I don't have a movie column in the magazine this week but will post here soon on Wolverine, Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control, and a couple of Tribeca Film Fest screenings. Of what I've seen at Tribeca, I recommend the docs Racing Dreams* and Croxley and the Brit satire In the Loop--an absolutely divine dramatization of what has come to be known as the "Downing Street memo." You want to know how intel is "fixed around policy" rather than vice versa? Here it is--paced like a Marx Brothers movie with more f-words than the collected works of David Mamet. Dick Cheney isn't in it, but one of his henchmen is played by David Rasche--I assume he's meant to be David Addington. And speaking of Cheney, here are some thoughts on his place in the pantheon of our culture's supervillains. The list is evolving: By all means e-mail your suggestions to my address at the right.

*CORRECTION: Whoopsie. This was corrected... I originally wrote Racecar Dreams (the credits when I saw it were incomplete) and the title matters since I'm not sure there's a distributor yet. There should be! Actually, I like my Racecar Dreams better even though "racecar" might not officially be a word. It's about kids who are great junior drivers and there's something kid-like about the word "racecar" that is more evocative than "racing." On the other hand, NASCAR probably would think "racecar" is a wussy word.

I should learn not to be disappointed by stars, the brightest and kindest of whom are still unstable and apt to be pissy when they’re not given due deference, but Robert Downey Jr. has thrown me for a loop. Vulture reprints this exchange from Movieline (welcome back, Stu!) in reference to the notorious “Full Retard” speech from Tropic Thunder:

Well, it turns out that the gun-fetish aspect of Observe and Report hasn’t generated nearly as much debate as the so-called date-rape scene. All involved, we’ve read, should be ashamed, and anyone who endorses the film should recalibrate his or her (but presumably his) moral compass.

I ran long in the mag this week on Observe and Report (wildly recommended) and Anvil: The Story of Anvil (a heavy-metal doc that must be seen to be disbelieved), so here are a couple of extra-short reviews of The Escapist and Sugar. Check back for a couple of sentences on the ten-hour The Human Condition (back at the Film Forum for ten days starting April 8), a formidable work that deserves more words than I plan to write (but not that many more).

Very much on the sidelines, I’ve waited a couple of weeks to write anything about my pal A.O. Scott’s passionate and wide-ranging New York Times Magazine essay heralding a “Neo-Neorealism” — a piece undermined, I think, by its immodest headline, which Richard Brody had a jolly time dismantling in a New Yorker blog post. Brody, his ire roused, scored points when it came to A.O.’s lack of rigor in defining neorealism, which in its postwar Italian incarnation was a specific (and short-lived) aesthetic. (When I am tempted to create new labels or invoke old ones, I find useful such constructions as: “noir-ish,” verité-like,” and, in this case, “quasi dialectical neo-realism-esque.”). Brody had me until, out of left field, he lauded David Fincher and Clint Eastwood, and so aligned himself with a particular species of formalist critic with whom I have too many differences to enumerate. But his writing is valuable and I hope to read more of it.