Some quick hits and then I have to rest up.

"Genova" is yet another Michael Winterbottom film featuring yet another stylistic turnabout -- the director who gave us "24 Hour Party People," "9 Songs," "Tristram Shandy," "In This World," "A Mighty Heart," and "The Road to Guantanamo" now delivers an emotionally loaded domestic suspense story about an American family fraying at the seams in Genoa. After mom Hope Davis dies in a car crash in the opening scene, surviving daughters Willa Holland and Perla Haney-Jardine relocate to the Italian city with dad (Colin Firth, above, with Holland)) and try to put the pieces of their lives back together. Easier said than done: the guilt-ridden younger daughter is seeing ghosts, her sister is discovering sex with cute Italian boys, and Firth is fending off the advances of lonelyhearts colleague Catherine Keener. On top of this is a tone of dread that never fully settles; after shaking us up with that opening scene, Winterbottom keeps us waiting for the other shoe to drop. There's a definite "Don't Look Now" vibe to the movie -- I kept waiting for the dwarf in the raincoat to pop out of an alley with a knife -- but the monsters in "Genova" are all in the head. It's an interesting, not entirely pleasant experience (and as the father of two daughters roughly the same age as the girls here, some of this was truly difficult for me to watch), but Winterbottom never figures out how to bring the movie to a proper and organic close. He's more interested in the journey than the destination. Good for him, but unfortunately in this case, only in theory.

"The Duchess" is about the 18th century Duchess of Devonshire Georgiana Spencer, who suffered the same massive public popularity and private marital discord as her descendent Lady Diana Spencer: Both women had cold fish husbands with big titles and a mistress, lived with a national preoccupation with male heirs, possessed a natural and influential sense of style, and had a yearning to do good works. "Duchess" works that parallel as best it can without ever leaving its perfectly reproduced period topiary behind. Keira Knightley plays Georgiana as a smart, vibrant woman ground down by her society's inability to think outside the gender box -- it's a very good performance -- and Ralph Fiennes gathers brutishness about himself as the Duke. It's gorgeous to look at, well-done all around, and I enjoyed it without ever piercing its exquisite veneer. For all the historical underpinnings, the movie feels like a high-40s Hollywood women's pic in corsets -- not a bad thing but also not, I think, what this movie was shooting for.

"Flame and Citron" is another of those WWII resistance dramas they do so well in Europe, this one a true story about a pair of Danish anti-Nazi assassins whose nicknames make up the title. The red-haired Thure Lindhardt (above, right) plays gunman Flame while Danish superstar Mads Mikkelsen (the uber-villain in "Casino Royale") plays his tormented friend and co-conspirator Citron. Rather than a triumphal tragedy of anti-Fascist martyrs, director Ole Christian Madsen daringly takes a psychological approach, showing how life lived underground eventually removes all moral and rational reference points. The film begins in mist and ends with its characters lost in a fog of other people's motives, and, if anything, it's too sprawling. Plot developments are repeated, revelations and incriminations go back and forth and back again, and the dreaded movie drift kicks in. Just because "Flame" is about entropy doesn't mean it has to play entropically. (Ironically, Flame and Citron are Danish state heroes today.)

Advance buzz on "Slumdog Millionaire" is that it's Danny Boyle's best movie since "Trainspotting." Advance buzz is right on the money. Granted, I was running on four hours sleep when I saw it this morning at 9 a.m, but I wasn't alone in my exhiliration as the film came to a close: an auditorium full of cranky, hard-to-please press and industry types burst into ecstatic applause. This epic fable in a harshly realistic setting is easily one of the best movies I've seen all year, a story of a Mumbai slum kid (Dev Patel, above left) poised to win 20 million rupees on India's version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" Is he a cheat? Is he a genius? Is it written? That's what the movie explores as it cuts back and forth from young Jamal's brutal childhood in the worst sinkholes of poverty and his slow progress on the gameshow, paralleling modern India's rise to economic power as it goes.

Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle film the tale in brilliant colors, and Chris Dickens' editing moves the two-hour movie along like a bullet train-- it's a film to lose yourself in while occasionally losing your breath. "Slumdog Millionaire" feels like Dickens, it feels like reality TV, it feels like the old-fashioned, big-hearted Hollywood drama that Hollywood doesn't know how to make anymore. People loved the film at Telluride and they seem to love it here, so I guess we should expect the backlash to begin any moment. I don't care -- this one swept me up in a way few movies do. It gets a release in the states on November 28 and deserves to bust out of the arthouse in search of the biggest word-of-mouth audience it can find.

You want to know what a star-studded film festival premiere looks like up close? Here's some video. It's not all that pretty.

Below, Clare Danes signs autographs for vaguely disturbing fans outside the "Me and Orson Welles" screening. Look at that expression: This is a woman punching the clock.

Here's a bank of about 200 young women getting a glimpse of Zac Efron and simultaneously ululating and ovulating.

On a less frivolous note, director Richard Linklater talks about how he got the nerve to make a movie about one of the greatest moviemakers who ever lived.

And, just to put that into context, here's Efron's take on the same subject.

And finally, so you understand the real glamor that is covering an international film festival, here's the cast and crew of "Burn After Reading" as seen from the nosebleed seats.

What a long, weird day it's been. At 10 a.m., I started off with a little sit-down with Spike Lee, who'd just arrived in town from New York to promote his WWII movie, "Miracle at St. Anna." Bleary-eyed as only a man who got up at 3 a.m. can be, he still cogently discussed why he wanted to make a film about the all-black 92nd infantry (aka "the Buffalo Soldiers"), and why he doesn't really have it in for Clint Eastwood. The conversation will appear in the Globe when the film gets released later this month, but for now here's some video of Spike the New York Knicks fan bowing down before the might that is Beantown.

In a nice change of festival pace, all the movies I've seen today have been comedies of one stripe or another: Romantic, antic, nostalgic, or just plain bizarre. The latter would be "JCVD," which may in fact be the first ever meta-martial arts action movie -- think "Fists of Fury" as remixed by Charlie Kaufman. The title initials stand for Jean-Claude Van Damme (in photo up top), who stars as an over-the-hill action-movie star named Jean-Claude Van Damme. Wait, it gets better: Weary from a prolonged child custody battle and burned out from too many straight-to-video sequels, the Muscles from Brussels returns to his native Belgium, walks into a bank, and is immediately taken hostage during an in-progress robbery.

Nothing turns out the way we expect: The police think the movie star is the robber, the robbers want his autograph, Jean-Claude's aged parents show up to talk him down, and in one astonishing scene, the actor ascends to the heavens to address the audience in a long, teary monologue about the metaphysical perils of fame. Directed with distinct Godardian overtones by Mabrouk el Machri, "JCVD" is one of the damndest things I've ever seen, and it forces you to consider Van Damme, who plays along brilliantly, in a whole new light. Let's see Steven Seagal top this.

"Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist" is another of those MP3 Generation movies that lives or dies by its soundtrack, but at least it's upfront about it. Starring Michael Cera and the lovely and amazing Kat Dennings as two Jersey teens who slowly fall in lurve over the course of a long Manhattan night, it's a lollipop of a movie: brittle on the outside with a soft chewy center. Director Peter Sollett made the low-budget street scene "Raising Victor Vargas" a few years back, and this is a confident step forward into the mainstream: a John Hughes film crossed with "Before Sunrise" with a shot of "Juno" on the side. The movie's good enough that I wanted it to be perfect, even if the energy flags at points and it never does take that leap into something bigger the best puppy-love romances (like "Say Anything") manage to do.

My high hopes for the new Richard Linklater movie, "Me and Orson Welles," were only partly met. Set in 1937, it's about another Jersey boy in Manhattan, this one a stagestruck high schooler who gets a bit part in the soon-to-be-legendary Mercury Theatre production of "Julius Caesar," directed by and starring Orson Welles. The Great Man is played by Christian McKay (who previously played Welles in a one-man stage show) as an immensely gifted baby tyrant, but the catch is that the kid is played by Zac Efron of "High School Musical" fame. He's not bad, just far out of his league, and Linklater himself seems a little cowed by the deluxe production design and period ambience. The result is a good film that could have been great, stiff in the places it should have soared. Worth a look when it comes out, though, especially if you're a fan of the time and place.

But, oh, the crowds outside the theater screamed for Efron -- I'll post some video of that in a bit -- and, man, did they shriek their polite Canadian lungs out for Brad Pitt when he walked the red carpet for the "Burn After Reading" premiere. Everyone got cheers -- the Coen brothers, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich, Richard Jenkins -- and then, alas, we saw the movie.

It doesn't bother me that the Coens have backslid from "No Country for Old Men" into what they do well and regularly, which is bizarre, vaguely cruel human comedy. It's that this farce about various Washington DC-based blowhards running around trying to kill each other seems so puny. Clooney's in this too, and like the rest of the cast, he substitutes "funny" tics for a performance. A Coen movie can often cross the line into a smug inside joke on the part of the cast and crew, and "Burn After Reading" goes there and stays there from frame one. There are laughs, many from Malkovich as a CIA agent having a meltdown and, surprisingly, Pitt as a lamebrain personal trainer, but where the long-ago "Blood Simple" took a slice-of-crime story and made it epic, this goes the other way: It's a big farce that's never not inconsequential. So color me disappointed, at least until the Bros' next outing.

(Rinko Kikuchi in "The Brothers Bloom")

How do you know you're in Canada? When the retired college professor sitting next to you in a bar is working himself into a throbbing-vein fit over the high price of hockey tickets.

The 2008 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival begins today in a spirit of mild but nagging confusion. A lot of the fall's major releases aren't here at this, the by-now traditional starting gun of the annual Oscar race. The lingering aftereffects of last year's writers' strike means that Oliver Stone's George Bush drama "W." is still in the final tinkering stages, as is Baz Luhrmann's epic "Australia," the biopic "Milk" (starring Sean Penn as assassinated gay politician Harvey Milk), and David Fincher's "The Curious Case of Banjamin Button," in which Brad Pitt ages in reverse. Adding to the general malaise is a bum overall market this year for independent films and documentaries -- no one's buying rights and, aside from the modest success of "The Visitor," no one's watching the movies -- and the shuttering of studio specialty divisions like Warner Brothers' Picturehouse and Warner Independent. A good film festival is supposed to feel like a celebration, but this year no one's certain exactly what we're celebrating.

And yet there are 312 movies screening at Toronto, give or take, and 500 stars and filmmakers in town to promote them. The wattage is high indeed: Pitt's here with the new Coen brothers movie, "Burn After Reading" -- the word is that it's a return to antic Coen snark and something of a comedown from the Olympian heights of "No Country for Old Men" -- and the gossip columns are clucking that he may run into his ex, Jennifer Aniston, who's here promoting the romantic comedy "Management." Anne Hathaway is present to chat up "Rachel Getting Married," a hopeful return to form for director Jonathan Demme. Colin Farrell, Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Viggo Mortensen, Spike Lee are among the many others. Parties are planned and, no, you can't get into the VIP room. So it's a festival.

Toronto has always been a two-headed beast, though. One head is the autumn marketplace where Hollywood shows off its most prestigious wares (in theory at least). The other head is the actual "international festival," in which films from 64 countries come as close as most of them will ever get to the inside of an American movie theater.

"35 Rhums" ("35 Shots of Rum") is one of the latter: a slice of life from director Claire Denis ("Chocolat") that's spare, lucid, and oddly tender. The film sketches out a few months in the life of a subway motorman (the regal Alex Descas), his college-student daughter (Mati Diop), and the neighbors (Gregoire Colin, Nicole Dogue) who pine for them, and it plays for all the world like an Ozu movie set among black Parisians. (Specifically, it reminded me of Ozu's 1949 classic "Late Spring," also about the relationship between a father and daughter.) At times, "35 Rhums" is so subtle and allusive that it dissipates into thin air; a colleague wasn't sure whether the penultimate scene took place at a wedding or a funeral. (It's a wedding. I think.) But it's also strangely moving and, in its wordless way, conveys the bone-deep intimacy that comes from living with someone you love. Points to Denis, too, for taking a scene in which the four main characters dance to the Commodores' 1985 cheese landmark "Nightshift" and making it spine-tinglingly erotic.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: I followed "35 Rhums" with "The Brothers Bloom," the second film from the talented Rian Johnson, whose debut, "Brick," was one of my favorites of 2006. This, by contrast, is a full-on sophomore work, woozy with filmmaking ambition and abandon yet lacking the chops to back it up. A comedy/drama/shaggy dog story/con game, it follows two grifter brothers (Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody) as they try to fleece a rich, lonely heiress (Rachel Weisz) before going their separate ways. Sounds straightforward enough, but Johnson goes heavy on the whimsy -- I mean, heavy -- to the point where "Brothes Bloom" makes a Wes Anderson movie look like a plea for sobriety. It's a film typified by the random shot of a camel swigging whiskey from a hip flask, which actually sounds weirdly delightful and is, for 45 minutes or so. It keeps going, though, cornering you like a drunken know-it-all at a party. Still, I'm glad I saw it, I'm glad Johnson got it out of his system, and I'm really glad someone is giving work to Rinko Kikuchi, "Babel" Oscar nominee and here a silent demolition expert with headwear taste to die for. That's Kikuchi in the photo at top, in one of her more sedate moments.

Sad news for even casual film fans: Don LaFontaine, the voice of more than 5,000 trailers, died in LA of complications from a collapsed lung.

You've heard him more times than you can remember, and his self-parodying GEICO insurance ads are brilliant. Check out this profile:

It was inevitable, I suppose, that the Circle Cinemas in Cleveland Circle would be put out of its misery. The theater never seemed not to be on its last leg. But the remarkable thing was how no one employee there seemed to mind or notice. The incongruity always broke my heart: The nicest, most efficient men and women worked at one of the worst places to watch a movie. Most of the houses at the Cleveland were like airless caves colored in sea foam, and the movie was the literal light at the end of a tunnel.

I remember a lot of what I watched there -- "Eurotrip" a few years ago, "Fred Claus" last winter, "Frontière(s)" this spring -- half because what I saw was indelible in its way (the two other people at my Saturday afternoon showing of "Frontière(s)" and I left feeling like survivors of something powerfully awful), half because the theater kept insinuating itself.

Not only did the chairs squeak, they put you absurdly low to the ground; or at least that's how it seemed. The sound of shoes unsticking themselves from the floor always made me want to see who was headed across the row and up the aisle. And if we're being honest, the average Cleveland Circle client came in two flavors: college kid and crazy. Which, of course, raises a serious concern regarding homeless moviegoers. As far as I could tell, bustling attendance was never the theater's strong suit. But the clientele seemed loyal, even if only as a consequence of proximity. "Superbad" was always playing across the screen. Now where will the kids go to watch its not-so-secret sequel, "Pineapple Express"? Where, when something ends as bananas yet banal as "300," will they stand to contemplate the bananality of it all? Certainly not that expanse of windows that overlooks Brookline. Not anymore.

On several late afternoons, I've stood there on the second level, just before that long, long ramp brings you back to the lobby, and squinted out of one of those windows, past the blinding sun, to contemplate the meaning of whatever it was I just saw. The last time I was there I turned around and notice the upstairs lobby and how the sunlight managed to liberate it from that dumpy place in my brain. The last time I saw it looked like a palace.

(The excellent photo is by Joe Laskowski.)

Because last night during somebody's speech -- Barack Obama's sister's, Jesse Jackson Jr'.s , maybe -- the folks in the control room had a good-ol' time looking for something, anything. interesting to show. My favorite random shot was of some delegates mobbing Spike Lee on the convention floor. He stopped, posed for pictures, looked happy. It was a rare moment of spontaneous entertainment in an oddly packaged evening. One wonders whether Lee considered shooting the convention film of Obama before Thursday night's speech. The job actually went to Davis "An Inconvenient Truth" Guggenheim.

A lot of movies opening today, but since it's the end of August -- a traditional elephant's graveyard for studio fare -- most of them are not so hot and the rest too hard for the marketers to pigeonhole.

Which isn't a bad thing, necessarily. "Frozen River" won the top prize at this year's Sundance festival, but it's a hard sell to audiences: a low-key drama about two impoverished women (Melissa Leo and Misty Upham) in upper New York State smuggling illegals over the Mohawk Nation border into the states. It's also a good, honest movie with two terrific performances. It's playing at the Coolidge, the Kendall Square, and the West Newton.

The real find of the weekend, though, may be the lovely Japanese anime "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" (image above) at the Brattle. This has a gentle Miyazaki vibe to it, even if it's not quite up to the master's standards, and it deserves to play to a much larger audience than the smart teen girls who'll seek it out.

The "big" studio movies are "The House Bunny" -- Anna Faris playing dumb dodo again, and as much as I love the lady (and I do), she needs a new agent -- and Rainn Wilson in a Jack Black-retread role as "The Rocker." There's also Steve Coogan going way over the top as a dithery high school drama teacher in "Hamlet 2," a movie that some people lovelovelove and that I found pretty forced. The climactic "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus" musical number is pretty funny, I admit, but the movie's so pleased with itself for being "shocking" that the scene doesn't actually offend, and that's a problem.

Oh, and Ben Kingsley and/or Penelope Cruz completists may want to catch "Elegy" (above), a curio about an aging stud professor in Manhattan, based on Philip Roth's "The Dying Animal." The movie cold as ice and it doesn't really work -- especially with a risibly melodramatic turn of events toward the end -- but it's consistently interesting, and Sir Ben is always watchable.

And Wong Kar-wai completists will want to get down to the Museum of Fine Arts for the retrospective of his 1988 debut film "As Tears Go By," starring Maggie Cheung and Andy Lau (below) back when we all were young.

Ostensibly, "The House Bunny" is a vehicle for Anna Faris. But it also has a part for Rumer Willis as the most unfortunate of the sad-sack sorority girls whom Faris's homeless Playboy Bunny makes over. Willis wears a body brace (see above) for half the movie, and until it falls off, I felt sad for the pretty girl underneath all that equipment. She has a face as long and curved as a crescent moon. All the features are either small, sharp, or angular. But it's more than a geometry student's dream. It's arresting.

Not until the closing credits did I know Body Brace Girl was Bruce and Demi's daughter. There's no telling whether she's talented (she can walk, talk, and run; and she evidently has a good sense of humor). It doesn't matter, though. That face is pretty amazing: a queerly perfect blend of both her parent's, beautiful and handsome at the same time. Two good-looking stars produced this exotic-looking child.

This is pretty much true for Eva Amurri, Susan Sarandon and Franco Amurri's kid. She also acts, has an equally full, fascinating face, and she is pretty good. As a matter of physiognomy, Amurri and Willis are both great for movies. The crime, of course, is that there probably won't be many interesting movies for their faces. Someone get them a European director quick -- or an American who finds them as interesting as the French find Ludivine Sagnier.

The painter and film critic Manny Farber has died at 90. Here are a couple of his choicer observations from "Negative Space," a few of which he wrote with his wife, the artist Paula Patterson. I bought a copy in college, and over the years it taught me something about film criticism that hadn't yet occurred to me. You don't necessary read it to argue with the critic but to try to see what they've discovered in a writer and director. Reading Farber (and Patterson) was like experiencing subjective travel writing from a couple that happened to be traveling in the dark, without leaving their seats.

On Preston Sturges: As a moviemaker, the businessman side of Sturges was superficially dominant. He even seems to have begun his career with the intention of giving Hollywood a lesson in turning out quick, cheap, popular pictures. He whipped together his scripts in record-breaking time, cast his pictures with unknowns, and shot them faster than anyone dreamed possible. He was enabled to do this through a native aptitude for finding brilliant technical shortcuts. Sturges tore Hollywood comedy lose from the slick gentility of pictures like "It Happened One Night" by shattering the realistic mold and the logical build-up and taking the quickest, least plausible route to the nerves of the audience. There are no preparations for the fantastic situations on which his pictures are based and no transitions between their numberless pratfalls, orgies of noise, and furniture-smashing. A Capra, Wilder, or Wellman takes half a movie to get a plot to the point where the audience accepts it and it comes to cinematic life. Sturges often accomplishes as much in the first two minutes, throwing an audience into what is generally the most climactic and revelatory moment of other films.

On Werner Herzog (with Patterson): The only roof Werner Herzog admits to is the sky; even the indoor shots of a dwarf prisoner, roped to a swivel chair, are unenclosed, chaotic, spacious. Herzog perversely subverts any potential drama, always opting for spontaneous activity over a pre-thought plan. One of his most rambunctious examples of history erupts in "Aguirre [Wrath of God]," The Spanish are making an assault on a cannibal village. They push in front of them an improbably acquiescent black slave on the proposition that he'll scare the savages to their knees. As they move forward, the ground turns at an angle, the stalwart Castilians roll around like marbles, and the spectator wonders why, where and what the director and his camera are doing. What are these Indians? Where are these countless arrows coming from? You can image [sic] Hezog whipping his frazzled actors before him with some of his movie's frazzled dialogue: "Move you sons of ducks, la pudre duh madre, keep the cannon out of the water!"... The overwhelming isolation of every mortal in the human kingdom is the sensation of any Herzog frame. When two types of loss-alienation can split apart within one frame, the movie is inevitably at its most hurtful and associative. Perhaps his entire oeuvre defines around the miracle scene, utterly dirty, of an Algerian hammering stones into gravel. His clenched doggedness is suddenly matched by an equally weathered intruder who takes a stiff, belligerent stand toward the camera. It captures a whole area's existence, dry mid-Sahara, and the outsider's impotent relation to it.

The great film critic Manny Farber (above left, on the set with Godard) passed away in his sleep yesterday at 91. Larger thoughts to come, but for now here's a very nice overview of this hugely influential man's legacy from Movie City Indie. Glenn Kenny also lays the flowers down with aplomb. That there's no longer any Manny Farber is sad; sadder still is that there's no longer any place in popular culture for the way he could wring savage meaning from a movie.

"Tropic Thunder" finally toppled "The Dark Knight" from the box office top spot, the latter weakened only because it has been in theaters five weeks now. "Thunder" has grossed $37 million since opening last Wednesday and made $26 million over the weekend -- good numbers but still not as strong as the similarly R-rated raunchfest "Pineapple Express" did in its similar release earlier this month. Why? Box Office Mojo's handy day-by-day gross breakdown provides the answer. "Express" had a mammoth Wednesday opening of $12 million while "Tropic Thunder" brought in just about half that first-day amount ($6.5 million), and it had a weaker Thursday as well. But a stronger weekend day by day take, if the estimates hold up.

Still, why? I'm not sure. Maybe there was a stronger have-to-see among Judd Apatow fans that kicked "Pineapple Express" up that extra first-day notch. Quite possibly everyone was watching swimming and gymnastics on TV this past Wednesday. The buzz surrounding Robert Downey Jr and Tom Cruise in "Thunder" has been high, though, and stronger reviews for "Thunder" compared to "Express" means it may have longer legs.

"Dark Knight" passed "Star Wars" to become the second highest grossing movie of all time at $471 million, unadjusted for inflation. (That chart is right here, and "TDK" is #39 and climbing.) "Titanic"? Don't look back, "The Dark Knight" has only $129,295,188 to go.

Speaking of all things Ewok, the animated "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" performed either mildly or strongly depending on whether you think $15.5 million was A) low for a franchise with a passionate global following or B) high for a cynical product placement for an upcoming TV series based on a science-fiction property its creator has beaten into the ground until hardly anyone cares anymore. The die-hards all came out this weekend; expect ticket sales for "Clone Wars" to dive off a cliff next week.

Horror movie "Mirrors" performed softly, which is fine, since it's really bad. "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" opened in almost 700 theaters, the widest debut for a Woody Allen movie since he was working for Dreamworks at the turn of the millennium. It did nicely, too: $3.7 million with a healthy $5,300 per-theater-average; good reviews and a sexy poster that barely mentions the Woodman doubtless helped. Compare this to the indie sorta-spiritual fable "Henry Poole Is Here," starring Luke Wilson: 527 theaters, a limp $1,500 PTA, and a $800,000 opening week gross. "Henry Poole" wasn't here.

More numbers from Box Office Mojo and Movie City News' Leonard Klady.

You have two choices here: Loud, messy, violent, and manic with "Tropic Thunder," or lightweight, sensuous, sunlit, and mellow with "Vicky Cristina Barcelona." They're both funny, too, "Thunder" in skit-like fits and starts, "Vicky" with the consistent pulsing of a late-summer lightning bug. And each has one bravura, worth-the-price-of-admission performance.

In "Thunder," it's Robert Downey Jr. -- I'm so very happy this man has finally become an A-level star -- as a lordly ham Australian actor gone undercover as a late-1960s black man. (Racism? Discuss. Me, I think Downey's fierce intelligence is the exact opposite of smug complacency, and that his joyful, committed playing of the role(s) opens the door to a conversation about modern blackface -- even at the inarticulate multiplex level -- rather than slamming it shut. I'm less forgiving toward Ben Stiller and the rest of the movie, mainly because he and it simply aren't as smart as Downey is.)

The breakout performance in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" belongs to Penelope Cruz, who finally sheds whatever misperceived covergirl/baby-Bardot image she has acquired from her Hollywood movies. (That fact -- that she gets better reviews for acting in Spanish than in English -- is mischievously teased in the new movie.) Cruz's character, the possibly bipolar ex-wife of the painter played by Javier Bardem, is scary, adorable, and worthy of worship in equal measure, and she's the one hint the movie offers that life is not a sunny Barcelona dream. I guess Wesley's right and that everyone here is a cartoon. But cartoons can offer great pleasure and sometimes small truths, and the spaces between their lines can be filled with as much or as little as you want. (Oh, and a word for the actress playing Vicky, Rebecca Hall, on whom I think I'm developing the sort of movie-crush even seasoned critics can fall prey to. She's delightful as a prim woman startled to discover that she's capable of lust. Ladies, stop complaining, you have Javier Bardem.)

By the way, how come the studios aren't publicizing the fact that Woody Allen wrote and directed "Vicky" and that Tom Cruise steals "Tropic Thunder"? Funny you should ask: Here's my big Friday morning thumbsucker on the subject.

The animated "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" opens today. Does anyone besides George Lucas really care? I don't know a soul who's interested in this movie besides the publicists. That sound you hear is the kitchen timer: after 31 years, "Star Wars" is done.

"Fly Me to the Moon" has excellent 3D and not a whole lot else, but six-year-old boys of all ages will probably like this imitation "Bug's Life" about houseflies hitching a ride on the Apollo 11 moon mission. What I miss about the new 3D technology is that you can't turn the polarized glasses around and make everything look inside-out anymore.

Wesley doesn't think much of the new Brad Anderson train thriller "Transsiberian," although it has its defenders. I haven't seen it. I have seen "Henry Poole is Here" and I can tell you this little L.A. fable is a deeply felt crock. Please, please, no more mopey dramatic montages set to alt-rock ballads. I'm begging here.

Elsewhere, there's a weary end-of-summer vibe in the air and the theaters. The Harvard Film Archive is dark for the rest of the month; guess they have a summer share in Nantucket. The Brattle is hosting a Sing-Along weekend for those of us with no weekend homes or friends to mooch off: "Grease" tonight and "The Muppet Movie" on Saturday. The MFA has an engaging mixed bag of movies, and if you can get through the weekend to Monday, the Coolidge is hosting the first "Big Lebowski" Bowling Party Extravaganza. Roll a strike for the Dude.

"The Dark Knight" held onto its #1 spot atop the box office for the fourth weekend in a row and is closing in on the $450 million total domestic gross mark. A colleague offered to bet me a dollar that "TDK" would break "Titanic"'s $600 million mark. I didn't take the bet.

Here's an interesting thing, though, and the first statistical sign that Batmania may be starting to wane: the new Judd Apatow action/comedy/buddy/stoner movie "Pineapple Express" (above) opened huge ($12 million) on Wednesday and had a much stronger debut than expected, grossing $41 million through Sunday and $23 million on the weekend alone, against a $26 million take for "The Dark Knight." More tellingly, the R-rated "Pineapple" played in only three-quarter the number of theaters as "TDK," which means its per-theater average ($7,566) is actually higher than that for the Batman movie ($6,488).

I imagine the audience for "Pineapple" was also a little higher, but in general the two movies shared the same young, male core demographic, so "TDK"'s loss was probably "Pineapple"'s gain.

"The Mummy: Tomb of the Lousy Sequel" tailed off precipitously -- 60% -- from its opening weekend, surprising no one. The other major new release, "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2," took the #4 spot, managing an okay $10 million over the weekend and $19 million since its Wednesday opening. Most of its target audience is probably still at sleepaway camp or spent the weekend going OMG over "Breaking Dawn."

Worth noting at #8 and #9 respectively, two movies with the best legs of late summer: "Hancock" in its sixth week of release ($221 million total US box office) and "WALL-E" in its seventh week ($210 million). (Best legs of early summer are "Kung Fu Panda" and "Iron Man," at #s 17 and 18.) Believe it or not, "Journey to the Center of the Earth" is still purring along in its fifth week, holding down #7 presumably on the strength of its 3D engagements, though no one seems to be reporting hard numbers. That bodes well for the animated 3D family film "Fly Me to the Moon," opening this Friday.

In general, the summer is winding down, and the next few weeks will see one final blockbuster ("Tropic Thunder") opening tomorrow, the standard dog-day release mix of off-Sundance product good ("Frozen River") and bad ("Henry Poole is Here") and sub-par burn-off product the studios want to clear from the shelves ("The House Bunny," "Bangkok Dangerous," "The Accidental Husband") Oh, and one surprisingly excellent Woody Allen movie: "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," which opens this Friday. Here's the Box Office Mojo list, and here's Leonard Klady's take at Movie City News.

Isaac Hayes, the musician, actor, and political activist, has died at 65. Yes, he was Chef on "South Park," but he revolutionized what a soundtrack could do for a non-musical movie: give it an independent musical life that captures the story in song. His songs for "Shaft" gave a gritty, urban cop thriller a seedy, sexy soul, and his orchestrations did even more for the hilariously lackluster "Black Moses" and his simply hilarious "Truck Turner," starring him as Truck. (The trailer is still a wonder of blaxploitation hype.)

My favorite image of Hayes was from the 1973 all-day concert film "Wattstax," where he emerged on stage in gold chains. He looked like he was on his way to performing in the science-fiction S&M disco version of the "10 Commandments." That moment was the personification of hot buttered soul.

The comedian Bernie Mac died yesterday of pneumonia. He was 50, although he seemed relatively ageless -- no number really seemed apt. His comedy could be curmudgeonly (everything seemed to exasperate him) but he was the suavest grouch: your classy, Cadillac-driving uncle. Mac wore suits, was always exceptionally groomed, and on stage usually seemed to be having a hot flash. Wearily wiping his brow was part of his act.

The movies never quite figured out what to do with either his smoothness or the unusual rhythm of this timing. If a comedian could smolder, Mac often did. By the time he'd made the first "Ocean's" movie in 2001, playing one of the many candles on Steven Soderbergh's caper cupcake, Mac was in his 40s, and he quickly hit a ceiling. He was far too sophisticated for the boorish dad he played in a remake of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (2005) with Ashton Kutcher as his white nincompoop future son-in-law.

"Mr. 3000" from the year before was more like it. He played a former baseball star who gets a shot at a comeback. The movie wasn't that great, but Mac cut back on the eye-popping shtick he perfected on his self-titled Fox sitcom and gave the part some swagger and, where Angela Bassett, playing an old flame, was concerned, some sex. He was, for once, a leading man -- unflappable but vulnerable to himself. He could have done parts like that for the rest of his career. Like the best stars, he made being cool seem a lot easier than it is.

If "Monsieur Verdoux" were released today, it would still cause gasps of dismay at the unstinting darkness of its vision. It's safe to say that irony was not a moviegoing pre-requisite in 1947 the way it is in the 21st century, and for all intents and purposes, Charlie Chaplin flipped his adoring worldwide audience the bird when he took on the title role of a dapper serial wife-killer. Yes, it's a comedy, sidesplitting whenever the unsinkable Martha Raye (above, with Chaplin) is onscreen. And, yes, it's as far from the beloved Tramp as can be imagined and as close as Charlie came to admitting he really didn't like other people all that much. Especially women. You can catch this remarkable work of career suicide in a new 35mm print at the Brattle this weekend.

If you'd rather catch a sublimely entertaining, even profound documentary about the guy who wirewalked from one World Trade Center tower to another in 1974, by all means seek out "Man on Wire." One of the best I've seen this year.

"Pineapple Express" looks cool on paper -- Kings o' raunch Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen join forces with indie auteur David Gordon Green ("George Washington") and a ton of pot jokes for a goofball take on 80s action buddy comedies. But, you're right, that's one too many pigs on the pile (at least), and the things never wholly clears the runway. There are still plenty of bonehead laughs, though, and I liked Danny McBride a lot better here than in his own "The Foot Fist Way." And James Franco effectively destroys his clean-cut psycho image in the "Spider-Man" movies. About time.

For girls who read, we have "The Sisterhoood of the Traveling Pants 2." For wine snobs, there's the fond "Bottle Shock" -- a table wine but a good one. There's some smart, nihilistic Hong Kong mayhem in Johnnie To's "Mad Detective," which is about exactly what the title says: a paranoid schizophrenic police detective who solves crimes better than you or I. It's at the MFA for a week or so, and probably causing heart fibrillations in casual moviegoers wandering in from the museum's bookstore.

Wesley has some things to say about "Boy A," which I haven't seen and thus cannot weigh in on. And there's a weird little come-on being offered by the Harvard Film Archive in the form of "I, Pierre Riviere" and "Back to Normandy", the first a mid-70s documentary/re-enactment of a notorious 1830s multiple murder, the second a 2007 return to the scene of the first film by one of its crewmembers, now an established filmmaker himself. That's a hall of mirrors to get lost in.

Six examples of the New Japanese Cinema at the MFA, including 2007 Cannes Grand Jury Prize winner "The Mourning Forest".

And maybe buy your plane fare now for Nairn, a village in the northeast of Scotland, where Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton has rented a ballroom called the Ballerina and, come August 15, is hosting a little film festival. The first day they're showing the rare and mysterious 1935 Hollywood spectral romance "Peter Ibbetson." From there they go to Kurosawa, Michael Powell, Ozu, Fellini, Polanski, and many more, some curated by Joel Coen, half of you-know-who. Sure, you could rent most of these movies on DVD. But then you wouldn't be in Scotland.

I went down to the South End and caught Company One's production of the rarely-staged Stephen Sondheim musical "Assassins" the other day. Excellent work; all it needs is a bigger orchestra to fill out the sound. It plays until August 9th and is well worth catching; here's my colleague Louise Kennedy's review, and here's a Globe piece on the controversy over its appearance in an election year. (But, then, controversy has dogged this play since its 1990 off-Broadway debut -- it never did make it to the Great White Way back then, and I admit the notion of tourists paying top dollar for a toe-tapping show about America's very darkest urges is difficult to picture, despite a 2004 revival that ran for 101 performances.)

No, watching this show will not make you want to go out and kill a president. On the contrary, what Sondheim and book author John Weidman are up to here is shining a light on how the all-American dreams of fame and success can get warped by lost souls; how powerlessness and rage can lash out at the biggest symbol at hand; how infamy can be just as good as celebrity to a twisted mind. "Assassins" is a play about delusion: Jeff Mahoney's Charles J. Guiteau -- a part-time evangelist who shot President James Garfield in 1881 -- is a charming chap who only gradually reveals the bottomless depths of his hatred of humanity.

Rough, confrontational stuff, and only slightly ameliorated by the brilliance of Sondheim's musical thinking: Each assassin's central number is composed in the style of the time period in which they lived. Minstrel banjo and Civil War strings for John Wilkes Booth (David Da Costa), whistle-stop brass band for FDR's would-be killer Giuseppe Zangara (Blake Pfeil). Etc. When John Hinckley (Nathanael Shea) and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme (McCaela Donovan) sing a goopy 70s love duet called "Unworthy of Your Love," the creepiest part is that they're not singing it to each other but to, respectively, Jodie Foster and Charles Manson.

I still think the climactic scene in which Lee Harvey Oswald (Jonathan Popp) is goaded by the others to pick up that rifle is far too glib and thus tasteless in a way the rest of the show deftly avoids. But "Assassins" deals in issues that won't go away, even when they're not crystallized by a madman with a gun.

This is a movie column, though, and I'm talking about a stageplay. So how about casting "Assassins" for the film version that will never, ever get made? If that doesn't take the show's loser-as-celebrity gamesmanship to another level, I don't know what does. Shall we begin?

Johnny Depp for John Wilkes Booth: Depp's shown that he can sing -- and sing Sondheim -- and he mustered up the requisite homicidal madness as Sweeney Todd.

Edward Norton for Lee Harvey Oswald. (Honorable mention to estimable colleague Mark Feeney for suggesting young Kevin Costner. Too handsome, says I.)

Character actress Margo Martindale for Sara Jane Moore.

Daniel Day-Lewis as Charles J. Guiteau

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as Giuseppe Zangara. The former wrestler says he wants to stretch, doesn't he?

Daniel Craig as William McKinley assassin Leon Czolgosz

Ellen Page as Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme

John Hinckley was already playing Robert De Niro in his head when he tried to kill Ronald Reagan. Best punishment, then, is casting De Niro himself -- fat, old De Niro circa 2008. Estimable colleague Feeney says Jack Black would be a better bet but I don't really feel like giving Hinckley the satisfaction.