Seldom have I ever been moved by a film as I was by Joyeux Noel, one of this year’s nominees for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. (It certainly deserved to win more than the South African film that did take the prize, Tsotsi, which is scheduled to open here next week.)

You can’t not love Nick Naylor. Just like the Mafiosi of The Sopranos and Goodfellas and The Godfather, we know that he’s the bad guy, the scum of the earth, the scum that scum wipe off the bottom of their shoes. If there isn’t a law against doing what he does, there should be. But he does it so well, with such wit and grace, that you can’t help but marvel at his skills and enjoy watching them exercised.

On the morning of the day I watched Tom Tanno’s documentary about the threat of global warming, The Great Warming, I read George Will’s newspaper column on the same subject. Will, the Washington Post’s high-church conservative, dismissed widespread concern about the issue as largely caused by “journalism calculated to produce it.” Liberal mediocratic gaming of the topic, in other words.

Near the beginning of Lucky Number Slevin, international assassin Goodkat (Bruce Willis) describes a criminal working method he calls the “Kansas City shuffle.” It works on this simple premise: Everybody looks right, you look left.