Last weekend, readers of the New York Times sports section might have noticed an ad for Redbelt, David Mamet’s new movie. This isn’t the first time movie marketing has involved hawking a movie to sports fans, but it’s surely a first for famous playwright-turned-filmmaker Mamet.

At a time when the environmentally and economically suicidal consequences of America’s obsession with automobiles are becoming clear even to the most stubborn freemarketers, with the cost of gasoline on a seemingly unstoppable rise and the near-inevitability of millions of more cars on the roads of India and China promising to make the situation much, much worse—just as it seems that Americans are finally starting to get it through their collective heads that civilization cannot continue on this way—is this really the time for a blockbuster movie that glorifies cars?

People eat at chain fast-food restaurants because they know exactly what they’re going to get: A cheeseburger from a McDonalds at the Salt Lake City airport tastes exactly like the one from the McDonalds on Ridge Road in Lackawanna and exactly like the one from the McDonalds on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. That’s what kind of a movie What Happens in Vegas is.

Ever since The Crying Game, I’ve been faced with the occasional problem of writing adequately about a film which contains an element of surprise. That is to say, an unexpected element of surprise, as opposed to the oxymoronically expected surprises you get in most horror films.

In the four years since Super Size Me, his investigation into America’s poor nutritional options hooked on his stunt of eating nothing but McDonalds food for a month, was an Oscar-nominated hit, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock has put his newfound fame into producing documentaries for television. Now he’s back on the big screen with a movie that asks a different question about the world in which we are raising our children.

Actors like Jenkins don’t always graduate to starring roles, either because they don’t get the break or because they just aren’t suited to carrying a film. He has his first starring role in The Visitor, but in a way it’s still a supporting part. It’s certainly a character you can’t imagine being played by a “star.”

Kids do love their cartoons. And given that “kid” these days encompasses the majority of that all-important 18-to-24-year-old demographic, it makes sense to offer animation in a story that you suspect young people wouldn’t otherwise bother with.

A quarter of a century ago most audiences may have gone to see Adrian Lyn’s Flashdance for its silly, crudely inspirational story of a female welder in Pittsburgh who aspires to become a ballerina, or for Giorgio Moroder’s driving pop score, but some young, inner-city males in New York were much more interested in its breakdancing scenes, the first appearance of this hip-hop art form in a popular movie.

Paranoid Park is substantially more coherent, emotionally and narratively, than Elephant, probably because it’s grounded in a young adult novel of the same title by Blake Nelson, which it follows in broad outline.

When Bill looks in the mirror, he doesn’t much care for what he sees: waxy skin, a gut that shows his addiction to candy bars, and a haircut that could only be improved were he to run a lawnmower through it (or maybe he already did).

The Palestinian Gaza Strip has scarcely been out of the news over the last several years, especially since the radical organization Hamas ousted the Fatah-dominated Palestinian government from this territory last summer.

Don’t look now, but Judd Apatow is taking over. In the 12-month period ending this summer, he will have been a force behind six feature films, all of them hits or likely to be. If you could buy stock in the guy, he’d be the best investment around.

Michael Radford’s Flawless is certainly a heist movie, but he and his collaborators also have at least a couple of other things on their minds. There’s nothing “pure” about their movie.

In a couple of scenes in Noam Murro’s Smart People, Dennis Quaid’s face becomes a malleable mask of sickly, embarrassed insincerity and passive-resistant condescension. It’s a lot to convey in one brief take, but Quaid manages it.

“I’m gonna find my mom before she forgets about me,” says nine-year-old Carlitos (Adrian Alonso) to his best friend. It’s been four years since his mother left Mexico to find work in Los Angeles, promising to bring him over as soon as she saves up enough money.

Set in the kind of snowy, bleak small town that provides settings for the novels of Richard Russo, Snow Angels often feels like it is gently but determinedly struggling to be less grim than it is.

In the interests of objectivity, I like to approach a new movie as a tabula rasa, knowing as little about it as possible. Sometimes this can be a mistake. Take the example of Street Kings, which like many movies these days has no opening credits.

Near the climactic sequence in War/Dance, there are a couple of brief shots of a small boy playing a crude, wooden xylophone amid a group of young performers. His face is a virtual study in rapturous concentration. It seems to be expressing nothing less than joy.

Starting out as a film buff in my teens in India, I remember buying a book on the history of the Academy Awards and committing it to memory. I had never been to America but Hollywood made me want to move there.

Here’s a complaint you will probably never again hear me level at a movie: The problem with Leatherheads is that there isn’t nearly enough football in it.

It’s funny, watching Martin Scorsese fussing over things like set lists. The great director isn’t new to concert movies, having made one of the best ones ever in The Last Waltz, which documented the final concert by The Band at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco in 1976.

California is a big state, big enough that it can’t all be a land of permanent sunshine and palm trees and shirtsleeve temperatures. Think of the opposite of all that and you’ll have the part of California where Sleepwalking is set.

“I’m not fat, I’m unfit,” complains rent-a-cop Dennis (Simon Pegg) to a transvestite shoplifter making him run laps around a London shop district.

If you couldn’t get into the Oceans Eleven movies because of all the old guys in the cast (“Brad Pitt? Yeah, maybe if I’m taking my mom!”), you are the target audience for 21, a movie that has as much impact on the screen as its title does on the page.

You can’t help but have noticed that there have been no small number of films about the war in the past year or two. They are all well intended and do their best to demonstrate either generally that war is an awfully thing or specifically that the current one in Iraq has been atrociously bungled from day one.

The opening credits sequence can do so much to establish the tone of the film we are about to see, which may be why so many filmmakers no longer like to use them: I suppose they disdain having to provide a précis of work that plans to take its time leading us in different directions.

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