HERO

Does any moviegoer really care what Zhang Yimou's Chinese martial-arts epic Hero is actually about? You get to see adversaries battling one another while running on water! You get to see a woman warding off a bow-and-arrow onslaught using only her dressing gown! You get to see a guy splitting raindrops in half with a sword, for Pete's sake!

OPEN WATER

We all know that shoestring-budgeted independent works aren't necessarily going to have the professional sheen of Hollywood output, but after reading the rave reviews for Open Water, I feel compelled to ask: Just how much amateurishness are we expected to endure in the name of cinematic political-correctness (i.e., loving an indie solely for being an indie)? Barring an ingeniously edited sequence during a thunderstorm and a few stomach-tightening moments when sharks make surprise appearances, I didn't find Open Water the least bit scary, let alone "Riveting!", "Electrifying!", and all the other superlatives currently being lavished on it (and this from someone who still gets freaked out watching The Blair Witch Project). Worse still, the movie is so badly performed and overwritten that it has the unintentional effect of coming off as totally phony, and since the film was notoriously shot with the leading actors surrounded by real sharks, realism is Open Water's only true draw. Are we film critics now so openly hateful toward CGI-heavy Hollywood blockbusters that we'll happily convince ourselves that tedious, flatly staged thrillers such as Open Water are actually great?

How strange that, of the two movies I recently caught as a double-feature - Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate and Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, directed by Dude, Where's My Car? auteur Danny Leiner - not only is Harold & Kumar the better of the two, it's the only one really worth discussing in any detail.

SUPER SIZE ME

At its best, Morgan Spurlock's hit documentary Super Size Me plays like an adaptation of Eric Schlosser's exposé Fast Food Nation: smart, funny, well-researched, and scary as hell.