wherein a sitcom family—tense mom, supercilious dad, two smirking teens, and an annoying little sister—gathers in the dining room to partake of a delivered pizza.

Antic without being funny, The Terminal’s attempts at humor are largely predicated on calculating how many pratfalls can be derived from a wet floor

As the media’s Klieg lights lit up California

The screening was an event in itself. A near-hysterical line ringed the downtown Ryerson University campus for the midnight world premiere of this candid-camera US journey. Desperate fans jostled TV crews—or were they plants, offering $150 a ticket?—as Borat made his grand entrance escorted by a horse. Twenty minutes into the movie, shortly after friendly Borat begins kissing strange men on the New York City subway, the projector broke down and the screening became theater: The immigrant projectionist apologized onstage as Borat materialized to praise the “minor nation” of Canada (“our countries are very similar and not only because of the projector system”), and Michael Moore erupted out of the audience to offer his services. The screening was canceled, but the next day’s makeup presentation afforded a wonderful festival coincidence: I dashed from Borat’s climactic attempt to stuff Pamela Anderson into his “wedding sack” to an in-progress showing of The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema—a continuation of Borat by other means—with wild and crazy Slovenian film theorist Slavoj Žižek holding forth for two and a half hours, in richly accented English, on the unconscious desires instilled by Hollywood movies.

Infertility is but a metaphor that enables Children of Men to entertain the possibility of No Future. The only parents these days who assume their children will inhabit a better world are either those living in the gated communities of the super-rich or the immigrants imported to tend their gardens. That these ’fugees are visualized as the persecuted rabble of a crumbling empire is only one of this movie’s inconvenient truths.

A vulgar Marxist might have noted that as Batman is the alter-ego of the richest man in Gotham City, his “law” was the protection of capital. (Smeared lipstick notwithstanding, one of the scariest things about the Joker is that he has no respect for money.) In any case, the film’s ongoing discussion as to whether Batman is the hero we deserve or the hero we need was trumped by the villain’s funhouse-mirror dialectic. The Joker (secret star of the movie, played by Heath Ledger, an actor from beyond the grave) argued that, operating from somewhere outside of the law, Batman was the real agent of terror while he, on the other hand, embodied a particular logic: “I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.” Like bin Laden, the Joker has the power to drive Gotham City mad. This criminal is Al Qaeda squared, Katrina personified, the Wrath of God run amok. And so The Dark Night was illuminated by two choices: chaos or fascism.

As defeated Poppy chokes back tears, Dubya trumps even the bilious, class-fueled anti-Clinton rage expressed by mother Barbara