So let’s get the easy ones out of the way. Come May 5, Tom Cruise will be pushing Mission: Impossible III hard, an excuse to get away from his pregnant wife. A week later, Poseidon, a remake of the 1972 disaster film The Poseidon Adventure starring Ernest Borgnine—I miss him. Then, well, only God (or perhaps Opus Dei) could stop The Da Vinci Code (May 19).

March boasts two—yes, two!—films to hope for the best from: the dark comedy Thank You for Smoking (March 17), by Jason (“Son of Ivan”) Reitman, and the futuristic V for Vendetta (March 17), from the furtive minds behind The Matrix, the Wachowski Brothers. (They’re still brothers, right? Didn’t one have a sex change? If so, are they still brothers? Discuss.) Smoking boasts what looks like a breakout performance from the perennially impressive Aaron Eckhart as a tobacco lobbyist at the top of his game. As for V for Vendetta … the last two Matrix installments were disappointments, but here’s hoping that the brothers have been energized by new material and a new muse (Natalie Portman). If you can’t get enough of this raven-haired ingénue, check out the small but poignant Israeli film Free Zone on April 7.

The sequel to 1992’s Basic Instinct arrives on March 31. Yes, Sharon Stone returns as the murderously sexy novelist Catherine Tramell. But no Wayne Knight. Why didn’t they bring him back? He made the crotch scene in the first film—his sweaty brow, his jaw-dropped expression. Michael Douglas had to play it cool, but Mr. Knight, he played it like the rest of us. But I digress ….

On April 7, Nicholas Jarecki’s documentary The Outsider debuts, about James Toback and the 12 days he had to shoot When Will I Be Loved, making Nicholas the third Jarecki brother to release a nonfiction film in the last three years. It should be good, considering the pedigree: Eugene’s Why We Fight is in the theaters now and has received decent reviews; Andrew’s Capturing the Friedmans was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004. Watch out, Maysle Brothers!

Nicole Holofcener’s Friends with Money, with a great cast, opens in … April? It has Frances McDormand, Joan Cusack, Catherine Keener (yum!) and Jennifer Aniston. Are studios afraid of another In Her Shoes, a well-received “chick flick” that didn’t make any money?

Two promising comedies emerge toward the end of spring: Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential (April 28) and Scott Marshall’s Keeping Up with the Steins (May 12). With the deliciously aloof John Malkovich playing the mentor to a bunch of burgeoning painters in Confidential, Mr. Zwigoff (Crumb, Bad Santa) looks like he’s found another subject to appeal to his fascination with the high art of the lowbrow (and vice versa). Meanwhile, Mr. Marshall, the son of director Garry Marshall, makes his feature-length, big-screen directorial debut with The Steins. The plotline: A boy uses his bar mitzvah to reconcile his feuding parents. (That’s nice. I used it to buy a car …. ) It stars Jeremy Piven (yes!) and Daryl Hannah (weird!).

Billy Bob Thornton plays Willie, the bad Santa in question, with a perpetually hung-over scowl for anyone foolish enough to seek holiday cheer on the basis of his seasonal attire. In fact, Willie is a professional safecracker who merely uses his Santa costume as a cover for casing the department stores that hire him with his partner in crime, Marcus (Tony Cox), a mean-spirited African-American dwarf who masquerades as Santa's elf. Much of the movie is merriment, and the dramatic arc arises from our gradual realization that Marcus is not only the brains and driving force of the covertly felonious team, but that he is also becoming ominously displeased with Willie's drunkenness and un-Santa-like womanizing. Willie and Marcus are initially so broadly drawn as diabolical inversions of all that is supposed to be lovable about Santa and his elf that the moral divergence between Willie and Marcus is much less perceptible-which is part of the film's subtlety. Also, as much as Willie and Marcus present themselves as cynical predators, the world in which they find themselves is hardly all sweetness and light and limitless credulity. Indeed, the only out-and-out "straight" character in the mix is Bob Chipeska (the late John Ritter), the store manager whom Willie and Marcus terrorize with the threat of an anti-discrimination lawsuit on behalf of minority "little people" when he proposes firing them both for improper behavior.

Willie and Marcus are less successful in gulling the store's security chief, Gin (Bernie Mac), an unflappable African-American con man in his own right. Having seen through their scam from the outset, Gin coolly cuts himself in for half the booty following a hilarious session of one-sided haggling between the supremely confident security chief and an extremely frustrated Marcus. But this little transaction sets up a surprisingly dark dénouement that rearranges the moral alignment, with death and near-death disrupting the genre conventions.

Willie's moral redemption is realistically slow in coming, but Mr. Thornton's restraint in his moments of potentially explosive surliness enables him to control the pace of his character's gradual awakening out of an alcoholic haze to the feelings of tenderness and love that had been slumbering in him. If Mr. Thornton had pulled out all the stops in his initially roguish period, he would've gotten a few big laughs from the audience, who would then rapidly tire of his one-note character. By keeping so much in reserve, and letting it out without much fuss, Mr. Thornton gives one of the best performances of the year in a part that could easily have degenerated into facetious farce. That it didn't is also a credit to Mr. Zwigoff's direction.

The two essential instruments of Willie's redemption are a fat, easily bullied little kid (played with marvelously imperturbable patience by Brett Kelly) and a sweetly amusing lady bartender named Sue (Lauren Graham) with an unrealized sex fetish for Santa since childhood. The kid, whose father is away in prison for embezzlement, invites Willie into his luxurious home, in which the only other occupant is his comically somnolent grandmother (Cloris Leachman), while Sue invites Willie-in his Santa suit-into her bed without coyness or conditions.

In contrast to Willie's easy, uncomplicated relationship with the very maternal Sue, Marcus is hitched up with Lois (Lauren Tom), a cold-as-ice Asian barracuda as ruthless as he is. The clues are all there for the film's final confrontation between good and evil, except that there's still an element of surprise involved. Willie and Marcus make such an engaging comedy team that we're conditioned to expect them to exit together smiling and happy. But Mr. Thornton's (and Mr. Zwigoff's) Willie is made of much sterner stuff.

Cerebral Cartooning

Sylvain Chomet's The Triplets of Belleville has received rapturous notices from most of my esteemed colleagues, but my first reaction was somewhat different: It was too cerebral, too strange and too art-gallery conscious for my taste in animation-which, I'm embarrassed to say, hasn't progressed much since Dumbo (1941). Part of the problem is that I've spent my life in the fantasy apparatus of narrative live-action cinematography-a tantalizing medium that merges creative art and recorded reality. Animation, for better or worse, is all creativity with varying degrees of anthropomorphic allegory. Though I've been moderately amused by some animation over the years, it's not really my turf.

Still, as more and more of my friends have talked to me about The Triplets of Belleville , I've begun to savor isolated images that have stuck in my memory. Above all, I love Bruno, the dog that grows old, fat and clumsy pursuing his obsession for barking at moving trains ever since a toy train ran over his tail as a puppy. Significantly, Bruno is the only character in Belleville with a dream life of his own; the sight of him lumbering up the stairs is as moving an image as any I've ever seen. Perhaps it's the recurring rear view that makes Bruno so, well, doggedly human.

There are some other, equally interesting characters in the story (besides the triplets themselves). The old, round-faced grandmother and her equally round-faced grandson are drawn in minimalist lines, making them emotionally distanced from the more accessible parent-child figures of conventional kids' cartoons. The grandmother single-mindedly looks for something to interest her mostly catatonic grandson, and when he shows a liking for his new tricycle, she begins training him in earnest for the Tour de France. He grows up to be a perpetually exhausted, beak-nosed freak with outsized leg muscles. But on his first race, he's kidnapped by the French mafia, who force him to compete in a bizarre indoor replica of the Tour de France. (Using a process-shot screen simulating the distance traversed by the cyclist, the gamblers in the gallery bet on the computed outcome.)

The triplets themselves are a French version of the Andrews Sisters, but much jazzier. They are first seen in their youth as performers on a televised variety show, but for most of the film they're withered yet still rhythm-conscious hags who help the grandmother rescue her grandson from the hoodlums in ways that defy gravity and every other law of physics and probability. Belleville itself is part Paris, part New York and part Montreal, though entirely populated by the clinically obese-a painterly mannerism that reads as an anti-American message to some reviewers. I think that's a bit of a stretch.

When the grandmother puts her foot out and sends the pursuing gangsters' cars tumbling to their doom, I couldn't help thinking of my own brave mother, who once faced down a gun-toting would-be burglar and made him run for his life when she picked up an ax. The comparative abstractness of Mr. Chomet's vision allows the mind to wander freely. So I guess I must've liked the Triplets of Belleville after all.

War Crimes

Norman Jewison's The Statement , from a screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the novel by Brian Moore, makes the most reprehensible antihero imaginable into its protagonist. Pierre Brossard (Michael Caine) is still on the run, 40 years after he is shown murdering French Jews during the Vichy era. Now in his 70's, he's the object of a two-pronged manhunt: the first by an avenging half-Jewish magistrate (Tilda Swinton) and a conscientious French Army officer (Jeremy Northam); and the second by mysterious forces within the Catholic Church and the French government intent on silencing Brossard before he reveals the identities of his protectors for the last four decades.

The problem with the scenario is this: Who exactly are we supposed to root for? To his credit, Mr. Caine creates a credibly unheroic, guilt-ridden religious fanatic, a Mel Gibson–type reactionary Catholic who opposes the liberalizing tendencies in the church-explicitly in the movie, the church's abandonment of the Latin liturgy. Yet Brossard remains a formidable adversary for his enemies, managing to kill two of his would-be assassins during the chase.

Another problem: It's bad enough that the performers, a largely British cast of well-known actors, are pretending to be French-but on top of that, they're speaking English. (And this at a time when more and more English-language films set in foreign locales are resorting to incorporating the native tongue.)

Still, the human dimensions of the story are subordinate to the real moral issue at the center of the film: the Catholic Church's active role in the Holocaust. But as the youngest possible Holocaust criminals reach and pass their 70's, 80's and 90's, and the rest die off from natural causes, one wonders how much longer this subject will be relevant to the political situation in Europe. A new wave of anti-Semitism is being nurtured under the cover of supposed sympathy for the stateless Palestinians, and an antipathy to the state of Israel. (Why do these sentiments rarely correspond, for example, to a sympathy for the Tibetans, and an antipathy to China?)

Nonetheless, it's good to see such estimable performances from Mr. Caine, Ms. Swinton, Mr. Northam, Charlotte Rampling, Alan Bates and Ciarán Hinds, who are all gainfully employed on an increasingly outdated subject.

Film Classics

The adventuresome Film Forum is giving discerning cineastes an early Christmas gift: An 18-film retrospective of Josef von Sternberg's dazzlingly visual career runs from Dec. 12 to 25, beginning with the highly recommended new 35-millimeter print of Shanghai Express (1932) on Dec. 12 and 13, as well as the new 35-millimeter print of The Devil Is a Woman (1935) on Dec. 14. Even more strongly recommended are Underworld (1927) and Thunderbolt (1929) on Dec. 15, with both classic silent films being shown for a single admission. Less recommended are Jet Pilot (1957) and Anatahan (1954) on Dec. 16; but you can't afford to miss The Last Command (1928) and Dishonored (1931) on Dec. 17, and Morocco (1930) and The Docks of New York (1928) on Dec. 18. Also highly recommended is Blonde Venus (1932) in a new 35-millimeter print, screening on Dec. 19 and 20. Moderately recommended are An American Tragedy (1931) and Crime and Punishment (1935) on Dec. 22 and The Shanghai Gesture (1941) and Macao (1952) on Dec. 23. And the highest recommendation for last: The Blue Angel (1930) and the documentary The Epic That Never Was (1965) on Dec. 24 and 25. The Film Forum is located at 209 West Houston Street; call 212-727-8110 for further details.

Jackpot, Nev., is a town 100 miles south of Twin Falls, Idaho, and serves more as a metaphor than as a milieu for the frenzied efforts of Sunny Holiday (Jon Gries) to become a big country-and-western singing star–even if it means abandoning his wife Bobbi (Daryl Hannah) and their adorable baby girl. He's accompanied on the road to nowhere by his ever-hopeful business manager, Lester Irving (Garrett Morris), who is seemingly as deluded as Sunny. On their long drives from gig to gig, Sunny and Les take turns spinning windy monologues at each other. Their 1983 Pink Chrysler makes its own comment in long-shot as it traverses the vast expanses of the Far West, the part that is practically all desert. Sunny and Les need huge road maps to trace their routes from one C&W- cum -karaoke tavern to the next. After a night's performance, some of the proprietors pay off only in home appliances and bulk-quantity detergents.

Curiously, despite the engaging talents of Mr. Gries, Mr. Morris and Ms. Hannah, the best thing about Jackpot is the generous spirit that pervades Sunny's on-the-road encounters with three representative but strictly dream-level pick-ups. First there's Janice (Peggy Lipton), a gorgeous waitress who is amiably philosophical when Sunny strikes out sexually from understandably sheer excitement; she even buys some detergent from him afterward. But the comic bonanza really begins one night after Sunny takes home a barfly named Cheryl (Crystal Bernard) after she passes out in the adjacent bathroom stall. Then, chez Cheryl, Sunny meets her underage daughter, Tangerine (Camellia Clouse), who sets out to seduce him by transparently asking him to join her in bed to sign her high-school yearbook. As she noisily flips page after page to get to her picture, and then blows on his bared midriff–sweetly explaining that she is giving him a blow job–the mixture of innocence and maladroitness provides one of the funniest non-sex scenes I've ever seen on the screen.

Indeed, the whole movie is bathed in a swirl of gentleness and infinite tolerance, performed with deadpan wit and executed with a formal circularity in the narrative. Adam Baldwin's Mel James, a hot-air C&W critic, exists simply to saddle Sunny and Les with false hope, and Patrick Bauchau's mysteriously fatalistic narration provides a spiritual enhancement to Sunny's otherwise pathetic pilgrimage. Anthony Edwards, as Sunny's even more fouled-up brother, is almost unrecognizable as the long-running authority figure in ER .

To put a point to it, the Polish brothers know what they're doing in breathing new life into a hackneyed subject.

More Like Ghastly World

Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World , from a screenplay by Mr. Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes, based on the comic-book series by Mr. Clowes, had already been praised to the skies by many of my esteemed colleagues when I finally caught up with it. Sadly, it turned out to be one of the biggest disappointments of the summer, though I would give it points for projecting its own heart of darkness with apparent conviction and an excellent cast–most notably the ever-reliable Steve Buscemi in the masochistic role of Seymour, a loser just born to be betrayed and humiliated by the wildly applauded teenage misfit, Enid (Thora Birch). But I'm sorry, guys–I found Enid smug, complacent, cruel, deceitful, thoughtless, malicious and disloyal. Worst of all, she's rarely funny and never charming, even when she joins her more conventional blond chum Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) in jeering a former drug-addicted classmate making her gushy valedictory speech from a wheelchair.

Politically correct Ghost World certainly isn't–even on matters of racial sensitivity and feminist dogma–and many of the film's admirers may find this iconoclastic attitude refreshingly courageous. Enid's favorite targets are people who are older, poorer or dumber than she is, which is to say that the California wasteland fashioned by Mr. Zwigoff and Mr. Clowes seems made up almost entirely of stooges for Enid and Rebecca to tease and taunt. (Actually, Mr. Clowes' locale in the comic-book series was reportedly Chicago, which exerts its own social dynamic.)

Of course, I didn't expect Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm , but there's a limit to the mean-spiritedness one can endure in a character one is supposed to find delightful. Indeed, some of the "practical jokes" Enid and Rebecca spring on their victims reminded me of nothing so much as the evil prankster in Ring Lardner's "Haircut"–and that wretch is finally shot to death. On the home front, Enid's father (Bob Balaban) is terrified of his surly daughter and hesitates to tell her that he's decided to ask his estranged wife, Enid's stepmother Maxine (Teri Garr), to move back in with them. All we know of Maxine is that Enid detests her, with all the force of the giggle-evoking sour expressions on her face–at which the viewers are invited to laugh in complicity. After all, what else are stepmothers with low billing good for?

But Enid's most destructive acts are directed at poor Seymour, an early victim of her warped sense of humor. She telephones him pretending to be the older but attractive woman he met in an airport for a brief moment and then tries to meet again through a personal ad in the local paper. After luring him to a diner, Enid and Rebecca stand around being terribly amused by his discomfiture at being stood up, and then follow him home and invade his life–or what passes for it in Seymour's buff-like obsession with old jazz records.

For me, Ghost World became more Seymour's story than Enid's when I recognized, from my own checkered past, all the ridiculously unsocialized loser types with whom Seymour fraternizes. Suddenly I remembered an early screening of Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963), where out of the corner of my eye I noticed Dwight MacDonald nodding laughingly toward me and two movie-buff friends for the benefit of Mary McCarthy. He had probably identified us as crazy Cahiers du Cinema types who regarded Alfred Hitchcock as a genius. On the other hand, I also remembered James Mason on the stage of Radio City Music Hall, graciously going out of his way to credit movie buffs with providing the impetus for the restoration of George Cukor's A Star Is Born (1954).

Hence, when Enid persuades a male companion to take her to a video sex shop so she can smirk at the embarrassed customers, I truly hated her, as well as Mr. Zwigoff and Mr. Clowes. This is not to say that they are lacking in panache and originality. It's just that Ghost World makes me wonder, for perhaps the first time, whether a film can be too personal an expression for its own good.

Venice Vacation

Silvio Soldini's Bread and Tulips provides, at the very least, a benign view of bohemian camaraderie–in, of all places, Venice, Italy–with a sunny Saroyanesque fable of the romantic regeneration of a neglected and discounted 40-year-old Italian housewife. After being left behind on a bus tour, she decides on a whim to hitchhike to Venice, a city she has never seen, and becomes a missing person. Her moderately concerned husband hires a bumbling plumber as a private detective to locate her and bring her home.

In Venice, the wife (Licia Maglietta) gets a job in a flower shop and cheap lodgings from a helpful waiter, with whom she forms a close friendship. I am very familiar with Bruno Ganz, who plays the waiter and has occasionally played angels in the past. For what it's worth, the film, director and cast swept nine David Di Donatello Awards, Italy's version of the Oscars. There is nothing particularly wrong with the film, but I found something soft in its attempts at whimsical humor. I suspect that its plot plays better with an Italian audience than with us hardened cinephiles over here.

Viewers who know Venice better than I do may find Mr. Soldini's back view of its less fashionable inhabitants enchanting and entertaining in itself, but I am still stuck in St. Mark's Square and the Lido, and I am too old and not poor enough to ever venture into the backwaters. But I do appreciate the joke of a plumber turned private detective who discovers that he can make a better living as a plumber anywhere in the world.

O Brother, Which Gang Are You In?

Takeshi Kitano's Brother plays as a lyrical parody of the gangster film, seeking to transfer the yakuza ethos of Tokyo organized crime to Los Angeles through the forced exile of one of its members, Yamamoto (Beat Takeshi, a.k.a. Takeshi Kitano), because of a shift in yakuza leadership. Yamamoto sets out to find his brother Ken (Claude Maki), who, it turns out, is leading a low-level drug ring in L.A. On his first day, Yamamoto has a violent encounter with Denny (Omar Epps), an African-American member of Ken's gang. But after Ken dies in a brotherly sacrifice for Yamamoto's interests, Denny and Yamamoto become allies.

Much of the time, Brother is hampered by its awkward English dialogue, much as Sergio Leone's classic spaghetti Westerns were perceived to be in the early years of their release. Similarly, the American players are less effective because they are temperamentally less in tune with the yakuza stoicism. But as an actor and writer-director, Mr. Kitano projects an amused irony that makes his films worth seeing, even when the proceedings become ultra-homicidal.

Not Bogart … Bogarde

The late actor Dirk Bogarde (1921-1999) is being honored with an 11-film tribute entitled "Gentleman in the Shadows" at the Walter Reade Theater (70 Lincoln Center Plaza, 875-5610). Particularly recommended are Terence Fisher's So Long at the Fair (1950), with Jean Simmons; John Schlesinger's Darling (1965), with Julie Christie; Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice (1971); Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Despair (1978); and Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974), with Charlotte Rampling. Bogarde was usually on the cutting edge and then some.