But in the end The Big Bounce avoids the intersection of Wilson's everybody-should-feel-good criminality and the more ruthless kind he gets caught up with. He drives off with a replacement girl while Foster is left standing on the side of the rode, in a wig, no less. She takes the fall for the movie when it makes this insipid gesture toward a conventional moral scheme that, as a work of irony, it exists to invert.

I enjoyed Starsky & Hutch more than The Big Bounce, but there's less to say about it. It's a variety show starring Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller, who make a superb vaudeville team: Stiller is uptight and Wilson isn't. It's a teaming similar to Bing Crosby and Bob Hope's in the enjoyable Road pictures from the 1940s, the teaming of a confidence man and a diffidence man. At their most inspired, trying to decide, for instance, if a biker-bar goon is tall enough for the handle Big Earl to function as an ironic nickname, Wilson and Stiller couldn't be better.

One of the great things about their teamwork is that they're both talk-it-through talkers. They don't just set each other up for one-liners as the old comedy two-acts from vaudeville and radio and early TV did. In the biker bar scene, in which they're trying to analyze an idiotic situation logically, it's like a comedy team made up of two Gracie Allens. It even works that at times they seem to be in different versions of the same movie, with Stiller parodying the TV show by replicating it too earnestly and Wilson just ambling through it. Some things work royally, others don't. Some of the guest stars (Snoop Dogg) hit and others don't. But don't let your grandparents tell you that the Hope and Crosby movies were any better than this. Enough said.

50 First Dates and Starsky & Hutch are movies I could send people to. Bernardo Bertolucci is one of the giants among movie directors, but there's no way I could recommend The Dreamers. Set during the Paris riots of May 1968, which were triggered by the attempt to fire Henri Langlois from the Cinematheque Francaise, it shows the involvement of an American student abroad with an incestuous, left-wing, movie-loving brother and sister. When Bertolucci made his masterpiece Last Tango in Paris (1972) starring Marlon Brando, he was imagining his way through taboos in character. His mind was as engaged as his other organs. In The Dreamers he looks back nostalgically at the '60s, which stand for revolutionary spirit in a tiresomely familiar way, but the taboos don't have much currency (e.g., tonguing the sleep out of someone's eye; soaking in a bath reddened with menstrual blood). Bertolucci tries too hard to be transgressive in so many ways that the relationships never cohere in a realistic sense or draw us in as fantasies.