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.

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.

It’s difficult to describe the plot without mistaking it with premonitions of The Avengers or Iron Man 5, but, this time around, the hotrod homunculus has to contend with two new villains—neither of whom are very super. Iron Man’s not very altered ego—Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.)—faces off with daddy issues while stressing the bejeezus out of his sort-of significant other (Gwyneth Paltrow). Mickey Rourke’s Vanko has daddy issues, too, and avenges his father by way of a string of supercharged Hanukkah lights that he lashes Stark—and several other Formula One drivers—with. This display impresses a skeevy Stark Corp. competitor (Sam Rockwell) who pines for a military contract that Stark refuses to make; the unveiling of Stark’s high-tech suit of armor has ushered in an era of world peace, but Rockwell’s Hammer and Senator Garry Shandling (!) know that peace doesn’t pay the bills. (His name is Hammer, and he really is a tool; since the U.S. ain’t buying, and Iron Man’s off the market, he pawns off his gimcrackery to the Axis of Evil, which, unfortunately, is not the name of a comic-book cadre.)

Conniving cinematic moguls have all the money in the world and never know what they’re paying for. The misalliance between the Wall Street grub and the Soviet Bloc-head threatens Stark’s international armistice and—yada yada yada. This expression of impatience is as much mine as the filmmakers’: Jon Favreau, the franchise’s auteur apparent, and Justin Theroux, the solo screenwriter. (The 2008 prequel enumerated four.) If Iron Man wasn’t played for breezy irony, it would most likely have been because these filmmakers had lost their minds—like most of the recent superhero movies have. A sense of proportion is key. When it makes one feel indignation at a project that one’s working on, that sense can have a poisonous effect on the tone. But this crew isn’t snide or condescending; their tone is consistently sportive. Many of the players are reprising their roles from the first film, and nearly everyone seems to be in it for kicks. Downey acts in the manner of a well-born Bill Murray; his hauteur burbles like molasses. He, Paltrow, and Scarlett Johannson—playing Double Agent Romanoff (the laziest Slavic surname a writer could contrive)—practically race each other to see who can spew smart-talk fastest. (Johannson has a hypnotic hold on innuendo even after it’s left her lips.) Only Don Cheadle—who’s demonstrated more talent in better roles, and replaces Terrence Howard as Lt. Colonel Rhodes—delivers his lines in a way that seems a little too robotic. (Downey looks robotic. He’s absurdly hale for 45, but his playboy’s looks are as integral to the fantasy as the special effects. These stars shine brighter than the glossiest gossip rag.)

Of the newcomers, Rockwell’s festooned in three-piece suits that make him look like a wallflower at a ’70s disco; he’s downgraded from walk to waddle to match his chichi threads. I think it’s an homage to The Wrestler when Stark conks Vanko on the noggin with a folding chair; but I hope Rourke pays homage to that performance by not coasting through the rest of his roles. He Russifies well, but he and Eric Bana (the Star Trek nemesis) ought to form a support group for neglected adversaries. Vanko is a symptom writer’s block rather than a roadblock to our heroes; and when he blows Queens to smithereens, it hardly gums up traffic any more than the daily commute.

The filmmakers’ construction isn’t nearly as durable as Stark’s suit of armor, but it’s an affable time-killer for sticky summer days; it may not challenge one’s intelligence, but it doesn’t insult it, either. Star Trek resurrected its heroes merely to piss on their graves; James Bond—who, in his spry, pre-Daniel Craig form was Tony Stark’s swanky ancestor—has gotten sententious. And the possibilities for something new—and interesting—from superhero movies have long since winnowed away. (Spiritually, the vigilantes in Watchmen were pallbearers at the genre’s funeral, but they only ended up burying a Watchmen franchise.) In the early 2000s, the X-men stood for acceptance, the right to be oneself, to grow up and become what one will; and the childlike Spider-Man features used waking up muscle-bound, the returned affections of a boyhood crush, and a newfound capacity for spraying white goo as a metaphor for adolescence—even if my metaphor might inspire Sam Raimi to scrub my palate with soap till I foam at the mouth. The heroes themselves may have grown up, but they still live in a kid’s fantasy domain; Stark the Renaissance man is serial wish fulfillment, page after page. So when The Dark Knight came out two months after the first Iron Man, and was celebrated as “mature” and “grown-up,” my mouth really did start to foam; the seriousness of its aspirations were what made the film pitifully naïve.

That superhero movies have flown so high as a Hollywood staple almost certainly relates to the way the nation reacted to 9/11, and the way the Bush administration conducted the War on Terror. The Dark Knight, likely unconsciously, made the implicit linkage explicit. Our collective, vestigial need for an authority figure—a superhuman big daddy—to wage our wars for us, expiate our crimes, stand by in selfless invigilation over his flock, and vanquish the subhuman abstractions of evil that “threaten our way of life” was a raw nerve that The Dark Knight groped. It was a safety blanket stitched with moral absolutes; and yet its “realism” legitimized our thoughtless acceptance of fascism by projecting it on the real world. For all its equivocations, it dumbed discourse down. Not that Iron Man 2 poses legitimate solutions to foreign-policy conundrums; the Obama administration isn’t going to consult Favreau anytime soon. “Ah yes!” quoth Robert Gates. “Of course we should disarm the military, and have a loaded (in all senses), impossibly handsome, improbably smart, corporate-heir vigilante shoulder the global balance of power! I mean, he gets hammered—and hammers Hammer—but he’s the world’s sexiest, super-est genius, and he’s on our side. Plus, he’s a TMZ darling!” But, to be fair, even Stark knows this benevolent despotism isn’t on solid footing. And so do the filmmakers, who, without insulting the fans, verbally zip past it. Their airy (airless?) banter lets even children know how far Iron Man lives from our world.

I’ve given Iron Man 2 more words than it requires; the scriptwriter has already chocked it full enough, leaving nothing left to pun-itrate. But the distinction between Favreau and Theroux’s campy camp and the “Why so serious?” (really, why?) legation is worth making. This is nothing more than a dopey, enjoyable spectacle, but its hedonistic wit and unpretentious sense of fun make iron feel lighter than air. My concern is that the franchise’s freshness will quickly turn to rot, and that Iron Man’s many progeny—already slated for production—will be stillborn before they reach theaters. Not that the studios heed my concerns: My appetite for superheroics is so whet that it’s soaked up. But legions of dedicated fanboys remain as slakeless as supervillains.

It’s the sort of synthesis that older generations would, in vain, adjust their hearing aides to comprehend: a neorealist thriller. The Italian neorealists who exposed the bombed-out penury of their native land generally told simple stories with a skeleton cast of nonprofessional actors. Plot-wise, The Bicycle Thief (1948) is nothing more than a poor old bloke trying to get his bike back and ending up as much the titular villain as the man who initially wronged him. Without explicitly falling into any partisan-political traps, Thief took society to task; a complex mess necessitates a complex solution. This seems to be the point of view of Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani, who wrote and directed Ajami—and cast screen-virgin thespians, to boot. With one exception—by my calculations—all of the crimes perpetrated here result from flukes; people are driven to crime by misunderstandings—by debts that, in a just world, they wouldn’t have incurred. Nineteen-year-old Omar (Shahir Kabaha) must protect his family from mafiosi that his uncle’s itchy trigger finger has offended; the Bedouin gangsters, in retaliation, whack a 15-year-old they’ve mistaken for Omar. (Omar dodges a few bullet-holes here, but the movie suffers a self-inflicted wound: We see little of how the victim’s family reacts, nor any apologia issued to them by Omar’s.) Another of the film’s protagonists—there are three of ’em—is the 16-year-old Malek (Ibrahim Frege); he’s resorted to crime because he needs to support his ailing mother. The backlash from one of the film’s two Romeo and Juliet-styled, religiously incompatible romances also helps to force Malek’s reluctant, tremulous hand.

Their liberal casuistry simplifies issues a bit, but Copti and Shani’s perspective is not intellectually disrespectable. It’s probably closer to the truth than any other criminological catchall; and it certainly goes down more smoothly than the tripe distinction between good and evil that’s been an interminable staple of the Hollywood diet—a shoot-’em-up lineage that was upheld by John Wayne and his spur-wearing ilk, and has recently clogged the arty arteries of No Country for Old Men and The Dark Knight. But the makers of Ajami have taken their sentiments, jammed them into a blender with a couple dozen plots and an enormous, multilingual cast, and then flung globs of their pâté in every direction. Their storytelling has the pacing and stability of a food fight. The framework certainly isn’t random; the plot goop eventually congeals. But it takes well over an hour to get one’s bearings, and the collation would have been a whole lot fresher if the blender had simply been omitted, and the story served up straight. Everything is chopped up just so that one can see the filmmakers’ prowess in piecing it back together; they’re like chefs who want you to admire the cooking more than the meal.

As a friend of mine griped, Ajami ticks by in Inglourious Basterds time. It’s divided into chapters, but even they are not chronologically ordered. The characters eventually Crash into one another, but not before the viewer is caught in a morass of people and subplots; and since Copti and Shani keep the audience persistently on edge, the tone is often too monotonous to parse out the essentials. By the ending credits, I “got” most of it—some things, like the details concerning a pocket watch, were a little too smudged in there or convenient for me to buy—but I would have rather spent my mental efforts observing and comprehending the flavor of life in this country. (Ajami certainly isn’t propaganda for Israel’s tourism industry.) The characters are too harried to learn much about, and some of them are a little too easily innocent. Omar’s little brother narrates the tale; his function is merely to drain our sympathies. (This little artist is so sensitive he’s clairvoyant.) He relates his life in comic-book frames—maybe that helps to explain the hyperbolic narrative. Commercial jigsaw structures work for movies like Inglourious Basterds and Shutter Island because those films were, respectively, a trifle and an analogue for psychosis. (The former may have been a symptom of psychosis.) In Ajami, the puzzling construction holds our attention for the sake of holding our attention; it helps to sell the thesis, I guess, but it doesn’t correlate with the characters’ experiences. They are not confused; they have clear motives; they know what’s up. Why must we be stuck taking notes? The movie was almost certainly conceived for international distribution, but the filmmakers’ style makes non-Israelis feel like tourists whose G.P.S. devices have failed them. We’re in a sketchy neighborhood, and without a map—too busy fretting over the best way out to concern ourselves with the plight of the locals.

The Wolfman isn’t woefully incompetent or wake-up-drooling awful. I felt a tad impatient, yet never quite bored; Joe Johnston directs at a silver bullet’s pace. The lack of imagination, however, drowsed rather than roused me. This movie makes Daybreakers seem as innovative as Citizen Kane. I wasn’t expecting Young Frankenstein—or even Shaun of the Dead. But is Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula too much to ask for?

Ninjas were a joke well before Kill Bill karate-chopped open the floodgates for them; but this movie’s scriptwriters (Matthew Sand and J. Michael Straczynski) and the director (James McTeigue) don’t appear to be laughing. Ninja Assassin has more squishy heart metaphors than a third-grader’s valentine, and yet the whole brutal affair is gorier than the dumpster behind a slaughterhouse. Who is the target audience? Bleeding-hearts who like to watch hearts bleed? So much of one’s enjoyment is had in quipping at the blockheaded movie’s expense that you almost feel guilty watching this guilty pleasure. (In Sorority Row, you feel in on the joke; here, the movie is the butt.) Misplaced snark palls on me fast, but if a pure-at-heart ninja yarn doesn’t invite sarcasm, I don’t know what does. McTeigue’s naïveté worked for V for Vendetta—which, like this film, the Wachowski brothers produced—but that was an old-timey swashbuckler: idealized anarchism. Between the bubble-brained acting, the founts of blood and treacle, and the whipping of children’s feet at a Hogwarts for magic masochists, Ninja Assassin is anarchy of a different kind.

But, as Susan Sontag pointed out, “Camp is always naïve. Camp which knows itself to be Camp (‘camping’) is usually less satisfying.” McTeigue may be the mainstream cinema’s last innocent; I haven’t seen this much Camp since I was a Boy Scout. But his work is satisfying. Though it may assassinate a few brain cells as collateral, Ninja Assassin is also an excellent killer of time; and in its own unpretentious way, it respects its audience—or at least that solitary man in front of me, who cheered the movie on the whole way through.

In District 9, Blomkamp has stretched those six minutes into nearly two hours, but he has nothing more to say; like a carton of milk left out for too long, the core idea sours and goes rotten. I’m not sure if the implicit change in attitudes was a conscious choice on Blomkamp’s part, but Alive in Joburg, like the documentaries, looks as if it was meant to raise awareness and engender protest; District 9 is like an unremitting demonstration of how horrible humans are. The government’s role in the short is co-opted by a private corporation in the feature; and, in order to give us a linear plot, we are shown how the company turns against one of its own when an employee, Wikus (Sharlto Copley), begins to mutate into one of the aliens. He bugs out, literally and figuratively. But this metamorphosis is straight-faced Kafkaesque. The company, supervised by the employee’s father-in-law (Louis Minaar), wants to dissect Wikus so that they may better understand and market the advanced alien weaponry—which will make them a killing (again, literally and figuratively). But Wikus escapes, and his only chance of survival lies in cooperating with aliens whom he earlier scoffed at.

Blomkamp has a background in special effects, and was slated to direct the Halo movie before it was shelved; working with the same producer, Peter Jackson, he made this instead. The problem with District 9 is that Blomkamp directs as if he were still adapting a video game. Working with a budget that seems frugal compared to Hollywood’s follies, and, I presume, limited interference from Jackson, Blomkamp’s intelligence comes through; but his direction is monotonous and oppressive. He doesn’t sustain the documentary conceit for long, but his camerawork and cutting remain as hysterical as his hero; there’s not a moment of humor, or levity of any kind—not even a breather. Some action flicks, and arty exploitation movies like Inglourious Basterds, leer too long at the hick pornography of violence. District 9 is the opposite—its violence is like a slave master’s whip, and we’re flogged into recognizing injustices that you’d have to have Oedipus eyes to miss. Wikus doesn’t see the error of his ways until very late in the game, and what with the lack of any likable or caring or even interesting characters (of the human persuasion, at least), the anti-corporate message becomes singleminded in its pessimism. It’s as if Blomkamp were saying that institutionalized apartheid is fated to go on forever, and if some higher beings from elsewhere in the universe were to come and penalize us for our barbarism, we’d deserve it.

To be fair, I don’t think that that was necessarily Blomkamp’s intention. This is his freshman go at feature-film direction, and his shortcomings may well be ironed out in the future—District 9 is considered the sleeper hit of the summer, so his career is open-ended. The visual effects are impressive; the fight scenes are visceral (literally—ruddy viscera constantly splatters the camera lens); and the C.G. aliens are cleverly designed—they look like hermit crabs deprived of their shells. But that couldn’t account entirely for the film’s success, could it? It’s reassuring when a picture comes out of left field and enjoys mainstream popularity, particularly if it has an I.Q. that makes the Transformer robots look like wheelbarrows. Outside of the movie world, we still live in a time when the President is castigated if he intimates that America has so much as made a booboo in its two-and-a-third centuries of worldly affairs. Though this movie is set in South Africa, the problem of institutionalized racism is universal and ongoing, and needs to be addressed—no matter how “post-racial” we flatter ourselves for being. The movie is profusely, masochistically apologetic, but its irrevocably lost faith in humanity makes us shoulder responsibilities that we’re not entirely culpable for. It seems we’re all given a bum rap for a few rotten eggs, and those eggs are impossible to crack, so there’s no point in trying. When I pined that The Hurt Locker wasn’t given the multiplex run that popcorny thrillers get, I was told it was because that movie was depressing. Well, I saw District 9 at my local shopping mall, and it makes The Hurt Locker look like High School Musical.

On a positive note, the classical marriage between sci-fi epics and old-school notions of social consciousness seems to have endured its trial separation. Thank God we’re no longer the wayward children of that broken home: The genre had become so commercially debased that even square Star Trek was lobotomized. But movies of the past that were comparable to District 9—like, say, Planet of the Apes—knew there was a silly side to Charlton Heston defending his manhood against coiffed simian scientists. They gave audiences a helping of derring-do with à la carte admonishments that Armageddon may be nigh—if we don’t change our ways, that is. District 9 is basically a flying-saucer flick from the ’50s made over in a modern style. The filmmakers have given us socially conscious science fiction with unabashed sincerity, and yet their technique seems robbed of its innocence. Watching their efforts is like being clobbered into the Twilight Zone.

There’s a sense of inevitability that permeates The Hurt Locker, and though it affects us on a deeper level than most procedurals do by virtue of both skill and discretion, the film stays true to that limited form. I don’t wish to be unfair; the way the filmmakers follow the procedural lockstep is integral to their conception, and part of the movie’s power stems from the singular, sensuous way they underplay the suspense scenes—poeticizing the horrors that are, for these characters, routine. The flesh is thick, and there’s a heart beating beneath it, but we can still detect that skeleton with clichés in its marrow: the trailer-park individualist who gets the job done but puts others at risk in the process; the by-the-book black soldier whose respect the lone wolf earns; and the younger, more impressionable lad who comes to idolize the loner. There’s familiarity in all this, as well as in the lone wolf’s relationship with a young local boy (Christopher Sayegh)—an Iraqi Shia LaBoeuf who, in a nice touch, endears himself to Americans by way of curse words. (It sounds as if Lil Wayne was his English teacher.)

But the director, Kathryn Bigelow, is a pro in both the banal sense and the positive one; she knows the ropes, but knows how to tug them, too. Her focus is narrow and her methods are austere, but her targets are well embodied, and pregnant with echoes of their grander context. It’s as if she made a war film in the style of The Wrestler. She stages combat effectively, appositely—the complexity of her images is almost subliminal. Rich in its invocation of atmosphere, The Hurt Locker coats the sun-baked sands of arid Iraq with a cool iridescent gel. It’s not the kind of star-glamour antifreeze required for a bland, exploitive movie like The Kingdom (2007)—a lemon; it’s more like the psychological analgesics that professional soldiers mask their anxieties with. We aren’t given babes in the woods like Charlie Sheen in Platoon; unformed baby-men whose innocence is despoiled by war are a dramatic shortcut, as easy to sympathize with as puppies under Jack the Ripper’s knife. Bigelow lets us under her guarded soldiers’ skins with a vision that’s neither tawdry nor ironic.

These troopers constitute a bomb squad in its final weeks of deployment in Baghdad: cocksure SSgt. James (Jeremy Renner), prim Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackey), and sensitive Sgt. Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). James is something of a legend for having disarmed 800-something I.E.D.s in his day, and approaches each new one with an aloofness that drives his teammates batty. This is pure procedural—vindicating the competent badass (and we’re cued in immediately that he’s a badass because he smokes cigarettes) who doesn’t follow the rules but gets the job done is old-bag Hollywood heroism. But the more we see James in action, the more his strut seems abreast of a fresher truth; back on the home front, he’s either a father or some woman’s baby-daddy—his ex-wife still lives with him, so he’s not sure. He’s graceful under pressure, and in the heat of combat, he’s coolly maternal to his men; yet, as Eldridge tells him, he’s one hell of a leader, but lackluster as a people person. He needs the specter of death barking up his leg like a rabid dog; without it, he can’t be all that he can be. His ravenous addiction to war is the tragedy of war.

One can imagine that Mark Boal’s script is delicately sparse: an outline using Post-It-note character summaries for guidance. I don’t mean this derogatorily. The characters don’t fully explain themselves or their biographies in much detail, but that doesn’t make them seem incomplete or phony or untrue to the types of people they represent; it’s a gracious form of ambiguity on Boal’s part—gracious to us and the actors. Renner, of course, is the star—but, unlike Jamie Foxx in The Kingdom, Renner makes his baditude seem mildewy, a defense against his battered sensitivity, which seems native to that plucky, plaintive face. I remember that face from The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, though he was subordinated there by Brad Pitt, Sam Rockwell, and Casey Affleck; but the chilly serial killer he played in Dahmer, which I once caught as a midnight snack on IFC, seems more closely related to his bomb tech here. Renner’s instinct leads him to introversion, which is perfect for SSgt. James; like Boal’s script, James’s character needs not be altogether there on the screen, but Renner isn’t like Christian Bale’s pilot in Rescue Dawn, who really wasn’t there at all. Renner’s self-seclusion isn’t appropriate for most leading-man parts I can think of, but he sends the stock role that James resembles into a tailspin. Mackey and Geraghty haven’t that mobility to work with in their characters, but perform very well; Mackey pulls off his Oscar-baiting breakdown (and I hope they take the bait), and Geraghty is meek without ever being weak—or annoying. In fact, he’s rather touching.

In a way, Bigelow and her team are more courageous than those who wear blinders in decrying the War in Iraq exclusively, sound as their premises might be. The makers of The Hurt Locker challenge the notion of war itself—be it in the form of bombs over Baghdad or muskets in Manassas (bayonets through Bull Run, if yer a Yank)—because of the toll it can take on soldiers. Lest one objects to pure pacifism, rest assured that the picture refuses to impose any doctrines on its audience or dog it with any dogma. A fundamental ambiguity exists. Like any hardcore addict whose value system is overridden by preternatural longings, James is weakened as a human being. His longing for adrenaline (and maybe something else) puts his life and those of others at risk even when in the service of saving lives; it’s cost one innocent his legs and one son his father—what next? In practice, the military needs techs like James, but, in theory, should it? Without answering directly, the film keeps you haunted by the question because of its adroit action sequences; Bigelow stimulates the lesser angels of our nature aesthetically rather than frivolously. (The relationship between the violence in The Hurt Locker and that in Inglourious Basterds is that of erotic poetry and exotic porn—porn directed by a self-aggrandizing poet manqué.)

The Hurt Locker merely demonstrates that the surest way for a film to be anti-violence is for it to present dynamic human figures on both sides of a conflict that one can relate to or care for to that minimal degree that one is pained to see them harmed. (One might protest that the Iraqi insurgents seem like boogeymen scheming at a distance, but are the Americans’ overarching objectives made any clearer?) What makes The Hurt Locker unique is that it chronicles its hero’s transformation into a masochist. (That arc occurs in The Deer Hunter, too, but in a more sensational, less plausible way.) We are made to understand his suffering and more, and because of that, the film encroaches the domain of art. The sort of of complex feelings that the movie inspires are lessons that will be relevant long after the sands have settled in Iraq.

One final thought. It is not only as a cinephile, but as one who—perhaps with undue naïveté—assigns more credit to the good taste of the mass audience than the conglomerates do, that it behooves me that a procedural combat picture made with intelligence, vision and broad appeal (broader than Apocalypse Now if narrower than Three Kings) should deserve to play on a fraction of the screens that a blockbuster like G.I. Joe does. It’s David and Goliath to a literal extreme. I haven’t seen G.I. Joe, and may be mistaken in my prejudice, but my educated guess is that it’s a big, cretinous slugger written as much by focus groups and advertisers (and military lobbyists) as screenwriters. When a script is scrawled on sheets of thousand-dollar bills, those involved in its production need assurances that their venture can pay for itself—not to mention the upkeep of the producers’ six swimming pools.

On the weekend of August 30th, The Hurt Locker played on 306 screens, as opposed to G.I. Joe’s 3,467. Despite the 10-nominee dilution, The Hurt Locker may have enough buzz to fan out come Oscar time, but is it really fair that a movie should play on one-tenth of the screens another does just because it cost less than one-tenth of the other to make? Sure, The Hurt Locker isn’t based on toys that sold jingoism and made dapper dates for Barbie dolls, but is it fiscal conservatism to slap in the face the fiscally conservative? I’m too skeptical to believe that talent has any bearing on such judgments. The state of capitalism has gotten dreary in recent months, but you needn’t be a comrade to know that “liberal” Hollywood’s more conservative than ever.

Tarantino’s Nazis surely get their due—either from the “Inglourious Basterds,” a brutal brigade of Jewish-American soldiers led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt—giving a funny, good-trouper performance), or Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a French Jew orphaned by the S.S. I’m sure Tarantino’s admirers, and young Jews like the Seth Rogen character who liked Munich because it showed the Chosen People finally kicking some ass, will approve of Inglourious Basterds’s dehumanization of Nazis. But wouldn’t they be offended that, for the eponymous squad of vengeful Semites, Tarantino has assembled a pitiful bunch that, save for the “Bear Jew” (Eli Roth), looks shlubby and undifferentiated? To top that off, the director has faithfully followed old-Hollywood convention by casting a glamourous star as their commanding officer: a Gentile good ol’ boy with better looks, better lines, and much more chutzpah than his men—men who fade into the background whenever he’s onscreen.

The Nazis are dehumanized, but so is everyone else: Tarantino converts his characters into little toy stereotypes, who, when wound up, amble down the quickest path toward bloodshed. The writer-director has an undeniable ear for dialogue, and he can make his characters sound like people—witty, ingratiating people, at that. But he betrays their human characteristics if it provides him an excuse to stage a clever set piece. Why else would Dreyfus (who looks like Uma Thurman) begin as a battered, sympathetic, movie-loving peasant girl, and end up glorified as a cold-hearted mass murderer with a shallow fixation on femme fatale glamour? Oh, that’s right. So Tarantino can squeeze in more movie references and squeeze out more blood. And the stiff-upper-lip Britisher (Michael Fassbender) who joins the Basterds, and reeks of suavity and finesse and noblesse oblige, is made a former film critic. Is the director trying to flatter me into giving him a good review? Nah. He’s probably just fanning the flames of his movie-trivia-drenched ego—massaging his fantasy self. Only a few minor characters—like the German father of a newborn—seem to have anything going on beneath a veneer of cool.

The true extent of Nazi horror is only touched on once, in the first scene of the movie. Colonel Hans Landa (the electrically chilling Austrian actor Christoph Waltz), the S.S.’s infamous “Jew Hunter,” manipulates a French farmer into admitting that he’s harboring “enemies of the state” beneath his floorboards. In the minutes that slowly tick away before the hidden Dreyfus family succumbs to German bullets, the scene is brilliantly written, directed, and acted. Waltz is so ingratiating, and yet you see glints of genuine evil in Landa’s cold eyes and back-slapping smooth talk. His is the evil of opportunism—you buy his rotten humanity, and shudder at the incongruity between his placid Aryan smile and the antisemitic propaganda he invokes, which you know he’s too smart for. Landa thinks his vision is clear because he sees through prejudices, which is why he, a “German hawk,” can think like a “Jewish rat.” But the analogy Tarantino feeds him is too clever; the writer outsmarts himself with his own fancy-pants epigrams. He does not follow through on what could be revealing screenwriting. Instead, he runs for cover as soon as the bullets fly, and shits on his own scene with a misplaced parody of spaghetti-Western music, capped off with a misplaced parody of The Searchers (1956) as Shosanna bolts out the door. The Searchers is famous for its maybe-he’s-racist-maybe-he’s-not portrayal of a Civil War veteran (John Wayne) who hunts down the Comanches that kidnapped his niece. Thematically, it’s relevant—but is an American director, who’s shallowly reducing World War II to Tom and the Jerries, really trying to draw a parallel between the Master Race and Manifest Destiny? He teases us with Pitt’s part-Indian Yankee called “Apache,” whose trademark is to scalp his Nazi son-bitch victims, but this is a clear case of mixing metaphors. A multifaceted artist could foreseeably make the comparison and have it be enlightening; Tarantino uses “deep” thoughts as mere decorations—flimsy trinkets that “prove” his own cleverness. They’re as hollow as Landa’s cold-hearted pleasantries.

Cleverness is what Inglourious Basterds is about. Cleverness and the barbaric pleasure of eye-for-an-eye revenge—the only drive that Tarantino’s painted-cardboard characters possess. Nazism is used as an aphrodisiac for this because it can be used for this; who’s going to come out and defend perpetrators of genocide? Tarantino’s art is in drawing attention to himself, but if one so much as thinks about what he says in his movies, one violates his grandiose vision—and, worse, is considered joyless or square. The director has it both ways: His keen sense of what’s politically correct (probably a defense against those who called him a racist for his movies’ liberal use of the  “‘N’ word”) makes his fictional avengers seem just; but, like Andy Warhol, Tarantino can hide behind chic, shallow amorality, as well. Then there’s that third layer: that he’s an artist, albeit a postmodern one who can pilfer as he pleases. And because he’s self-conscious, and because he does have talent and artistic flair, he can claim to be an alchemist who transforms scuzzy exploitation flicks into Oscar buzz. Hardcore fans of schlock vindicate themselves with him as its martyr. But despite having titillating artful touches that get it damn-near close, Inglourious Basterds is never elevated to art; it’s just exploitation inflated by money and self-importance.

There’s a movie-within-the-movie: a propaganda film by Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) that seems to be nothing more than shots of a Nazi sniper shooting and reverse shots of his anonymous victims histrionically dying. But when Tarantino cuts to mocking closeups of Hitler (Martin Wuttke) laughing at the carnage, you wonder, How’s that movie any different from Inglourious Basterds? We even see the fake film’s producer crying tears of self-admiration. Is Tarantino in any position to mock this?

Was I entertained by his movie? Yes. Is that all that matters? No. A good entertainer can make you pleased with facile things, even if there’s nothing in the attic and the basement is full of worms. In The Dark Knight, for example, Christopher Nolan’s smash-bang pacing kept one unaware of the suspicious subtext. Tarantino’s a smoother craftsman than Nolan, but more careless about what he says through his cartoon mouthpieces. He turns carelessness into a rancid personal style, a kind of spoiled-child anarchism. I don’t think he’s being false to his values or personal vision; he wants to give us what entertains him. But what entertains him could entertain a three-year-old. His is movie art for beginners because it’s movie art unabashedly reduced to the bare minimum needed to satisfy our collective pleasure principle. The hip ambiguities of Jackie Brown have degenerated into a wet-dreamworld that suffers from a pop-culture infestation and an antisocial hard-on for vengeance.

Since Tarantino’s self-infantilization is on par with the late Michael Jackson’s, his estimation of what gives his audience pleasure has become insultingly low. Yeah, we like sex and violence, and who hasn’t, at some point, been wronged and fantasized about a showy retaliation? It’s one thing to bring teenage daydreams—which often feed on the silly, evanescent movies that hormonally overwhelmed adolescents seek refuge in—to the screen, but Tarantino seems in denial about how silly his reveries were. Violence in movies doesn’t need to serve some social function, and I don’t think the average viewer is turning into a psychopath because of it. (S/he may be becoming desensitized to psychopathy, but that’s another story.) But violence in a great film serves a narrative purpose or follows a dramatic logic; it’s motivated. Violence for its own sake, as it is here, is masturbatory; violence motivates the plot. It’s lewd, neanderthal fun, if smartly, prettily executed—but that’s all, folks. Tarantino fails to show here that he grasps this, which makes him small potatoes. For all his talent, he seems dead-set on plateauing creatively; he resists the adult world like Peter Pan, but he’s aggressively lacking in innocence. His content is hedonistic and yet his style has become snobbish. Loving trash does not make one a vulgarian; aggrandizing trash does. Tarantino’s merger of simplifications and distortions with grandiloquent references and “personal touches” is enough to fill a garbage dump. At worst, it can make complicated issues like torture seem cut-and-dry.

Inglourious Basterds fulfills and exacerbates A.O. Scott’s dictum that movie marketing is handing arsenic lollipops to our inner children, but this film’s even guiltier than a Transformers 2 or Star Trek or G.I. Joe because we’re resigned to their big-franchise stupidity and opportunism. If there is a shred of genius in this film, it’s a wan, needling one; for me, it was like having my face shoved in dog shit and being forced to admit I enjoyed it. I didn’t react this way to Pulp Fiction, which was also a distillation of sorts. And I certainly didn’t react this way to Death Proof, which, at its best, turned reductivisim into concision; it had a dedication to craft that made it gleam like a vintage convertible, freshly waxed by its beloved owner. It even seemed fascinated by real human lives, flubby though they were. But a movie like Inglourious Basterds can make you feel corrupt—and not in the way that moralists fear. Tarantino, despite his wrongheaded pretensions, has the energy requisite to make you feel that maybe this is all you need: a plateful of horny, violent dog shit. He celebrates, in earnest, the history and potential of cinema, and it amounts to—fuckin’ up Nazis. What a transcendent downer. Said energy is hard to distinguish from glitz and self-satisfaction, but it does amount to vision—grubby and complacent though it may be. Some day, perhaps, Tarantino will move beyond self-worship—which has been incorporated into his hero worship—take a step back, and see that good movies are more than the sum of their parts. But not with this film. Who’s an inglorious bastard? Someone who has massive artistic and financial power, and wastes it.

This is the first actual Bond sequel in the 48 years of the film franchise’s existence. In Casino Royale, the promiscuous James Bond (Daniel Craig) found a special someone, Vesper (Eva Green), who turned out to be a double-agent. She defected, but her organization of ne’er-do-wells—the eponymous Quantum—tracked her down and led to her demise. In this movie, Quantum is an octopus with tentacles strong enough to put a squeeze on both governments and counterintelligence agencies. Bond’s superior, M (Judi Dench), is nearly killed by her seemingly trustworthy bodyguard; and, after he’s disposed of, MI6 can still find no paper trail linking him to Quantum. The shadowy organization’s representative, Dominic Green (Mathieu Amalric), works hand-in-hand with a guerilla South American dictatorship—which he intends to scam—but Quantum money is lining both American and British pockets, so MI6 is called off. But Bond knows better. Along with Green’s girlfriend, Camille (Olga Kurylenko)—who has her own vendetta against the dictator, General Medrano (Joaquín Cosio), who incidentally happened to kill her parents—Bond goes rogue, and takes matters into his own hands.

The “social consciousness” of the movie likely derives from Paul Haggis (Crash), who wrote Quantum (as well as Casino Royale) with Robert Wade and Neal Purvis (who also penned the pre-Craig Bond movies The World is Not Enough and Die Another Day). Haggis’ conception of the hero is anti-Bond: a super-sensitive super-spy. And, here, his conception of the world is a left-wing conspiracy theorists’: the U.S. is too stretched out, and too corrupt, to stave off an omnipresent consortium of Hawaiian-shirt-wearing power-brokers. Green is a manipulative worm (and phony environmentalist)—a shrimpy businessman who’s no match for Bond physically. He resembles Peter Lorre and Roman Polanski, and perhaps the latter evocation is not coincidental: Green’s dastardly plan (privatizing public water and causing a drought) borrows from Noah Cross’ in Polanski’s Chinatown.

With a Bond that has to buck the system and fight for justice, Quantum is an attempt at being a Dark Knight of the left—James Bond and Bruce Wayne both attended the same Ayn Rand fantasy-camp for budding übermenschen. But, thankfully, the makers of this film hadn’t the heart (or aptitude) to match their form with their content. I can’t really buy the notion of suave super-spy Bond as a “complex” character, but Craig embodies that ideal in such a perfect way that it seems credible. Unlike his predecessors, this Aryan rock-formation doesn’t look like the kind of guy who got his job because of his good looks or who his daddy knows; Craig’s is a scrappy Bond—a man who isn’t really sensitive, but neither is he aloof (though he may pretend to be). He’s worked hard to get where he is, but he suffers from an arrested development—exactly what we in the audience are seeking to experience when we go to see a Bond picture. (If we really expected “realistic” or “adult” entertainment, we’d complain that the hero was still alive after the first act.) Craig’s contribution to his character really sparkles when this troubled-teen secret agent is teamed with his school-marm superior, M. Dench’s punctilious Britishness helps make up for the loss of that testy old tech-guru Q—although nothing here makes up for the loss of his trinkets.

The director, Marc Forster, has proven that he has a knack for making offbeat material appealingly commercial in Finding Neverland, Stay and Stranger than Fiction. One can imagine purchasing his movies at Starbucks. He seems to imbue his films with dedication—a strength that glosses over weaknesses like shaky casting and commonplace resolutions. Here, he glides over much of the “important” material; he stages a dramatic scene for the death of one character, and, in the next, chucks the bloke into a dumpster. And the putative importance of Bond’s need for vengeance is, well, also tossed in a dumpster. (The climatic scene of that subplot is wholly without the necessary buildup, but nobody really cares. Quantum’s cynicism can be grating, but we don’t go to Bond movies to see heartbreaks and homilies.) The movie is short and efficiently to-the-point; the action scenes are mind-numbing (with a choppy, Bourne-again editing style), but I found the movie generally unmanipulative and relaxing, and executed with just enough style—such as the chase scene at the opera—to be satisfying.

In the end, Quantum really isn’t a very good movie, or even a very good Bond movie: Camille, the supposed Bond girl, is lovely but lackluster (and utterly lacking in the innuendo department); and Bond isn’t even allowed to sleep around for pleasure anymore—his trip to the bed (with a British agent sent to intercept him) is strictly business. (And the result of their liaison is worse for her than that of most STDs…) Bond, like Batman, doesn’t live in our drudgery-laden real world—nor should he. The pleas for pathos don’t save this messy picture, but the movie’s dumb liveliness saves us from them.