Convenient political correctness is what stunts Sacha Baron Cohen’s humor and keeps him from being a great comic artist. It’s why his 2007 film Borat ultimately was worthless. Because Borat catered to liberal/conservative partisanship, even GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination) came to expect that Baron Cohen’s latest film, the homophobia charade Bruno, would conveniently line-up with their program. (When GLAAD “wasn’t brought into the process” of Bruno’s production, they protested; apparently unembarrassed about demanding a priori censorship.) Evidently, Baron Cohen’s Convenient Political Correctness teaches hypocrisy, not fairness or free expression GLAAD’s objection to Bruno—in which Baron Cohen portrays a Eurotrash fashion-model-turned-journalist—comes from the few skits that challenge a mediasanctioned special-interest group. Read more

Only amateurism separates the indie sex comedy Humpday from Hollywood product. Its story of two male BFFs who reunite, still bluffing and challenging each other like schoolboys, turns into a gimmick where they agree to do a porn film in which they have sex with each other. Hollywood’s version of this would at least be slick with some formulaic humor. But Humpday’s writer-director Lynn Shelton takes this absurd sitcom seriously—that is, humorlessly. Read more

CINEPHILIA, MEANING “love of cinema,” has been well served by the extraordinary range of good films released so far this year. As usual, it’s not the big hits or consensus favorites that make a film-lover want to go back to the movies; it’s the films most critics ignore first time around (but that you might catch belatedly on DVD) that confirm why movies matter. Read more Read it in print

ALTHOUGH BRIAN DE PALMA lost his artistic bearings on the anti–Iraq War bandwagon, director Kathryn Bigelow found her perfect subject.That’s the difference between De Palma’s confused, preachy Redacted and Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. Bigelow (working from a script by Mark Boal) stays focused on the personalities of soldiers during Bravo company’s last 39 days of rotation in 2004 Baghdad. Read more

WHY WASTE SPLEEN on Michael Bay? He’s a real visionary—perhaps mindless in some ways (he’s never bothered filming a good script), but Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is more proof he has a great eye for scale and a gift for visceral amazement. Bay’s ability to shoot spectacle makes the Ridley-Tony-Jake Scott family look like cavemen. Read more Read it in print

Under Our Skin, the Lyme disease documentary, is a tendentious film primarily interesting to the Lyme community, but its poignancy gives the film a somewhat wider appeal. Read more

Judd Apatow’s raunchiness may go too far but it never goes deep. That’s the problem with Year One, which starts out spoofing prehistory but quickly veers into ridiculing religion. Its prehistoric and Biblical jokes don’t necessarily go together, but the mash-up assumes a derisive attitude toward religious historical belief no different than Apatow’s childish, self-serving, unprincipled approach to sex. Read more

Imagine if Don Quixote tried to write Don Quixote. That kind of complex and quixotic self-exploration defines Alexander Olch’s The Windmill Movie, an extraordinary, if indulgent, documentary about indie filmmaker Richard P. Rogers that opens at Film Forum this week. Read more

Ten years after his great expectoration of bile in Deconstructing Harry, Woody Allen comes up with Whatever Works—the most shameless, cynically titled Hollywood con job since the days of Billy Wilder. Having lost his originality, Allen here reboots the acerbic Deconstructing Harry by mixing in the rancid, misogynistic Mighty Aphrodite. It’s another of his old-goat/younggirl fantasies, but with TV’s Larry David in the know-it-all lecher role and Evan Rachel Wood as the bimbo sexpot. Only this time, Allen’s wet dream is primarily bile, adding little wit and then an avalanche of sentimentality. Read more Read it in print

The U.S. premiere of Alain Cavalier’s 1962 Le Combat dans L’ile at Film Forum (screening through June 18) resurrects the captivating images of Romy Schneider and Jean-Louis Trintignant, both young, vibrant and emotionally complex in ways actors rarely are anymore.Their classic glamour came back to mind while I watched The Proposal and The Hangover—contemporary movies that use actors in ways that disrespect the audience’s need for big- screen identification. Read more