What do war, famine, disease and poverty have in common? They're four of the few things in life less funny than The Doorman, an excruciating, run-for-the-hills mockumentary about a famous international gatekeeper to ritzy nightclubs. Think Borat with 99 percent less ingenuity and humor. And, in fact, keep thinking about Sacha Baron Cohen's befuddled Kazakhstani journalist, or fluffy clouds on a warm summer day, or your first kiss, or anything else that makes you smile, as conjuring up memories of happier experiences gone by is the prime means of enduring such across-the-board ineptitude.

The dolt at the center of this fiasco is Trevor (Lucas Akoskin), a doofus with an ambiguous European accent, an ego the size of the Pacific Ocean, a taste for overblown threads, and a predilection for Yogi Berra-isms. "I know people. And more importantly, I know people who know me," is typical of Trevor's self-consciously dumb dialogue, though he's not alone in delivering leaden bon mots, as evidenced by one doltish woman's claim that "The Doorman is God, really." Which, I guess, makes me an unrepentant atheist.

Watching Jacques Nolot's Before I Forget, I couldn't help thinking of my friend Arthur Lazere, the late film critic and creator of the still-operational site culturevulture.net, ("Choices for the Cognoscenti"). Arthur was gay and in his 60s when he succumbed to a long illness in 2006; he loved movies but he rarely found one that pleased him, or rather spoke to him in particular. The Barbarian Invasions (2003) was one of his favorites, I remember, and I enjoyed talking to -- and arguing with -- him about it and many other films. I wish I could have talked with him about Before I Forget, a film about a HIV+ gay man nearing his 60s. I admired the film all on my own, but Arthur would have got it.

That's actually one of the best things about Before I Forget, which was selected as one of last year's ten best films by Cahiers du Cinema; it's the uncompromising work of an artist making a film for himself, rather than targeting a demographic. Jacques Nolot mainly works as an actor, with roles in films like Claire Denis' Nenette & Boni (1996), Francois Ozon's Under the Sand (2001) and many André Téchiné films, including The Witnesses from earlier this year. He has written and directed three feature films, all starring himself: L'Arrière pays (1998), Porn Theater (2002) and this one. The three films are certainly homosexual and appear to be at least partly autobiographical, and even if they're not, Nolot still opens himself up totally: in an early sequence, his character Pierre wakes up, throws up, pops some pills makes some coffee and walks around his apartment, naked. His thinning hair and thin moustache are perfectly placed, but his sagging belly shows a losing battle with age.

One thing you should know about the Julian Schnabel-directed concert documentary Lou Reed's Berlin is that Lou Reed has personally instructed theaters to play the film at concert-level volume. That means it's really, really loud. When I saw it (at NYC's Film Forum, which is following Reed's command throughout the film's limited engagement), an elder woman walked out. Of course, I can't be sure that it was due to the sound, though the exit was during one of the loudest songs.

The volume may seem excessive and unnecessary to some, but at a time when concert docs are shown in IMAX and/or in 3-D, it really helps a film like Lou Reed's Berlin compete for audiences seeking a filmic experience comparable to the real thing. And leaving the theater with your ears ringing will help you think that you were actually there when Reed performed his 1973 album Berlin live for the first (and second, third and fourth) time in Brooklyn, New York, December 14-17, 2006.

This never occurred to me before, but "train" movies are a really interesting sub-genre. You could program an entire two-week film festival of train movies, from comedies (The "Three Stooges" shorts, The General, The Darjeeling Limited) to suspense movies (James Bond, Strangers on a Train, Murder on the Orient Express, Runaway Train) and tons of others. It's the perfect setting for a movie: it's a limited space, but long -- for chases -- and it moves through the frame as opposed to sitting still like a hospital room or a warehouse. Plus, unlike an airplane, there are plenty of beautiful views going by outside. And so, if the train movie is a genre, it follows that it needs a solid genre director to add another potential classic to the list.

Brad Anderson (no relation to me, by the way) is such a director. Like Howard Hawks or Billy Wilder, he has been able to effortlessly leap between dark, genre films (Session 9, The Machinist) and romances (Next Stop Wonderland), and even weird combinations of the two (Happy Accidents). His films may not reach the pinnacles of great art, but each and every one of them represents a good, sturdy, entertaining example of sheer, joyful craftsmanship. Anderson's fifth feature (not counting his early, hard-to-find The Darien Gap) is Transsiberian, a film that I would be proud to add to the list of recommended train movies. The title train runs from Beijing to Moscow and crosses through some pretty remote, snowy terrain; it's a great place for something devious and sinister to happen. (The 1973 Peter Cushing / Christopher Lee film Horror Express took place on the same train!)

Imagine you're a filmmaker and you've got this cockamamie story about astronaut chimps that just won't go away. You don't have much money, but the story involves lots of technology and outer space effects. What do you do? You could use your imagination and shoot in darkness with lots of odd angles and perspectives, like Mario Bava's sci-fi masterpiece Planet of the Vampires (1965). But that would raise all kinds of questions about how to present the chimps. You could do a hand-drawn animated cartoon, something like Persepolis, for comparatively little money. But that would expose the fact that you really don't have much of an idea. So you decide to make a big, computer-animated film, make it fast, fill it with annoying jokes and hope no one notices how cheap and unfinished it looks. But what you don't do is open it three weeks after the astonishing WALL-E so that everyone notices the difference.

Space Chimps comes from the folks who brought you the universally despised animated film Happily N'Ever After (2006), and although I didn't see the earlier film, I'm told Space Chimps represents something of an improvement. Regardless, everything here has a kind of mechanical sheen rather than organic textures, and it feels like something closer to Tron than a cartoon about monkeys. Then comes the story: Ham (voiced by Andy Samberg) is the grandson of a famous chimp astronaut, who actually went into space. The younger Ham works at the circus, getting himself shot out of cannons. In the film's opening scene, he rockets toward the moon and reaches out for it, disappointed when gravity's pull inevitably begins dragging him back toward Earth.

Right about here is where all the gushing and excitement and enthusiasm should begin, because I'll tell you right off the "bat" that Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is cause for celebration indeed. But then you'll figure out -- after only one sentence -- that I pretty much loved this movie, and then you'll head off to another, more unpredictable film critic. But it's the WHY that interests me so much. What I enjoyed about Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and Hellboy 2 could probably be covered in one lengthy -- and inevitably nerd-tastic -- conversation between the two of us. But The Dark Knight... Well, clearly we're approaching a whole new level here.

Several of the pre-release gushings are accurate. Some say "Scorsesian" and others reference Michael Mann. Many spend paragraphs on the (truly amazing) penultimate performance by Heath Ledger, while others will revel in the grown-up tone or epic scope of the film. What amazed me most about The Dark Knight, among several things, is that the flick's got more layers than an onion farm -- and yet it never loses touch with the idea of FUN. True that we're talking about a comic book fun that's decidedly more melancholy than the cinematic exploits of The Marvel Gang, but dang if TDK isn't supremely satisfying for about a dozen different reasons.

I'm slightly mistrustful of titles that include exclamation points. They always remind me of the musical version of The Elephant Man, Elephant!, in The Tall Guy ("... there's an angel with big eeears..."). But in the case of Mamma Mia!, I'm actually surprised the title only included one exclamation point -- you can imagine the filmmakers or the creators of the stage version embracing even more emphatic punctuation, just to let you know that This! Is a Musical! And also Wacky!! As if chorus lines of men in flippers, Meryl Streep waving a feather boa, and enough ABBA music to sate the leads of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert wouldn't have clued you in.

The movie, like the stage musical it's adapted from, is essentially and unabashedly an extended gimmick -- an excuse to sing and perform songs that originated from the Swedish musical group ABBA. Characters spontaneously burst into song not because they're aspiring performers (Chicago), or because their singing is meant as a melodious soliloquy (Sweeney Todd), but because the situation or their emotional state reminds them of an ABBA song (sometimes more tangentially than others), and they decide to share it with everyone. I've had friends like this in real life, although that seems to have been a college-age thing.

The pop-culture appetite for Batman seems inexhaustible; thousands of comic books, several movies, endless animated iterations, some of which are quite good and some of which are rather bad. Is there any real need to return to the character beyond the profit motive, though? After the financial and critical success of Batman Begins, the powers-that-be behind The Dark Knight could have made a safe bet of a sequel; a little more action, a few more actors, more of the same and a few extra explosions.

What's telling about The Dark Knight, though, is how risky it is -- how it's bold and brave and truly exciting, full of rich and strong performances and some real ideas along the way. Why return to Batman? It turns out that for Christopher Nolan, the reason to come back is that there's something to say about, and with, the character even after decades of stories and multiple reinventions. I was hoping The Dark Knight would be good; I had no idea that director and co-writer Christopher Nolan was going to make a film that not only addressed the philosophical and political conflict between the rule of force and the rule of law but also takes on the timeless clash between order and chaos ... and, along the way, evokes everything from Michael Mann's Heat to John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. ...

If you thought the latest Indiana Jones adventure was implausible, wait till you see Journey to the Center of the Earth! It makes Kingdom of the Crystal Skull look like a documentary. It's fun, though, and a perfectly good way for a family to spend a Saturday afternoon, particularly if that family has a lot of 8-to-12-year-old boys. I have friends with kids in that demographic, and watching the movie I thought, "Those guys will LOVE this."

It was shot in digital 3D and is being exhibited that way in select theaters. By all means, if you see it, see it in 3D. The filmmakers indulge in some shameless gimmickry every now and then, making characters point things directly at the audience for no good reason, but for the most part the effects look fantastic. It's a smart way to bring the story to life, even if the story in question is all spectacle and very little brain.

Brendan Fraser, getting back into wholesome action-hero mode, plays Trevor Anderson, a scientist who specializes in tectonic physics. That was the life's work of his deceased brother, Max, whose 13-year-old son Sean (Josh Hutcherson) has now come to stay with Trevor for a few days. Trevor hasn't seen his nephew in years and barely knows the lad. Sean, sullen and heavily into his PSP (that's a portable video game system, old-timers), was only 2 or 3 when his dad disappeared.

Jason Freeland's Garden Party plays a bit like Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993), taking a look at a cross-section of Los Angeles characters, though it runs less than half the length and, conversely, half the depth. The movie also reminded me a little of that early scene in Billy Wilder's Sabrina (1954), wherein the titular heroine secretly watches a swank Los Angeles party from a safe distance, imagining what it must be like to be there. Likewise, sophomore writer/director Freeland (Brown's Requiem) doesn't quite feel like the host of this particular "garden party," but rather like the party's Sabrina, secretly spying from the sidelines. The film feels a bit removed, unwilling or unable to muster the courage to party crash, to really engage its characters.

Garden Party starts with April (Willa Holland), a beautiful 15 year-old with an Avril Lavigne look, who tries to escape from her lascivious stepfather by acquiring a fake ID and posing for nude internet photos for cash. Then we meet Sally St. Clair (Vinessa Shaw, who played the prostitute "Domino" in Eyes Wide Shut), a successful, controlling and backstabbing realtor. She keeps a greenhouse full of prime pot that she uses to close deals, and her assistant Nathan (Alexander Cendese) is at her beck and call 24/7. Nathan drives her car, stays in her house and looks after her garden. He smokes too much pot, is confused about his sexuality and seems to have forgotten why he came to the City of Angels in the first place. Todd (Richard Gunn) is an independently wealthy artist who lives in the house he grew up in. He's obsessed with Sally, whose old, nude photos he has admired on the Internet. By chance he meets her in a parking lot and endears himself to her by removing gum from her expensive shoe.

Eddie Murphy. Raw.

That really used to say it all. A comedian known for his brash wit and go-for-broke charm, Murphy used to be willing to say anything to get a laugh. Trading Places. Coming to America. Beverly Hills Cop. Now, he's clearly willing to do anything.

Somewhere along the way, "I believe that children are the future" became not so much a punchline as a personal career credo. He's fallen into the rut of safe family-friendly fare, led on by the likes of Steve "Cheaper by the Dozen 2" Martin and Tim "The Santa Clause 3" Allen, the success of both having come to suggest that the water's quite fine in the kiddie pool. Dreamgirls proved that this man still has a genuine something left in him, and yet, we the world are instead subjected to a little less of that and a little more of Shrek.

Safe. That's what Meet Dave is, and what Murphy never used to be.

Imagine one of the Star Trek crews transported to Tolkien's Middle Earth, or Buffy and her Scooby gang whisked away into the heart of Narnia. That's how Hellboy II: The Golden Army can feel, as you watch a cartoonish-looking, cigar-smoking demon fight gorgeous creatures right out of ancient folklore (and one Miyazaki-esque nature deity). Your reaction to such a contrast -- as fascinating, jarring or downright repellent -- will likely influence your feelings about the latest film from Guillermo del Toro, a sequel to his 2004 adaptation of Mike Mignola's graphic novels. The writer-director's previous film, Pan's Labyrinth, was a favorite of mine, and while Hellboy II doesn't quite measure up to that film's richness of character and story, it is still visually extraordinary.

I came into this film entirely ignorant of the Hellboy universe ... much like with Sex and the City, although it seems bizarre to compare Mignola's characters to Candace Bushnell's. I haven't read the graphic novels and I hadn't even seen the first movie (it was impossible to find a rental DVD of Hellboy in Austin last week, which may bode well for the popularity of the sequel). And yet, unlike Sex and the City, I didn't feel as though I must have missed something in order to fully appreciate the film. Hellboy II gives us virtually no backstory on its main characters, but that's not necessary, as the setup becomes obvious almost immediately. Sure, there were a few scenes where the comic-book fans were laughing and I didn't get the joke, but it didn't bother me and I never felt lost or confused.

Five years ago, Roman Polanski won an Oscar for directing The Pianist. But he couldn't attend the Academy Awards ceremony, because had he entered the United States, he would have been arrested as soon as his plane touched down. Or so the excuse went. While the scenario might have indeed played out that way, the story of his hypothetical incarceration was at that time more a part of the legend of Polanski than it was a matter of truth. More hearsay and speculation than complete fact.

Now the difference between that legend and the lesser-known truth is exposed in the documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. And basically it's the gap between a generalized truth and the whole truth. So, yes, as we all heard and/or discussed at our Oscar parties five years ago, Polanski was in fact a fugitive, having fled the United States in 1978 after pleading guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl. But there is so much more to the story than just that.

If you still haven't watched any of the million documentaries about the Iraq War because you're still not quite ready for that kind of subject matter, you might want to check out Full Battle Rattle. It is a documentary, and it is related to the Iraq War, but you may consider it more like a simulation of a documentary about the Iraq War than an actual example. Think of it as like a practice piece until you can handle the real deal.

How is Full Battle Rattle different from the rest, you ask? Well, it's not set in Iraq or even in the Middle East. It takes place in America, in California's Mojave Desert, to be exact. It's there that the U.S. military has built a bunch of fake Iraqi towns, complete with fake Iraqi people, some of whom are played by actual Iraqi immigrants, others of whom are played by soldiers preparing for combat before being deployed overseas.

And then there are the other thousands of soldiers who basically play themselves on the unscripted side of partially scripted training exercises designed to simulate possible scenarios that they'll be faced with once they're shipped out to Iraq. In a way, watching the simulations documented in the film is like watching Civil War reenactments, except that in this case it's more like pre-enactments.

Back in the old days, moviegoers used to get a cartoon before every movie. A lot of the classic Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry, Droopy, Popeye, Superman & Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons that many of us grew up watching on TV were once savored on the big screen. Eventually filmmakers began cranking out cartoons much more cheaply for television, and it was the end of an era -- almost. In recent years, Spike & Mike's touring cartoon festival has been a big success and other cartoon festivals have joined in. Earlier this year the five Oscar-nominated animated shorts opened in theaters, although together they ran nearly two hours. The new The Animation Show 4 collects some 18 shorts and series and runs less than 90 minutes. (See official site.)

Curator Mike Judge, the gentleman behind "Beavis & Butthead" and "King of the Hill," is definitely a man who likes his cartoons to get to the point, and so the three longest shorts here run about 7 minutes apiece. Steve Dildarian's Angry Unpaid Hooker is one of them. When his girlfriend arrives home early, Tim has trouble explaining the angry unpaid hooker sitting on his couch. The befuddled Tim will go on to star in his own series, "The Life and Times of Tim." Another epic is This Way Up, from the team of Smith & Foulkes. In it, a pair of long-faced morticians (father and son?) carries a sarcophagus to its final resting place, attempting to keep the box upright despite cruel fate's best attempts to knock it down. Stefan Mueller's Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen and Mr. Horlocker, from Germany, is the other "long" one. A cop investigates some noisy neighbors in an apartment building, but can't quite get the entire story until the same scenes are played out again, behind closed doors. This features the greatest cinematic drug trip since James Toback's Harvard Man.