SEMI-PRO

In the '70s-era sports comedy Semi-Pro, Will Ferrell plays Jackie Moon, a one-hit-wonder pop star who becomes the owner of the American Basketball Association's Flint Tropics, a struggling Michigan team for which he also serves as coach, promoter, and star player. And forgive me for asking, but shouldn't any one of these five roles have been enough for Will Ferrell?

MUNICH

He may be revered - and often reviled - for his sense of childlike wonder, but no Hollywood director shoots scenes of violence with the no-frills grimness of Steven Spielberg. In the helmer's taut, ambitious Munich - which focuses on Israeli retribution for the murders of nine of their athletes at the 1972 Olympics - Spielberg, as he did in Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, doesn't distance himself from the carnage on the screen, and doesn't let us distance ourselves, either. There's nothing self-consciously "artistic" about the numerous killings we're shown here; bullets tear through flesh with terrifying force, bombs rip limbs apart, and most of these atrocities are portrayed with an almost shocking matter-of-factness - we recoil from the violence because Spielberg's presentation of it is so intentionally artless. (The murders in Munich come off as almost painfully realistic.) Yet although Munich is a brutal work, it isn't brutalizing; Spielberg is too much of a natural showman - and natural entertainer - for that. The film is a riveting and intelligent political thriller, and although the director can't fully rein in his expectedly sentimental impulses, Munich is probably Spielberg's strongest directorial accomplishment in more than a decade. It's a gripping and, for Spielberg especially, refreshingly tough-minded piece of work.