BATMAN RETURNS

Many Hollywood blockbusters feel so generic as to have been formed by committee, and in Batman Begins, that committee appears to be comprised entirely of comic-book bloggers. Just how afraid of Internet fanboys have movie studios become? It has been widely reported that this new installment in the superhero franchise is a deliberate rebuke to director Joel Schumacher's beyond-campy Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, and I couldn't be more on board with that; Schumacher managed to turn Warner Brothers' moody franchise into a half-assed Mardi Gras spectacle, minus the debaucherous fun. (Only in Schumacher's hands could Uma Thurman come off as a depressed drag queen.)

CINDERELLA MAN

Every time Hollywood releases a prestigious drama between June and August - Saving Private Ryan, The Road to Perdition, Seabiscuit - a big deal is made about whether audiences are "ready" for weightier fare in the summer months, as if the movie-going public, en masse, annually says, "But it's summer vacation! I don't want to think!" To my mind, this question of "Will audiences show up?" is a mostly pointless one, because (1) these movies don't expect you to think much, and (2) they generally go on to earn a bundle, having cornered the market on cineplex heft.

STAR WARS, EPISODE III - REVENGE OF THE SITH

I've spent a lot of time - both in print and in person - making fun of George Lucas' Star Wars prequels, and for a reason: It's pretty easy. The prosaic (and endless) exposition, the flat staging, the unspeakable dialogue, the ba-dum-ching! clunkiness of the comedy, the videogame-inspired mayhem, Jar Jar Binks ... there's practically no end of topics worth goofing on.

CRASH

Crash, the magnificent drama by Million Dollar Baby screenwriter Paul Haggis, fits alongside such sprawling, ensemble-driven works as Grand Canyon, Short Cuts, and Magnolia, movies in which plotlines dovetail within one another and themes enmesh, and where bitter, dissatisfied characters might not wind up more content than before - some might not even wind up alive - but they will definitely have shared, for better or worse, An Experience. (These characters might not receive traditional happy endings, yet they almost invariably find degrees of solace and a measure of hope.) Moviegoers who crave a clearly delineated moral to their stories can be driven batty by films of this ilk; more than once I've heard someone ask, apropos of one of these works, "But what was its point?" Crash, like its predecessors, explores characters so hungry for contact and meaning and understanding in a chaotic universe that they're ready to explode, and oftentimes do. That hunger becomes the point.