In Il Divo, Paolo Sorrentino treats former Italian premier Giulio Andreotti (Toni Servillo) as not only the exemplar of Italy’s extravagantly corrupt, intensely conspiratorial, geographically riven and Mafia-infiltrated political system, but also as its human epicenter. He’s a political don, the system’s prime mover. This may strike some as a bit much, but Sorrentino’s flamboyantly expressionistic film flaunts its muchness. It proceeds with a dark snarkiness to surround this purported capo di capi with a landscape of assassinations and suicides of politico-commercial power brokers, operatives, journalists, and magistrates.

If ever an actor needed to tell his agent to find him a good comedy script, it’s Christian Bale. In the last decade, he has played unvaryingly morose, self-serious characters ranging from American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman to the new Batman, from the haunted insomniac in The Machinist to the Viet Cong prisoner in Rescue Dawn. The closest thing to a lighthearted role he’s played was as Jesus in a 1999 TV movie. That he’s gone to the well once too often is one of the problems with Terminator Salvation (what, we don’t need colons anymore?), in which he plays a dreary John Connor that audiences are going to have trouble caring much about.