New York City, to come and retrieve him.

Wendy is an aspiring playwright on the high strung side of neurotic, a pill popping sometimes depressive, engaged in a passionless affair with a middle-aged neighbor, Larry (Peter Friedman); when they have sex she zones out and pets his dog, and we sense that the affair is really just a pretext to see the dog. Like a lot of thirty-something playwrights, Wendy works boring temp jobs and lives in a 400 square foot closet.

Wendy calls Jon in Buffalo and convinces him to come with her to Arizona to figure out what to do about dad. Jon is none too thrilled at the prospect of caring for a father who apparently abandoned them to their lives, but joins his sister. When they finally see him, he has already slid deeply into a state of angry confusion, only half aware of the presence of his children. Unsure what to do, they deposit him in an elderly care center in Buffalo, a depressing gray building enveloped by gray skies and snow. Lonely, Wendy decides to stay with Jon to help take care of their father and work on her play.

Wendy is probably one of the more sympathetic portrayals of a “headcase” to appear in films in a long time; she’s a wonderfully emotional person, and like so many people with that disposition, she’s prone to bouts of depression and bursts of impulsive behavior. With an elastic face that can move from bright to sullen with imperceptible fluidity, Laura Linney is very good at playing fully realized women who straddle the line between whimsical beauty and moody disarray, and her Wendy is no exception, a perfect take on a deeply imperfect character.

Hoffman brings the same kind of perfection to Jon. He’s an indulgently frumpy middle-aged theater professor and expert on Bertolt Brecht (Brecht fans will be happy to know that a Kurt Weill tune makes an appearance), digging his way through an unfinished manuscript in his hovel of an apartment in Buffalo— the writer and director, Tamara Jenkins, is smart enough to know that most unmarried professors can only afford to rent. Jon is moody, sardonic, out of shape, emotionally isolated.

With a flat monotone that can rise to a thunderous rancor, Hoffman instills the character with a gritty anger and vulnerable sadness. But there is also good humor, and the pessimistic facade often melts away, revealing a sturdy and humorous humanity hiding beneath the glum surface. Like Wendy, Jon is a complex, living character, and Hoffman plays him with what can only be described as a feat of emotional acrobatics. Being a comedy about depression, aging and dying, any less would sink the whole enterprise.

Lenny is the most subtle and perhaps most difficult character in the film, since he spends much of his time in disconnection, confusion, or hostile anger. But he’s also a catalyst for the other two characters, drawing out their buried emotions and sibling rivalries. Their arguments about where to house their father, and one particularly nasty episode when Jon discovers Wendy lied about a theater grant out of competitiveness, rage around Lenny.

Because he’s so withdrawn, Lenny can only express himself through subtle facial expressions and vocal outbursts. Philip Bosco has to play his hand close to his chest, often using only his eyes and mouth to convey anger, confusion, or in certain key moments, sad regret, perhaps for crimes committed against his children earlier in their lives or a longing to reconnect with them even while his sanity and life slide away into the darkness. Bosco’s role is too easy to forget when Hoffman and Linney are sparring, but it’s central to the movie, which is, in its sad-happy way, a love story.

What allows the film work dramatically, saving it from being a cynical farce, is the attention paid to the love affair between Jon and Wendy. Not a sexual one of course, but a believably intimate and knowing one, the kind you would expect from siblings who grew up protecting each other from a tyrannical parent. Both of these characters are deeply hurt, and the pain has only been exacerbated by age and distance. Watching “The Savages” is like watching two people who only had each other to look to coming together after a long separation—they have desperately needed each other without ever knowing it.

Tamara Jenkins directs the film with great, and rarely self-conscious, intelligence. Even her handling of Brecht, a sure sign of pretension in a lesser film, is smart. There is one scene late in the film where Jon lectures his class on Brechtian Theater, discussing Brecht’s use of artifice to emotionally distance audiences from the material in order to engage their intellect. Wendy’s play is a little Brechtian too, illustrating what the film has shown us through considerably more cerebral means. But in its admiring way, “The Savages” is quite the opposite of Brecht, dealing with its unsentimental emotions head on.

“The Savages” is not merely a comedy, even though it is quite funny at times. It’s a sad and affecting film that takes its themes seriously. There is real conflict and weight to the story that unfolds, and a hard earned resolution that is resolutely true to life. As we watch sister and brother care for their dying father, outbursts of anger and hostility flare up, but also buried reservoirs of deep and affecting love. Comedies and family dramas are rarely so funny or so true.

The “Rambo” films are the ultimate conservative fantasy movies of the 1980s, American wish fulfillment carried out through unspeakable acts of entertaining, if unbelievable, carnage and violence. John Rambo, embodied by the eternally ripped Sylvester Stallone, took his personal war to Vietnam to save our semi-mythical POWs and brought the Indochinese communists to their knees. He followed up that résumé stuffer by dealing the deathblow to the Soviet forces in Afghanistan, teaching the Mujahideen how to fight old school American style: with maximum firepower and carte blanche to use it.

Now, twenty years after the mumble-core super soldier rocketed to screens, John Rambo is back with a film bearing his name and the same old chip on its shoulder. Rambo has retired from the life, living on a river boat in Thailand, passing the time wrangling snakes for low rent entertainment. One day he’s approached by a Christian missionary/human rights advocate, Sarah (Julie Benz), who implores the grizzled old warrior to drive her fellow Christians up the river into Myanmar, where the Burmese government has been graphically slaughtering Karen villagers.

Rambo mumbles something about Burma being a war zone, but persistence soon brings him on board, along with a squad of mercenaries presumably in it for the money and glory. Stallone doesn’t so much act during the perfunctory scenes of dialog, as push his considerable middle-aged weight around and mutter sullenly. That is until the boat is attacked by pirates, at which point Rambo comes out of his shell to get some killin’ done. And kill he does, in one scene of audience pleasing brutality after another, using knife, bow, claymore (the mine, though I wouldn’t blame you for thinking the sword) and a really big machine gun that literally shreds his enemies.

We don’t really get to know the Burmese soldiers or their victims. This is consistent with the Rambo worldview, which is about American catharsis first and foremost, merely using the suffering of civilians as a pretext for Rambo’s self-sacrificing heroism. We see civilians rounded up and shot, Karen women turned into sex slaves, boys abused and Burmese soldiers leering at their victims, but neither the Karen nor the Burmese are allowed any perspective- they literally exist to be wiped out or saved. If I can’t relate to the victims on any human level, why should I care if they’re avenged?

Many critics talk about this film’s emphasis on human rights, but I’m not really sure what they mean by throwing around that term. I haven’t checked up on my UN charter lately, but I don’t remember the part where it says that illegally crossing a border of a sovereign state with mercenaries and killing members of said state’s army without a recognized international mandate is a legitimate means of dealing with human rights violations. In fact, I think it might actually constitute a human rights violation.

“Rambo” movies have always promoted the belief among certain hawks that lofty moral concepts like human rights just get in the way of the nasty, though necessary, business of war. To its credit, the new “Rambo” isn’t quite so enthusiastic about this dunderheaded patriotic line. Rambo doesn’t talk much, but when he does, it’s to express a creeping fatalism. “Things never change” is a recurring argument throughout the movie. Instead of fighting for freedom and justice, the old man is fighting because it’s what he’s good at. The humanitarian mission is of secondary importance. I don’t want to accuse this happily dumb movie of depth, but in its own way it creates a new context for the earlier “Rambo” movies. Maybe “Vietnam” and “Afghanistan” didn’t work out after all; perhaps the earlier “Rambo” films don’t take place in an alternative history, but simply ended in failure.

But I’m probably just digging in the mud here. Ultimately, audiences attend “Rambo” movies to ride the testosterone high provided by well executed action scenes. Sure, half the movie might be a slog through robotic dialog, murky locations shots and bad writing, but no one attends for the setup, only the payoff: bad guys getting their heads blown off by anti-personnel guns. We’re living in a country that favors action, not geopolitical contexts. And the “Rambo” series offers the seductive idea that action is all it takes. I’m just not sure that John Rambo agrees anymore.

Charlie Wilson’s congressional career was two faced in the way a lot of Cold War careers were: all smiles and progressive goodwill stateside, and all underhanded interventionist violence abroad. A longstanding US Democratic representative from Texas, Wilson supported social programs and civil rights for the South, while partying with corrupt rightist regimes like the Somoza clan in Nicaragua. He is best remembered for securing appropriations for the CIA’s operations against the Soviets in Afghanistan. In “Charlie Wilson’s War,” or as I prefer to call it, “John Rambo’s Funding Source,” Tom Hanks plays the notorious coke sniffing, booze swilling, skirt chasing congressman at his Reagan era apogee.

When we first see him, Charlie’s partying with a couple of naked broads in a Vegas hot tub. Things are going well until he sees Dan Rather on the news interviewing Afghan rebels and refugees who have fled in the face of the Soviet war machine. Sobered by this development, he returns to his DC office to size up the situation. His office is staffed with an army of smart buxom women he refers to collectively as “jailbait.” Despite his pro-choice record, I’d be hard pressed to call Charlie a feminist. He loves smart women, you see, but would prefer them in varying states of undress.

Tom Hanks is well inside his comfort zone playing gregarious southern charmers, and his Charlie Wilson is no exception. He sidles up to the Texan, sporting a soft permaglow of swaggering politico masculinity. The only awkward moments in his performance appear when he skews serious, something that happens in the film’s most clumsy scenes, the ones that want us to cry, inspire us, or make us cry while inspiring us.

Charlie visits an Afghan refugee camp on Pakistan’s northern border at the behest of General Mohammed Zia, then dictator of Pakistan and all around nice guy- Charlie gets one off about Zia executing his predecessor, the late Benazir Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Bhutto (one of the virtues of the film is that it rewards informed audiences). In the refugee camp, Wilson has his Oscar Schindler moment, and walks around in a teary eyed daze. This is the first of many unbelievable moments where the generally sharp comic satire drops out, leaving us to, what? Care, maybe.

Wilson decides to arm the Afghan rebels with Soviet made surface to air missiles by way of Israel and Egypt, unlikely allies recruited with the usual Cold War cynicism, summed up with the maxim “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” or at least “someone I can work with until something better comes along.” To drum up support and money stateside, Charlie pulls some Washington connections on the appropriations committee and calls out some favors from his lover, the millionaire Texas matriarch and born again Christian, Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts with a pair of greyhounds and a southern belle put on).

His man in the CIA is Gust Avrakotos. Played with brutal mustached directness and acid tongue by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Gust is the kind of guy who lives on the toxic fumes of patriotic realpolitik and the crass political maneuvering that goes with it. He’s a spook and proud of it, the most outlandish character and the film’s most sobering. He has a flair for skulduggery, but also seems to exist above the action where morality simply does not matter, allowing him to speak with the hindsight of history. Beneath the cankerous fuck you attitude is the most serious and sobering voice in the movie, conscious it seems about future contingencies, like the potential blowback of arming Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan.

What ultimately unites the spook and his womanizing ally in Congress is their shared desire to “kill Russians,” an attitude that makes them both perfect operatives in Reagan’s foreign policy exploits against not only communists, but leftists throughout the world. The real Wilson can take partial credit for expelling the Soviets from Afghanistan, but his dealings with violent thugs in Central America and elsewhere grew out of the same inflexible patriotic sentiment. Because the film is directed by Mike Nichols, a left leaning director, it goes easy on Wilson’s political, and carnal, love affair with the right.

The idea of a liberal in bed with Reagan might seem like a strange conceit now, but Wilson was perfectly in line with anticommunist liberal traditions going back to Kennedy and beyond, willing to spill blood overseas to protect democracy and the free market at home. That kind of muscular liberalism had its field test in Cuba and Vietnam in the 1960s with generally disastrous results. One character in the film observes that Afghanistan was a chance to bleed the communists like the Vietminh bled the Americans.

The film suggests that Afghanistan was the triumphal return of Kennedy era can-do-ism. It’s a nice story, but isn’t supported by subsequent history. Indeed, the film shows how once the Afghans had their victory over the Soviets, lawmakers like Wilson couldn’t even raise the money to build one or two schools in Afghanistan due to the apathy of their colleagues. While I think Afghanistan probably needed significantly more than a school to prevent the rise of the Taliban, I can see the point.

The problem with “Charlie Wilson’s War” is that it often confuses its overall message and tone. Most of the film is sharp and viciously satirical, leering perversely at the contradictions in Wilson’s political attitudes and nearly reveling in the foreknowledge of Afghanistan in the post-Soviet age, summed up nicely by Charlie as “[fucking] up the end game.” The film has a lot of fun revealing how the United States, Israel and the Arab world often share the same bed for short term gain- a handful of scenes in Israel and Egypt are master classes in cynical politics. There are also some domestic details, like an inquiry into Wilson’s cocaine use, that function as clever screwball comedy.

But then it wants to inspire us with swelling music and teary eyes. The struggle against the Soviets, it contends, was a glorious and necessary war, and if only we built that school everything would be hunky dory, ignoring the often bloody minded and hideous means employed around the world to keep the Soviets at bay. With its dramatic arc and “uplifting ending” the film absolves Wilson of all responsibility for how Afghanistan turned out, because ultimately it was Republican apathy that led to the blowback and not the Machiavellian scheming that characterized all our Cold War dealings on both sides of the aisle.

“Charlie Wilson’s War” is a fun film with few dull moments. One wonders how much more fun it might have been had it not been declawed in the name of feel good heroics and nonpartisan patriotism. As it is, it’s only half a satire and only half as good.

“There Will Be Blood” plays like a horror movie about vertical integration, real estate speculation, religion, and most concretely, oil. In this sense, it’s very much of a horror movie for our times. Oil lurks and seeps like a monster beneath the Earth, enthralling the greedy, gobbling up lost souls, and quite literally killing those who would drag it to the surface. The evil of men can be measured by their greed for it, and the desire for the wealth and power it brings. In an early scene, oil is smeared on a baby’s forehead like a baptismal rite.

The man most obsessed with oil is Daniel Plainview, an early twentieth century wildcatter enthralled by the substance as much as the aggrandizement that comes with it. Daniel Day-Lewis, who portrays him, does not so much act as give himself over to demonic possession. From his oddly patrician speaking voice to the wry smile that dances across his face to the outbursts of pure animal instinct and reckless violence that gushes like oil from a well, Day-Lewis is Plainview, a man fixated on both the process of extraction and the financial rewards that follow.

He’s an unhappy man, given to bouts of sullenness, intense misanthropy, and brutality when people stand in his way. An instinctive survivalist, Plainview is also a bit of a cad, seducing landowners with the promise of fortunes immeasurable, prying their fingers off the prize with sweet words and when those fail, outright threats. Day-Lewis acts the part in the negotiations, performing for an audience, speaking with forced affability and carefully observing audience response. This makes Plainview sound like a sociopath, but there are still many businessmen like him in the world and we tend to accept them, warts and all, at face value.

Accompanying Plainview on business trips is his intensely serious kid, H.W. (played by the unforgettable Dillon Freasier), who he uses to sell his humanizing family man pretenses to suckers, though with his son’s eerie gaze and little man getup, one wonders who Plainview thinks he’s fooling. Outside oil, H.W. is Plainview’s closest friend and only true confidant; Plainview teaches him about the business, how to buy at below market value, treating him as an adult because that’s the only way Plainview knows how to treat anyone, as either an associate or an adversary. That H.W. is really someone else’s baby is largely beside the point, well, until it isn’t.

Plainview is drawn to a sparsely populated county in the middle of California’s Mojave Desert after being tipped off about oil seeping through the soil. Ostensibly hunting quail, he and H.W. dig around and find the black seepage. The only drawback to the find is that it’s sitting on someone else’s land, an old evangelical Christian and his family. Plainview attempts to lie and swindle his way to the land, but finds unexpected resistance from the eldest son, Eli (Paul Dano), who annoys Plainview by seeing what he’s up to. Eli has his own plans for the land: he wants to build a congregation and knows the oil will attract workers and capital to his church.

Plainview agrees to put up the money for the church, and before long he’s erected a towering well. His workers swell like ants around their encampment, all single mindedly determined to draw the filth from the earth. These scenes, as well as the earliest in the film, treat oil with suspense, dread and outright horror. The score by Johnny Greenwood, plucked out on unnervingly dissonant strings, has a Modernist flavor, recalling horror music from the 1970s. The oil is like a living thing, and the well a temple designed to summon its spirit from the depths of hell. It also metes out death, killing workers foolish enough to venture into its occult world. When the oil finally comes, it arrives like a geyser of black ejaculate, and in one of the most spectacular scenes ever, turns into a furnace blast of fire, which Plainview prostrates himself before, even while his son lies nearby, deafened by the sound.

As the oil arrives, so does the capital and a bigger church. The already strained relationship between Plainview and Eli is stretched nearly to the breaking point when Plainview’s son and heir loses his hearing and Eli comes by to collect the promised money for the church. In the film’s first show of real human violence – though certainly not its last – Day-Lewis physically attacks Dano in a murderous rage. It’s a painful little scene, watching the physically imposing Plainview beat up on the boyish Eli, and sets the stage for a progressively more violent, though largely passive aggressive showdown between the two men, culminating in the film’s shocking, darkly comic and decidedly gangsta finale.

Paul Dano brings a kind of open faced boyishness to Eli, but subverts it with reptilian callousness, an odd mixture of mirth and chortling viciousness that bubbles to the surface like the black seepage on his property. It fits in well with his harsh, somewhat Calvinist take on salvation. An atheist, Plainview has no time for religion and regards Eli like a parasite. But despite their ideological differences, both men are obsessed with the promise of the oil, both men see opportunity in the ground, worldly in both the spiritual and material sense, bound to the earth and the greed it inspires.

What drives Plainview’s obsessive hatred is Eli’s ability to understand and effectively manipulate people, drawing fevered support from their suffering. The arid west of the early twentieth century is a merciless place, where the only infrastructure or support comes from those who freely give it. Eli is a huckster but he understands the spiritual emptiness that plagues the people, even Plainview’s workers, and speaks to that. Plainview, an outsider and alienated misanthrope, cannot relate to people, but relies on sheer force of will to get what he wants. It’s Eli’s ability to inspire misplaced love, especially the bad faith surrounding it that really drives Plainview crazy.

Littering the background of this conflict, though often functioning as the foreground, are Plainview’s business schemes, including plans to build a pipeline to the ocean so that he can vertically integrate his operation, cutting out monopolies like Standard Oil. Saddened by his son’s loss of hearing, Plainview takes on a partner in the form of a long lost brother, and in one incredible montage literally surveys his way to the Pacific and swims in its waters. But somehow the discord between the religious zealot and capitalist, especially as it concerns cold hard cash, interrupts, sowing ruin and chaos in their lives.

“There Will Be Blood” was written and directed by P.T. Anderson, freely adapted from Sinclair’s sprawling (and heavy to carry) epic “Oil!” Many critics have noted its dissimilarities - setting, topic and nauseous creepiness – from his other films, which if we are to believe these accounts, are light exercises in pure filmmaking craft, or worse yet, purely aesthetic. But most Anderson films deal with greed, violent impulses, and ambition unto madness and/or death. Even “Boogie Nights,” his best and funniest film, was a pretty pointed and depressing beast beneath its quasi-glamorous Valley porn superficiality.

“There Will Be Blood” is lean and sun baked, obsessively detailed, an austere film about austere people, but in its own alienating way, it’s perfectly in sync with the rest of Anderson’s work. Even Anderson’s sense of humor is present; there is much laughter all the way to the horrific, bloody end. The film is not so much wagging its finger at the evil of capitalists and religious zealots, tycoons and false prophets all, as it is inviting laughter at their demise, their slow ambling walk to the grave, unhappy and unfulfilled to the bitter end. Oil is a monster, but only because it’s afforded that status by men.

In their own idiosyncratic way, Plainview and Eli are the spiritual ancestors of Dirk Diggler. To echo one industry suit in the film, you buy the land, lay the equipment, pull the oil out, and once it’s done you do it all over again. But then what?

“No Country for Old Men” runs its course in the expansive broken landscape of West Texas in 1980 and yet seems to reside in the deep and disturbed recesses of the American mind. It’s as much a product of this country, with its tangled and bloody history, as the superficial cowboy fashions its protagonists wear. Directed by the Joel and Ethan Coen and based on the sparse and violent Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, “No Country for Old Men” plays out like a nightmare, heavy with the cruel resignation of the inevitable.

The inevitable in this case is Anton Chigurh, a black vortex the story swirls helplessly around, pulling everyone he encounters into his destructive orbit. He’s played by Javier Bardem, a Spanish actor with a knack for hiding in plain sight (watch “Before Night Falls” to see what I mean). With only a cattle gun and a shambling lurch, Anton burns a trail of carnage across a wide swath of small towns and scrubland. His eyes linger on his victims with the aloofness of an archangel, his expression shifting from subtle amusement to empty headed serenity. Anton is not a standard issue sociopath, but a natural force, immutable and eternal.

Through the mechanics of fate or arbitrary happenstance other characters are sucked into Anton’s maelstrom. Llewelyn, a retired welder and Vietnam veteran played with devious ingenuity by Josh Brolin, discovers the bloody remains of a drug deal gone bad while on a hunting trip in the desert. Among the corpses, he discovers a satchel with a couple million dollars. A foolhardy cowboy by nature, Llwelyn takes the money and runs. After a near lethal encounter with Mexican smugglers, he sends his sweet wife, Carla Jean (played with open faced sincerity by Kelly MacDonald), to her mother’s and flees with the money. But his bid for fast cash soon attracts Anton.

Anton has escaped arrest and garroted and cattle gunned his first victims. His initial killings, carried out with the efficiency of a robot programmed for murder, attract the attention of local sheriff Ed Tom Bell and his deputy. Played with an unapologetic West Texan drawl by Tommy Lee Jones, Bell enters the story saddled with feelings of defeat; his narration, which bookends the action, introduces us to a man who has simply stopped understanding the world. With Bell’s old fashioned values and conservative mindset, sociopaths like Anton exist beyond the pale of explanation.

Once Bell realizes what Anton is doing, he decides against his own best interests to protect Llewelyn and Carla Jean. He cautiously picks up Anton’s trail and reassures Carla Jean that he’ll bring down Anton before he can kill Llewelyn, but their jittery conversation tells us that they both know that Llewelyn is in way over his head. Also picking up the pieces left by Anton is the genteel hired gun, Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), who tries to warn Llewelyn to give up the money at his own peril.

Llewelyn is able to get by on guile and luck, but Anton is single-minded, determined, and just keeps coming back for more, reminding me of Robert Di Niro’s description of Joe Pesci’s character in “Casino.” No matter where Llewelyn runs, Anton is right there, even when he escapes to Mexico. A feeling of dread hangs over the chase like swollen black thunderheads on the horizon and the Coen Brothers use every trick in the book to sustain an impossibly long stretch of nerve wracking suspense.

Most of the film plays like a perfectly calibrated horror movie with a western look, but unlike most horror films it builds towards a powerful and resonant final act with a handful of perfect monologues. The beauty of the film is not merely technical, like some critics have suggested, but also arises in its dialog (mostly taken from the novel), which is both deeply meaningful and deceptively opaque, echoing the strange otherworldly discord Juan Rulfo gave his ghosts in “Pedro Páramo.”

The conversation Anton has with his victims is absurd in its dry detachment. The people he encounters are struck with bemusement when this strange creature, with his own rules about life and death, ambles into their lives. Negotiating with him is like negotiating with the weather. Ed’s narration is all horror of the world and resignation. Llewelyn is mostly a doer, but even action collapses in the face of the inhuman Anton. And when words are called for, they fail him.

One conversation is particularly crucial. Feeling too old and impotent to take on Anton, Bell visits his rueful Uncle Ellis, a retired cop played by Barry Corbin, who tells him a haunting story about a lawman at the turn of the century and how he met his doom. Anton is not something new to Uncle Ellis, but just the latest version of an ancient evil buried in the national psyche; he’s not an aberration but a recurring disease for which there is no cure. Bell finds no solace here. This conversation and a later one with his wife elevates the genre material into tragedy.

The one criticism someone might level at the film is its overriding nihilism, its sense of hopelessness in the face of cosmic evil. It offers little in the way of personal redemption or rectifying justice. But it serves as a corrective to the narratives of good and evil, civilization and barbarism, individualism and adversity latent in the western genre. It offers neither closure nor the cathartic joy of revenge to its protagonists. And that’s okay, because sometimes resourcefulness and effort really aren’t enough.

“No Country for Old Men” drains away the last of the western’s antiquarian charms. If the traditional western was our nation’s “Aeneid,” a story of frontiers and civilization designed to seduce us with a flattering self image, these new westerns are our “Romulus and Remus” stories, ugly and primitive, revealing something buried and repressed in the national character. They’re not explanatory narratives laying a neat schematic of westward expansion, but bleak metaphors for an inherent condition in American culture. Anton is eternal, the horror underlying the neat story of law and order on the frontier.

Even without the incredible performances, beautiful writing and thematic power, the movie would be a visual masterpiece. Roger Deakins’ camera work is perfect, encompassing both the monumental scale of the desert- I’m from the southwest and his work captures the color and light of the American desert perfectly- and the frightfully close up intimacy of people struggling on a small scale. The natural landscape, beautiful but pitiless, simply dwarfs and encloses its human inhabitants. Like Anton, there is no escaping this place.

“No Country for Old Men” is a brilliant film and certainly one of the best films, if not the best, in the Coen Brothers filmography. They have made more entertaining films, but never a more merciless or deeply felt one. In parts it sucked the air out of my lungs, but somehow the whole left me giddy and inspired. By seizing the mythic, it rises above simple politics and interpretations and leaves the viewer stunned and breathless. It’s really that good.

“Juno” is the latest film in the sweet and twee school of comedy, following “Garden State,” “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Me, You and Everyone We Know.” It’s quirky, it’s cute, it’s written by an ex stripper, it has an indie rock soundtrack, and it’s a little on the glib and facile side. It stars Ellen Page in a fairly winning performance as Juno, an irreverent teenager in Minnesota who gets knocked up by her boyfriend and generally goes about dealing with it.

Juno considers getting an abortion, but in keeping with the generally conservative tone of the better film comedies of late, decides not to after spending time in a depressing waiting room and listening to a tirade about fetuses “having fingernails” from a high school friend protesting in front of the clinic. For once, I would like to see a movie where a woman warms up to the idea of an abortion and benefits from it, instead of brushing it off like “Knocked Up” or sniffing at it distastefully.

Termination ruled out, Juno decides to find parents to adopt the baby. Her father and stepmother defy the rules of the teen comedy genre by being reasonable people who respect their daughter and decide to support her endeavor. Played by J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney, they’re quite charming, as smart as Juno and mercifully less pop culture savvy. With the support of her father, boyfriend Paulie (Michael Cera) and best friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby), she makes contact with a young couple who want a baby.

Well, one person who wants a baby anyway. The couple she finds live in a giant McMansion complete with Oprah approved Martha Stewart décor, and beam bourgeois tidiness. The would be mom is played by Jennifer Garner as the kind of weepy femme neurotic we more or less expect to be fertility challenged in the movies.

The considerably more likable “man child” husband is played by the always reliable Jason Bateman, a composer of commercial jingles who still longs to form the next Sonic Youth (this movie is reaching for indie cred after all). Juno is all too happy to unload her baby on them, but as the story progresses, she discovers that not all is well in paradise. Cracks appear in the genteel façade, and something like complexity enters the story. Hint: men with interests are immature losers.

Juno is a bit of a cutup, riding through life on the easy train of sarcasm, the smart ass teenager archetype we all know and love, but she’s allowed to break free of the sitcom conventions at certain points throughout the film, providing Page with opportunities to drop the TV nonchalance and act like a real smart teenage girl dealing with pregnancy. Beneath the rapid fire writing we can see the genuinely lovable human being fighting to get out, but the cuteness of the screenplay too often suppresses that.

The performance is good, but if it’s as praiseworthy as some critics have suggested, we should retroactively give an Oscar to Sara Gilbert who played a more realistic take on the same kind of character on the long running “Roseanne” in the 1990s. A smartass teen I can believe; a teen tossing off rapid fire Bill Murray zingers not so much.

Another actor whose natural charm stands out is Michael Cera, who plays Juno’s boyfriend Paulie, a pale awkward boy who runs track and eats a lot of Tic Tacs. In another post-Arrested Development turn, Cera steals every scene he’s in with understated sincerity. It’s rare to see a performer who is both disarmingly funny and authentically nice, and rarer still to discover one so young. Cera and Page make for a charming couple even as they’re made to endure the forced eccentricities of the too smart screenplay.

Like a lot of these zany paisley eyed creations coming down the culture industry’s production line, the film, which was actually directed by the rather smart and promising Jason Reitman, is too in love with its own eccentricity. And while genuine sweetness lurks all around, a lot of it rings hollow. The writer Diablo