The real pleasure is in having a film that is like a box of assorted chocolates: you have the power to approve or not as you move through the variety, even though the bits are picked for you.

It is kept listenable--and watchable--because Bourdieu uses his knowledge of these people with winning ease. The story's conclusion verges on the grim, and it underscores Bourdieu's presumable theme: student life and talk are the last real vacations in many lives.

The picture is so suavely made that we don't feel disappointed until it is over: what chiefly holds us is the quality of the acting.

In short, this squad is an ill-trained, slovenly bunch of soldiers. That such behavior exists, or can exist, in any army is surely commonplace, but that Israeli producers should want to make a film about the matter at this time is puzzling.

I could have managed to bear all the film's shortcomings if it weren't for Clooney. Where was he during the making of this film? His face is there, he knows his lines, he moves as needed, but any traces of the intelligence and rapport, the subtlety and understanding, that have marked his best work are excruciatingly missing. Clooney behaves as if he discovered after he had committed to the film that he really didn't like the script as much as he thought he did but would go through with it anyway. The result is puppetry.

Winslet is an actress, Diaz is not. The screenplay by Nancy Meyers, who directed, has dialogue that is not near the snap level of, say, Nicole Holofcener's comparable "Friends With Money."

The one attraction in the picture is DiCaprio's performance: easy yet strong, confident, humorous.

We are left finally with a double response: it is hard to know exactly why the film was made, what its emotional and thematic point is, yet we are glad it happened because of Harris's performance.

Throughout we keep waiting for the real Almodóvar film, and it never arrives.

Is Scorsese desperate? This screenplay has the scent of it, as if he is scraping for material to feed his basic filmic interests. But the risk in this case--not evaded--was that his need led him close to painful strain. I can't remember another Scorsese moment as shockingly banal as the finishing touch here.

The film isn't dreadful: it is just generally disappointing.

We are meant to think about a society that revels in this moral pit. But all that puzzled me was why an audience would need a film to immerse it in wanton, speciously motivated death when the television news provides so much of it every day.

What the role needs, and what Macy cannot quite provide, is the sense not of a robot but of a potent man who has been imprisoned by rote. Remember Jack Nicholson in "About Schmidt."

The best performance comes from Stanley Tucci as the Runway art director. Tucci presents a homosexual man without a trace of cartoon--shrewd, skilled, and weathered without being worn. It is a well-judged and accomplished piece of work.

The dialogue creaks, all the more so since we know better than it does what it is going to say.

Only the onstage performing has moments of lift, particularly Keillor's diabolically homespun monologues and the cowboys with their risqué jokes that are reminders of such outhouse reading as Captain Billy's Whiz Bang.

The screenplay is at the start far from lucid in setting forth characters and relationships and intents. And after the film has been barreling along for two hours of its 148-minute journey, it seems to have lost the ability to finish. Three or four times in the last half-hour, I thought the film was over, only to be jarred by more of it.

What keeps us watching? Chiefly it is Edward Norton's performance as Harlan. It is hard to doubt his belief in everything he says, no matter how silly or dangerous it sounds.

Despite the pictorial riches, despite the firm performances by Ray Winstone as the captain and Guy Pearce as Charlie Burns, despite the miraculous John Hurt in an eccentric role that was put in just for spice, The Proposition is hollow.

The film's trouble is in what happens in each section: not enough. Once the atmosphere of each period is established, the story is too weak to interest--and the characterizations are too thin to compensate.

A moderately engaging satire, some of it amusing and some of it strained, but in considerable measure it reflects a strange circumstance in all our lives.

Well-photographed and adequately directed and acted, Iron Island is (painless) propaganda, informing us about domestic peace and goodwill. And this film, too, leaves us with a question: why does the currently aggressive Iran want the world, especially our chunk of it, to see what it is "really" like?

The danger in Hong's procedure is obvious. Dramatists learned long ago that it is risky to include a static character because he may so easily bore the audience.

We may indeed yawn a bit from time to time, but we know that we are yawning in the presence of a director who is intelligently disturbed by the moral inertia he sees around him and whose future is worth watching.

Less would have been more. Still, CSA has some laughs, most of them bitter.

I hazard the guess that quite small children--pre-science fiction, pre-heroics--will enjoy its fairy-tale quality.

This Jeffrey Hatcher-Kimberly Simi version, directed by Lasse Hallström, has a resemblance to some of Casanova's memoirs but is chiefly based on the assumption that, in a costume drama, anything goes.

Malick continues to float along the edge of the American film world as an unusually intelligent personage who occasionally delivers the fruit of his meditations. But his role as adjunct philosophe is better than the films he eventually gives us.