In order of recommendation:

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

I was completely rapt by the austerity and dread of David Cronenberg's A History of Violence - for the first five minutes. In the film's beautifully sustained opening sequence, we watch as two men - one middle-aged, in a black suit, and another, younger and sporting a T-shirt and jeans - exit their motel room. They load up their car, and the older gentleman drops off the room key while the other - slowly, slowly - pulls the car up to meet him. Moments later, the older man returns, having had, he says, "a little trouble with the maid." But before they leave, they need water. The younger man enters the motel office to replenish their supply, and as he does, we finally see the image that Cronenberg has thus far denied us, and that we in the audience have properly anticipated - the motel manager and maid lying dead in pools of blood. A frightened little girl, gently stroking the hair of her doll, enters the scene and makes eye contact with the younger killer. And the man, smiling gently, tells her not to be afraid, slowly aims his revolver at the girl's head, and fires.

SCARY MOVIE 3

With Scary Movie 3, the assignment of directing has been passed from Keenen Ivory Wayans to Airplane!'s David Zucker, which is a big step forward right there. (Zucker isn't much of a director, either, but at least he has ideas on how to shape a scene, and is actually pretty adept at making his film parodies look like the films they're parodying.) Plus, any time Zucker and company are satirizing the outrageous pomposity of M. Night Shymalan, whose Signs receives - and deserves - particularly harsh treatment here, Scary Movie 3 is everything you want a movie spoof to be: smart, funny, and more than a little mean. (And heartening - until now, I thought I was the only one who detested Shymalan's "Hitchcockian" appearance as the vet who accidentally kills Mel Gibson's wife in Signs.) The wide-eyed, appealing Anna Faris returns as the lead, ably satirizing Naomi Watts' reporter from The Ring, and comic actors such as Charlie Sheen, Jeremy Piven, Queen Latifah, Camryn Manheim, and legendary spoofster Leslie Nielsen all score some laughs. So why is Scary Movie 3 still so disappointing?