Halloween might be over, but that doesn't mean the scares have to stop. We wouldn't go so far as to call Vertigo a "horror movie," but Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock ratchets the tension to such unbearable levels that parts of it are more terrifying than anything you'd see in whatever torture porn is defiling theaters in a given week. Of course you've watched Vertigo before, so we aren't going to tell you anything new—Bernard Hermann's score is fantastic, Jimmy Stewart is perfectly obsessive, Kim Novak is the epitome of cold, blah, blah, blah—but did you know that Turner Classic Movies is now available in HD for Time Warner subscribers? It's true! If you thought Vertigo looked great before, wait until you see it now. [TCM, 8 p.m.]

Tuesday: By the People
Because what you need is more opportunities to watch Barack Obama on television, here comes By the People, a new HBO documentary produced by Edward Norton (who presumably took time out his busy schedule of Modern Family watching and New York City marathon preparation to do so.) By the People is a behind the scenes look at the 2008 presidential campaign, which should be fun, if only to remind us that just a year ago we were so much more optimistic than we are now about the future of America. It'll be nice to see now-president Obama once again telling us that yes, we can. [HBO, 9 p.m.]

Wednesday: The Girl Next Door
If a movie came out today starring Emile Hirsch and Paul Dano, chances are you would expect it to be some serious indie drama directed by Sean Penn. But back in 2004, the movie they co-starred in was a teen sex comedy about a high school senior dating a porn star, and it did so poorly at the box office, you probably forgot it even existed. Not us though! You can write off The Girl Next Door as trite and silly, but Luke Greenfield's film is kinda brilliant—funny, smart, poignant and raucous. And if nothing else, you can just watch for the music cues. Does anything go better with coming of age angst than "Baba O'Riley" and "Under Pressure?" We didn't think so. [FX, 8 p.m.]

Thursday: Community
And now we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you a weekly plea to watch Community. For reasons that we cannot figure out, this show hasn't caught on the way it should. The ratings are poor (despite a full season order from NBC, Community averages just under 6 million viewers per episode) and, worse, there seems to be quite the negative stigma attached to the series. People don't want to like! When we tell friends it's funny, they get a look on their face like we're telling them to watch Family Guy. Wake up, everyone! Whether or not Community makes it longer than one season remains to be seen, but what we have on our hands is the quickest and snarkiest show on network television since Arrested Development. Seriously, the jokes fly out at a clip that would make even 30 Rock jealous. That you aren't watching this on a weekly basis is borderline criminal. [NBC, 8 p.m.]

Friday: The Darjeeling Limited
Wes Anderson made quite a stink in the blog world last week when he (facetiously?) wondered to the New Yorker why Slumdog Millionaire was the India-based movie that hit with the populace and not his 2007 travelogue of ennui, drugs and broken familial bonds. And as you read that description, perhaps you can figure out the answer. In the oeuvre of Mr. Anderson, The Darjeeling Limited sits somewhere towards the bottom, but it's never terrible thanks almost totally to Adrian Brody, Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman who play the least believable-looking set of brothers we've ever seen. Whenever the three are allowed to riff off each other, The Darjeeling Limited is quite fun; when it bogs down with sentimentality and spirituality, it's not. Still, the real problem is that unlike Slumdog Millionaire, there isn't a dance number during the credits. Next time, Wes. Next time. [More Max, 4:15 a.m.]

Monday: How I Met Your Mother
Is Monday night the new Thursday night? Tonight brings the season premiere of House, a new Gossip Girl, a two-hour Heroes (yep, that show is still on the air) and the launching of the CBS Monday night comedy block, which includes the series premiere of Jenna Elfman’s Accidentally on Purpose. Phew! Us? We’ll be watching Gossip Girl at 9 p.m., natch [Ed note: But some of us will be watching House]. But before that, we’ll definitely tune in to the season premiere of How I Met Your Mother. We aren’t even sure whether to call the comedy a cult hit anymore—after all, tonight marks the start of season five—but it still feels like less people watch this than they should (this despite the fact that every person we know counts it as one of their favorites.) Come on, folks! What are you waiting for? [CBS, 8 p.m.]

Tuesday: North by Northwest
Our favorite Alfred Hitchcock film manages to be his most accessible. You know the story, but in brief: Everyman extraordinaire Cary Grant gets mistaken for a spy and away we go; cue a cross country chase that culminates on Mount Rushmore. What we’re always amazed by whenever we watch North by Northwest is how it manages to be so thoroughly modern. Whereas some old movies don’t hold up, this one feels like it could be released today and become a huge hit. [TCM, 8 p.m.]

Wednesday: Mercy
Apparently 2009 is the Year of the Nurse. Who knew? We have yet to see Mercy, but from the promos it feels like the new series will to slot itself somewhere in between the darkness of Nurse Jackie and the treacle of HawthoRNe. Nurse Veronica Callahan (Taylor Schilling) has just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq and—wouldn’t you know it—she’s the only person at Mercy Hospital that actually knows what they’re doing! We can’t say we’re all that interested in Mercy, but that it features Michelle Trachtenberg—as the naïve young nurse—makes us take notice. Still, truth be told, we hope Mercy gets canceled, just so Ms. Trachtenberg can become a full-time cast member on Gossip Girl before the year is out. Georgina Sparks forever! [NBC, 8 p.m.]

Thursday: Grey’s Anatomy
Speaking of bad doctor soap operas: Grey’s Anatomy is back! The show you love to hate returns with a two-hour season premiere that will feature the official death of George O’Malley (T.R. Knight, probably happy for the first time in three years) and the recovery of Izzie Stevens (Katherine Heigl, probably still hating every second she has to spend working on Grey’s). With Ellen Pompeo pregnant, and, Ms. Heigl and Patrick Dempsey taking off for episodes at a time to star in movies, expect this season to be a transitional one. Whether Grey’s can become the next ER—forever regenerating its sprawling cast—rests solely on what happens this year. [ABC, 9 p.m.]

Friday: Gangs of New York
The most disappointing news of the fall? That Paramount shifted the Martin Scorsese-Leonardo DiCaprio thriller Shutter Island from its October release date to February. Boo! Now where are we supposed to get our Scorsese/DiCaprio fix? We’ll just have to settle for Gangs of New York instead, which isn’t as good as The Departed and isn’t as bad as The Aviator in the Scorsese/DiCaprio oeuvre. Them aside, the real star here is Daniel Day-Lewis (would you expect anything less?). As the villain, aptly named Bill the Butcher, Mr. Day-Lewis does Daniel Plainview-before-Daniel Plainview, stomping and chomping scenery like a Method Godzilla; he’s brilliant, even if the movie never actually reaches that height. [IFC, 2:45 a.m.]

In The Philadelphia Story, for instance, he's condescending, too wry, a tabloid reporter stuck covering a society wedding who gets loaded and tries to bone the bride-to-be. In Rear Window, it's bad enough that he's become, trapped in that wheelchair, this peeping tom, creepy, obsessed, but he also treats Grace Kelly most of the time like she's a flesh-eating virus he might catch. And in It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey may be the bulwark that prevents Bedford Falls from devolving into Potterville, but the man is also self-righteous, self-pitying, driven easily to suicide, and a screamer. This is the bravery of Jimmy Stewart. He didn't hedge for your sympathies, he screwed with them. He undermined his sappy, sad face with nasty, sinister eyes; and used that timorous, aw-shucks voice to say the most terrible things.

Which brings us to Vertigo. It's on TCM, this Saturday evening, at 5:45. Don't count on doing much afterward, because it tends to leave a person pretty fucked up. But it's Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece and maybe the finest American movie ever made, our apologies to Godfather fans.

Here, Jimmy Stewart plays Scottie, a detective forced to retire because dizziness hits him at any height above chair level. Kim Novak plays the rich woman he's hired to tail, who is probably sick in the head but may be possessed by the ghost of a Spanish noblewoman, whom he falls in love with and loses. Ms. Novak plays too the shopgirl he meets later on, also loves, wants to possess.

So, he remakes the shopgirl in the image of the dead rich woman. He's like a Hollywood talent agent manipulating some kid fresh off the bus into the shape of a starlet. He re-creates the style of gray suit he remembers, dies her hair platinum blond and twists it back up into the tree-ring knot he longs to caress. "Judy, please, it can't matter to you!" is what he pleads, as he dolls her up and destroys her.

Maybe the detective parts of him are still whirring and humming inside, putting her puzzle together piece by piece, deducing with great difficulty why the rich woman and the shopgirl look so much alike, making the mystery make sense. But he's also so deeply disturbed, so awful and broken, that Freud and a whole team of Viennese psychiatrists wouldn't be able to figure him out. Hell, they couldn't even name what he's got. His vertigo, bad enough, becomes a disequilibrium that can never be righted. We think Scottie's weirder and scarier than Heath Ledger's Joker, but because he wears a Jimmy Stewart suit and Jimmy Stewart seeming-good intentions instead of facial scars and war paint, it's hard to see.

Anyway, for anyone who doesn't already know, we're loathe to spoil the ending, so all we'll say is that Scottie cures himself of his vertigo, but the cure is tragic.

And about Kim Novak, who you'll mourn twice, she had the crazy knack of acting both earthy and uncanny. We recommend following Vertigo up with one of two other Kim Novak movies: Kiss Me Stupid, a Billy Wilder sex-farce co-starring Dean Martin as a grosser, hornier, even drunker version of himself, or The Notorious Landlady, the comic thriller she made in London with Jack Lemmon and Fred Astaire. In each of these films, she again plays someone pretending to be someone else, but these masquerades end happily. Of course, there's no real antidote for Vertigo.

Tuesday: Frank TV
If you're a baseball fan, or if you've just happened to flip past TBS in the last couple of weeks, you've probably seen an ad for Frank TV. To call the marketing push for the second season of Frank Caliendo's sketch show "ubiquitous" would be an insult to the word. These ads are everywhere. Did we mention the show is terrible? Whoever said impression is the lowest form of comedy must have seen a Frank TV marathon. Still, you should see it for yourself. [TBS, 11 p.m.]

Wednesday: To Catch a Thief
We can't fault you for thinking that To Catch a Thief occurred in Alfred Hitchcock's disappointing post-Psycho years. Surprisingly though, he actually made this light-as-air genre flick in 1955, long before North by Northwest, Vertigo and Psycho. That's fine. There are worse things than watching Cary Grant and Grace Kelly circle each other like mountain cats against the backdrop of the French Riviera. Ms. Kelly, in her last appearance in a Hitchcock film, is so stunning here that you may need to avert your eyes. With all due respect to January Jones, a.k.a. Betty Draper … we've seen Grace Kelly, and you, Miss, are not even close. [HBO Signature, 6:35 a.m.]

Thursday: Touch of Evil
As an actor, Orson Welles was always much better at playing an angry cad than he ever was at playing a spry leading man. It goes to reason, then, that Touch of Evil is his best performance. He's bloated, drunk, racist, angry and truly corrupt. And every time he's onscreen, Touch of Evil reaches incredible heights. This is the reedited version of the classic, cut together by Apocalypse Now editor Walter Murch to hew more closely to Mr. Welles' original vision of the film, which Universal foolishly trashed and pushed to the side on the original release. (Watch the film's famous opening shot above.) [TCM, 10:45 p.m.]

Friday: Vanilla Sky
If the reports on the Internets are to be believed, the next Cameron Crowe movie involves Ben Stiller, Reese Witherspoon and the plot of Joe vs. the Volcano. Sigh. What happened? Vanilla Sky certainly has its flaws, but we'd posit that it might be the last great movie Mr. Crowe ever directs. It's an assured and melancholy work, and the ending never fails to make us incredibly depressed. Not sold? What if we told you Penelope Cruz is totally topless in this thing. Many, many times … (Ladies, don't kid yourselves. You want to look, too.) [Universal HD, 10:30 p.m.]

The movie, to be honest, kind of blows. This isn't one among the ridiculous, unequaled streak of Hitchcock masterpieces that began with Rear Window and ended nine years later with Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds, right in a row. Torn Curtain came after, and everything's off, echo-y. There's no Bernard Hermann score. The Hitchcock blonde is played by redheaded Julie Andrews. Newman is only a slightly more convincing rocket scientist than Denise Richards in whichever Bond movie. Still, we can recommend four minutes of the film, which is how long it takes Paul Newman and a farmer's wife to kill a guy.

Hitchcock wanted to experiment for once with inelegancy. "In every picture somebody gets killed and it goes very quickly," he explained, "And I thought it was time to show that it was very difficult, very painful, and it takes a very long time to kill a man." So Newman throws a bottle of milk at the German secret policeman and starts choking him. The farm frau breaks a knife blade off in his neck and busts his kneecaps with a shovel. They turn on the gas and shove his head in the stove. The soundtrack offers no crescendoing or creeping music to tell us what to feel; it's just their grunts and sighs and whimpers. Newman, in his gray tweed and skinny tie, looks like another Kennedy brother, which doesn't help. When the German's hands finally stop struggling and wriggling, you worry that maybe you should call the cops or face charges as an accessory.

This was, mind you, the year before Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway got mowed down in "Bonnie and Clyde," supposedly the act of cinematic violence that shocked Hollywood into realism; and 42 years before the equally brutal, much more hilarious, seemingly never-ending beating James Franco, Seth Rogen and Danny McBride give each other in Pineapple Express. We'd argue that the fight in Torn Curtain influenced more filmmakers than the shower scene in Psycho; all that slow lurching around is as precise and perfect as any other Hitchcock set piece, but it's also savagely straightforward, and perhaps easier for smaller talents to replicate.

Still, those four minutes don't totally make up for the other 124; and no consolation for the fact that Hitchcock, who gave Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant their best and weirdest roles, mistook Paul Newman for some young punk. After Torn Curtain, of course, Newman still had a million great movies in front of him. But it took the once-profilic Hitchcock a decade to direct just three more films, his last. They were grubby, unglamorous, scaring nobody, starring nobodies.

Was it only a matter of time until this happened? In April of last year, Andrew Sarris reviewed Disturbia, writing: "D.J. Caruso's Disturbia... was described to me by a colleague (before I caught a studio screening) as a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) for today's teenage audiences." So did it take a year and a half to get together the lawsuit, which is being brought by the estate of Sheldon Abend, which owns the rights to Rear Window? Or did Abend's estate guardians happen to cozy up with a Disturbia DVD over the weekend and suddenly realize that actually, these two films do have many eerie similarities? How'd they miss the hype last time around? Jeez, people really don't read newspapers anymore, do they?

We've always been partial to the poison glass of milk Cary Grant goes to give Joan Fontaine in Suspicion; amazingly, that only sits at No. 45. And, like everyone else, we're pretty sure the incredibly creepy, off-putting and totally awesome kiss that Jimmy Stewart gives Kim Novak at the end of the ^second act in Vertigo is one of the best sequences we've ever seen put to film. Fittingly, that ranks third.

But we have gripes, too! Since the list is only 50 deep, we know not everything can get mentioned. But we were more than a little disappointed to see Notorious get a slighted. O.K., it wasn't slighted; Notorious does appear on the list three times (the scene in the wine cellar, the drunk driving and the very end). But where is that fantastic crane shot into Ingrid Bergman's hand to reveal that she is holding a key to the wine cellar? For us, that's one of Hitchcock's most indelible and lasting images.

Of course, we were grateful that Shadow of a Doubt only cropped up once. That movie is just too creepy, even for us.

Tuesday: Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares
In America, Scottish celebrity chef is best known for his cartoonish, abusive outbursts on the Fox reality cooking competition Hell's Kitchen. But across the pond, his far superior television show, Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, showed a softer side of the rough-and-tumble chef. That program, which follows Ramsay as he tries to help failing restaurants, has also been remade for a U.S. audience (also for Fox), but skip that and DVR the BBC America reruns of the original. Today, Ramsay travels to Paris to help a Scottish woman who's opened up a vegetarian place—with an uncontrollable chef, a bratty waitress and terrible food. Expect tough love, and Ramsay's signature short fuse. [BBC America, 1 p.m.]

Wednesday: Hand Behind the Mouse
This documentary about Ub Iwerks, one of the early geniuses of animation technology, offers a sort of alternative history of early cartoons, focusing on Disney's 'go to' guy rather than the more recognizable names associated with our early animated friends. The film also features tons of old cartoons that, despite an entire cable channel devoted to Disney productions, are rarely broadcast on tv. [Ovation, 8 p.m.]

Thursday: Stand By Me
Oh, Corey Feldman before he was a mess. Wil Wheaton before he became a computer nerd. Jerry O'Connell before he got skinny. And River Phoenix before he became an icon. The Observer can still quote this 80s classic, based on Stephen King's short story "The Body," about four boys coming of age in the 50s who set off on a day's journey in search of a teenager's dead body. Scary, hilarious, and unbelievably sad. [AMC, 12 p.m.]

Friday: Doctor Who
We're totally obsessed with the remade Doctor Who series, which stars adorable, foppish Scottish actor David Tennant as the well-dressed time lord (bespoke suits! Chuck Taylors!) who zips around in a police box fighting aliens and rooting out bad extraterrestrials. Today, the first part of one of our most favorite episodes airs on the SciFi channel. In it, the Doctor and his season 3 companion, Martha Jones, appear in Britain in 1913 where the Doctor has been forced to forsake his time lord self and become human in an attempt to evade some alien pursuers. There are also scary scarecrows. Trust us: this is not the Doctor Who of your youth. [SciFi, 5 a.m.]

Voyeurism is a vice to which I cannot even pretend to assume a pose of moral superiority, since most of my life has been one long adventure in the vicarious contemplation of and identification with the luminous phantoms of the silver screen. Besides, the protagonists of both Rear Window and Disturbia drift into becoming Peeping Toms as a result of their being confined within a limited space by events beyond their control.

Privacy issues come to the fore in both films, but the audience, of course, finds itself—in both situations—becoming hypocritically implicated in the high-tech peeking. Otherwise, the two movies diverge wildly from each other after their initially similar premises to become statements of how much life and the movies have changed in half a century. To put a point on it, Rear Window never stooped to become the Grand Guignol of a horror movie that Disturbia has turned into by its climatic final sequence.

Still, as a point of fact, I must add that Mr. Landon, co-screenwriter and story originator of Disturbia, cites other climatic peephole precendents for his inspiration. These include, most notably, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974).

Anyway, unlike Rear Window, Disturbia requires a prologue that serves as the protagonist’s sentimental back story before it can get down to its suburban snooping activities. Kale (Shia Labeouf) is shown on a fly-fishing outing with his dream-like dad, who treats him like a fully grown-up buddy. On their ride home, an elaborately constructed two-stage auto collision kills the father and spares the son. A year later, Kale is still traumatized by the accident, and when his Spanish teacher reprimands him for not doing his homework and asks him, in a face-to-face confrontation, what his father would think, Kale punches him out.

Kale’s mother, Julie (Carrie-Anne Moss), intercedes with the judge to keep her son out of prison after his conviction for assault. Instead, Kale is sentenced to a three-month term of house arrest with a tamper-proof monitoring device attached to his leg. With his mother working day and night to support herself and her son, Kale is left alone most of time. After a few days of compulsive videogame playing to all hours, the 17-year-old shut-in gets bored. He begins looking at the outside world through the various windows of his two-story house with all the surveillance gadgets available to suburban teenagers. He is particularly curious about a neighborhood newcomer named Ashley (Sarah Roemer), especially when she swims in her pool in a bikini. I imagine that the film has a PG-13 rating because Kale never sees Ashley take off her bikini—a visual coup that would have earned Disturbia an automatic R rating.

Kale is joined from time to time in his surveillance by his high-school chum, Ronnie (Aaron Yoo), who also provides the cutesy comic relief. Both voyeurs are panic-stricken when they realize that Ashley is onto their fun-and-games. But not only is she not offended by all the attention from the two boys, she brazenly asks them to let her join in on the spying. It turns out that Ashley, like Kale, is still searching for her identity in a confusing world.

The three mischievous musketeers start getting in over their heads when they zero in on a seemingly harmless neighbor, Mr. Turner (David Morse), whom they begin to suspect is the serial killer responsible for the deaths of several women who have mysteriously gone missing over the last several weeks, and whose faces are splashed all over the television screen. The kids don’t have much to go on at first—certainly not enough to interest the police. But as they get closer and closer to Mr. Turner’s secret, their own lives become increasingly in danger.

Mr. Caruso and his screenwriters have managed to generate some human interest during the hectic proceedings, so that we are at least rooting for the kids to come through their somewhat self-imposed ordeal. The technical challenges of creating surveillance vantage points in a suburban neighborhood composed of several different California locations dwarfs the technical problems that Hitchcock faced with a single studio set representing a courtside view of many Greenwich Village apartments full of colorful but not at all neighborly characters. But then Rear Window had only one murder to solve, not a full chamber of horrors’ worth.

The performances of the small cast are more than adequate for the tasks assigned them, with Mr. Morse and Mr. Labeouf being especially adroit in overcoming the narrative’s more egregious contrivances. The state of public paranoia being what it is, and the ongoing war on terror shredding the last vestiges of the right to privacy, Disturbia is disturbingly contemporary in its celebration of the technology that can make us all potential victims of the full-time snoops among us.

With Friends Like These …

Emmanuel Bourdieu’s Poison Friends (Les Amitiés Maléfiques), from a screenplay by Mr. Bourdieu and Marcia Romano, won the International Critics Week Grand Prize at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, at which it was the opening-night attraction, and it is nothing if not quintessentially French in its preoccupation with the darker side of intellectual life. The film begins from the point of view of Eloi Duhaut (Malik Zidi), a new student in a Paris university, attending his first class with Professor Mortier (Jacques Bonnaffé), who is teaching a graduate course in the various theories of writing and literature. Eloi appears unsure of himself as he tries to explain why he has arrived a day late for the class. When the professor asks for a volunteer to address the class on the subject of writing, a strikingly self-confident and charismatic student named André Morney (Thibault Vincon) raises his hand, and proceeds to captivate the professor and his classmates with his tone of certitude as he presents his theory that people write only because they are afraid not to write. As André speaks, Eloi notices that everyone in the class seems to be writing something on notepads, as if it were a class of closet diarists.

When André concludes, Professor Mortier praises his contribution and resumes his own lecture. Since André is sitting next to Eloi, he starts up a conversation with the shy newcomer and, in essence, offers him his friendship. Eloi is soon introduced to Alexandre Pariente (Alexandre Steiger) another of André’s protégés, whom André has persuaded to give up his playwriting ambitions to devote himself full time to becoming an actor. Mr. Vincon provides André with a persuasively overpowering presence that makes Eloi and Alexandre willing subjects of his intellectual domination.

When Eloi becomes attracted to the beautiful university librarian, Marguerite (Natacha Régnier), André is strangely amused, because he is already sleeping with her—and yet, even more strangely, he seems to have no objection to Eloi’s courting her. We learn that Eloi’s mother, Florence Duhaut (Dominique Blanc), is a popular novelist, whose work André considers too pitifully vulgar and mainstream for Eloi to emulate. It soon becomes apparent that André is a malignant presence in the lives and careers of all the people who fall under his influence. He is given to lies and deceptions at every opportunity.

But irony of ironies! In spending all his time sabotaging the projects of Eloi, Alexandre and Marguerite, André neglects his own project, to the extent that his own thesis proposal is rejected by Professor Mortier. At this point, André shook my own professional bones to the marrow by slapping the professor around in order to get him to sign off on an intermediate diploma in order to keep him at least marginally employable.

Undaunted by his disastrous academic defeat, André lies to the members of his already restive circle that he has received a scholarship to Berkeley in the United States to complete his studies in American popular literature. Curiously, despite all its improbabilities, Poison Friends succeeds as a suspenseful psychological thriller, mainly because of the complex villain’s extraordinary magnetism. One can thereby believe in the narrative as an allegory of the misuse of power in personal relationships by unscrupulous charmers in every field—and the intellectual malefactors are perhaps the worst of all. Still, André’s character, even in the depths of his humiliation, remains remarkably dignified and non-self-pitying. That gives this academic melodrama an unexpected depth.

Whereas The Godfather was based on a vividly lucid and transparent fictional narrative, The Good Shepherd is made shadowy and secretive by its fictional variations on the founding and clandestine operations of the C.I.A., starting even before its official creation in 1947 from the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, and more or less ending with the agency’s disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, intended to overthrow the Castro regime.

The motivation behind this period movie seems to be to make viewers even more suspicious of an outfit whose recent head assured President George W. Bush that proving the existence of concealed W.M.D. in Iraq would be a “slam dunk.” Also, the early sequences of the film places its central character in the midst of a Skull and Bones initiation at Yale that invokes W.’s own reportedly colorful college days.

The prevailing tone of the film is both cautionary and cynical in its very reasonable assumption that excessive secrecy can induce excessive paranoia among the operatives involved in maintaining the secrets, to say nothing of the population at large. Matt Damon is in top form as the fascinatingly repressed Edward Wilson, who is first seen in female garb and makeup in a collegiate production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. When a classmate asks Edward in the dressing room afterward what it feels like to be a woman, Edward snaps back with a nervy “Why do you want to know?” This quickly establishes the pattern of Edward’s terse wit, though it must be added that the terseness often suppresses the wit.

Mr. Damon’s Wilson is loosely based on the still-controversial James Jesus Angleton, the legendary head of C.I.A. counterintelligence from 1954 to 1974. During his initiation ceremony into Skull and Bones, Edward reveals upon request a literally deadly family secret to clinch his acceptance into what will prove to be only the first of several secret societies. His story also demonstrates his unremitting poise under pressure, which eventually earns him the grudging admiration of his Soviet counterpart.

Still, Mr. De Niro and Mr. Roth have made Edward such an uncommunicative character throughout the film that much of the narrative is hobbled by understatement—usually an aesthetic virtue. I was also momentarily confused by the casting of dopplegängers Angelina Jolie and Tammy Blanchard as the two significant women in Edward’s life. Ms. Jolie becomes his wife after an aggressive courtship on her part results in pregnancy, making a hasty marriage imperative to preserve the honor of her high-society family. Ms. Blanchard is Laura, a deaf Yale undergraduate who is Edward’s first love and later, mystifyingly, an instrument of his betrayal after an extramarital venture on his part.

I didn’t think Ms. Jolie fell short in her thankless role as the neglected wife, as some reviewers have argued—particularly in this era when good parts for Hollywood actresses are in especially short supply. As it is, both women remain marginal and disposable figures in a predominantly male cosmos. The only other female character of any importance, Martina Gedeck’s Hanna Schiller, is Edward’s assistant (and one-night-stand bedmate) in Berlin, a double agent who gets rubbed out for her treachery—though not by Edward, who always remains immaculately above the fray.

It was only after I saw the film that I learned that Angleton was a close friend of William Empson, the literary critic who wrote The Seven Types of Ambiguity. Suddenly, the doppelgänger casting for both males and females, spies and moles, friends and foes in The Good Shepherd made a kind of convoluted sense. Yet I feel that the visual imperatives of a cinematic narrative with doppelgängers require the more expert hand of an Alfred Hitchcock, vide Anthony Perkins and John Gavin as the mirror images of each other in Psycho (1960), to make that point without ever confusing the audience. Hence, though I do concede that the director and his collaborators have fashioned an absorbingly uneasy entertainment very much in tune with the contemporary zeitgeist, I feel that Mr. De Niro pays a price for his otherwise admirable, philosophically pessimistic consistency.

It may be that my preference for Hitchcock (and Fritz Lang) over most of the modern practitioners of film noir reflects my taste for clarity over ambiguity. And The Good Shepherd is nothing if not ambiguous in its characterizations and its storytelling. Along the way, Alec Baldwin as Sam Murach, Edward’s F.B.I. counterpart, and William Hurt as Philip Allen, Edward’s C.I.A. superior, managed to entrance me with their deftly deceptive role-playing. Truth to tell, I sort of liked the movie, despite my being left in the dark about many of its more complicated operations.

Significantly, the most brutal act of torture is performed by John Turturro’s Ray Brocco, a self-proclaimed Italian-American subordinate in Edward’s unit. Edward himself goes so far as to acknowledge his own ruling-class ethnicity when challenged by Joe Pesci’s Joseph Palmi, a deportable Italian mobster. For that matter, Mr. De Niro plays Bill Sullivan, a non-Italian character based on “Wild Bill” Donovan, the founder of the O.S.S. and Edward’s recruiter into the world of espionage. One might note, if only in passing, that it is highly unusual for an American film to skirt the boundaries of political correctness by being so precise about people’s ethnicities.

The most tantalizing performance in the film, however, is that of Michael Gambon as Dr. Fredericks, a gay academic who is expelled from the Yale faculty for his supposedly pro-German activities as a double agent in British intelligence after the outbreak of World War II. This occurs after he has promoted Edward to the editorship of Yale’s literary magazine—ostensibly motivated by their mutual love of poetry, but actually as part of an unsuccessful attempt to seduce him. This gay subtext is extended by the curiously mannered performance of Billy Crudup as Arch Cummings, an affected operative based on the British double agent Kim Philby, who was eventually exposed as a mole in the employ of the Soviet Union.

These and other strands of Cold War double-agentry—on both sides—are scattered throughout the narrative, with melodramatic embellishments. Still, no previous American film has ventured into this still largely unknown territory with such authority and emotional detachment. For this reason alone, The Good Shepherd is must-see viewing.

The Older Man

Roger Michell’s Venus, from a screenplay by Hanif Kureishi, would have served as a creaky vehicle for any aged actor less gifted and eternally luminous than the 74-year-old Peter O’Toole, he of the soft blue eyes that long ago glistened against the snow and ice of Nicholas Ray’s The Savage Innocents (1960) and the desert sands of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962). As an added dividend, Mr. O’Toole briefly shares the screen with Vanessa Redgrave, one of the most charismatic stage and screen actresses I have ever seen, here cast as the lead character’s amiably forgiving and long-ago-abandoned wife, Valerie.

Mr. O’Toole plays Maurice, a retired actor who still performs bit parts on television shows. His two closest, if often cranky, friends, Ian (Leslie Phillips) and Donald (Richard Griffiths), are, like Maurice, beyond-twilight thespians huddling together with their uppers and downers and much alcohol for chasers in one pub or another. Their ritualized routines are temporarily disrupted by the unexpected visit of Ian’s grandniece Jessie (Jodie Whitaker), who has come to town from the provinces where she lives with her strict parents, supposedly to “look after” her aged granduncle.

Instead, Jessie spends her nights partying to all hours, sleeping late in the morning and completely ignoring her presumed household duties. Ian is quickly fed up with Jessie and her slovenly ways, but Maurice takes a less-than-platonic interest in the uneducated young girl, and soon we have the comic spectacle of a deviously lecherous Henry Higgins pretending to educate his (in this case, definitely not virginal) Eliza Doolittle by taking her to the art museum, where she can appreciate the finer points of a nude by Velázquez. Though Jessie accepts a job that Maurice gets her as an artist’s model, she is adamant in her refusal to let him see her naked. What is acceptable for her callow boyfriend is verboten to a leering geezer like Maurice. This distinction is something that Jessie senses instinctually, but Maurice shamelessly perseveres in his pursuit—even after he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, making his quest for Jessie’s fair flesh more quixotic than ever.

When Ian finally realizes what Maurice is up to, he flies into a rage. Blows are struck, though without any lasting impact on the two men’s friendship, which the inexorability of time threatens to make short-lived anyway. Mr. O’Toole’s self-confessed excesses over the years have left him looking much older than his official 74 years, which lends an existential pathos to his stirringly gallant portrayal. No one knows how much longer we are going to continue to be blessed by this incandescent talent. If indeed Venus is his swan song, it resounds with a sweetly magnificent melody. Don’t miss it.

Scary Tales

Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, from his own screenplay, is distinguished by another in a long line of recent child performances that are nothing short of astonishing in their accomplished matter-of-factness. The latest child virtuoso is 12-year-old Ivana Baquero, who plays Ofelia, the fairy-tale-fancying daughter of Ariadna Gil’s Carmen, the pregnant wife of a Francoist general named Vidal who, in 1944, has taken his present and future family into a forested mountain-garrison headquarters somewhere in northern Spain, where the anti-fascist Loyalist guerrillas still operate. As Carmen’s second husband, Vidal is actually Ofelia’s frightening evil stepfather, who has driven the young girl, with her feelings of loneliness and dislocation, to seek refuge in her books of fairy tales. These ironically come to life for her in her forbiddingly isolated new surroundings.

The family’s very competent housekeeper, Mercedes (Maribel Verdú), plays a pivotal role in establishing a connection between the fascist general’s family and the anti-fascist partisans in the area. Mercedes’ brother happens to be a leader of the partisans, and she and the garrison’s doctor (Alex Angulo) arrange to bring much-needed medicines from the fascist pharmacy to the Loyalist guerrillas.

Meanwhile, Ofelia searches through magical caves and tunnels carved out of the mountainscape and encounters various manifestations of Pan (Doug Jones) and the King (Frederico Luppi), among other nocturnal creations of her fevered imagination. The two levels of reality are given equal weight in Mr. del Toro’s inventive mise-en-scène. He has traversed this supernatural territory previously in The Devil’s Backbone (2001), an anti-fascist ghost story set during the Spanish Civil War. He has long been an admirer and practitioner of the Gothic horror film, beginning with his first film, Cronos, in 1993, followed by Mimic (1997), a wild horror film about genetically engineered insects; Blade II (2002), a vampire-versus-mutant contest of good and evil; and Hellboy (2004), the well-regarded adaptation of the Dark Horse graphic novels by Mike Magnola, about a supernatural creature employed by the United States government as a “secret weapon” against its paranormal enemies.

Mr. del Toro is never without a certain degree of humor in his various ghoulish ventures. The problem is that his often-frightening depictions of evil—as with General Vidal in Pan’s Labyrinth—tend to dehumanize his villains so completely that they become even less believable than the imaginary creatures in Ofelia’s book of fairy tales.

I can understand the deeply entrenched hatred of Franco’s fascist regime among Spanish-speaking artists like Mr. del Toro, but coupled with an addiction to the supernatural on a graphic level, the combination becomes too negatively spiritual for my taste. However, this is not to take anything away from the enormous talents of the director and his young star, Ms. Baquero, which make Pan’s Labyrinth eminently worth seeing despite its Manichean excesses.