Can rock music ever go back to the days of “headphone records,” gatefold albums, mysterious liner notes and fans creating their own image of the band in their minds? Music video did much to kill the radio star, by presenting a carefully screened image for mass consumption…but Ed Sullivan started it all rolling downhill and Marty Scorsese might have reached the nadir with what might otherwise be considered the absolute zenith of rock-n-roll cinema, “The Last Waltz.” His sumptuous concert doc made high art out of simple musical performance, and enshrined the legacy (well, a particular version of it, anyway) of an erstwhile relatively-anonymous, workman-like group of musical superstars, the Band.

That simple, partly-modest, partly-conceited monicker underscores the extent that, without a pre-chosen image foisted upon the listener, this band could be whatever you choose. They first rocketed by prominence in 1968, playing on a plain white slab of modified petroleum product – a bootleg called “The Great White Wonder” – that purported to document some of what the mysterious Bob Dylan had been up to in Woodstock since his motorcycle accident. Before that they had been an anonymous touring band on the Canadian rockabilly circuit, before before being booed around the world supporting Dylan’s wee electric experiment. After that, they were on the cover of “Time” magazine (albeit, in a sketchy line drawing that still left much to the imagination) and on the top of the pops (and Ed Sullivan, too!).

The Band were a true ensemble. Three singers, four multi-instrumentalists, one wicked guitar player. Five members total. Two of the singers played the drums (one alternated between the skins and his piano, the other, a mandolin). Listening to the records, without visual aid, it’s easy to imagine all the permutations and guess who’s singing and who’s playing what. Scorsese’s version of the Band presents guitarist Robbie Robertson as the clear leader of the band, an articulate intellectual and philosopher of rock music and the star of many a close-up. Camera pans make out raspy-throated drummer/singer/mandolin-player Levon Helm to be the main singer, while boyish bassist Rick Danko takes a few cameo turns on vocals. Weird, mysterious Garth Hudson gets a bit wonky on his synthesizers, while additional drummer/pianist Richard Manuel seems like a sideman. The camera loves Robbie, and he tells all the best stories (even if they’re not his), while Levon Helm seems the most “homespun” (the Arkansawyer is the only actual American in the “Americana” band).

Helm’s autobiography, “This Wheel’s On Fire” (co-written with Stephen Davis), is a welcome corrective to Scorsese’s “print the legend” version of the Band. First, of course, is the fact that Helm had been the technical leader of the band (at least, as far as the musician’s union was concerned) during their Canadian rockabilly days, and the one who brought them their independence from founder Ronnie Hawkins. Not to mention that he was the one, after Dylan had recruited him and Robertson to fill out his first post-Newport electric rock band (in Forest Hills, hell yeah!), convinced Dylan to hire the entire Band (then known as Levon and the Hawks).

More important corrections to the legend apply to bandmates. Garth Hudson, as hinted at in “The Last Waltz” by the anecdote that the other members had to pay him additional money as a musical tutor (in their pre-salad days), was the true musical director of the band (especially the expanded “Last Waltz” band with its strings and horns). And poor Richard Manuel, who goes mostly overlooked by Scorsese’s cameras, is the Band’s main voice and true heart and soul. The troubled Manuel, who suffered from substance abuse and ultimately took his own life while on the road with the Band, actually sang lead on the lion’s share of the Band’s songs. The way that Scorsese placed the cameras – and given the listener’s ability to create one’s one mental image when listening to the other records – one (and I mean me) could be forgiven for thinking that most of those songs were being sung by Helm or Danko in a higher register than usual.

Although Helm is clearly very critical of Robertson’s role in the demise and subsequent legend of “The Last Waltz,” the author attempts to remain somewhat magnanimous and notes Robertson’s many contributions, both musical and of leadership. However, any criticism must be tempered slightly by the potential of “sour grapes” and the fact that Helm had ceded his own leadership of the Band by abandoning them while on Dylan’s legendary/disastrous 1966 tour of England when the booing of the folk purists became too much for him. By the time he returned to Woodstock, midway through the Basement Tapes period, band dynamics had obviously changed.

Still, Helm avoids actual bitterness until the afterword written for “Wheel’s” 2000 reprint edition, when mourning the death of Rick Danko years of age. Helm attributes Danko’s death at the relatively young age of 56 to a life of “hard work” and bitterly notes that Danko died with his money (royalties from “The Last Waltz” and other recordings) in Robbie Robertson’s pocket.

“Vicky Christina Barcelona” is the most thoroughly enjoyable hour and a half you could spend at the movies this season. At what point does Woody Allen’s “comeback” (as each of his last few movies have been hailed by critics) get to stick? Liberated from the upscale Manhattan locations that his characters could no longer afford, as well as from the crutch of casting himself or a famous impersonator as the romantic lead, Allen’s films have been consistently thoughtful, sober and darker than his proverbial “early, funny ones.”

Bankrolled by the Spanish tourism industry, the film is set in a clearly booming Barcelona (note the construction cranes that dot the skyline), which gets top billing along with the two American tourists (played by Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall) whose summer in the city fuels the plot-line. Vicky and Christina are propositioned by painter Juan Antonio for a weekend of art, wine and sex. Javier Bardem is charming as the oddly well-rounded and soulful lothario (particularly for a Woody Allen film). Hall’s Vicky opens her mouth and Woody incredulously rejects Bardem’s proposition (though she thankfully spares us an impersonation). Johansson’s Christina, however, is intrigued and accepts. Johansson is a very spotty actress, but she usually acquits herself in roles such as this, that are basically variations on the 20-something ingenue set adrift that she played in “Lost In Translation.” Like all mid-summer night’s sex comedies, everyone eventually sleeps together. This includes a refreshingly non-judgmental open relationship between Bardem, Johansson and Bardem’s tempestuous unstable ex-wife, Penelope Cruz (who’s a wicked delight every moment she’s on the screen).

Ultimately, every winds up alone with a little less faith in perfect love. This is a consistent theme in Allen’s movies. Remember, his best-loved romantic comedy is wistfully narrated after his break-up with Annie Hall. Love rarely lasts in Allen’s movies. And lust, particularly lust for a passionate but unstable lover, usually ends badly – either in murder (“Match Point,” “Crimes and Misdemeanors”) or institutionalization (“Stardust Memories”). Here, Penelope Cruz stabs and shoots at Javier Bardem. This is a comedy, mind you, and a very funny one.

It seems I chose a bizarre time to rediscover “V,” my favorite TV show from childhood about an alien invasion of Earth that served as a Holocaust parable. In a Penn Station book store on Friday, I noticed that familiar spray-painted “V” on the cover of a book called “V: The Second Generation.” Date of first publication: February 2008. The salesman who rang me up was as surprised as me to see it. “This used to be a TV show, didn’t it?”

The book is written by Kenneth Johnson, who created the initial 1983 miniseries but left before NBC made a mockery out of its sequels. Johnson writes the book as a straight up sequel to the original miniseries, taking place 25 years after the events in the original. In Johnson’s timeline, the Visitors have made good on their promise of sharing their scientific advances with mankind. Cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s and numerous other diseases have been cured, new fuel and information technology introduced. All national wars have been put to an end. The Visitors brought order and control to the world, and, naturally, most people go along while those who closely collaborate are greatly rewarded. The tiny Resistance that does exist is branded as “terrorists” and “scientific plotters” by the Visitor-controlled media. The Visitors have captured millions of humans for food and slavery and convinced most people that they were killed by “Resistance terrorists,” and they’ve taken half of the Earth’s water under the ridiculous guise of “cleaning” it before its promised return to Earth.

In marked contrast to the “Starchild” of NBC’s sequels, the half-breed hybrids are rejected by both species as deformed “dregs,” relegated to the lowliest manual labor. The human scientists and doctors are rounded up into ghettoes and strictly controlled. The historic parallels are obvious, but Johnson has a frustrating tendency to make them explicit, as his narration goes off into tangents about the Vichy French, the Warsaw Ghetto, Captain Cook and the native Hawaiians, African slaveships and more, assuming a certain lack of historical knowledge in his readers. Of course, I think his primary audience is television executives that might option the book for a new “V” television series. One historical parallel that Johnson thankfully does not footnote is a call to war by the Visitor Leader in which she declares that the far-away mutual enemy of the Visitors and humans have created a dangerous new chemical weapon that they intend to use against us, and that preemptive action is necessary.

Towards the end of the original miniseries, the nascent Resistance launched an SOS message into space, which was a potentially interesting plot thread that the NBC sequels dropped. Is the enemy of my enemy truly my friend? What if another alien race comes, not to save Earth but to vie with the Visitors for control over it? Johnson picks this plotline back up, but leaves it unresolved. Just like NBC’s sequel, which was followed by a regular series after Earth’s liberation, Johnson is hedging his bets in order to keep a franchise going, this time with more brains.

How well does childhood memory of favorite teevee shows hold up? Judging by the maddening 80′s nostalgia currently in vogue, I would wager not well. I mean, “He Man” and “Jem” were pretty stupid as far as kids shows go. They’re simply painful to sit through as an adult. As a kid, my favorite “adult” show was “V,” an occasional miniseries turned shortly-lived regular series about the human resistance against an extraterrestrial invasion of Earth. What my five-year-old self enjoyed about the show was the rough-and-tumble adventuring antics of the resistance fighters, the “vshboo, vshboo” sound of the aliens’ laser guns and the frequent reveal that under the aliens’ human masks were lizard skins. An exciting action-adventure serial with no redeeming qualities, or so I recalled.

Revisiting the series on DVD, I was surprised to find that the original 1983 miniseries was a taut, sophisticated Nazi allegory. In a montage that was ripped off by “Independence Day” years later, 50 alien saucers appear over the major cities of the world, and people gather excitedly around their televisions and below the motherships to await first contact. Unlike the aliens of “Independence Day,” these “Visitors” have a more ambitious agenda that simply blowing stuff up. Their envoys send greetings of peace in a ceremony on the roof of the United Nations. Their planet is dying, they claim, and Earth has certain chemical resources that they need to save their planet. The Visitors have assumed human first names like “John” and “Diana,” and seem just like us except that they wear dark visors to protect their eyes from our sun, have weirdly modulated gravelly voices and dress in militaristic jumpsuits adorned by a symbol that looks like a connect-the-dots swastika, if you were being cynical. But why be cynical? The Visitors promise to share their vast scientific knowledge with us in exchange for our help. Intergalactic travel, a cure for cancer and more!

And many people fall all over themselves in the series’ first hour to collaborate with the Visitors: The journalist who trades her objectivity for exclusive access as their official mouthpiece, the industrialist who contracts her factory to engineer the Visitors’ mysterious chemical and the teenage loser who seeks power, respect and a laser gun in the Visitors youth auxiliary. At the same time, others begin to question the Visitors’ true motivation. But after an outlandish plot by Earth’s scientists to murder and drive away the Visitors is foiled and some of the brightest scientists in the world “confess” not only to the plot but to withholding cures for common diseases from the public, the handful of remaining skeptics are driven underground, hated by the vast public who welcome the protection of the Visitors’ clampdown, even as entire towns are “disappeared.”

Our skeptics, who slowly form a “Resistance” against the fascist aliens, eventually discover that the Visitors are actually giant lizards under their fake human skin, and that the chemical they are creating on Earth is flushed down the drain as soon as it’s brought on board the motherships. The captured humans, however, are stored in gooey pods to be brought back to the Visitors’ home planet. Some will be brainwashed and used as laser cannon fodder in the Visitor Leader’s many wars with his enemies. The rest, in classic science fiction tradition, will be eaten.

The first “V” miniseries was a big deal back in its day, with fairly sophisticated special effects and a very large cast. The storyline rapidly progresses from the initial excitement of the first contact to the dreadful realization that the humans are no longer in control of their destinies. Writer-producer Kenneth Johnson’s breathtaking audacity to deal with a subject as serious as Nazis and the Holocaust in a medium that could have easily been a trivial shoot ‘em up adventure is enhanced by his stubborn refusal to give the miniseries a Hollywood happy ending. Which is not to say that the ending isn’t optimistic, as an official “Resistance” is formed, makes contact with an anti-fascist “Fifth Column” within the Visitors’ ranks and sends a distress signal out across the cosmos (for help, or worse), but it does imply a long struggle.

But not too long, it turns out. The original “V” miniseries was too big a hit in the ratings to stand alone, so NBC’s Brandon Tartikoff revived it one year later in “V: The Final Battle.” Kenneth Johnson is long gone by this point, and some of the ridiculous action-adventure tropes I recall as a kid first start to appear. For instance, it appears to be ridiculously easy for our Resistance heroes to steal a Visitor shuttle and steal away aboard any of the motherships, and the Visitors, apparently, couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn with those laser guns of theirs.

Still, the cast of Resistance fighters displays some charming chemistry, and the (not-so) friendly rivalry between Mike Donovan (Marc Singer) and Ham Tyler (Michael Ironside) is probably what I liked most about the series, as a kid and now. And the second miniseries closed out each episode with a great “shock” cliffhanger ending: the Resistance fighters ripping the skin off of Visitor envoy John on live teevee and the birth of the snake-tongued alien-human hybrid Elizabeth and her afterbirth. As promised by the title, the Resistance does drives the Visitors off of the planet by cooking up a virus that supposedly turns everything on the planet into poison for them. Despite some hokiness, “The Final Battle” would have been a satisfying conclusion to “V,” but, alas, NBC went to the well one time too many.

The following season, “V” returned as a regular weekly series. The virus, it turns out, only works in colder climates, so the Visitors return to fight the humans in Los Angeles. The writing for the regular series was frequently insulting to human intelligence. For instance, the Visitor motherships were hiding behind the moon, where no Toys-R-Us telescope could possibly see them. The female Visitor leaders have sewn shoulder pads into their military uniforms and frequently engage in “Dynasty” style catfights. Our heroes in the Resistance spend most episodes traveling to small towns in peril and helping people rise up against the Visitors and/or their collaborators. It’s kinda like the A-Team, except the bad guys don’t stand up and dust themselves off after getting blown out of their jeeps, and, instead of Mr. T, we have the hybrid “Starchild,” Elizabeth, who sheds her skin and becomes an 18-year-old hottie and frequent deus ex machina.

This, finally, was a show that a five year old could love. It’s lots of derring do, and ripping skin off scaly lizard people, laser gun and space shuttle dogfights, and the aliens constantly eat disgusting things like worms, rats and tarantulas. Apparently, five-year-olds weren’t a big enough audience to keep the show on the air. As a cost-saving measure, “V” vaporized half of its cast in the middle of its first and only season and was eventually cancelled after 19 episodes. Apparently, there is still a cult of fans for the program and rumors of a revival on the Sci Fi network. “V” does deserve a proper revival, now that television science fiction is finally displaying more brains and sophistication. Perhaps the next writers can delve deeper into the issues of fascist collaboration and resistance that were hinted at in the terrific original miniseries.

Daniel Day-Lewis is pure, foreboding menace in “There Will Be Blood.” Although, when he finally unleashes the full force of his menace, it is not entirely what is expected. Nor, likewise, is the blood alluded to in the title precisely what one would expect from the cleverly edited promotional trailers, although plenty of the red stuff flows.

Based upon the Upton Sinclair novel, “Oil!,” the film could easily have been mere anti-capitalist propaganda, but director Paul Thomas Anderson focuses more on themes of family, ambition and envy. Anderson doesn’t make short films and “Blood” is no exception, clocking in at nearly three hours. But whereas previous movies featured a large, Altman-esque cast of characters, Day-Lewis is the sole, scene-chewing focus of nearly every frame of “There Will Be Blood.” It’s one of those performances that shouts, give me my fucking Oscar or I’ll cut your fucking throat. Or bash your head in with a bowling pin 17 years from now. It’s a mesmerizing performance, and easily worth a six and a half dollars matinee ticket.

Todd Haynes’ new anti-biopic, “I’m Not There,” lives up to its hype as the perfect film distillation of the life and legend of Bob Dylan. The stories of six Dylan-like characters (played, among others, by a 13-year-old black boy, a British actress, Richard Gere and Batman) intertwine, and, naturally, nothing is revealed.

The soundtrack is fantastic, including covers by a who’s who of middle-aged alt-rock and a terrific selection of Dylan classics and overlooked gems like “Blind Willie McTell” and the early version of “Idiot Wind” that wound up on the cutting room floor for “Blood On The Tracks.” The title is taken from a heretofore unreleased “basement tapes” recording, one of those haunting songs that Dylan recorded in one take and perversely never touched again, much to the chagrin of us cultists. It turns up here in a re-mastered mix and Sonic Youth cover.

Cultists, the only folks who could properly enjoy two and a half hours of abstract Dylanology, will have a field day with character names, set decoration and other sly references to songs both popular and rare. The rest of the squares, like the couple sitting behind me who would not shut up, will content themselves by pointing out that Cate Blanchett’s insufferable-prick-era “Dylan,” Jude Quinn, “probably means the Rolling Stones,” when introducing Brian Jones as a member of “that cute little cover band.”

For many, the scenes that stretch hardest for credibility are Richard Gere as Billy the Kid-in-hiding, after escaping Pat Garrett’s bullet. For me, this is the most enjoyable part of the film. It’s a tribute and celebration of Dylan’s weird and wonderful “basement tapes” period; a tangled up mix of Americana from the Civil Way to the Dust Bowl, with circus freaks and outlaws and ostriches, that somehow makes sense of non-sensical lyrics like “pack up the meat, sweet” and “open the door, Homer.” It’s a visual delight for any true Dylan freak.

It’s hard to imagine in this DVD age that John Turtuorro’s “Romance and Cigarettes” could languish in a studio vault, largely unseen by the public, for over two years. In many ways a valentine to Queens, particularly the areas down south by Kennedy airport, where things get weird, Turturro’s working class characters break into song and dance when feeling most dreary and desperate. It’s a familiar device to fans of Dennis Potter, but unlike “The Singing Detective” or “Pennies From Heaven,” “Romance and Cigarettes” neglect to weigh down its narrative with believable drama.

The family at the heart of the story are hard to take seriously, with Aida Turturro and Mary Louise Parker playing James Gandolfini’s daughters. The characters are probably supposed to be teenagers, or at least in their early twenties, if their living at home and playing in a backyard punk rock band is supposed to be believable rather than just weird. Steve Buscemi, as Gandolfini’s best friend, doesn’t so much participate in dialogue as throw out a lot of sexually graphic non-sequitors, while Kate Winslet is “a crude broad.” Don’t get me wrong. They’re all a hoot, but it doesn’t add up so much for a compelling drama as a series of hysterical vignettes.

A clear highlight is Christoper Walken, already verging on self-parody, breaking out into his “Weapon of Choice” dance for his rendition of Tom Jones’ “Delilah,” including a dance with the lover he has just knifed. Gandolfini’s theme song, Englerbert Humperdink’s “Man Without Love,” is presented as an adorable montage of the men (and boys) of Howard Beach lip-sinking its lovelorn lyrics while going about their daily routine.

“Romance and Cigarettes,” which is playing in a limited run at the Film Forum, will apparently be given a limited release in theaters shortly. It probably won’t come to a theater near you. But it would be worth a rental on DVD, if it ever gets released in such a format.

I want to be Philip Marlowe. Or maybe Nick Charles. My favorite kinds of movies are film noir, particularly the hard-boiled detective genre. I love the interplay of shadows and light in black and white. I love the cynical worldview, the disdain for scruples, morals and basic decency. I love that the characters drink rye and gin, smoke Chesterfields, wear fedoras and ties, consult the phone directory for research and do any number of other terribly old-fashioned things. I love the women – tall, thin, legs for miles, usually dressed in black and up to no good.

But, mostly, I hero worship the gumshoe protagonists. The hard-boiled detective is the ultimate male fantasy. He is how we would all like to envision ourselves: suave, a sense of style, quick-witted and sarcastic, a healthy appetite for liquor that actually serves to sharpen his senses, seemingly irresistible to women, knows when he’s being played and always saves the day. Dashiell Hammett, the ultimate master of the genre, acknowledged this male fantasy aspect in the creation of one of his most famous characters, Sam Spade:

“Spade has no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not, or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague, want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.”

The protagonist from Hammett’s early novels, the nameless Continental Op, was just such a Holmes-like solver of riddles. These – “The Dain Curse” and “Red Harvest” – are true mystery novels, emphasizing clues and plot twists over character, as the Continental Op has none. It was with Spade in “The Maltese Falcon” that the detective story developed true heroes. The detective hero in Hammett’s final novel, Nick Charles, has character in spades. Seen as a mash note to his lover Lillian Hellman, “The Thin Man” presents a male fantasy of a committed relationship: to a saucy heiress half his age, who mixes his drinks, massages his shoulders, countenances a fair amount of hanky panky with the novel’s femme fatales and helps him compile the clues to the mystery.

Raymond Chandler, the author who is credited as carrying Hammett’s hard-boiled mantle, did not improve upon his predecessor’s economy of words nor his gripping plots, as most of Chandler’s stories were obvious and perfunctory. But he did create the ultimate Hollywood detective: Philip Marlowe. With a back story that involves getting fired from the D.A.’s office for political reasons, Marlowe has charm of the renegade hero that Hollywood has been trying to imitate in action and adventure movies ever since. Always too quick to mouth off to cops and criminals, Marlowe frequently takes his punches and his nights in the clink. His bottle of whiskey is conveniently available to loosen up a suspect or an already loose woman. Usually hard up for cash, he nevertheless passes up opportunities to shake down his clients and often shields them from the wives, daughters and mistresses who are scandalizing them. Still, he’s no softie (“I don’t like your manner, Mr. Marlowe.” “That’s all right. I’m not selling it.”).

Playing Marlowe in the movies is a kind of drag. The early actors – Robert Montgomery, Dick Powell, George Montgomery and the best of the lot, Humphrey Bogart – played him as the traditional tough guy of noir stereotype. James Caan played an older, wearier Marlowe in “Poodle Springs.” Robert Mitchum brought his unique brand of cool to a British adaptation in the 1970′s, perhaps because the stiffness and properness of the 1940′s U.S.A. could only be recreated in the 1970′s by transporting the tale to England. Elliott Gould, also in the 70′s, played Marlowe as a man out of time in sunny L.A. That portrayal, in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” is perhaps most intriguing for the purposes of this article. Following his iconoclastic “M*A*S*H*,” it was hoped that Altman would do for noir genre what he did for the war movie and make a kind of a “Trapper John, PI.” While Gould maintains his roguish charm, Altman maintains a certain reverence for the Marlowe archetype. He tips his hat to the nudists next door and refuses to loosen his tie even on the beach. All the characters around him tease him for his old-fashioned ways.

The film was not a success, although a recent revival at the Film Forum landed Elliott Gould on the cover of the Village Voice decades after his curious period as a smart-ass Jewish matinee heartthrob. Instead of a revival of noir, the 1970′s saw the rise of Dirty Harry and other vigilante heroes, who in turn gave rise to that loathsome archetype, the action hero. In place of black suits and fedoras, we get ripped t-shirts and bulging muscles. In place of flirtatious banter and crossed legs, we get an inarticulate bodybuilder gnawing on some starlet’s tits at around the 50 minute mark in a well-choreographed bedroom romp. In place of investigation and deduction, we get explosions and lots of them.

Why has the action hero replaced the hard-boiled detective as the male fantasy? I would chalk it up to sort of generalized anxiety that men feel about their role in society these days, except that the hard-boiled fantasy is also about being in control (of the situation, of life, of women). Maybe the difference between the two stock types is too little to fret over, and I’m just guilty once again of being nostalgic for a time before I was born.

Veteran British actor Ian Richardson passed away recently. I took the opportunity afforded by my monthly mail order video subscription (no brand names, comrades) to stage a private film festival of Richardson’s best-known work, the BBC series, “House of Cards.”

The 1991 miniseries focuses on a fictional Tory power struggle following Thatcher’s ouster, as Francis Urquhart, the diabolically unassuming Chief Whip, plots to destabilize the government and sabotage his competitors. The filmmakers give more than a nod and a wink to Shakespeare. Urquhart’s Lady MacBeth-like wife is played by Lady MacBeth, Diane Fletcher (from the Polanski version), and F.U. frequently addresses the audience directly, to share his plotting or just to raise an eyebrow. It’s Richardson’s performance that turns what could have been a cheap gag into a darkly comic and chilling tale. The entire enterprise is devilish fun, right up to the shock ending.

The filmmakers revived the series for two sequels which compare less favorably to the original, if only because grabbing power is more fun than merely preserving it. “To Play the King” is more inherently British than the other series. Not because it focuses on a battle between an idealistic king and a cynical Prime Minister, but because, unlike entertainment fare tailored for American audiences, the filmmakers feel no need to make any of their main characters particularly likable. After all, the idealistic king’s politicking in favor of social welfare spending is no less an abuse of power as the Prime Minister’s Machiavellian dirty tricks, and is more hypocritical. Unfortunately, the filmmakers rely too heavily on F.U.’s ability to order “black-ops” mischief as a lazy deus ex machina to tie up the loose strands of an unwieldy plot.

“The Final Cut” is a slight return to form, finding F.U. struggling vainly to remain in office longer than Thatcher. The toll of time is conveyed interestingly, as ten years in office and gallons of blood on his hands, F.U. is surrounded by a cabinet and advisors than contain no familiar faces from the previous series. As the sins of his past inexorably catch up to him, his wife cold-bloodedly calculates how to preserve his legacy and their retirement finances.

As our own American political system gears up for a succession battle, it strikes me that few of the candidates are incapable of the cartoonish evil of Ian Richardson’s portrayal, but that none of them are capable of the wit and charm that makes the make believe politics of the “House of Cards” series so watch-able.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is a sort of gothic fairy-tale for adults and weird little kids. Like Jim Henson’s “Labyrinth” and “Dark Crystal,” this beautifully shot Spanish language film from Guillermo del Toro guides a ten year old girl through a dark fantasy world full of monsters and ghouls with questionable motivations. The world of the labyrinth exists largely in the imagination of the girl, Ofelia (Ivama Baquero), who is interpreting the far more horrific real world she inhabits, in which Franco’s Fascists are exterminating the remaining rebels in the dreary spring of ’44. In a bit of a cop-out, the filmmakers allow the audience to imagine that Ofelia’s fantasy world might be real, thus dulling the impact of a surprisingly sad ending. Sergi Lopez is almost cartoonish in his villainy as the Captain, which is fine by me. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my Fascists all snarling and evil. His brutality, as well as the brutality of his well-deserved comeuppance, had me wincing in my seat, a rare and oddly enjoyable experience.

Your honor, it was the beer talking. Not me. It’s a lame excuse coming from Mel Gibson when he’s caught being himself (a sexist, anti-Semite yob), but even lamer when coming from drunken frat boys being drunken frat boys, on camera no less! The unnamed frat boys in question were the ignominious stars of “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.”

I don’t need to tell you that Borat is the brainchild of comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, a fake TV journalist from a former Soviet republic who baits Americans to say outrageous things (that they likely believe) with his seeming innocence. On his TV show, he famously got a bar room full of country-western fans to sing along with a song called “Throw the Jew Down the Well.”

The movie is savagely funny. It has a fair amount of poop jokes and Jackass-style gross-out humor, but it also has a keen eye for mocking the elite and the powerful, and the racism and sexism of ordinary Americans. While everyone is baited, some of our fellow citizens pass their tests with flying colors, such as the driving instructor who responds to Borat’s “traditional” two kisses on the cheek with a grumbly, “Well, I’m not used to that, but that’s fine.” But most take Borat’s bait and reveal the ugliest tendencies of Americans. A crowd of rodeo fans applaud Borat’s speech, in which he wishes that Bush drink the blood of every Iraqi man, woman and child; a gun store clerk responds to Borart’s query of the best way to protect against Jews with the instant recommendation of a very large handgun.

Unlike these other victims of the fake foreign journalist, the frat boys in question – who are so embarrassed by the spectacle they made that they are suing the filmmakers to have their appearance removed from the film – needed no prodding at all. As soon as Borat hitchhiked his way onto their RV, they were extolling the virtues of slavery, the innate inferiority of women and how tough it is to be a white man these days where no one gives you any breaks.

I saw the new Borat movie on opening night with a raucous Times Square crowd, and the scene with the frat boys was the only part of the movie that hushed the crowd. It wasn’t funny. It was scary and depressing. These morons are the future of America. They’re probably future Congressmen.

Writing in the Nation, Richard Goldstein accuses Borat of double standards, of couching bigotry in humor in order to get away with the bigotry that Borat himself employs. Goldstein either did not see the movie, or did not get it. It is significant that the only black people (other than Alan Keyes, who deserves mockery) who appear in the movie are in on the joke, and help satirize genteel white racism. Everyone is not fair game, just the rich, the powerful and the intolerant.

Like all of Woody Allen’s movies since his “early, funny ones,”"Scoop” has received pretty uneven reviews. One camp considers it a loose, freewheeling trifle. The other, a plodding, boring mess. Count me in the former camp.

“Scoop” is silly fun. It’s got Woody being Woody – stammering, neuroses, card tricks and Vaudeville humor – minus the distasteful groping of young ladies (a Herculean feat for any man when you are the Director and the delectable Scarlett Johansen is your star). Ms. Johansen, herself, works better here than in “Match Point.” While she’s got the figure and sultry good looks to be a femme fatale, she may take a couple of decades to grow into that role. In the meantime, she is better suited to play awkward, unsure girls who happen – purely by accident – to be sexy.

Building on a few borrowed plot points from “Match Point,” that movie and this one can be seen as a pair as a major improvement of the central gimmick of “Melinda & Melinda,” that is, that comedy and tragedy can be mined from similar material.

The biggest crowd pleaser that’s something other than one of Woody’s one-liners was the response to the site gag of Woody driving around in one of them lil Smart Car “Two-fers.” This, I don’t understand. Seeing our diminutive hero tool around the English countryside in one of those glorified go-karts makes me pine for the day when we will finally see the little buggers zipping around our New York City streets. Perhaps in the next Woody Allen movie.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman perfectly impersonates the late author (as far as I can tell, based upon the clips I have seen of his later TeeVee appearances as a professional celebrity), and brings a subtle complexity to the role of Truman Capote as he uses (and abuses) everyone around him while researching and writing “In Cold Blood.”

Capote traveled to a sleepy Kansas town that was the site of a grisly quadruple murder in 1959 to write a story for “The New Yorker” but worked instead for five years on the first “non-fiction novel.” He traded on his celebrity to gain the confidence of the wives of the town’s lawmen and used his money to fund the legal appeals of the murderers in order to win their trust and keep them alive long enough to get their side of the story. Of course, he needed to have them swinging from the gallows in order to have an ending for his book. That conflict is at the heart of this movie, which handily shifts its tone as the subject matter grows darker and ratchets up the tension as it builds towards the inevitable (but still shocking) climax.

“The Aristocrats” is a disappointment. For all the talk of how the World’s Dirtiest Joke is like some great jazz improv, which improves with each new teller’s unique voice, mostly, it’s the same joke. There’s diarrhea, there’s incest, there’s Joe Franklin and the same lame punchline.

I always thought the joke was that aristocrats (like England’s royal family) actually engage in some of the child-fucking, shit-eating acts described in the joke’s set-up. In fact, the punchline is meant to contrast the genteel evocation of the “aristocracy” with the foul deeds detailed in the joke itself. For that reason, the montage of interviews with comedians laughing at the existence of a better punchline (“the sophisticates!”) around the middle of the film is one of its funniest bits.

Likewise, when comedians digress from the established joke into hilariously ribald tangents, the film finally hits its stride. George Carlin riffs on the consistency of diarrhea, Gilbert Godfried explains the preponderance of blood in the set-up, Sarah Silverman makes it personal with Joe Franklin and damn near everyone picks on the absent Gallagher.

“Tell me a joke” would have been a better motivation for the filmmakers than “tell me the same old dirty joke.”

Though I’ve long been intrigued by trailers and reviews, I’ve failed to see any of Gregg Araki’s movies until “Mysterious Skin.” What I’ve missed in the past is not likely to be as remarkable and utterly affecting as “Skin,” which is easily the best movie I’ve seen so far this year.

Centered around troubled Kansas teens Brian and Neil, who shared a life-changing experience in the summer of 1981, the film leads inevitably towards their devastating reunion ten years later.

As an eight-year-old Little Leaguer, Neil (boldly played by “Third Rock From the Sun’s” Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was lured into a sexual relationship with his coach when he was eight years old. His voiceover narration makes clear that he was always attracted to men and was happy and proud to be so liked by “Coach,” who, remembered purely in flashbacks (it seems the movie was set in the 1980′s purely to salute that golden era for mustaches) is a kindly and likable figure (it’s up the audience to feel conflicted). The experience leaves Neil with a taste in older men that leads to him turning tricks that grow increasingly dangerous.

Likewise abused, Brian (Brady Corbet) blocked out the experience and finds only one logical explanation for his missing time: alien abduction. Whereas Neil grows up to be a jaded loner with self-destructive sexual impulses, Brian becomes a lonely geek with no clear sexual desires. Brian’s efforts to document dreams and repressed memories dredge up details Little League uniforms and another little boy that lead to his encounter with Neil, which brings the film to an abrupt end.

Neil remembers everything and fills in Brian, whose own memories come back in a flood as he recoils into a fetal position on Neil’s lap (Corbet’s performance is affecting). Neil, for his part, in voiceover, expresses regret and remorse that cast his whole narrative during the previous 100 minutes in question and leaves the audience reeling as the credits roll.