There’s some bedevilment at the heart of any of these movies: They must affirm religious doctrine or reject the supernatural. Either way, I end up feeling a bit screwed over. So when I saw an ad for The Last Exorcism, my first instinct was: Finally! Fortunately, the writers (Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland) and director (Daniel Stamm) took a middle path, and modeled their bayou-based yarn on the 1972 documentary Marjoe, which concerned a former boy-preacher who now sought to expose the phoniness of his florid techniques and the credulity of his tent-church followers. Our hero here, Cotton—to play anyone by that name you need a rustier drawl than Patrick Fabian provides him with—is out to expose exorcisms, in order to spare future children from not surviving that procedure. He’s vaguely agnostic, but doesn’t see himself as a fraud. He’s a placebo healer. So he takes a film crew in tow when he’s called to cast the devil out of a 16-year-old farm girl named Nell (Ashley Bell, who has a spectral, fluttery presence). As you may have already inferred, this chick isn’t your normal gal haunted by puberty and stunted by home-schooling. And whatever’s possessing her knows that Cotton has doubts…

There’s intellectual tension in the tightrope these filmmakers walk; they are intelligent enough to realize that losing their balance means more than losing their vitality—it also means selling out. The attention I paid to their gymnastics exceeded my concern for little Nell’s well-being or their Cotton-mouthed crisis of faith. Then again, I didn’t find myself praying for the movie to end. But, even if the jangly camera lingers over some images—like a baby doll’s head submerged in bathwater—just long enough for them to be arresting, there’s none of the obsessive trouncing that made Martyrs, a French slasher, the work of an artist. Not that these Yanks, who feign doc realism no more skillfully than reality-show editors, harbor any such pretensions. They’re not possessed by the art of filmmaking; when a boy asks the characters if they’re making a movie, he doesn’t even steal a vain look into the lens. But these low-budget filmmakers are not without integrity. They’re a cut above placebo spookers.

That Wright’s new film, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World—starring Michael Cera and based on manga-inspired comic books by Canadian writer Bryan Lee O’Malley—has been a box-office dud is vaguely, if not wholly, anomalous. Although the film was well-received at ComicCon—Cannes for comic geeks—and can boast a hip soundtrack (featuring Beck and the genuinely eclectic Broken Social Scene) that should’ve been catnip to indie-music geeks, it seems to have been neglected by its target demo. Perhaps everyone’s so bashed by the state of world affairs that they need nothing less exorbitant than The Expendables to rouse them from their funk; or maybe the filmmakers have tapped into a demographic that’s tapped into online streaming; or, possibly, the old truism that people want to see people they “identify with” on the screen no longer holds true. In any case, it’s a misfortune. While it does not live up to Hot Fuzz, Pilgrim is probably the brightest, smartest movie this summer; and its failure, which will—for the time being, at least—vote Michael Cera out of stardom, prognosticates some possibly gloomy trends.

From the very first image—a chintzy pixellation of the Universal logo, accompanied by a N.E.S.-styled rendition of its fanfare—we know that Wright is playing with video games. Honestly, that jarred me a bit—particularly when, only a few minutes later, Pac-Man and Zelda’s names were both conspicuously dropped. I sensed the presence of Diablo Cody loitering behind the scenes. But, I was happy to discover, the video-game references are chiefly—and cleverly—stylistic, not spoken. Wright pays homage rather than sucking up. He employs the usual “kaboom!” and “meanwhile” title cards, but—rather than simply reproducing comic-strip frames and thought bubbles—he’s devised an equivalent style of dislocations that is both unique to him and unique to movies, all without failing to scribble in recognizably cartoonish shorthand. True, it’s an instant-gratification machine: A few brief scenes exist merely to be setups for gags, and the quips go by so quickly that the new ones banish the old ones from one’s head. It’s tweet-paced. But his style is also at the service of the boho-Toronto characters—20-somethings who, typically, are fashioned to be idolized by teenage romantics. Pace Iron Man 2, the garishness of comic books can appeal to the outsize feelings of young people; to that extent, comic tropes can provide lighthearted metaphors for real-life experience. The writers’ sentiment (Wright cowrote with Michael Bacall), and Pilgrim’s gentle nudging of hipsters, reminds me of recent lyrics by Arcade Fire: “So much pain for someone so young, well / I know it’s heavy, I know it ain’t light / But how you gonna lift it with your arms folded tight?”

Actually, those lyrics also encapsulate Cera’s persona. He teases his moral uptightness, but it’s there—and it was there hardcore in the last outing of his I saw, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. I think I underrated that movie a bit; I misunderstood its target audience. This isn’t to say that it was anything stupendous, but it carried a laudable amount of conviction for a teenie-bopper flick. Cera, however, seemed to be folding his arms tighter than before; his sorrows were too nebulous for Nick. In Pilgrim, he’s finally gotten a little ballsy; his passive-aggression is in tact, but he’s not afraid to be a dick. However, beneath the balls—yeah, I went there—he still has the awkwardness that manifests itself in the few extra words he interpolates into every sentence, and his not-fully-comprehended need to do the right thing. His naïveté is in the classic Huck Finn mold, and I think it is—or was—at the core of his appeal. Cera might’ve been playing it safe by harping on his little-guy-ness, but he stamped it on every role like a name tag, and—until now, it seems—didn’t do much to renew his caricature. But if his appeal is on the decline, I’m curious to know who—if anyone—might fill that vacuum; and if a vacuum persists, does that mean a regression in tastes? Not-quite-grown-up grown-ups are in now; yet Cera’s edge is that he has a dinky body but an old-soul sensibility. Although he hasn’t demonstrated the same range as an actor, Cera may end up like Elliott Gould: someone so feasted on by his particular film generation that he can’t help but become a relic of it.

But Pilgrim isn’t just Cera’s show. The ensemble cast helps one forget the banality of the video-game-overloaded plot. In order to win Ramona’s heart, Scott must vanquish her seven evil exes—most of whom seem way older than her, and inexplicably famous. Each of the exes is very funny in turn, and Wright is able to shake things up visually, but the story seems to be recycling itself. It’s like looking over some dude’s shoulder as he plays an arcade-game boxing match; the levels keep getting tougher to beat, I guess, but they all seem the same from back here. Fortunately, Wright’s panache is redemptive; it makes Pilgrim’s progress more fun than this summer’s intellectual tourist trap, Inception. The cast is redemptive, too. Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who plays Ramona, has Maggie Gyllenhaal eyes and hair that cycles through primary colors. She also has a sweet, ambiguous presence; one can understand Scott’s attraction to her. And her chimeric underplaying legitimizes her hipster look: Her nonconformity is a manifestation of her melancholy. As a Japanese-Catholic schoolgirl, whose hitherto untouched heart gets squashed, Ellen Wong’s cupidity is charming, a parody of the transformation Sandy makes at the end of Grease. Kieran Culkin is creepily smooth as Scott’s oversexed gay roommate; is it a subtle joke that Wallace shares his name with Wallace Langham, who played a similarly accoutered, sexually ambiguous schoolyard sadist in The Chocolate War? (All such references are subtle: Are the opening titles meant to remind one of those from Metropolis?) Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air, Twilight) is the only kink; she’s too redolent of the teen-movie world.

Hopefully, Netflix will be redemptive, too. I’d be sad to see Pilgrim fade into obscurity. While it’s by no means a great or profound movie, it’s inspiriting. It rocks. Even when Scott’s garage band is bombing, it’s fun to catch its vibes just as it’s fun to catch live music—really any live music—when you’ve had a few (too many). And the jams interact nicely with Wright’s hyperkinetic editing, loaded imagery, theatrical lighting—hell, he even takes us to a claymation-desert afterlife and back. As much as or more than ever before, comedy directors are at the service of their actors; the method behind Dinner for Schmucks and Cyrus is akin to that of documentarians whose cameras are trained on meerkats, ready to pounce if their fuzzy friends do anything of interest. Just substitute Jonah Hill for meerkats. Wright, on the other hand, is a remarkably sophisticated visual talent; his very mania is funny: Goofy Scorsese. I just hope that audiences won’t continue to neglect the difference between Wright and wrong.

But this movie’s aim is not to be a bom-chick-a-wow-wow Greek tragedy; and it wouldn’t be quite fair to compare it to other mother-lovin’ comedies, like Murmur of the Heart or Spanking the Monkey, in which genealogy is actually defied, and the kinfolk really do get kinky. Rather, it’s spawn of a more standard form—an inversion of Meet the Parents—though, in technique, it’s very different. The writing credit allotted to the directors—the brothers Mark and Jay Duplass—may be largely symbolic; according to Reilly, “90% of the movie is first or second takes.” It’s as if they were importing the concept of sustainability to film; but the honesty that’s composted doesn’t quite jibe with the comedic potentialities heaped on the trash pile. They seem indisposed to break past slaphappy gentility, so Cyrus coasts on its delicate charm, like a bodyboarder riding the mellow whims of a glassy morning tide. Clearly, the Duplasses—masters of mumblecore—didn’t want to grease up their style, and harsh their (critical) buzz. This is their first sort-of-marquee-name cast, and their first sort-of-big-studio (Fox Searchlight) production. Despite the salable simplicity of their plot, it was bold of them not to crumble to commercial tastes.

The mainstream comic movies today have alarmingly effective defense mechanisms. The specter of big-daddy postmodernism is certainly to blame; something like The Hangover is insulated by our society’s dwindling gamut of sexual taboos (even the culture warriors have cozied up with this sort of safe sex, emasculating the satirists’ sting), the fungibility of the fungal jokes, and the pop-cultural echolalia, the references that feed off one another. Ergo—to my tastes, at least—the less affected the bonehead comedy, the more purely enjoyable. Ambitions can be crippling when the audience wants an easy laugh. Turning their laughter against them when they seek the safe-bet mindlessness that a certain class of comedy is a shoe-in for can come off as a betrayal. I don’t mean to sound condescending; smarty self-consciousness in this type of movie can slaughter laughter, and lead to a posture of condescension that may not have been intended. Witness Hot Tub Time Machine from this year, or Observe and Report from last; neither were hits. Despite my reservations about them, I did sense creative intelligences at work—if sometimes slacking off. They were trying to latch onto the frat-pack school of comedy, headquartered in decaying Guyland—or, if you’ll permit me, Brahpolis. Unfortunately, they also wanted us to know how distasteful Brahpolis is—and even if they’re right in finding the milieu rather slimy, there’s no better way to snag a laugh in ice-cold intellect, restricting its access to the mouth, than by sucking up to something while cussing it under your breath. (An Apatow production like Pineapple Express isn’t really an exception. The actors flirted with satire, but the filmmakers couldn’t sustain the winkiness, and welded both eyes shut. It became a shoot-’em-up, and bungled another genre.) So, as ironic-funny as Rob Corddry was in H.T.T.M.—he has a better outlet on the show Childrens Hospital, now on Adult Swim—his lines became grating. The filmmakers just didn’t get that Will Ferrell himself is a parody of fatuity. (The trouble is that he’s been impersonating George W. Bush for too long; playing him as a harmless, good-natured dolt just doesn’t quite cut it for me anymore.) By attempting to parody a style too self-conscious (and too self-consciously lowbrow) to lampoon, the filmmakers ended up degrading themselves.

You can’t satirize Brahpolis within its city limits, but you can within your own niche, or in the freeing light of realism. Though Lynn Shelton’s Humpday did not critique Guyland, or at least not its typical habitués—the shameless self-caricatures who populate Jersey Shore—it did touch on the bromantic gray areas that remain taboo to bozos and bohemians alike. It was like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice for a time of post-sexual-revolutionary capitulation, or a weak-tea Americanization of Alphonso Cuarón’s brilliant, electrostatic Y Tu Mamá También. Weak tea, but sweet tea. Shelton directed the 2009 problem comedy—about a pair of straight college buds who decide to star in a gay porno together—in mumblecore fashion, and there were briar patches of revelation and fascination in the off-the-cuff interplay; but it too was marred by hyperconsciousness. With an introspective filmmaker like Mark Duplass cast as one of the leads, the film awkwardly went about doing the audience’s interpretive work for us, and I felt that bogged the picture down. But how can it be avoided anymore? That sort of hippie-lineage let’s-talk-it-out bullshit is imprinted on this chastened generation. I hate to castigate honesty.

Cyrus, peopled with some top-notch troupers, doesn’t suffer from self-conscious neurosis; but it’s also a little touchy-feely. In sum, it’s rather provincial: a sunny black comedy; sunrise-gray with the attendant warmth and dew; strangely, Tantrically centered and peaceful. Lovely. I’m not trying to be a smart-ass; like the Duplasses’ 2008 Baghead, Cyrus makes virtues of simplicity, pleasantry, and a dignified concern for its characters. But the distended dénouement, which has been unfairly dismissed as “commercial,” instead points to the filmmakers’ almost obsessive idealism, a naïveté carried over from the improbably tranquil resolution of Baghead. The happy ending isn’t a concession, but it’s an aesthetically dubious choice—far too quick and painless. For a few stretches, I hadn’t laughed so hard since Bad Lieutenant, back in March; but I didn’t chuckle as long as I’d hoped.

Hill is a surprisingly versatile comic actor. He’s 180 degrees away from the sex-crazed boor that made his name in Superbad. He’s still a virgin—or so I gather—but this celibacy seems self-imposed. Despite being an ascetic of sorts, Cyrus is no Jesus freak; he’s shaped like Cupid, but has poison darts in his quiver. So long as the arrows are being shot, Hill is in top form—shifting from guilelessness to inscrutable calculation. The performance hits a wall, however, as soon as John and Cyrus reconcile. Reilly’s pain is too real when John breaks down; he’s violating the rules of improv, shifting genres, and Hill isn’t sure how to respond. Then again, how could Hill be expected to pull off such an undefined turnaround in his character? It’s like Cartman, on South Park, becoming a diplomat. But there are so many conflicting elements at play when Cyrus shows off his electropop compositions for Joe-Schmo John that my laughter must have disturbed the patrons in the rows behind me. Here’s this dead-eyed, tubby creep, who shares bathroom time with mommy, playing jams for clubs that wouldn’t even let him in.

Hill has a fine rapport with Tomei, but her shtick here is to play clueless and ditsy. (One probably can’t blame her entirely. In terms of the scenario, Molly’s more pivot than person.) It’s fine, but it seems to put in a vise the tough cookie who roughed out The Wrestler, and the brassy, hoop-earringed dame who squawked triumphantly through My Cousin Vinny. All this improvisation may be counter to her style and training, though she aces her romantic scenes with Reilly, even as she slinks around all soft and mousy—against type. They share the same curly clown wig, which, as Dr. Steve Brule, Reilly used much to his advantage. Reilly can go from Boogie Nights to Chicago to Step Brothers with ease; but, save for the prenominate snafu, this is probably his richest performance. What separates Steve Brule from Ferrell’s NASCAR lackey in Talladega Nights is a core of sadness, vulnerability; and he imports that melancholy, so clearly close to the thespian’s heart, to Cyrus—and without the usual dumdum overlay. John, the freelance film editor, is emotionally vulnerable, not mentally. This should fling open the door to real comedic terror; Cyrus should be that manipulative, mind-fucking monster who has no qualms about the innocence of his victims, with John as his helpless patsy. But the Duplasses only keep the door ajar.

Still, these filmmakers are almost irresistibly likable. They have even wooed another pair of siblings—Tony and Ridley Scott—into an unlikely alliance with them; the Scotts are credited as executive producers. But, good and good-natured as Cyrus and Baghead are, I’m not sure whether the Duplasses are capable of a truly major comic work. They are proficient within a small scale, and that’s a gift. But they scale back, too, on the payoffs; the culmination of John and Cyrus’s rivalry is a fracas at John’s ex-wife’s wedding. Hill acts demoniacally, but Cyrus would be kicked out of hell for good behavior. Our fears for John are assuaged too early; Michael Andrews’s anodyne anti-folk score is like elevator music that consoles us just as we want to get freaked out. The Duplasses’ sweetness and modesty are virtues, but it blanches their comedy. They may never really be in the black.

Although this is the latest model in the dude-this-blows-my-mind-pass-me-the-joint mold, and it’s meant to whirl like a dervish in the viewers’ brains, enticing ’em to scamper back to the theater to reverse engineer its backed-up cranial plumbing, I didn’t find it too hard to follow—and that’s a compliment. Nolan fluidly hopscotches from one nightmare to the next, dragging his mottled dream team in tow. DiCaprio heads up this rather esoteric bunch. For high-income clients, he and his gangly assistant, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, will climb over the mental membranes of unsuspecting schmucks, and purloin secrets from their subconscious. Is this legal? Is this common? Does John Q. Public know that his dreams are no longer private? You might need to rock Nolan’s dream boat to get any concrete answers. Perhaps the closest we get to a clue comes when Cobb (DiCaprio) recruits Ellen Page to be an “architect” of mental states after her predecessor is vanished—presumably tortured to death by a Japanese bigwig named Saito (Ken Watanabe). (Her job is to design the topography of the dreams that Cobb dips into, and I’m sure someone will draw a soggy parallel between it and to film direction.) Under Michael Caine’s tutelage—he makes hardly a cameo, unfortch—she seems to have learned the basics of Cobb’s trade; but she’s about as aware of the specifics as the Ivy Leaguers were of the C.I.A. when they were harvested to staff its first generation.

Saito’s brain is the first we see hacked; but whatever they retrieved from it must not have been too vital to his conglomerate—he becomes Cobb’s next client. The plan now is not the usual retrieval, but “inception”: planting an idea in subconscious soil. Apparently, though, this is risky business; ideas metastasize like cancers, and eventually wrack the whole brain—for all intents and purposes, warping the victim’s personality. Their mark is a preppy named Fischer (Cillian Murphy, posed in stock photos like a Ralph Lauren model); he’s the inheritor of his cold-fish father’s business empire, and rival industrialist Saito wants to see that kingdom as divided as Lear’s. (Cobb & Co. are like trust-busting privateers, even if Nolan doesn’t frame them that way.) Over the course of an international flight, they break into the yuppie’s soul, and face off not only with an army of superegotistical white blood cells, but also Cobb’s own demon—his late enchantress of a wife is down there waiting for him.

It’s also down there that Nolan gets to show off his kickass blockbusting skills. He ups the ante, widening the ambit of slumberland to dreams within dreams—and that only accounts for the goings-on in Fischer’s noggin. Cobb caroms through the synapses on his own guilt trip, with Page accompanying him, acting as an in-house analyst. In the world above, we’ve already bounced between continents. (It’s an open secret of good summertime moviemaking that one should dazzle the audience with exotic locales, titillating their inner tourist—particularly at a time when real tourism budgets are strapped.) The world below isn’t quite what it could be, though. We get a rainy day in New York (?), a five-star hotel, and what looks to be the ninja bivouac from Batman Begins situated on the ice planet Hoth. There’s also the decomposing remains of a comatose limbo that Cobb once cohabited with his wife (Marion Cotillard)—don’t ask me who their real-estate agent was—which is finely imagined, if curiously. Of why they’d choose to build a Mies van der Rohe nightmare for themselves, with a skyline of identical obelisks, I have no idea. I heard some guy bitching about Inception on the of the entertainment-industry channels, and he compared it to Mulholland Drive. In truth, Nolan’s dreamworlds have nothing on David Lynch’s intuitive dreamscapes, or the feeling one gets even from Lynch’s lesser movies; but this is a thriller first and foremost, and, considering that, some of his visuals—M. C. Escher stairwells, Gordon-Levitt curb-stomping through zero-G hallways, and cities folding on themselves like board games going back into the box—are very impressive.

Even if Hans Zimmer’s obdurate soundtrack is usually little more than a foghorn blast (aside from the eerie bars reserved for Cobb’s foreign-accented wife, the chatelaine of his withering fantasy); and even if the linchpin of the connubial subplot hasn’t even the logic of a Lynchpin; and even if the roles assigned to the ladies (the savior and the bitch) may give pause to some feminists—that isn’t what I want to take issue with. There’s an icky insensitivity in much of Nolan’s work—and it may be more deeply unconscious than anything in this movie. I like many of his films; they’re a cut above your average multi-million-dollar brand-name spectacle. (That is, if you’re able to plug your ears to, or titter heartily at, his transparently aspirational dialogue.) His reputation is predicated on his predilection for themes like justice or obsession or guilt; but they are interlarded rather than immanent: They stick out of the narrative like keys on a map. This sort of obviousness is easy to overrate—but even that is a minor flaw. Inception is very much Freudian slippery—and this bothers me, at least, because so much is slid away.

For instance, Watanabe (the saving grace of Letters from Iwo Jima) is perfectly cast; the dignity and weight he brings to his role sweeps under the rug not only the fact that he’s a bushido cliché, but also the notion that Watanabe’s honor is yin to the yang of Saito’s obfuscated deviousness. Sure, it’s his goons who dispose of Page’s predecessor, but aren’t they just following his orders? It’s standard-issue for a Nolan film—ever-lauded for so-called moral complexity—that Cobb’s crew is utterly unconcerned about their fallen comrade; they just move on. It’s a little insulting that we aren’t expected to care, either. Nolan is shockingly cuddly with corruption. When Cobb agrees to take on Saito’s assignment, it’s in exchange for a pardon; we know he’s been falsely accused of murdering his wife, but a warrant’s still out for his arrest in the States. All it’ll take for him to get off the hook is one measly phone call to the authorities from Saito, who’s also been instrumental in duping Fischer—he bought out the airline that the victim is flying on, and all of its flight crew, to boot. I’ll never trust a stewardess again. To the director, these actions seem like nothing more than cogs in his plot machine; to me, they’re rather fishy.

And then there’s the matter of the whole procedure, which is the crux of the film. It’s no wonder that the details surrounding it are left so high up in the air that they seem almost designed to flit away from all but the most skeptical viewers. Cobb’s men are supposedly the good guys, but they’re basically rapists-for-hire. So much fuss is made about Cobb coming to terms with the truth about his wife; but poor Fischer is given a false resolution to his daddy issues, and it seems to be played off as a token of the team’s benevolence. So what if it tarnishes the reputation of a family friend (Tom Berenger) that Fischer’s been turned against? There’s a lot of collateral damage in slumberland. Murphy is a fine actor, and he gives an affecting performance—broken down from years of lilting in big daddy’s shadow—for which Nolan has reserved some of the better dialogue. But Fischer’s given short shrift—and Nolan’s all sunshine and rainbows about that. We’re not meant to step back and look at the global significance of this little mind game. Saito wants the Fischer empire to downsize to prevent it from becoming a monopoly—so selfless of him, truly. Clap. Clap. Nolan must be a blessed innocent to take this industrialist at his word, and not even question whether Saito merely intends to do some empire-building of his own. But, of course he wouldn’t! He’s a decent enough fella because he’s committed to unshackling Cobb, right? Right…?

As much as I enjoyed this movie, I’d never trust Nolan with my stock portfolio—and certainly not my kids. I just can’t buy into all this puffery about Inception being “ingenious” or “transporting” or anything like my idea of a “dream movie.” And it’s a gazillion degrees away from being an “intellectual overload”—unless you’re prone to headaches. (A mess like Synecdoche, New York may have been more worthy of that mantle, and that’s precisely because it was overloaded.) Nolan is like an upscale J. J. Abrams, but that scale doesn’t rise too high—and, as much as I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun (I had it, too), I think people are exercising themselves unduly by climbing it. It may be amusing, and maybe a little trippy, but Inception—coming a decade after The Matrix, and five after The Twilight Zone—isn’t even that original. C’mon, people. This didn’t even leave me with the tingle that Shutter Island did, despite the continued solidity of DiCaprio’s acting. Only one scene here came close to the emotional bonanza of the Scorsese film, and that was its simplest: when, at the end, Cobb cradles his wife as she shrivels to oblivion in the intimacy of a formless void. A black hole is the perfect metaphor for where most of Nolan’s emotional currents end up. My dislike of The Dark Knight is all too well documented, but Inception is wounded by the same failings. Nolan mines for human material where there is none—in pulp—and yet seems oblivious to it in its natural habitat. He’s in his own dreamworld, and I wish someone would wake him up.

But Pixar pastiches are too richly imaginative to feel like hand-me-downs; they don’t make allusions, they draw together familiar threads and stitch them into a unified whole. What separates Toy Story from The Velveteen Rabbit or Where the Wild Things Are or A. A. Milne’s stories about Winnie-the-Pooh—though not The Brave Little Toaster, a childhood favorite of mine borrowed from liberally here—is its inclusion of consumer culture. In earlier eras, sentient dolls weren’t threatened with the garbage pail; they had the insurance policy of being passed on to the next generation. At a time when there’s a new hot item every Christmas, these figurines have to stay in shape if they want to stay in the crate; the conflict between cowpoke and spaceman in the first Toy Story was not instigated insignificantly. Though the toys’ acceptance of their new phase of “life” is cheerful in part three—and, for a blockbusting cartoon, courageous—there are strands of feeling that seem almost heartbreakingly mature. When, as they inch perilously closer to the hellish maw of a fire-breathing incinerator, the toys link hands and form a chain, it’s an eerily moving moment—the acceptance of moving on in Up has advanced to an acceptance of moving beyond. No plastic circle has ever left our mortal coil so gracefully unfurled.

Structurally, The Square has a fine film noir skeleton, but no meat on top of it. It has a paucity of wisecracks, a perfunctory romance, and a complete deficiency of glamour. In other words, a set-up, a moral, and one bad deed after another—which is adequate, if not my idea of a good time. This is the first feature that former stuntman Nash Edgerton (you might remember his body, if not his face, from The Matrix Revolutions and episodes II and III of Star Wars) directed; it was written by his brother Joel (an actor who plays an arsonist here) and Matthew Dabner. But there’s little derring-do for stunts to shine through, and no interesting characters for performers to embody. They’ve brought nothing new to the genre, but retained its clichés: How did this pair of marital cheats end up with their original spouses (a marginalized housewife, bland as bean paste, and a Blue Collar Comedy Tour roadie with no discernible career aside from unspecified malefic schemes)? Edgerton’s plotting is studious and style deterged; but there’s no passion or pleasure—as in Broken Embraces and Shutter Island—merely precision.

In a way, Edgerton’s myopic dedication to this threadbare plot, and the few raggedy characters that dangle in it, has integrity. The seaside setting—a town too generic to warrant a name—constitutes the movie’s entire universe. Although it’s in Australia—the accents and Christmastime picnics and cans of Jack Daniel’s and Cola (say whaaa?) bespeak that—this place seems like those pockets of Americana, otherwise invisible, that old sitcoms were once contained in, at a remove from the somber realities of the world beyond. It’s like Lumberton in Blue Velvet—an aw-shucks idyll with big-city crime rotting out its edges—except here all classes of life blot together in a surreally convenient way. Though they have the appurtenances of modern life on the outside, inwardly, these characters live in some gloamy gray area before The Simpsons and The Truman Show. Edgerton probably only intended to keep things simple and economical, but the effect is peculiarly unsettling: an empty, farcical world, complete with a sitcom stock company—yet without humor, or much levity of any kind. Even the assignations are chillingly banal. The lovers long to escape—but where to? In terms of atmosphere, The Square is like The Ghost Writer’s insensate kid brother—like an existential drama by a prisoner who didn’t even know he was incarcerated.

The Square isn’t a showcase of the Edgertons’ creativity—only their craftsmanship. But they do show promise, and, once given the freer rein of a bigger budget, perhaps their imaginations will be unloosed. For obvious reasons, they’ve been compared to the Coen brothers, and hopefully that compliment will prove auspicious. The Coens’ first feature, Blood Simple, was also a pared-down noir. And it was also overrated.

But how can you distrust a face like Banksy’s? Or, more precisely, the shadow that eclipses the hooded figure’s visage—an effect complemented by the vocoder veiling his Da Ali G accent? This lack of image is Banksy’s style: anonymous, save for the skater-boy hoodie. Although he does this for legal reasons—his scabrous, caustic artwork is, by design, spray-painted on canvases that he technically doesn’t own—it’s also an affront to the art-world “establishment”: He’s Kool Aid to the cults of personality that he accuses them of enshrining. Ruefully, however, he claims responsibility for one of its newest celebrities: Thierry Guetta, a.k.a. Mr. Brainwash.

As the pseudonym implies, Thierry is as opaque as Banksy’s black-out. The French emigree, living in Los Angeles, has does’ eyes and doughy cheeks, topped off with squirrel’s-tail mutton-chops that have long outlived their ironic bite, and a fedora off the Hot Topic rack. I interpret these as warning signs. After spending several years as the local street-art scene’s resident videographer—documenting Shepard Fairey and others as they went about their nocturnal raids—Thierry turned his camcorder toward the movement’s most famously elusive figure; he’d make his Banksy & Me. The Briton, however, cooperated; he’d found a Robin for his Batman. But subject and documentarian were fated to switch roles. After watching Thierry’s rough cut of the footage, Banksy suggested, in the most anodyne terms possible, that the Frenchman concentrate on another medium. The intention was to send Thierry off on a wild goose chase; but the goose laid golden eggs—or, in Banksy and Fairey’s opinion, rotten eggs: Pop-art shells with nothing inside them. And yet, thanks to self-publicity, publicity, publicity, collectors and connoisseurs not only appeared in droves for the amateur’s boffo début, but gobbled up work and artist whole.

Exit Through the Gift Shop is a perfect demonstration of how imagination, talent, and meaning are no match for drive, self-promotion, and networking—too perfect. The public buys up Banksys, and Banksy, renegade from his anarcho-socialist scene for selling out, sneers at the buyers; if his work is used as a commodity, then it’s been tragically misunderstood. When we see his work auctioned off at Sotheby’s, or mounted in private collections beside Picassos and Monets, we’re not shown how it’s gotten there—has it been scraped off billboards or has Banksy put it on the market himself? (Early on, if his work ended up in museums, it was explicitly without the curators’ consent.) When he holds his first show, the media is only interested in a live, painted elephant; to them, it raises questions about whether the artist abuses animals rather than what it was intended to symbolize (ironically, the major issues that people tend to ignore even when confronted with them). As Banksy, ever humbly, declares, this movie is about Thierry—not himself; but his own history, used as context, is more relevant than he cares to admit. He’s using the film to rebuild his street cred. If it’s a hoax, then he’s literally Mr. Brainwash’s alter ego, counterfeiting his own work to make a statement. But even if the movie’s genuine, Thierry is still set up as Banksy’s evil twin; Banksy may have caught on with the public, but—hey guys, I’m still cool! How does someone anathema to hype learn to toot his own horn? Subliminal advertising—subliminal maybe even to himself.

In a movie about the importance of an artist’s intentions, the artist’s intentions are important. But one’s sense of phoniness would have to be as rigid as Holden Caulfield’s if one were to write off Banksy entirely for being guilty of my charges. (Or, as I personally doubt, one would have to think him an utter mountebank—riding graffiti as an escalator to success. The problem with irony of this magnitude is that it could well have been perpetrated by a sour reactionary, intent on tricking the “knowing” by pandering to their smugness in a scam to sell tickets. Then again, Elvis could be alive and well, and shacking up with Osama bin Laden.) He’s ensnared in the same cage that Michael Moore rattled in Capitalism: A Love Story; but how can he go on creating artwork that’s meant to shake the core of capitalism if he can’t scrounge up the scratch to produce it? And if he’s making bank with the movie, that’s okay with me. He’s not just using his fame to snatch a director’s chair: As a novice documentarian, he’s got quite a bit of talent. And as a novice screenwriter, with a knack for character and narrative sense, he’s even better.

Some have speculated that the “documentary” ends, and the fiction begins, when Thierry works on his show with Banksy’s blessing. But, if he’s a fraud the whole way through—the notion that the secretive artists allowed him to shoot them in flagrante delicto serves to bolster this theory—he’s perfectly cast. His Gallic mysticism seems particularly salient following Man on Wire, and it makes him hard to read. Is there a buffer between Thierry’s introspective pensées and the Jacques Cousteau-scented hot air that leaks out? Early on, he likens himself to a shadow; when he films the artists at work he’s a veritable non-entity, observer rather than commentator—a hint of his Warhol rip-offs to come. Thierry’s initial filmmaking style—aimlessness—also runs parallel to the Pop star, who “directed” static motion pictures (though the epigone’s editing style—resembling filler from an M.T.V. reality show on Benzedrine—is vapid in a different way). Gift Shop suggests that Thierry’s camerawork is compulsive, and digs into his past—the death of his mother, while he was young and unaware of her illness—to diagnose it. I think this is a likable trait. Thierry may not have the talent of an artist, but he has the sensibility of one; and one key reason why this film works is that Thierry is not a flimflammer or greedy exploiter so much as a holy fool.

But, most importantly, Gift Shop is funny. It can be a little too snarky, smug, and even superior at times; but, given its targets, and the genuine baleful ambivalence it dredges up, that only serves to certify it hip. Sure, it’s a self-serving manifesto for street art; and yessiree, Thierry’s night-vision footage could be counterfeit Jackass; but, even if simulated, these clips exude the energy, the novelty, of seeing a mangy counterculture sucking in its first gasps of air. Some effects, such as the way Thierry’s childhood tragedy is brought into the mix, aren’t quite convincing; Banksy, and the narrator (Rhys Ifans, of Pirate Radio and Greenberg—an appropriate choice), just can’t play sentimental. But the change in timber between the set-up of Mr. Brainwash’s 2008 expo and its aftermath—in which the tone shifts from being ulcerous with worry for Thierry’s impending confrontation with reality to bemused high spirits, vectored like a hipster’s feigned enthusiasm for the World Cup at the gala’s you’re-shitting-me outcome—is sedulously engineered, particularly if it’s staged.

As I exited through the concession stand, I didn’t want this film to be a forgery. I hated seeing those frazzled browsers of Mr. Brainwash’s pop-cultural enfilade trying to exhume from a bottomless pit the deeper meaning of a MacBook Pro overlaid in Edward Hopper’s Automat, and knowing they’d been had. (The show, by the way, was not a hoax; but it’s been suggested that Gift Shop’s receipt of Brainwash’s sales runs high, like the doctored price tags at Thierry’s boutique.) Yet, camera trained on our faces and microphone jammed down our throats, wouldn’t many of us have reacted similarly? Peer pressure and hype bully well beyond high school, and refugees from art class are hardly immune. Who wants to seem square, sagging, aesthetically senile? It may be a joke on the spectators, a joke on L.A. Weekly for lunging head-first onto the bandwagon, and a joke on us in the audience, lulled into accepting the “truth” at face value. But maybe cranky Banksy’s critique is too illuminating to be merely bitter. One wearies of Thierry after awhile, but I think we’re meant to like him, and—to a degree—appreciate his hard work. Banksy, whether scammer or culture jammer, knows better than to let us think that art is sold by an evil cabal of tastemakers with philistine machinations; it’s by luck, and showmanship, and our weaknesses for both. In a sense, Banksy’s at one with Breathless; it can be hard to find guilty parties when bad art is the crime.

They say it’s the 50th anniversary of this, Godard’s first feature-length film, but I don’t believe ’em. For a youth movement, the nouvelle vague has aged strikingly well; sci-fi blockbusters, reissued with upgraded F/X, seem like Joan Rivers jobs by comparison. (This restoration was supervised by the original cinematographer, Raoul Coutard; it’s luminous. Considering the movie’s reputation for improvisation and innovation—deserved though it is—I’m in awe, this time around, of the filmmakers’ assured craftsmanship. But—forgive me—it’s still, by impulse, to movies what the punk movement was to the mainstream rock of its day.) Godard, already an old soul at age 29, had uncorked the fountain of mass-culture youth. One of the director’s early stateside champions, Pauline Kael, wrote that the young hero of Breathless is “romantic in a modern sense because he doesn’t care about anything but the pleasures of love and fast cars.” Not quite. Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is romantic in a modern sense because he’d rather die a movie hero than live as a human being. He apes a picture of Humphrey Bogart’s impassive mug as if fawning over his own reflection. If all the world’s a stage, then this hedonist thinks he’s the leading man. Michel, the romantic, wants to bring the house down; but it ends up falling on him.

Generally, the most fascinating movies are made by artists in conflict with themselves. Lang was of two minds about technology; Godard’s heart is torn by pop culture. Breathless is dedicated to Monogram Pictures, once an exponent of lurid thrillers that were alimentary to the director’s imagination. But he makes Michel shallow because the character’s frame of reference—cheap American fantasy—is shallow. In a panic, Michel takes out a police officer, but his fear subsides as soon as the deed is done. He decides to book it to Italy with his girlfriend Patricia (Jean Seberg), but doesn’t object to dallying around her Paris lodgings, looking for a lay. Godard, in a telling cameo, rats out his hero to the cops. But it’s Patricia, who’s bored with this diversion and game to begin a fresh one, who effectively sells out her hood. Michel, alas, doesn’t make it to prison. To paraphrase the showman’s eulogy of old King Kong: It wasn’t the bullets; it’s movies that killed the beast. These lovebirds aren’t malicious; they’re merely oblivious to everyone else. So it’s hardly coincidental that our femme fatale is an American.

But Breathless is no naggy condemnation of movies, and even less of movie lovers. It is, instead, the first, most immediate collision of the world outside and life onscreen; the first, or the first recognized, example of an artist’s personal voice and experience rhapsodizing under the breath of a commercial-film genre. The historical period in which it was made, so elegiacally stylized in A Single Man and beautifully rendered in An Education, is vividly revived here—so tensely present that immortality seems not just possible but proven. Rather than nail this butterfly’s wings to their historical context, go back and analyze its cocoon, or study the eggs this fertile caper hatched, I’ll just say that the film’s both an enrapturing character study and a furtively insouciant comedy, and that it may be the chillest, illest, coolest, chicest movie ever made, I don’t care what you think, it is.

For filmmakers, the silent era was like college or band camp: a time for experimentation. And if you were conducting your experiments in Weimar Germany, at the height of the Roaring ’20s—well, things were bound to get out of hand. Metropolis is what can result from handing an imaginative, impassioned, ambitious nutcase a heaping wad of filthy lucre. Set 100 years in the future—or, roughly 17 years from now—it’s a parable about class rapprochement that was flayed left (for depicting the proletariats as brutes) and right (for applying Marx’s view of history to the future). A certain éminence grise, one Herbert George Wells, lambasted this shaping of the things to come for, among other things, its vertical urban planning: Why hasn’t Metropolis gentrified, depositing its dregs into suburbs? Why haven’t the efficient machines outgrown their need for human operators? (Two decades thence, Orwell might have had an answer for him.) In what sort of vision of the future do we still bop around in Packards, with biplanes in every garage? Wells shanked the movie and twisted the knife: “Originality there is none, independent thought none.” Ouch! He must have read the intertitles but stewed up his own imaginary dystopias while Lang’s visuals played onscreen. Luis Buñuel, writing two years before he picked up a camera to shoot Un Chien Andalou, was more appreciative of Lang’s balls-to-the-wall formalism:

Those who understand cinema as an unassuming storytelling mechanism will be deeply disappointed in Metropolis. … But, if to the tale we prefer the “plastico-photogenic” background of the film, then Metropolis will fulfill our wildest dreams, will astonish us as the most astounding book of images it is possible to compose.

Forty years later, Andrew Sarris neatly summed up the film’s flaws:

Fritz Lang’s cinema is the cinema of the … fable, and the philosophical dissertation. … Lang’s plots generally go inexplicably … sentimental at the very end. His characters never develop with any psychological precision, and his world lacks the details of verisimilitude that are so important to realistic critics.

Right on, with one reservation: Metropolis is saccharine-sweet and sentimental throughout, like a river of simple syrup. (The mediator between the mind and hands must be the heart? Riiiight.) But I’ve doled out all this criticism of a classic for a reason: It wasn’t a classic when it came out; Metropolis was the UFA studio’s Heaven’s Gate. Nowadays, its place in the pantheon’s assured, if only for its influence—Star Wars to cyberpunk to animé, on down. And yet, in terms of substance, in terms of “verisimilitude” and “psychological precision,” this film’s no better than Slumdog Millionaire—and if that newer movie is going to end up in textbooks, like Metropolis has, it’ll likely be in reference to multiculturalism rather than technique. In 2001, Kubrick’s characters were about as lively as Civil War casualties, but he obsessed over the details of 21st-century life; Lang has no such fixations. I have no idea what the mediator, Freder, does in his spare time—aside from running track, and being chased around by an all-girl flapper production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that’s accoutered like the court at Versailles. There are no human voices like Peter Lorre’s wounded cry in M, which would have been spooky in silence, too.

But Lang’s voice comes through. Our admiration of his technique—of his indulgence in the potentialities of a high-tech medium—is mirrored in the movie. In a take off of Cubism, people literally blend into the urban landscape: The workers perform a pas de deux with their clock-like contraptions, even as the Moloch-machines suck ’em dry like industrial vampires. Kaleidoscoped eyes look lasciviously on as a femme bot makes a jive out of her conniptions. Her dance number is the most brilliant, flagrant curveball in the movie; she looks like a lady but gyrates her hips like the pistons that power Metropolis. It’s as kinky as a carburetor. And yet the rich—dressed to the nines like Gatsby’s meretricious gate crashers—fall over each other to nab Čapek’s coquette. The poor fall for her ruse, too, and even more embarrassingly. This robot is in the guise of Maria, the deposed saint who preaches pacifism; the original has been kidnapped by the android’s mad inventor, whose incomparable appellation is Rotwang. But Maria’s followers are insensitive to the switcheroo even as their Gandhi spouts off like Sarah Palin; she goes from Tolstoy to Stalin in the blink of a cybernetic eye. Clearly, Lang is enamored with technology to such a degree that his characters can’t distinguish flesh from steel; but he’s enamored, too, with the Bible, and its austere moral certitude. (As Buñuel grasps, “Metropolis is two films joined at the hip, but with divergent spiritual necessities that are diametrically opposed to each other.”) The parable that passes for a script is credited to Thea von Harbou, but Lang and his artisans (among the cinematographers was Karl Freund, who later filmed I Love Lucy) were clearly infected with its conflicting passions. Their visual aesthetic—Art Deco-Babylonian—is as retro-futuristic now as it was in 1927. The ideas are ancient, and yet the vision—the emotional extravagance—is ageless.

In some ways, however, Wells was right: Lang’s muddled Marxism never came to fruition. The director was courted by the Nazis, but he didn’t think his Jewish heritage would wash; he fled the fascists that von Harbou—his wife—came to embrace. Despite its rousing, funky vision, Metropolis represents a capitalist dystopia; and yet there is an elegance to this prophecy, in both its concept and implementation, that is soothing for being so naïve. Climate change imposes itself on today’s forecasts; mechanical slave-drivers are no longer analogue. Though it was probably not Lang’s intention, Metropolis can make one nostalgic for a future that was never to be.

Sherlock Holmes fared well when Guy Ritchie removed the detective’s deerstalker; but Robin seems naked without his tights. In the old days, he robbed from the rich and gave to the poor—the Tea Party’s worst nightmare. Coy as the allusion might be, it’s apropos to this adaptation, which muddies things up and makes the “history” denser, but keeps its ideals on a commercially duplicitous level. Robin soapboxes about liberty and rallies against taxation, but the taxes are levied to pay for the Crusades—a war in the Middle East. (Only socialists will be displeased with the film’s shifty politicking: The French are invading England and pilfering indiscriminately. One of the marauders, on the verge of raping a landowner, tells her, “Nobody should own 5,000 acres.” Staliniste! But the filmmakers probably aren’t worried about upsetting socialists; they don’t pay for tickets anyway, right…?) Sequences that should be rousing, if naïve, seem to have been manhandled by clammy appendages. Even the setting is too clammy. These mizzly medieval days can get so dour that I wished the Technicolor sunlight that Errol Flynn basked in would break through the heavy-handed clouds. Some of Jim Mathieson’s photography is quite accomplished—the firelit oranges twinkling on the midnight blues, the beads of water dripping from an arrow, its launch slowed down for us to savor. But Scott’s images no longer look as if seen through a frosty pane of glass, as they did in The Duellists; and they lack the dynamism of Sergei Bodrov’s in Mongol.

Scott is either above pumping testosterone out of his heroes’ pores, or he’s simply short on adrenaline; but he doesn’t replace the he-man cheerleading—à la 300—with a satiric counterpoint (which it probably deserves), or with the lighthearted warmth that made the old swashbucklers glisten. Their forces combined, this director, and the screenwriter, Brian Helgeland (Mystic River, Man on Fire), are as light as a hydrogen bomb. But Scott also isn’t the man’s-man filmmaker that Gladiator put him on the market to be; attempting to extract merriment from Robin’s men, he sputters like a shrimp lifting weights. He’s most comfortable when Russell Crowe’s Robin is schmoozing with a lady, Cate Blanchett’s Maid—er, Matron—Marian. These scenes are carried by a sweet and delicate charm, enlivened, from time to time, by Max von Sydow, that prestigious old coot. Marian wears the pants—she even slips into chain mail. (Not that this isn’t incumbent on women in every historical action picture these days—lest we think women’s rights have evolved over the eons.) Crowe, by shrinking into his bulky frame, dropping his eyes, and mumbling, is the right Robin for this conception. His muffled inflections are a peasant’s attempt at eloquence; he isn’t an extraordinary hero, but a likable common man, affected by injustice, and now elevated to a position to fight it. Crowe performs creditably; he’s human. But he’s a real person trapped in a dulled-out version of make-believe. This isn’t the extroverted Robin Hood who forsook the luxuries of high birth to champion those who couldn’t afford to fend off oppression; unlike Tony Stark, these filmmakers’ paladin fails to inspire a romantic grandiosity that is both tacky and fantastically appealing. And so does their movie.