Fun reviews are fun. You know how much fun? Sometimes we start writing them before we see the movie. The other afternoon, I started thinking about an Avatar piece headlined "Avatar Is the Greatest Movie of All Time For People Who Love Wearing Glasses." Right? I had a whole set piece ready about how, during hour 17 of the movie, I got distracted and started wondering if friction from the Costello-grade thickness of the 3D specs was causing a zit on the patch of skin between my skull and left ear. I thought this was fine to conceive ahead of time, because Avatar is obviously just a mass entertainment, and don't get it twisted: let's all have some fun, no? READ MORE

We are going to have to talk a bit about aesthetics and their relationship to fiction and reality here, and I will try to make that as painless as possible. Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" (opens tomorrow, if you live in a major city, looks like) is a very suspenseful, intentionally frightening (thriller-style) look at a wildman who defuses bombs during the early-middle stages of the Iraq war. It is about, Bigelow said the other night at MoMA, an "inexorable tide of potential violence." (She meant, I think, reality; real violence.) It is also gorgeous, and successfully shot in a manner that is intentionally documentary-like yet artful and immersive (manipulatively so!) at every step. READ MORE