Jon Heder and Will Ferrell in Blades of GloryBLADES OF GLORY

It's goofy, it's obvious, and several of its inspirations are only borderline successful, but with the exception of David Fincher's Zodiac, the figure-skating comedy Blades of Glory is the most thoroughly enjoyable movie I've yet seen in 2007. It's also, quite possibly, the best, most unexpectedly clever work of its type since The 40-Year-Old Virgin. How do I even begin to describe how surprising this is?

Jon Heder, Rob Schneider, and David Spade in The BenchwarmersTHE BENCHWARMERS

The audience laughter at The Benchwarmers chilled me to the marrow. What in God's name are we allowing to pass for "children's entertainment" these days? Dennis Dugan's "comedy" is about a trio of aging dweebs (Rob Schneider, David Spade, and Jon Heder) who - seeking retribution for their childhood humiliations - arrange to play in a Little League tournament, and it's better for everyone's mental health that I ignore the logistics of the plotting.Suffice it to say that the film is an empowerment fantasy for middle-aged booger-eaters everywhere. But it isn't geared toward adults. (At least, not adults with IQs in the triple digits.) The Benchwarmers is a diversion aimed squarely at kids, and as such, it's almost unspeakably repellent - the movie is so hateful that you want to file a restraining order against it.

Jodie Foster in FlightplanFLIGHTPLAN

Movies such as Flightplan are hell to review. How do I explain, exactly, why the film doesn't work without giving away the plot secrets that prevent it from working? Like last fall's already-forgotten The Forgotten, director Robert Schwentke's airborne thriller involves a missing child. During a trans-Atlantic flight from Berlin to America, Jodie Foster's newly widowed Kyle lays her six-year-old daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston) down for a nap, falls asleep herself, and wakes to find the girl missing. Obviously, escape from the plane is impossible, but Julia is nowhere to be found, and, more disturbingly, no one on the flight seems to remember her being aboard. Could Julia have merely been a figment of Kyle's imbalanced imagination?

Jet Li in HeroHERO

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!