Art School Confidential

Director Terry Zwigoff and graphic novelist screenwriter Daniel Clowes' follow-up to the wonderful Ghost World is at once more embittered, darker, and yet broader than its predecessor, a biting satire masquerading as a '60s-style exploitation flick that skewers just about everyone while hiding a romantic heart-of-gold at its center. Delicately handsome Max Minghella (Bee Season, Syriana), son of Cold Mountain and The English Patient director Anthony, plays the earnest art school freshman who idolizes Picasso, only to come up against the thwarted artistic ambitions (and sexual come-ons) of drawing teacher John Malkovich.

There's a classic scene with a nude male model flapping in the wind as he chats "up" one of the female students, and wonderful turns by My Name Is Earl's Kevin Smith protege Ethan Suplee, an aspiring filmmaker bankrolled by his grandfather, and a grizzly Jim Broadbent as an alcoholic graduate who grudgingly imparts his cynicism about having to suck up to succeed in the art world in exchange for a bottle of booze.

The seemingly superfluous subplot about a serial killer around campus results in a final plot twist linking notoriety to commercial success, which wraps the story up a little too easily. But Zwigoff and Clowes' vision is as close as you can get to R. Crumb's Zap Comix on the screen, with plenty of laughs for those who enjoy the kind of twisted humor the film revels in.

Mission: Impossible: III

With all due respect to director J.J. Abrams, who has proven his mettle with TV's Felicity and Lost, which I've loved, as well as Alias, inspired by the original Mission Impossible TV series, this is, first and foremost, executive producer/star/stuntman Tom Cruise's show. With his off-camera exploits making it impossible to suspend your disbelief, Cruise's film seems to mirror the star's tabloid travails in its hokey plot as well as the choice of co-stars in Felicity's Keri Russell, a doomed agent who eerily resembles Nicole Kidman, and Michelle Monaghan, a seeming dead ringer for his latest paramour, Katie Holmes.

The first part of the movie revolves around Cruise's attempts to keep his return to the field secret from Monaghan, and the second is about saving her from villain Philip Seymour Hoffman by retrieving the so-called rabbit's foot, a doomsday weapon that serves as the ultimate Hitchcockian maguffin in that its true nature is never identified.

The scene-stealing Hoffman is woefully underutilized as the leering psychopath he played in The Talented Mr. Ripley, and there are at least two major set-pieces, including a fiercely pitched battle over a bridge that features cars spinning around in mid-air along with one in which Cruise swings from roof to roof among the skyscrapers of Shanghai. But the final result, while never boring, leaves you feeling pretty hungry again an hour later.