One nice thing about Public Enemies (there are more of them, but not enough) is that Johnny Depp palpably loves being a movie star and loves wearing wide-brim fedoras and long black coats and spats and firing tommy guns at G-men. And I ask you, friends: Who wouldn’t? It’s a happy confluence of actor and role, since Depp’s John Dillinger palpably loves being a gangster and hiding among the people, who regard him as a folk hero. (Without the threat of America’s Most Wanted, Twitter, or Gawker Stalker, the fugitive Dillinger travels the Midwest with relative nonchalance.) Depp also gets to woo a luscious Marion Cotillard (whose attempt at an American accent sinks somewhere in the mid-Atlantic) with a killer comeback — She: Boy, you’re in a hurry. He: If you were looking at what I’m looking at, you’d be in a hurry, too. So smooth. Yes, half his face is sometimes shadowed to suggest that Dillinger has a dark side, but Depp is so jaunty you could easily dub him “Sunny John.”

Although it’s endless and eardrum-buckling, the Hasbro-sanctioned toy-tie-in Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen will pack them in, because guys all over the world dream of manipulating those amazing parts. And that’s just Megan Fox — there are also those cool robots. Actually, the camera lingers more lovingly on the Fox than the ‘bots, which transform so cartoonishly fast that any pretense of reality is instantly vaporized. Much of the movie is computer-generated hash, weightless even with nonstop BOOMS and METAL GROANS and THUDS. Fox’s jugs, in contrast, have verisimilitude — and heft.

You can read my brief but pointed review of Food, Inc. here, but there’s something I didn’t have room to say in the mag. Film Forum, one of New York’s (and the country’s) most vital exhibitors — good guys who show good movies that contribute to the social good — would have you and your kids watch Food, Inc. while munching on Orville Redenbacher popcorn. That’s baaad. That's the product made by ConAgra, one of the movie’s several super-villains, named after a guy who never existed and was designed to look like a nerdy Midwestern farmer turned small entrepreneur. Alas, as the movie shows, no corn product is untainted by misplaced government subsidies, but switching to Newman’s Own (organic) would make sense on so many levels. And that goes for the rest of you indie exhibitors!

UPDATE: A Film Forum rep has responded that the theater will look into the matter and consider its options. Excellent. Drop them a line if you are so inclined. Among its other virtues, Food, Inc. has inspired me to become a film critic/popcorn activist. But I would be remiss if I did not admit to my hypocrisy in one regard: I would be mighty upset if they stopped selling my beloved diet cola, however vile, unhealthful, and politically tainted. So let's not take this too far...

When we talk about an actor being “hip,” it’s often subjective: He or she embodies what we’re not but on some level long to be. To me, David Carradine was the apogee of hipness: not my favorite actor, not even in the top 50, but my existential hero, and a man who looked like he got laid a lot — a sort of B-movie Jack Nicholson. His vaguely Asian physiognomy made him suited to kung-fu and Zen masters, and his acting had that same alert detachment. You rarely got the sense that his roles cost him emotionally: Unlike his brother, Keith, who has been known to take risks, David had an inviolable sphere of privacy. But he never condescended to his material, even when it was risible, and his amusement was contagious. Like his dad, John, he made his mark in a socially conscious epic (The Grapes of Wrath for the father, Bound for Glory for the son), then settled contentedly into B and C genre pictures. (He never dropped to the D level of his dad, who ended up making scores of movies like Astro Zombies, but he might not have minded that so much: His old man worked until the end, reportedly with no complaints.) David Carradine didn’t seem given to advance planning, career calculation, control. He was the anti–Tom Cruise.

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.

Saw The Soloist last night (I’ll reserve judgment on the movie for now), and it’s easier to see why Robert Downey Jr. bristled when asked what his character in Tropic Thunder would say about Jamie Foxx’s performance as the brilliant, schizophrenic cellist Nathaniel Ayers — easier to see and easier to excuse.

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:

That headline seems more ambitious than is warranted … Masaki Kobayashi’s ten-hour, six-part epic, The Human Condition (three features with breaks for intermission), has another few days at the Film Forum (it runs through April 16), and you can still commit to the long haul. Yes, it’s worth it, but more for the experience — for the commitment itself — than because Kobayashi’s humanism will rock your world. Chances are if you’re there in the first place you know that occupying foreign lands and abusing the locals is wrong; that killing people you can barely see for reasons you probably don’t agree with is not a design for living; and that struggling to survive while fellow soldiers, women, and children perish around you from starvation will destroy your capacity for empathy and take the ultimate toll on your humanity.

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.

My enthusiastic review of Observe and Report was written shortly before the spate of horrific shootings last week, and all at once it’s an unpropitious time to open a movie teeming with gonzo gun humor. But the film is, if anything, even more relevant — and greater than the sum of its sick jokes. As Taxi Driver was a madhouse travesty of Death Wish with a dash of Dostoevsky (the Underground Man was alive and unwell and living in New York in the seventies, with access to automatic weapons), so Observe and Report is a travesty of Taxi Driver. A loner given to “morbid self-attention” wanders among the drug-addicted masses (now they’re mallrats), obsesses over a blonde who’s out of his league, and finally cracks up, hurling himself into the role of vigilante avenger. Let's all laugh at this savior-in-his-own-mind, uneasy but confident in the knowledge that — this being a comedy — no one will die. And, indeed, it all winds up happily, with heroism, bloody retribution, catharsis, and renewed potency. The movie is a carnival ride through our culture’s love affair with gun violence. You can whoop it up and still feel a little like puking.

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.

Sunshine Blog Cleaning: This week’s print column on I Love You, Man is here. Two reviews I didn’t have room for — of Sunshine Cleaning and The Great Buck Howard — follow.

It’s easy to see why Ingmar Bergman and not his Swedish countryman Jan Troell gets all the sugar when academics talk about late-twentieth-century world cinema: Bergman, a student of nineteenth-century philosophy and theater, freights his dramas with metaphysical baggage, whereas Troell’s characters appear to be unencumbered by anything except daily life. But that doesn’t mean there are no metaphysics — only that they don’t stop the show. They’re hidden. Every frame of Troell’s entrancingly beautiful new movie Everlasting Moments uses surfaces — light, texture, faces — to hint at another world, a shadow realm. The metaphor is right there in the story, which centers on a woman who finds an old camera in a cabinet and discovers that she has what another character calls “a gift for seeing.”

The Last House on the Left is a studio remake of the seminal seventies indie torture-rape-and-revenge flick directed by Wes Craven when he had no inkling he’d ever be mainstream — or that the stuff of gutbucket-sleaze triple-bills would one day top the box-office charts and play alongside Disney movies in the multiplex. Craven said his film was inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, and it actually was — only with two female victims instead of one, the rape and murder of frolicking innocents lovingly prolonged, a sweet-and-icky instead of stoic revenge, and no religioso finale. One can make the artistic case for Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween, but there’s no art to get in the way of one’s response to Last House, and no camp value (as in H.G. Lewis’s Grade-Z gore porn) to lighten the emotional load. It is what it is — although we’ll never stop debating just what “it” is.

Daniel Barnz’s Phoebe in Wonderland dramatizes — messily and with an eccentric kind of force — a dilemma facing parents of “difficult” children that’s unique to our age: to medicate or not to medicate. It can seem outrageous how casually today’s physicians push drugs on kids and how eagerly some parents respond — until you see a kid whose life has been transformed for the better. The little girl in this case, Phoebe (Elle Fanning), has a condition most of us will recognize from media depictions; yet we’ll also sympathize with the convulsions of her mother, Hillary (Felicity Huffman), who’s incensed at the prospect of taming (or punishing) her child’s wayward spirit. Phoebe’s behavior alienates her from her peers, but the girl finds refuge in fantasy and then theater: She wins the lead in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and connects with another misfit, a boy (Ian Colletti) bent on playing the Queen of Hearts. Before you groan, it’s important to say that Barnz’s approach to every scene could be called “anti-thesis.” Whenever we think he’s about to linger on the transcendental magic of theater (cue the piano chords) or go soft on his characters, the mood turns edgy and dark. His people are too unstable to pin down.

With some fanfare, this blog, the Projectionist, made its debut in the fall of 2007 and has averaged one post every six weeks — one every twenty if you don’t count the Oscar chats, expanded reviews, and obits of people like Paul Newman, Sydney Pollack, and John Leonard. That is, by any reckoning, pitiful, and while I certainly worked my butt off in that same period (weekly film columns packed with sparkling insights, etc.), the time has come to charge ahead or fall on my sword.

It’s funny how Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in its sundry languages and cultures gets under the skin of so many writers and filmmakers. Yes, it’s the enticement of easy money, but there’s something even more insidious: the fluky mixture of tackiness and grandiosity; the questions that mischievously drift from history to science to the most ephemeral of pop-culture ephemera; the option to “phone a friend” — who might well let one down with a thud, as friends often do. A cruel god puts fortune just within reach — and just out of it. A sense of divine mockery is at the heart of Slumdog Millionaire, a galvanic coming-of-age saga constructed around the show’s Hindi incarnation. The movie, directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later), borrows the ingenious premise (but only a few specifics) from the novel Q & A by Vikas Swarup: A poor young Muslim, Jamal (Dev Patel), wins millions of rupees on TV and is promptly arrested on the grounds that an ignorant “slumdog” who serves chai to better-paid workers must somehow have cheated. Via flashbacks, Jamal explains to a cop (Irfan Khan) how he knew the right answers — how each question, as if by fate, connected with some event in his violent, tragic life.

Paul Newman has died, damn it. He was the closest thing we've had in a movie star to a saint—and probably he'd say that was the dumbest thing he'd ever heard, which as far as I'm concerned is more proof. I'm not just talking about the hundreds of millions he earned for charity with his Newman's Own products, or his persistent but judicious political activism. As an artist, he was self-deprecating, often deeply self-critical; he never assumed we'd love him because he was, you know, Paul Newman. When directors built him pedestals, he worked to earn his place on them. Early in his career, he studied the Method, but he never went in for the fumbly-mumbly self-plumbing that became its hallmark. He always threw his attention onto the other actors—which might be why, opposite him, so many became stars and won awards. Everyone looked brighter in his light.

He was a marvelous man: prickly, but, at least in later years, generous-spirited and strangely, almost compulsively self-deprecating. He was by then in artist (not critic) mode, and spent most of his days brooding over his paintings in his Southern California studio, working beside his wonderful wife and partner, Patricia Patterson.

Courtesy of Pixar

This is a revision of an earlier posting.

The new Pixar picture Wall-E is one for the ages, a masterpiece to be savored before or after the end of the world — assuming, like the title character, you’re still around when all the humans have taken off and have access to an old video player. Wall-E (that’s the name of the machine) is a trash compactor, the last of his kind from an age in which cleaning up garbage was mankind’s highest priority — before people threw in the towel (and broom) and apparently (no spoilers here!) rocketed away. Now, this squat, childlike robot with his pivoting goggle eyes resides in a metropolis surrounded by skyscrapers that turn out, on closer inspection, to be compressed trash bricks piled high into the soot-gray sky. The movie is a bit of a trash brick itself: Director Andrew Stanton and his Pixar collaborators have taken cultural detritus — bits and pieces from cherished film genres, pop icons, visionary sci-fi tropes, half-remembered bric-a-brac from childhood — and compacted it all into a sublime work of art.