We were a little disappointed by Saturday Night Live this weekend when Neil Patrick Harris hosted. Not because he wasn't hilarious-he was!-but because they did too much Doogie and not enough Barney, Mr. Harris' slimy, yet weirdly charming womanizer on HIMYM. Over the last few years, this Friends-ish pal comedy has gained a healthy following, but it hasn't yet become the breakout we think it should be. So tune in tonight for a new episode; for better or for worse, Heidi Montag, Spencer Pratt and Kim Kardashian guest star. [CBS, 8:30pm]

Tuesday: The Dreamers

If you find yourself in the mood for something outrageously decadent--perhaps maddeningly so--The Dreamers is the mid-week movie for you.

Monday: How I Met Your Mother

We were a little disappointed by Saturday Night Live this weekend when Neil Patrick Harris hosted. Not because he wasn't hilarious-he was!-but because they did too much Doogie and not enough Barney, Mr. Harris' slimy, yet weirdly charming womanizer on HIMYM. Over the last few years, this Friends-ish pal comedy has gained a healthy following, but it hasn't yet become the breakout we think it should be. So tune in tonight for a new episode; for better or for worse, Heidi Montag, Spencer Pratt and Kim Kardashian guest star. [CBS, 8:30pm]

Tuesday: The Dreamers

If you find yourself in the mood for something outrageously decadent--perhaps maddeningly so--The Dreamers is the mid-week movie for you. Bernardo Bertolucci's 2003 drama features a then-unknown Eva Green as a stunning, elusive Frenchwoman in a bizarrely close relationship with her brother Theo (Louis Garrel), who draws a young American student (Michael Pitt) into her strange world of movies, ideas and French stuff. Paris '68 is the backdrop, and much of the film follows the young stars wandering in and out rambling rooms half-dressed. [IFC, 12am]

Wednesday: The Apartment

Even though The Apartment is a Christmas movie (in the sense that the plot involves an office holiday party and the time of year is New York in December), you can watch it any time of year. Shirley MacLaine is the hotel operator at a big insurance company; Jack Lemmon is the push-over who loves her; and Fred MacMurray is the married man driving her insane. Billy Wilder won the 1960 Best Picture Oscar for The Apartment-if ever a film deserved it, it's this one. [TCM, 8pm]

Thursday: Tool Academy

We actually watched the first episode of this show, the latest in Vh1's stable of makeover programming, and liked it, mostly for one reason: after years of watching women claw each other to shreds on reality tv, and generally expose themselves as the mean, mindless jerks they are, now we get to see men do it! On Tool Academy, a group of guys enrolled by their girlfriends for being bad partners are forced to confront the realities of their relationships, and their many emotional shortcomings, through various tasks and therapy sessions. Some can handle, others can't; tantrums ensue. One things for sure: these guys all belong there. [Vh1, 11am]

Friday: Friday Night Lights

Like HIMYM, Friday Night Lights is a show that should be as big as Doctor Who is in Britain. (That's big!) And this, it's third season (which aired on DirecTV last fall) is going to make or break this show for good. If you aren't into sports, get over it. FNL isn't really about football. It has the best parental characters since The OC. The teen cast is ridiculously beautiful. You will laugh, you will cry. Just watch it. You'll only be sorry you didn't earlier. [NBC, 9pm]

The nonexistent plot reworks Harold Ramis' 1993 movie Groundhog Day , in which Bill Murray played a cynical weatherman doomed to relive the events of Feb. 2 over and over until he learned to become more empathetic toward the Punxsutawney rodent looking for its shadow. If his character was stuck in purgatory, Drew Barrymore's character, Lucy, is condemned to limbo. A medical phenomenon who lives only in fractured time, she's an arts teacher who suffered a head injury in a car accident. Now she loses her short-term memory every night and wakes each morning believing it's the day of the accident all over again, which is also her father's birthday. For reasons you don't want to know, her hateful dad (Blake Clark), steroid-pumped brother (Sean Astin) and various native hula dancers (did I neglect to mention it all takes place in Hawaii?) go along with the gag, even watching a nightly rerun of The Sixth Sense and feigning shock and surprise every time Bruce Willis turns out to be a ghost. When the delusion therapy bores, Mr. Sandler enters as a marine veterinarian and conqueror of lady tourists named Henry. He falls for Lucy the minute he spots her in a diner, making a house out of a stack of waffles. She likes to sniff his fingers because they smell like mackerel. That's just the nauseating clean part. The nauseating dirty parts assault what's left of your own brain faster than you can say "Farrelly Brothers."

In every Adam Sandler movie, fun is poked at gays, senior citizens, paraplegics, people in loony bins and wheelchairs. But isn't it curious that the only person who looks damaged and sub-mental in all of these movies is Adam Sandler himself? In the obnoxious 50 First Dates , his deficiencies seem even deadlier than they did in the numbingly pretentious Punch-Drunk Love . While the lame script by George Wing pads itself to an unendurable feature length of 95 minutes with a series of never-ending dates in which Lucy thinks she's meeting Henry for the first time, the repetitive kiss-and-cuddle scenes are offset by director Peter Segal's commitment to gross-out overkill. At each stage of the romance, the movie digresses into so much scatology and puerile adolescence that it seems to have been directed by Mr. Segal with a finger down his throat. Mr. Segal is the man responsible for Anger Management and Nutty Professor II: The Klumps , among other imbecilic disgraces, so nobody is likely to enter this crypt in search of subtlety, freshness or style.

But even by Hollywood standards, what kind of mind slam-dunks you with a combination of this much toilet humor and physical abuse at the same time? Prepare yourself for gruesome kindergarten bits about bruised testicles, a walrus that vomits profusely and a near-hermaphrodite. (Wouldn't one or the other have sufficed?) Lucy's father cruelly imitates and mocks his son's speech impediment. (Aren't the young man's exaggerated pecs enough?) We're all encouraged to laugh uproariously at a brain-damaged mental patient, and a sick joke about Gary Busey's near-fatal real-life motorcycle accident falls as flat as elephant dung. Then there's the hammy, overwrought performance by perpetual Sandler repertory sidekick Rob Schneider, as a Hawaiian dope addict with dark skin and pidgin English who keeps finding new ways to tear open the wounds on his stomach from a shark bite.

Stupid, coarse and abysmally unfunny, this is the kind of movie that makes you pray a real live tiger-tooth would show up in the middle of a scene and do some permanent damage of its own. Now there's a cruel joke that would really leave me in stitches.

Oversexed Trio

For all of the hype and controversy surrounding its kinky sex and full-frontal male nudity, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers is a movie that sweats to command-but fails to hold-attention. It's ponderous and irksomely unsexy. Intoxicated by cinema and the Kama Sutra , Bertolucci has, in his last few films, abandoned the hormones with which he drove Marlon Brando, in Last Tango in Paris , to demonstrate the only use for butter that never occurred to Julia Child. But in The Dreamers , set in Paris during the turbulent spring of 1968, Mr. Bertolucci returns in his dotage to his three favorite subjects-sex, movies and politics. All three were in full throttle then, fueling the revolutions of the chaotic 60's. The year was a time of strikes, student protests, political scandals and furious, chain-smoking hedonism, when Henri Langlois was ousted from the halcyon halls of the Cinematheque Française in Paris and mobs of rioting cinema buffs chained themselves to the gates with New Wave icons like François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Simone Signoret. Newcomer Bertolucci, a former assistant of Pier Paolo Pasolini's who joined the sacred ranks after his first film in 1962, was there, and the adrenaline of memory is obviously still surging through his brain. It's the last time enough people were so influenced by the philosophy they encountered onscreen that they were willing to storm the barricades and battle police wielding clubs and tear gas to defend the films of Nicholas Ray.

Adapted by Gilbert Adair from his novel, The Dreamers chronicles the experiences of Matthew (Michael Pitt), a lonely, naïve American student and insatiable cinephile who hangs out at the Cinematheque night and day. With a touch of brandy and a twist of fate, he meets Isabelle (Eva Green) and Theo (Louis Garrel), exotic French twins whose eccentric parents have gone on an extended holiday and left the siblings alone in the cluttered, spacious and slightly screwy family apartment. Within two days, the brother and sister move Matthew's things out of his hotel and into their flat, where they flirt, fascinate, romance and seduce him into a ménage à trois that changes his entire life. Here is a polite, soft-spoken, clean-cut American from San Diego with a background of green lawns, station wagons and Brooks Brothers button-downs, whose sexual propriety is gradually diminished by an incestuous brother-sister act eager to initiate him into the bohemian games of their own unconventional sexual revolution. It's as much a film about film as it is about copulation. Since the oversexed trio's references to life's experiences are all restricted to scenes from movies they've seen on the screen, Bertolucci cuts to film clips of Chaplin, Garbo in Queen Christina , Fred and Ginger and, of course, every American's indelible first impression of Paris-Jean Seberg selling the International Herald Tribune on the Rue l'Opera in Breathless . Matthew wafts into a secular existence of incestuous decadence, giving himself over to every sexual experiment with total surrender, until the adventures in the riot-torn streets outside overtake the awakenings in the beds inside, and the road to maturity and self-discovery ends in separation. Matthew realizes at last that there is more to life than nonspecific gender orgasms. The question posed is: What about a sequel, where he puts his horny transformation to the test back under the palms of San Diego?

There's plenty of sex, but most of it is tenuous and none of it is very pulsating. The actors are almost red with a rash of embarrassment, and with the exception of Eva Green-who moans with simulated lust like a porno queen-nobody seems to be very turned on. Mr. Pitt, an intensely awkward actor from Brooklyn with wheat-colored hair and swollen lips, bares his butt and his johnson, but he's too scrawny and prissy-mouthed to work up much of a fever. The baroque Paris atelier where youth acts out its fantasies gives the film a lovely, muted quality that rarely ventures into daylight, but this is a myopic subject that Bertolucci is not entirely successful in extending beyond his own personal vision. The French political climate of 1968 is not a subject that many people are curious about in 2004, and the sex is no more erotic than Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl. It's a film about youth and passion that seems old and passionless.

Can-Can Can!

Can-Can , the first "Encores!" production of 2004, dispelled the myth that this popular series of staged concert versions of old Broadway musicals has outlived its usefulness and popularity. You wouldn't know it from the screams of approval bouncing off the balcony beams of the City Center. One question nags, however. The original purpose of "Encores!" 10 years ago was to reprise shows that nobody had seen for years, mounted without sets or costumes, with the entire cast carrying books and librettos in their hands and performing neglected, often-forgotten scores worthy of a second look. Does Cole Porter's frothy but vacuous Can-Can qualify? Maybe it hasn't been seen much since it opened in 1953 to decidedly mixed reviews, with a cast that included Lilo, Peter Cookson, Gwen Verdon and Hans Conried, but it ran for two years and won Tony Awards for Gwen Verdon and the choreography by Michael Kidd, so who would call it obscure? And we can go to our respective corners of the ring right now and come out fighting over whether or not it is "worthy" of ever being staged again. Abe Burrows' book was always flat, but in 50 years it has grown hair. And despite their time-resistant durability, hit songs like "I Love Paris," "C'est Magnifique" and "It's All Right with Me" have always been among my least favorite entries in the Cole Porter catalog. On top of that, I find Michael Nouri a lox made of cypress, and I have always been completely allergic to the screeching of Patti LuPone.

Having said all that, I must now bite into a large slice of humble pie and admit that I had a perfectly fine time at Can-Can . The one-dimensional plot about a battle that turns into a love affair between an uptight judge named Aristide, who vows to uphold the censorship laws of 1893 by banning all suggestive public dance exhibitions that might encourage or nurture the base instincts of naughty Parisians, and the saucy La Mome Pistache, owner of the notorious Bal du Paradis cabaret in Montmartre, where the illegal can-can is a nightly draw, is as disposable as ever. Everything leads up to the trial, where in the courtroom, only one thing will change the law, sway the jury and melt the icy hearts of the judges: Bring on the can-can! It's corny beyond description, with an intrusive quadrille, "Garden of Eden" ballet and torchy apache dance that were all merely perfunctory. But there were also a few undeniable pleasures: The second-banana plot about Boris, a pompous, starving Bulgarian artist, and his long-suffering girlfriend Claudine, a can-can dancer, was hugely enhanced by the raffishly charming Reg Rogers and the libidinous, long-legged Charlotte d'Amboise. And as the buxom Pistache, Patti LuPone finally found a role that filled her voice and her corset. She was the worst Annie Oakley I have ever seen, and as an ill-fated Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes , I couldn't understand a word she said (or sang). But in Can-Can she was a belle époque cupcake who owned the stage. Her singing soared without being brassy or flat, her salty acting convinced without being edgy or sharp. Whenever she was waiting in the wings, you could hear the audience losing attention. When she returned, striding but not strident, everyone came to full attention, ready to salute. This is a cut-and-paste production, professionally directed by Lonny Price, of a show that I can easily advise, in the lyrics of Cole Porter, to allez-vous-en . I never want to see or hear Can-Can again, but as a rare showcase to spotlight the best qualities of Patti LuPone, the song title "C'est Magnifique" came startlingly true.

But whereas Mr. Bertolucci arrived in Paris shortly after making his first film, The Grim Reaper , in 1962, I'd already had my life and my luck changed-having worked briefly for Langlois and his formidable life partner, Mary Meerson-by the time I spent a year in Paris in 1961. And though I've been to Paris several times since (though not in 1968), I have no special expertise to evaluate the authenticity or even the plausibility of the fictionalized account by Messrs. Bertolucci and Adair, both of whom witnessed the student uprisings firsthand. Mr. Adair's previous novel was Love and Death on Long Island , which became a well-regarded 1997 film version directed by Richard Kwietniowski. (And whatever happened to Mr. Kwietniowski after this stunning feature-film debut?)

To make a digressive critique a little shorter, let me say up front that The Dreamers fails to connect its dots to form a coherent and convincing narrative. This isn't to say that viewers at all familiar with the onset of movie madness in the late 50's and 60's should miss this affectionate tribute to the period and its passionate enthusiasts. And I would add-albeit reluctantly-that the assorted film clips that Mr. Bertolucci has adroitly assembled are almost worth the price of admission alone. Then again, you can see my problem (as a willfully ardent auteurist) when the first clip in the film is that of Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963). My comparatively kind review caused me to be pilloried at the time by the New York critical establishment for my allegedly trashy taste. Ah, but I digress again ….

The story of The Dreamers begins with a voice-over in English eventually attributed to Matthew (Michael Pitt), a young American student from San Diego who is befriended-at a demonstration for Langlois, ironically, after he was fired by the government-by a couple named Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green), who turn out to be brother and sister. Matthew is immediately attracted to Isabelle, but gradually begins to suspect that she and Theo are unusually close-possibly even incestuous-siblings.

After the first meeting, Matthew is invited by his new friends to the spacious Left Bank apartment owned by their well-to-do parents, a British-born mother (Anna Chancellor) and a French-poet father (Robin Renucci). With the parents about to leave the city for a country vacation, Isabelle and Theo persuade Matthew to move in with them.

Most of the rest of the action is confined to the apartment, in which a bizarre ménage à trois , impervious to the world outside, begins to take form. Full frontal nudity, both male and female, becomes so casually commonplace that the erotic excitement inherent in the situation begins to diminish amid the soporific, Eden-like atmosphere. Though Theo keeps edging ever closer to Matthew, the disturbingly sadomasochistic proceedings play out as more unisexual than bisexual. Isabelle and Theo habitually share the same bathroom, and soon Matthew-originally a paragon of straightness-begins to shed his inhibitions, along with his clothes. But only up to a point: When Isabelle "playfully" starts to shave his pubic hair with Theo's assistance, Matthew angrily calls a halt to the proceedings and tries to pry Isabelle away from Theo. The effort is foredoomed, however, when Theo locks himself in his bedroom with another girl; Isabelle goes berserk with grief and jealousy, while Matthew stands by helplessly.

Mr. Bertolucci has not pushed the envelope of explicit sexuality this forcefully since his internationally scandalous Last Tango in Paris (1972) more than 30 years ago. For his efforts, The Dreamers has received an NC-17 rating from the increasingly irrelevant industry censors, who merely send out a signal to the hordes of Internet-porn patrons among us. Unfortunately, in my own depraved expert opinion, Mr. Bertolucci has failed to ignite another revolutionary erotic explosion, partly because there is much more competition in the realm of cinematic sensuality than there was 30 years ago, and partly because the actors lack the necessary chemistry with each other. Messrs. Bertolucci and Adair keep leading us up the garden path and then down again, without resolving any of the issues so teasingly dangled before us.

Hence, a laborious suicide attempt is thwarted by a rioter's cobblestone fortuitously thrown through a window; Theo rejoins the revolution by hurling a Molotov cocktail at the heavily armed and well-shielded riot police; and Matthew asserts his skepticism about the value of political activism, defending the United States in its Vietnam War even though he's clearly ducking the draft with an academic deferment.

During the screening, I noted that I might have been quoted-or even misquoted-in the film regarding my comparison between Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. No matter: The clips of Chaplin's "Little Tramp" at the end of City Lights (1931) remain eternally luminous, as is the case with many of Bertolucci's cinematic reminiscences: Robert Bresson's Mouchette rolling herself down a hill to her death in Mouchette (1967); Garbo caressing the furniture in tactile memory of her night of love in Rouben Mamoulian's Queen Christina (1933); Marlene Dietrich taking off her gorilla's head in Blonde Venus (1932); and, of course, Jean Seberg hawking the International Herald Tribune in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960).

Down and Out in Tokyo Anime

Satoshi Kon's Tokyo Godfathers , written by Keiko Nobumoto and Mr. Kon, was purportedly "inspired" by John Ford's Three Godfathers (1948), itself the umpteenth movie version of The Three Godfathers , Peter Kyne's pulp novel dating back to the early silent era. As it turns out, Mr. Kon's animated Tokyo is such a long way and a far cry from Ford's Monument Valley that one wonders why any attribution of a source was deemed necessary. It's certainly not because the central contrivance of a baby being rescued by three hardened criminals would be too maudlin for Japanese tastes without its being associated with American folk sentimentality: After all, even Akira Kurosawa, the proud samurai director, got all blubbery about an abandoned baby in Rashomon (1950).

In previous versions of this Christmas tale, three bad men undertake the mission of taking an orphaned infant to safety in what passed for civilization in the Old West. In Mr. Kon's story, the three bad men have been replaced by three homeless derelicts- Gin, a burly, bearded alcoholic; Hana, a flighty middle-aged transvestite overflowing with maternal instincts; and Miyuki, a teenage runaway fleeing from the trauma of having stabbed her father.

Mr. Kon has thus expanded the original plot by giving each of the Magi-like protagonists a backstory. In the end, all is happily resolved after a succession of chases and cliff-hanging brushes with death, ending with the reunion of the baby with its loving parents. Hence, the community in the Hollywood version is replaced in Mr. Kon's film with the family as the final sanctuary for the endangered baby.

I must confess that I'm not sure at what level of irony and sophistication Mr. Kon is operating, and to what sector of the Japanese and international moviegoing public he has tailored his film. His visual style looks more mainstream-illusionist than that of the more cerebrally stylized The Triplets of Belleville . Yet Mr. Kon doesn't exploit his down-and-out characters for facile pathos; they are too energetically and vitally mobile for that. Indeed, he virtually preaches to them not to wallow in self-pity but rather to buckle down and make new lives for themselves.

A near-murderous assault on Gin by a gang of teenage hoodlums "cleaning up the neighborhood" serves as a jolting reminder that people who live on the streets in our great cities are easily victimized by a variety of predators. Though all ends well for the threesome, there are long stretches in between when social indifference and injustice plague the protagonists, as well as our own consciences. This may very well be the point of the whole exercise.

Analyzing Analysis

Amie Siegel's Empathy employs both fictional and nonfictional devices to illustrate some of the quirks, eccentricities and absurdities of the psychoanalytic process unleashed upon the world in the last century. Ms. Siegel doesn't always indicate the demarcation line between fiction and nonfiction, although she tends to focus exclusively-almost excessively-on the tensions that arise between male analysts and female analysands under the cover of a culturally sanctioned intimacy. This leads to often banal Q. and A.'s in which "analysts," either real or impersonated, are asked if they've ever made sexual advances on their female patients or allowed female patients to make advances to them. Do the analysts ever lie? Do the patients? Two questions arise in my mind: Firstly, how you can tell if they're lying? And secondly, does it make any difference-since, as Freud tells us, even lies can reveal something embedded in the subconscious?

On a lighter note, Ms. Siegel suggests that the work of the analyst is profoundly influenced by decisions on interior decoration. A particular piece of orange furniture designed by Charles and Ray Eames is the subject of a sustained closeup with no human beings visible in the frame. (We're told it's known as the "Billy Wilder couch," even though it looks like a classic analysts chair to me.)

Despite this, the film flows with a certain grace and smoothness, due largely to the sense of psychic mystery projected by a sweet actress, Gigi Buffington, in the fictional role of Lia, a seeker of truth and self-recognition. And as for the question of intimacy, an interesting item of gossip emerges, implicating a famous British psychoanalyst for crossing the sacred boundary between analyst and patient: "Winnicott had a woman patient whose hand he took in his and held it that way four times a week for months and months-I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that." Empathy is playing at Film Forum through Feb. 3.

But when the lights go down and they impatiently finger their notepads and stopwatches, Mr. McBride's moles won't be assessing the coherence of Mr. Fry's vision or whether Mr. Bertolucci can still make cinematic magic. They will have a much different mission: to suss out and catalog with the precision of a museum curator every single moment of nudity or coupling that takes place at the festival.

As the 41-year-old Mr. McBride told The Observer , "We don't give a shit about the movie. We just care about who gets naked in it."

Since the late 70's, Mr. McBride, a former futures trader, has been collecting and archiving every titillating cinematic moment that involved a female member of the Screen Actors Guild, as well as a number of foreign talents who are not. Since 1999, he has been offering his considerable research on a subscriber-only Web site called Mr. Skin (www.mrskin.com), a virtual catalogue raisonné of cinematic nudity that rivals the Internet Movie Database in size, Penthouse in debauchery and perhaps ESPN.com in visitors. According to Mr. McBride, the site attracts four million unique, non-repeat oglers a month-most of whom pay $29.95 a month for access.

And what do they get? The site features movie scenes and clips that have fueled the onanistic fantasies of previous generations and many more yet to come: Phoebe Cates' breast-baring scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (which Mr. Skin ranks as the best nude scene of all time), Elizabeth Berkley shaking her thang in Showgirls , Julie Christie's "real" performance with her then-beau Donald Sutherland in Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now and, of course, Bo Derek in 10 . They are all available on Mr. Skin in user-friendly "SkinVision," which in the N.F.L. is known as slow motion.

Feeding the culture's almost pathological obsession with sex and nudity hasn't earned Mr. McBride much respect among the Sundance set, but it has led to fortune and a certain kind of fame. The Web site is wildly popular with the coveted 18-to-34-year-old demographic that sets Fox Network executives' loins atingle, and Mr. McBride-who went by the "Mr. Skin" moniker years before the site launched-has become something of a cult figure: a cross between television movie reviewer Leonard Maltin and syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage.

Mr. McBride makes numerous public appearances philosophizing about who and what make a great nude scene ( paging Robert Altman! ), and this year's annual Anatomy Awards-which acknowledge the actresses with the best "funbags, "geriatric jugs" ( Bea Arthur fans, take note ) and "furburgerage," as well as "ass" ( link to Salon.com here! ) and other body parts-will be hosted by Howard Stern on Feb. 25. Mr. McBride also recently signed a deal with St. Martin's Press to release, in early 2005, Mr. Skin's Skincyclopedia: An A to Z Guide to Essential Celebrity Nudity .

Mr. McBride said that he's got two in-house "skin-ployees," as he likes to call them, and three stringers at this year's Sundance Film Festival, who will send him daily reports of on-screen breast, buttock and bush sightings-"skinformation," in the Winchellesque parlance of his Web site.

Mr. McBride harbors no illusions about what he and his employees do. "You don't need to be a movie reviewer"-although some of Mr. Skin's secret stringers are-"you don't need to be a writer," he said. "You just need to be able to notice who got naked, what they showed, how far into the movie, and get the information back to us."

With that information, Mr. McBride separates sexual fact from fiction, usually in a section of the Web site devoted to festivals. Once he acquires footage or stills, however, the information and visuals are categorized by both film and actress.

Prior to Sundance, for example, one wild rumor sweeping the Internet had Natalie Portman revealing all in Scrubs -actor-turned-festival-golden-boy Zach Braff's Garden State . Mr. McBride doubted the rumors, so he wasn't dismayed to learn that Ms. Portman only shows her panty-clad "nubile form" in a rather tame pool scene.

The report on Tracey Antosiweicz is far more encouraging, however. "As a hooker getting boned from behind in a hotel room," one of his sources wrote in an e-mail, "we see a few seconds of her flopsies slapping about." Mr. McBride, however, said that this was just the "bare-bones information." "My writers rewrite what they send in so that it's interesting," he explained. Or puerile and sexist, depending on the reader. But don't just assume that all women hate Mr. Skin. Eleven months ago, Mr. McBride married an attorney, who, he said, is "totally cool" with Mr. Skin. They are expecting their first child in May.

Back to Sundance: Mr. McBride also mentioned Open Water , a film about two scuba divers marooned in shark-infested waters. He cited one e-mail, which read: "It doesn't take 10 minutes before the lovely Blanchard Ryan gives us a look at everything she's got in front, lying on her bed, fully nude. It's a nice long scene, well-lit, that even provides a nice view of her George W. Bush."

On top of Sundance, representatives of Mr. Skin travel to film festivals in Toronto, Seattle, Cannes, Tribeca, Austin (South by Southwest), Chicago and New York City. About last year's Cannes premiere of the controversial The Brown Bunny , one of Mr. Skin's informants wrote: "At the one hour and 50-minute mark, Vincent [Gallo] guides his meat-gallow into Chloë [Sevigny's] open kisser for an up-close, uncensored, have-some-Kleenex-handy bout of oral sex. Let's repeat to be clear: mainstream American actress Chloë Sevigny opens her mouth, scary-looking filmmaker and egotist Vincent Gallo inserts himself therein and the camera shows every ensuing lick, slurp, gulp, swallow, dribble, hip-buck, fist-pump and kielbasa-kiss for the next three minutes. There's no 'money shot,' per se, but catch this breakthrough as it goes down in history." Kleenex, indeed. But in the oversexed world of pop-culture media inundation, an argument could be made that the most objectionable part of the above quotation is the writer's reference to Ms. Sevigny as a "mainstream American actress."

Returning to his Sundance intelligence, Mr. McBride warned against seeing I Like Killing Flies , Napoleon Dynamite , LSD a Go Go , Oedipus , The Cold Ones and, surprisingly enough, a film called Nibbles , since they do not contain one snippet of nip. Sadly, since D.E.B.S. and Bright Young Things had yet to premiere, no "skinformation" was available on them.

Mr. McBride has been collecting this information since he was a teen growing up in suburban Chicago in the late 70's. "I'd tape two or three movies a night off of HBO, Cinemax and Showtime," he said by phone from his office in the Windy City, where he has lived for the last 10 years. "The next day I'd edit the nude scenes onto separate videotapes, like make best-of-nude-scene tapes. And that's how my passion started."

To make a living, Mr. McBride traded futures on the floor of Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which he was doing in 1996 when he met Chicago radio talk-show host Harry Teinowitz in a bar. "He couldn't believe that off the top of my head, I knew any actress, what movie she'd been naked in and what happened in the nude scene," Mr. McBride recalled. Impressed by Mr. McBride's idiot-savant-like ability to recall the "formative" years of an actress' résumé, Mr. Teinowitz invited him onto his show. Mr. McBride agreed to do it, but decided to appear under the moniker Mr. Skin-a name both he and Mr. Teinowitz came up with-so that his co-workers wouldn't recognize him.

When the Web site launched in August 1999, Mr. McBride had only one person in his staff. He currently employs 30 staffers, ranging from technical support to writers. But he also gets a lot of free help.

"I get a lot of e-mails from people in the industry that maybe are working on a movie-maybe they were in the post-production of a movie," Mr. McBride explained in a clipped Chicago accent. "They'll tip me off: 'Hey, you're going to love this movie. Such-and-such gets naked.' Obviously, until it actually comes out, I can't confirm it. But I can tell you what the rumors are and that kind of stuff."

On top of the Web site, which requires 20 servers to maintain his database of film clips, each week Mr. Skin posts a top-10 list of niche nude scenes, ranging from "Pleasing Plumpers" to "Brooklyn Babes" (which, of course, includes Rosie Perez), to the more traditional "Sorority Sweethearts" and "Luscious Lips." Other categories include "Favorite Babes from the Middle East" and "Nude Chicks with Guns!", which may someday include D.E.B.S .

There is a method to Mr. McBride's mammary madness that stands apart from the easily employed Freudian psychoanalysis. He asserts that there is an art to assessing and reviewing a nude scene. "No. 1 would be how hot the actress is," he said. "Obviously, Phoebe Cates versus Kathy Bates-that's a no-brainer. No. 2, and maybe even as important as No. 1, is the lighting. You could have Cindy Crawford full-frontal naked in a bed, but if the room's dark and you can't see anything, what good is it?" Mr. McBride followed up that bold statement with his final criteria, "length of the scene. If it's a two-second scene, that's obviously not going to be as good as a one-minute scene." Mr. McBride said he prefers his cinema sex "without a guy in the scene. But if you have to, that's fine. It depends on what you see of the actress. If the guy's blocking your view, then that ruins the scene."

And, of course, what would a reviewer be without a list of favorite directors? "Robert Altman has always been a director that has great nudity in his movies," Mr. McBride said, channeling his inner Kael. "He's a very well-respected director from a critical standpoint. But from a nudity standpoint, boy! I mean, he's had some of the great nude scenes of all time, including Short Cuts , where Julianne Moore stood bottomless for three minutes-a great scene with Matthew Modine. Another [master] is Stanley Kubrick. Eyes Wide Shut "-featuring Nicole Kidman in the buff-"is an example. He loved natural women and full-frontal nudity, and I'm a huge fan of his stuff." Mr. McBride also mentioned Lolita and Unfaithful director Adrian Lyne, whose films, he said, are "pretty much guaranteed to have some good nudity in them."

When it comes down to ranking the best nude scenes for his upcoming Anatomy Awards, Mr. McBride consults no one's opinion but his own. "I'm Mr. Skin … I'm the expert. And that's what I think is the best," he said. "If you wanted to know what Roger Ebert"-writer of both Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Beyond the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens -"thought were his best movies for the year, you'd want to know that it wasn't him polling his office. You'd want to know that it was what he thought was the best."

And it is Mr. McBride's credibility that allows Mr. Skin to promote films with the help rather then the condemnation of the studios-who long before Mr. Skin realized the selling power of sex. Mr. McBride essentially picks up where the studios leave off, taking over, for example, when the press attention that surrounded Mr. Bertolucci's The Dreamers and its NC-17 rating began to fade-or, to give another example, when the hoopla that surrounded the obscene amount of money paid to Halle Berry to flash her breasts in the otherwise execrable Swordfish faded to black. Perhaps Mr. McBride has capitalized on the fact that more people remember Sharon Stone's crotch in Basic Instinct then her performance. But then, this is a world in which an Internet-distributed excerpt from a porn film helped make Paris Hilton a TV star.

The difference between Mr. McBride and the studios, it would seem, is that Mr. Skin is unabashed about his role in the food chain. "I truly promote the movies," Mr. McBride said. "If an actress has a great nude scene in a movie, I am going to be talking about it in my weekly 'Mr. Skin Minute.' I'm going to be talking about it on the radio. I'm going to be talking about it on the Web site, where we get four million visitors a month who are interested in this topic. I truly can promote a movie; I truly have great promotional power to get a movie across. Hey, I'm promoting it for the nudity, but who cares? The bottom line is, I promote it."

For much of its running time Limbo seems to be soaring to a new peak of artistice xpression, then it suddenly gets bogged down in an irritating melodrama that seems designed to punish us for becoming attached to the characters and the milieu. As the movie peters out with an audience-bashing lady-or-the-tiger fadeout, I can't help wondering what point, if any, Mr. Sayles is trying to make. On the other hand, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, David Strathairn and Vanessa Martinez would be hard to beat for acting awards-here or there.

I begin with the dumbfounding ending, partly because it is unlike anything I've ever seen before from this generously humanistic storyteller whom I have long admired, and partly because, as an Aristotelian and a Christian, I believe too strongly in redemption, at least as it pertains to the protagonists of dramatic narratives, to tolerate the sin of despair to which Mr. Sayles has succumbed. A tragic flaw is one thing, but unwanted destruction by another's malfeasance is simply lousy luck, and is an unworthy fate for the compelling characters Mr. Sayles has created with the invaluable help of his marvelous cast.

The setting is present-day Alaska, in which the hard-eyed natives mingle uneasily with the wide-eyed tourists. At first, the satiric tone is reminiscent of the old television series Northern Exposure , but with a harder edge. Mr. Sayles is too class-conscious to let the notion of Alaska as a theme park slip by without a derisive guffaw. Ms. Mastrantonio sings up a storm as Donna De Angelo, a much-traveled tavern singer who never quite made it either career-wise or multiple-husbands-wise. She is too old now even to hope for a big break, but she doesn't want to give up the feeling she gets from putting a song over for an audience. Her daughter Noelle (Vanessa Martinez) doesn't make life any easier, with her sarcastic putdowns of her mother for messing up both their lives.

David Strathairn's Joe Gastineau enters Donna's life with a big monkey on his own back in the form of a nightmarish memory of a freak fishing boat accident in which two of his passengers drowned. One feels that Joe and Donna have actually met in the last chance saloon of life, and the odds are very much against them. Yet they proceed to give us unreasonable hope that they may overcome all their difficulties and misfortunes. But the past in the guise of two eventual nemeses named Smilin' Jack (Kris Kristofferson) and Bobby Gastineau (Casey Siemaszko), Joe's free-wheeling half-brother, comes back to haunt Joe as well as the unsuspecting Donna and Noelle.

As we get deeper and deeper into everyone's character, the plight of Joe, Donna and Noelle becomes terminally desperate. I cannot remember another such movie in which such lovingly accomplished character development was poisoned by the writer-director's despondent fatalism. Why? I ask because I do not know.

Dramatically Nonexistent Is Not a Genre

Bernardo Bertolucci's Besieged , from a screenplay by Mr. Bertolucci and Clare Peploe, based on a story by James Lasdun, demonstrates the limitations of stylistic virtuosity in the service of a disarticulated narrative that is more affected than affecting. Mr. Bertolucci and his co-scenarist, Ms. Peploe, have attempted to cause two worlds to collide and coalesce by a series of undramatic nonconfrontations.

The protagonist Shandurai (Thandie Newton), the closest thing to a point-of-view character, is an African medical student in Rome who fled from her oppressed homeland after her husband was locked up in a military prison. To help pay her tuition, she works as a housekeeper in the home of an eccentric British concert pianist named Jason Kinsky (David Thewlis). This would be the stuff of Gothic romance if the ugly political realism of disheartening African-over-African tyranny did not intrude with what since Casablanca (1942) has been designated as the "hill of beans" mantra. In the past, Mr. Bertolucci has dabbled deviously and deliciously in the witch's brew of politics and eroticism, but Besieged is singularly chaste, cold and cerebral in the context of the Bertoluccian oeuvre even before Last Tango in Paris (1972) pushed the envelope of simulated sexual provocation.

Besieged suffers from the malady of many recent marginally English-speaking international co-productions that replace character-building dialogue with a dazzling multiplicity of portentous camera angles. Unfortunately, though there is a degree of resolution in what little plot unfolds, there is very little action with which to test the strong, silent and strange characterizations. Ms. Newton is an appealing and sympathetic actress even when she is not loaded down with enough political correctness to carry a halo from one continent to another. How can there be any suspense with a character so cheerfully martyred? The only question is whether she will be canonized in this life or the next. As for Mr. Thewlis, he has little to do but look strange and slightly mysterious, which with his interestingly insolent and self-sufficient range of expressions he can manage without half-trying.

Still, Besieged is to be commended for the understated nobility of its characters, and for its unshaken belief in the viability of civilized behavior in the face of the world's disorder. Shandurai and Kinsky take a long time getting to the point where they can let their defenses down long enough to utter the sweet words of love and commitment. Unfortunately, the reluctant lovers have long since drowned in an ocean of obliqueness. What ultimately washes up on the shore of the moviegoing architectural experience is a partial return to the angst associated with Michelangelo Antonioni long, long ago. The point is that a dry-as-dust endeavor like Besieged doesn't get any points for being emotionally repressed and dramatically nonexistent. There is very little juicy mainstream left in moviemaking, only an assortment of tiny tributaries flowing into hit-or-miss, boom-or-bust outlets that attest to the end of both the studio system-despite an updated logo here and there-and the disappearance of a contented and complacent habit-forming audience. What, then, is Mr. Bertolucci trying to prove?

Defending Your Life in Japan

Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life is a Japanese low-tech rendering of an intermediate step in the processing of the dearly departed. It seems that when we die we are marched into an architecturally nondescript facility, half low-grade hotel and half-primitive movie studio, where we are asked by a courteous and compassionate staff to select one memory from our past life to remember through all eternity to the exclusion of every other memory.

As I was watching the playing out of this conceit with my significant other, we both wracked our brains to no avail. One memory that supersedes all others? There is no such thing for us. As Sara Fishko, my ever skeptical hostess on my weekly radio ruminations about movies on WNYC and NPR, suggested, what the guardians at the gate of After Life are seeking is an endless array of Rosebuds to accompany Charles Foster Kane's childhood sled into the Sweet Hereafter.

Still, After Life is not without a certain degree of stoical humor as it prepares to reproduce the chosen memories of its 22 applicants on videotape with the threadbare technical resources of a Japanese Ed Wood. As one memory after another is crudely simulated a merry metaphor for low-budget moviemaking is set into motion. Many of the chosen memories are heartbreakingly trivial as if many if not most lives are singularly unpleasant or unrewarding. Great emphasis is based on the details of touch and smell with each chosen remembrance. The remarkable patience and politeness of the Japanese national character is highlighted in this dire context. At times, I was reminded of a French Nazi concentration camp movie I saw long ago in which a Jewish prisoner politely allows a woman prisoner to precede him in entering the truck destined to take them both to the death camp. Some civilities never die. Perhaps, some spark of humanity persists through all eternity.

After Life ups the ante somewhat when halfway through the movie we learn that the afterlife hotel-studio staff itself is composed of earlier applicants who were unable or unwilling to supply their own personal Rosebuds. The writer-director reportedly interviewed many screenplay people throughout Japan in preparing After Life and in this way managed to sketch a hazy, ghostly portrait of recent Japanese history. He even contrives an ultraspiritual romance at the facility between a staff member and an initially recalcitrant applicant seemingly destined to become a staff member himself. But when he discovers to his amazement that he was deeply loved by a previous applicant he barely remembers, he chooses to venture into the Great Beyond with that one revelatory moment in his mind.

From Robert Milton and Sutton Vane's Outward Bound (1930) onward, Western treatments of this theme have seldom resisted the temptation to score easy allegorical points with bloated capitalist characters confounded by their sudden loss of power to influence events and other people with their money. There is no such facile comeuppance in After Life . There is instead an appreciative awareness of a people who instinctively understand the limits of life and death.