I get that Carolla is just cracking wise, from inside the bubble of his own lame version of post-rockabilly guy-shtick — he is interviewed inside a garage, with what looks like an orange Camaro behind him in the middle distance — and that if you brought up the fact that those old-time “chick jobs” paid 40 to 80 percent less than “guy jobs,” he’d get all irritated with you for being a drag. He’s still an idiot, though, even if he’s an idiot in quotation marks. That’s kind of the problem with “Mansome,” which tries to tackle the enormous subject of contemporary male vanity as an assemblage of whimsical anecdotes, which are often entertaining in themselves but studiously avoid any semblance of intelligent analysis or historical understanding.

It’s pointless to come down too hard on a film like “Mansome,” because like all Spurlock’s work (including “Super Size Me” and “Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?”) it’s driven by a good-hearted frat-boy humor that seems fundamentally sincere. It’s more first-person journal and travelogue than it is cultural archaeology, and as such it’s basically OK. Spurlock gets to interview some of his celebrity pals about their attitudes toward masculinity and grooming: Paul Rudd is slightly ill at ease, Judd Apatow is charming, and Zach Galifianiakis steals the show, of course. (When asked to rate his looks on a scale of 1 to 10, Galifianakis responds confidently that some people find him “a strong 2.”)

Spurlock documents his own decision to shave off his trademark porn-star ‘stache, thereby reducing his 5-year-old son to torrents of tears. (It was definitely a mistake, Morgan.) He meets various kooky characters who have some tangential relationship to his theme, including a California suburbanite named Jack Passion who describes himself as a professional “beardsman,” meaning he travels the world exhibiting his Hagar-the-Horrible facial thatch in competitions. (Anthrax rhythm guitarist Scott Ian responds: “Beard and mustache competitions, for want of a better word, are kind of gay.” I laughed, and I know that’s wrong.) Then there’s the elegantly coiffed and tailored Manhattan clothing buyer who describes himself as the “dictionary definition of a metrosexual,” perhaps making up for his teen years as a Sikh immigrant outcast in middle America. And the entrepreneur who has introduced a lotion-y product called Fresh Balls: The Solution for Men. (Yes, it is what you think it is.)

In fairness, Spurlock is at least half aware that all the jokes and episodes of “Mansome” never add up to anything, except perhaps the conclusion that neither male narcissism nor male grooming is anything new, but that they have been coded in different ways at different times. Masculinity is no less a troubled construction than is femininity, and it’s just as easily whipped about by the tides of commerce and fashion. The aristocratic dandies of the 18th century make Spurlock’s New York Sikh metrosexual look like a shoeless Dust Bowl farmhand, and every Important Man of the 19th century, regardless of background or affiliation — King Leopold II! Karl Marx! The pioneering Ambrose Burnside! — had his own tonsorial signature that required extensive maintenance.

Now, I’m not denying that there’s something specific and contemporary about the version of male narcissism wrought by consumer capitalism, with its tendency to turn things once seen as immutable, such as gender or sexual identity, into fluid and exchangeable commodities with no fixed meaning. (Speaking of Karl Marx, it was he who wrote that, under capitalism, “all fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”) It was to address that question on a pop-sociological level that the term “metrosexual,” first introduced to America a decade ago in this Salon article by Mark Simpson, was originally invented. (Simpson’s coinage was instantly stolen by marketers, of course, and turned into a pretty-boy Frankenstein monster who was, in turn, burned by the resentful villagers.)

Some of that big-picture stuff comes up almost by accident in “Mansome,” but Spurlock doesn’t even pretend to pay attention. He’s just a guy! He’s confused like the rest of us! He makes his little boy cry and watches pro wrestler Shawn Daivari (a Minnesota native who plays the anti-American “heel” called Sheik Abdul Bashir) shave his back all the way down to his butt crack. He sticks for far too long with an embarrassing framing device in which Jason Bateman and Will Arnett go to a spa and engage in uneasy homoerotic banter. He chops up the movie into irrelevant chapters about beards, mustaches, hair and so on, as if those things were unrelated. When he goes to get his own hair cut, it’s at some pseudo-old-fashioned place in downtown Manhattan where the wood fixtures are way too polished and the barbers are conspicuously overdressed. It’s kind of endearing and kind of asinine.

“Mansome” is now playing in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Seattle and Austin, Texas, with more cities to follow.

While I wouldn’t assume there’s a vast amount of historical and social accuracy to “Hysteria,” it’s a lot of fun, and could definitely provide a viable moviegoing alternative for adult women eager to move on from “Iron Man” and “Captain America.” Gyllenhaal’s character, the crusading feminist and social worker Charlotte Dalrymple, who becomes the comic and romantic foil to Hugh Dancy’s stuffy, stammering Granville, might be described as a supporting character who takes over the movie. Charlotte effectively becomes the modern viewer’s window into the world of “Hysteria,” insisting as a matter of course that women indeed enjoy sexual pleasure (but are often plagued with partners who don’t know how to deliver it) and espousing then-outrageous views about women’s right to vote, go to college, work outside the home and so on.

Although still best known for her roles in independent films like the 2002 spanking-liberation manifesto “Secretary,” Spike Jonze’s “Adaptation” and the underappreciated “Sherrybaby” (not to mention her early role opposite real-life brother Jake Gyllenhaal in “Donnie Darko”), Gyllenhaal has also appeared in several major Hollywood productions, including “The Dark Knight,” “Crazy Heart” and the forthcoming “Won’t Back Down,” in which she stars with Viola Davis as parents trying to rescue a failing public school. Her prodigious on-screen charm is matched by a reputation as one of the most genuine and easygoing people in the movie business, and although I’d never met her before, this was one of the most relaxed interviews I’ve ever conducted.

We began our conversation, in fact, by talking about the Park Slope Food Coop, the legendary Brooklyn collective grocery store where we are both members. Unlike some celebrity members I could name, Gyllenhaal and Sarsgaard perform their assigned Coop work shifts personally. (She works in the basement, wearing a kerchief and packing nuts, teas, spices and cheeses, although like any other new mom she now has a one-year work exemption.) Is the Coop’s produce both better and cheaper than the pretty but nosebleed-expensive stuff for sale at Manhattan’s outdoor markets, we asked each other rhetorically? It is. Then we moved on to “Hysteria.”

So it seems like this must have been a fun character to play. You get to be the totally uninhibited character in a movie where everybody else has the 19th century hanging over them. You’re the liberated woman at a time when there almost weren’t any.

Right. Sometimes, a movie is set up where you’re meant to be winning, you know what I mean? I’ve certainly played a lot of characters who were really flawed and did horrible things, and where the challenge is to ask the audience if they can be compassionate enough to still have empathy for you. That’s really important to me, and I think that’s a really interesting thing to do with film — play a character who’s really flawed and ask the audience to practice being compassionate. Or who does things that are really outrageous that the audience might have judgments about, and make them question where their judgments come from.

This is completely different. This is like, you walk in and the movie doesn’t work if Charlotte isn’t winning. But the one thing I really did think — I mean, the script was so great, and so much of the tone of the movie was in place. I didn’t think it needed to be shifted almost at all. But one thing that I think comes from me is that I didn’t care at all about her being historically accurate. About her not having the 19th century over her, like you said. I think the movie is served better if she seems wild even now, if she seems so full of life that she could come from any time. Or any planet!

Because what she’s talking about in the movie — the actual politics — is very simple. The movie doesn’t have room for a complicated discussion of socialism. She says, “Socialism is a lot of people working together.” Well, you know, I mean — there’s a lot more to say about it! (Laughter.) Or, you know, women should have the right to vote, women should be able to go to college. We’re good with that here! So because her politics are so simple, and because the things that were so outrageous that she was saying do not sound outrageous now, she needs to be more outrageous in her spirit. So, yeah, it was fun to be able to just go, “You guys are constricted and constrained by all these things, and I just don’t feel them!”

I have to say the question of historical accuracy, or lack thereof, really never bothered me. It’s not that kind of movie.

Yeah. I think you’re on the wrong track if that’s what you’re worried about!

But one thing the writers really got right — or maybe this is your theatrical background and English-lit education at work — is that Charlotte feels like the heroine of a George Bernard Shaw play that Shaw never got around to writing.

Right! Right! She fits into a history of great wild women, you know? Even, like, ’40s women, screwball women, who you love even though they’re pissing you off. So, yeah, I agree with that. I liked that about it. I thought it would be fun!

You know, I probably can’t push this analysis of your career too far, but you do have a pattern of playing transgressive women, women who are defying social norms. Do you see it that way?

Well, I guess I think — and this might not be true either — but if you think about who might be interesting to watch, is it interesting to watch someone who’s absolutely following the norm and the pattern you’re used to watching? Sometimes people write those characters and they’re much more secondary characters meant to give you some exposition or whatever. Usually, the interesting character in a movie is either making a big change or transgressing somehow — making you think about how you live. So, yes, that is what appeals to me, but I also think it appeals to many people.

But no, I think maybe you’re right. When I think about Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” for example — did you happen to see the production that we did last year?

No. I really, really wanted to. I love that play.

Well, so, of the three sisters, the transgressive one is Masha, and that’s who I played. But of course Olga is such an interesting character, and she’s not really transgressing at all. And in the movie I did after this, which is called “Won’t Back Down,” I’m also fighting against everything. It’s coming out in September, I think. I’m so pregnant! I’m all like, “It’s coming out sometime! I’ll talk to people about it!” Then there’s my character in “Crazy Heart” — she’s transgressive too, in a way. In her heart.

And of course everybody’s going to bring up “Secretary,” which, although it’s quite a different movie from “Hysteria,” is also about liberating female sexuality.

Well, yeah. That’s why people think about me that way. It’s always about what your first big movie is, that anybody knows about. And that movie is about transgression. I mean, that movie is overtly about what it means to transgress, and how it feels, and how you can live as a transgressor. But maybe it’s true: I am interested in people who are thinking — although the girl in “Crazy Heart” definitely isn’t thinking, or she wouldn’t do a lot of the things she does! I don’t know, you probably can’t tie them all together.

No, I wasn’t arguing that they all fit into that template. I’m always curious about the effect of having appeared in a really big movie. Do people see you on the street now and recognize you just because of “The Dark Knight”?

Some people do, yeah. It’s funny, because I’ve moved back and forth a lot. Even last year, I made “Hysteria” and then I made “Won’t Back Down,” which is a studio movie. There’s such a different feeling in terms of schedule, in terms of time, in terms of subject matter. I used to find it much easier to work on little movies: the pace and the way of working was just better for me. But I think I’m starting to change. I think I work the same way now on a smaller movie as I did on “Won’t Back Down.” It depends on the style of the movie. It’s harder when you’re in and out, like on “Dark Knight” or “World Trade Center.” I find that difficult. You’re not going to work and working for two months, going into the tunnel and just getting in your body who you are.

How has moving into your 30s changed your career? Don’t get me wrong, you’re still young! I was actually thinking it might have opened up some different possibilities.

Yeah, I actually feel like getting older has opened up a spectrum of roles to me. When I was younger, a lot of the roles that were coming to me were like, especially from a more Hollywood standpoint, the wacky girl. (Laughter.) Now I feel really drawn to playing grown-up women. I’m 34, and maybe it’s the way people age now or whatever, but I still feel like some roles I play are not grown-up women and some roles are. In “Won’t Back Down” she’s a child. In “Hysteria” she’s a woman, and in “Crazy Heart” she’s kind of half and half. You know, I have one foot in and one foot out. But thank God I’m done with, like, the wacky 25-year-old girl! That never worked that well for me. Plus, it’s so interesting to see a crop of really talented new actresses who are in a different generation.

Tell me who you especially like.

I love Rooney Mara. I was absolutely blown away by her performance in “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” Absolutely blown away. And to be honest, when you’re an actress, you go in and say, “All right — show me what you can do!” And every turn of that performance was excellent, and not just excellent in the way that some young actors are, where they’re just working on instinct and they have no craft. That was a crafted, excellent, beautiful performance. So to root for someone younger, that’s new for me. (Laughter.) You know, I’m sort of not in that young group anymore! I’m in another group now, but I like seeing talented young women come along. It’s exciting! What are they like? What I loved about Rooney Mara in that movie was that she wasn’t asking for anyone to love her. That’s hard to do!

“Hysteria” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.

Indeed, if the message of most classic Hollywood noir is that crime does not pay, one might say that the message of “Elena” is that crime is the only thing that pays, at least in the crude Darwinian universe of Putin-era Russia. While there are no overt politics in “Elena,” it’s a movie about the most pernicious forms of class warfare, made barely 20 years after the collapse of the regime that was supposed to end class warfare for good. That’s enough politics, and enough knife-edged Russian irony, for a dozen ordinary movies. I’m not claiming that Zvyagintsev feels this way, necessarily, but “Elena” put me in mind of the Russian witticism that’s been repeated in many varieties since 1991: Communism was a dreadful system, we had no food and no freedom. Nothing could possibly be worse than that — except maybe the way things are now.

Zvyagintsev isn’t an international art-house brand name the way Andrei Tarkovsky once was, and that probably isn’t possible these days. So I won’t pretend that “Elena” is likely to become a crossover smash. But it’s going to play quite a few North American cities (see below) and is a breakthrough movie after its own fashion, a mysterious existential thriller that’s brilliantly acted and masterfully directed, without a second of wasted screen time. There’s nothing especially cryptic or confusing or pretentious about it, and once you adjust to the long, hypnotic takes of cinematographer Mikhail Krichman and the almost wintry pace with which Zvyagintsev draws you in, this tale of a frumpy, heavy-set Mother Russia type in late middle age (the amazing Nadezhda Markina) who is driven to desperation becomes utterly absorbing.

Zvyagintsev’s previous two features, “The Banishment” and “The Return,” were staged in timeless, nonspecific settings that recalled Tarkovsky’s more allegorical works. “Elena” takes place in the 21st-century Moscow built by the post-Soviet Putin oligarchy, where the rich live in opulent, barren detachment and the poor are clustered in crumbling Brezhnev-era apartment buildings plagued by skinhead gangs and irregular electricity. In almost every indoor scene, some inane reality show is playing in the background, and while I know that sounds heavy-handed, it works perfectly here, both as realism and as a kind of symbolic shadow-play version of the main action.

Markina’s character, the eponymous Elena, has apparently risen in class late in life, after marrying a sour, elderly business tycoon named Vladimir (Andrei Smirnov, himself a well-known Russian director) whom she met when she was a nurse and he was a hospital patient. Both have children from previous marriages: Elena’s unemployed son Sergei (Aleksei Rozin) lives with his wife and two kids in grinding, despairing poverty, and her eldest grandson is on the verge of flunking out of school and ending up in prison or the army. Vladimir’s daughter Katya (Yelena Lyadova), on the other hand, is a decadent 30ish beauty who is only interested, as he drily puts it, in “the pleasurable things of life.” We meet her only briefly when she comes to meet Elena, but the character is so slinkily rendered that we can see it all: the parade of guys (and perhaps girls too), the drinking and drugs and long, long nights ending at dawn, the overwhelming boredom with herself and her rich dad and the world.

If you think you see where this is going, you’re both right and wrong. After suffering a devastating heart attack, Vladimir has a partial reconciliation with Katya and decides to leave her nearly all his fortune, despite her evident flaws as a money manager. Although he promises to provide for Elena with an unspecified annuity, he refuses her requests for emergency funds to save her errant grandson from the draft. (As we see in a terrifying interlude, by the way, said grandson may not be worth saving.) What happens next is, indeed, a series of noir-type plot points — but, again, that’s a bit like describing “Crime and Punishment” as a murder mystery. “Elena” absolutely has a plot, and one that will keep you guessing up to the last seconds, but the movie’s real point lies in the long and often wordless scenes that pull you along, stealthily, toward moments of revelation or coincidence.

When Vladimir goes to his posh gym for an afternoon workout, for example, we watch him ogling a younger blonde with that predatory rich-guy gaze. She notices, and returns his stare, and we know — because this is that kind of movie — that their paths will soon cross again. But how? Is she a gold digger? An upscale hooker? An entrapment device, placed by journalists or gangsters or government officials? In this world, no encounter is ever innocent of avarice or naked self-interest. Even stranger and more powerful is a scene aboard a train that Elena is riding, with many thousands of rubles in cash clutched nervously in her purse. The train bumps to a stop, and men in uniforms rush through the car. We see her visibly tense up — will she be the victim of a robbery on this voyage, above all others? — but what has actually happened is even odder, an almost dreamlike event that (I think) may actually be borrowed from a Chekhov or Tolstoy story.

“Elena” isn’t really a film noir, because those kinds of crime films always involve the iron application of Murphy’s law, in its most moralistic form: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, in order to punish the transgressor and restore the rightful order of things. In Zvyagintsev’s world, as in most classic Russian art and literature, the rightful order is non-recoverable. We live in a fallen world, and whatever could go wrong already did so, a long time ago. What Elena does is indefensible, certainly — but then, we don’t know what Vladimir did in the first place to become so rich that his daughter never has to work. Will Elena “get away with it”? I don’t know, but it’s not the right question. The truly terrible question asked by this quiet, haunting and magnificent film is: Dear God, isn’t there some better way to live?

“Elena” is now playing at Film Forum in New York. It opens May 25 in Los Angeles; June 1 in Boston; June 6 in San Jose, Calif.; June 8 in Miami, San Francisco, Portland, Maine, and Tallahassee, Fla.; June 15 in Portland, Ore.; June 22 in Houston and Washington; June 26 in Boulder, Colo.; June 29 in Wilmington, Del.; July 6 in Philadelphia; July 13 in Chicago, Denver and Seattle; July 20 in Minneapolis; July 27 in Salem, Mass.; Aug. 3 in Santa Fe, N.M.; and Aug. 10 in St. Louis, with other cities to follow.

It’s undoubtedly gilding the lily to claim that “Battleship” is the dumbest movie I’ve ever seen — for all that I front as someone who only likes Turkish films where people stare at the landscape without talking, I’ve seen a lot of dumb movies — but it’s definitely up there. Over and above its extraordinary, mind-melting level of stupidity, “Battleship” (which is directed by actor-turned-filmmaker Peter Berg, of “Hancock” and “Friday Night Lights,” and written by action-flick brothers Erich and Jon Hoeber) is also extremely weird. Its shameless and nonsensical combination of ingredients finally won me over, after a fashion, when I realized that its gung-ho Navy-recruitment propaganda and retrograde gender politics shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than the ZZ Top, AC/DC and Billy Squier songs on the soundtrack. The only point of the whole exercise is to make small boys whoop and holler.

You know that bar over on the roughneck side of town, the one where all the jingoistic, pro-military, America-hell-yeah movies go to quaff some brewskis and swap tales about kickin’ Communist hiney? Yeah, that one. Well, when “Battleship” shows up there and starts breaking beer glasses on its head, “Top Gun” and “Red Dawn” and “The Green Berets” get to feel all grown-up and complicated and full of girly-man sensitivity. That’s how stupid it is. Come to think of it, that’s the same Oahu tavern where we first meet our handsome but headstrong hero, Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch, last seen fleeing the ruins of “John Carter”), who’s enjoying a birthday beverage and stern lecture, both provided by his uptight Navy officer brother, Stone (Alexander Skarsgård). Let me back up and repeat that key piece of information: Skarsgård’s character is named Stone Hopper, and I promise that if you remind me of that in three years, I’ll still think it’s hilarious.

That bar on that evening is also where Alex first claps eyes on Sam (Brooklyn Decker), a leggy, cheerleader-ish blonde who’s come into this testosterone-rich dive bar unaccompanied, only to be denied a microwave burrito. Alex gets her that burrito, and wins her heart, at the end of a painful slapstick sequence that involves the total destruction of a convenience store and him being repeatedly Tased by local law enforcement. Funny! Shortly after that, we get to see Sam wearing short-shorts and a tank top, smooching with Alex on the beach — and that’s the one and only moment of faint implied sexuality anywhere in “Battleship.” Decker’s Sam might as well be encased in a glass vitrine; for the rest of the movie she’s seen only in chaste white dresses or tomboyish outdoor clothes. She’s less a Megan Fox-style sex object than a small boy’s vague and non-threatening idea of a sexy lady, and in her remaining scenes with Alex she spends her time urging him — I’m not kidding about this! — to ask her father for her hand.

Alex doesn’t get around to doing that right away, because after the seemingly endless throat-clearing of these early scenes, stuff finally starts happening and the action movie gets here at last. See, Alex has been dragged into the Navy by his big brother Stone Hopper and somehow gotten an officer’s commission, and Sam’s dad (Liam Neeson, doing his growly Amurkin act) is some big-shot admiral who hates him, and then some huge alien vessels from outer space show up, because of a beacon sent out there by geek scientists (thanks, nerds!), destroy Hong Kong and land in the Pacific right in the middle of RIMPAC, which sounds vaguely pornographic but is actually a massive naval exercise involving fleets from many nations. The alien ships are immense gleaming CGI monstrosities wielding impressive firepower — as usual, far beyond our comprehension, etc. — but they’re also kind of the McMansions of the alien-invader world, meaning that they look great for the first few minutes and then you start wondering what the point is, and how well anybody thought any of this through before they started building.

There appear to be no clear rules governing the behavior of the marauding aliens, which is to say that the only rule is this: Despite their overwhelming military superiority, the invaders must have weaknesses that will eventually allow the United States Navy to boo-ya all over their asses. So the aliens never fire on anyone who doesn’t pose a direct threat (except when they do), even though their apparent purpose is world conquest. They come from a planet that, as we are repeatedly told, is very similar to Earth, yet they have reptilian eyeballs and cannot tolerate direct sunlight. Their ships can apparently fly — or, at least, they flew here across millions of miles of space — yet they navigate through the ocean with a frog-hopping motion not unlike metallic whales doing the butterfly stroke. In fairness, all the big machines and humanoid monsters and things that go boom are awesomely rendered; Berg has definitely spent his reported $200 million budget on stuff you can see. It’s just all so profoundly stupid.

Thanks to whatever marketing logic dictates that these kinds of summer movies have to last more than two hours, Berg and the screenwriters pack in all kinds of Navy protocol, ludicrous subplots and irrelevant comic business, among the explosions. R&B star Rihanna is here, in a nothing role as a tough-as-nails petty officer, and Tadanobu Asano, a major Japanese star whose presence may pay off in East Asia, plays a kind of guest-star captain who figures out how to track the radar-cloaked alien ships using a low-tech grid that somewhat resembles — yes! — the traditional layout of the Battleship game. I bet there were high-fives all around in the writing room when they figured that one out. (Let me observe here that playing the Hasbro version is lame; Battleship can and should be played with graph paper.)

I’m not even getting into the bizarre “Space Cowboys” twist toward the end, in which a mothballed World War II-era battleship, and its crew of geriatric docents, is dragged into the fray in a last-ditch effort to save the world. I mean, I know what the title of the movie is, but it’s somehow especially funny that they got all worried about the fact that the real-life Navy doesn’t use battleships anymore. (“Man, we can’t let down the people like this! They want a freakin’ battleship, and they’re gonna get one!”) Plus, did you know that museum ships built 70 years ago are kept all fueled up and ready to go, with stacks of live missile shells piled up behind the Grab-a-Smurf machine? Me neither! But please forgive me; I’m just bitter. Unlike Taylor Kitsch’s endlessly enthusiastic character, I never did get around to asking my wife’s dad for her hand in marriage. And when you get right down to it, isn’t that kind of a charming custom? Why in the world did we let that one get away?

It’s an ancient truism of comedy that what makes us most uncomfortable and shocks us the most is also where the deepest veins of humor reside, and throughout his career Baron Cohen has specialized in prodding those sore spots, sometimes with an evident political point of view, and sometimes totally not. In a throwaway moment early in Baron Cohen’s new movie, “The Dictator” (directed by Baron Cohen’s frequent collaborator Larry Charles, who was also at the helm for “Borat” and “Brüno”), we see the bearded North African tyrant Admiral General Aladeen, portrayed of course by Baron Cohen, playing a first-person-shooter video game called “Munich Olympics.” You’re groaning already, right? Here’s how it works: You knock on the door marked “Israeli Olympic Team.” When a cute little Smurf-like creature in a yarmulke and side-curls answers the door — “Shalom!” — a pop-up widget announces “Shoot the Jew!” and you waste him. It continues from there: “Oy vey!” “Mazeltov!” “Meshugenah!” cry the cheerfully dying figures.

This is funny precisely because it’s not funny, and if that sounds too mystical or dialectical for you, let’s remember that we’re talking about a guy who has cited World War II-era historian Ian Kershaw, who was one of his professors at Cambridge, as a major influence. “I know it’s not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust,” Baron Cohen once told Rolling Stone interviewer Neil Strauss, while making it clear that in exposing the casual cruelty and docile conformity of the ordinary people with whom he interacted he was doing exactly that. You can argue there’s a personal agenda at work here, since Baron Cohen grew up in a prominent British Jewish family and is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor (in his words, the last Jewish girl trained as a ballerina in Nazi Germany). But I see something more than that, a dark and even misanthropic moral and intellectual vision that conceals, somewhere way deep down, the smothered hope for a better world.

We laugh at the “Munich Olympics” video game (if, indeed, we do laugh) because we’re appalled and we see some truth in it. We’re appalled that Baron Cohen and his co-writers were malicious enough to come up with it, we’re appalled with ourselves for so readily accepting it as humor, and we’re appalled by the incontrovertible fact that some people — in places like Aladeen’s fictional homeland, the Republic of Wadiya, but also in Britain and the U.S. and anywhere else you care to mention — would take smirking delight in such a game if it existed. (Which, for all I know, it may.)

“The Dictator” is a much more normal kind of movie than “Borat” or “Brüno,” perhaps because Baron Cohen is now too famous — and has been threatened too many times with lawsuits and/or beatdowns — to pull off his in-character performance provocations. (Frankly, hadn’t the shtick worn out by the time of the very mixed “Brüno” anyway?) Despite some cleverly snipped bits of real news footage from the Libyan crisis, “The Dictator” is a scripted entertainment from start to finish, with Baron Cohen playing both the vainglorious and idiotic Wadiyan autocrat and also the even dumber rural goatherd selected to serve as his assassination-thwarting double. On a trip to New York to address the United Nations, the real Aladeen gets separated from his entourage, thanks to an incompetent CIA blowhard played by John C. Reilly. Shorn of his beard and of his access to voluptuous hookers and anti-Semitic video games, the erstwhile dictator is forced to work in a feminist food collective in Brooklyn, where he falls hard for Anna Faris, as its unshaven-armpit, pixie-cut sporting, ultra-p.c. manager. (Aladeen repeatedly remarks that she has the physique of a preteen boy — and specifically of Harry Potter — but it’s not clear whether that’s a bad thing.)

Although the character of Aladeen seems awfully predictable by Baron Cohen standards, the movie itself veers from one hilarious, absurd and patently offensive setup to the next, mercilessly mocking the stupidity and paranoia of Americans, the venality of celebrities — there’s a joke about Katy Perry’s purported relations with Aladeen that I can’t even euphemize successfully — the Chinese lust for world domination and the cultural vapidity and backwardness of the Arab world. There are moments of unabated vulgar silliness, as when a rich woman gazing out the window of a Manhattan luxury hotel gets an unexpected faceful of wobbly Aladeen dong. And there are even moments when Baron Cohen’s portrayal of the benighted dictator — who is perhaps more ignorant and miseducated than innately evil — borders on sweetness, if you can really use that word to describe a film that involves jokes about rape, torture, abortion and fellatio performed with a geriatric drug dealer’s severed head.

But let’s revert to my original WTF question about Baron Cohen by way of this film’s obvious relationship to Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 “The Great Dictator,” which is also about a demented world leader with genocidal fantasies and the ordinary citizen (in Chaplin’s film, a Jewish barber) who becomes his accidental replacement. On one level, of course, the comparison is ridiculous. Chaplin’s film is a masterpiece, or something close to it — prescient, daring and almost unbearably tragic, an optimistic and sentimental plea for reason in a world teetering on the edge of the abyss. Remember that when that film was released, the U.S. and Germany were not yet at war and the worst atrocities of the Holocaust had not yet happened, although the film seems to see them coming.

I can’t resist feeling that “The Dictator” (whose screenplay is credited to Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer, along with Baron Cohen) restages Chaplin’s great farce in a darker and more vulgar register, to reflect a world that has been fundamentally poisoned, not just by Hitler’s crimes but by decades of subsequent mendacity and hypocrisy. I shouldn’t spoil Aladeen’s climactic speech, in which he praises the many virtues of dictatorship (which the Western world has so foolishly left behind), except to say that it’s a brilliant, sardonic response to the paean to progress and democracy delivered by Chaplin’s barber in the guise of the dictator Hynkel — and that its targets are you and me, not the known tyrants and despots of the Arab world. “We are coming into a new world, a kindlier world, where men will rise above their hate, their greed and brutality,” Chaplin’s character tells the world. There are good reasons to suspect that Baron Cohen, who spent his teen years active in the Zionist-socialist youth organization Habonim Dror (which advocates peace between Israel and its neighbors), is a lefty somewhere deep down. But the new world without hate, greed and brutality — nuh-uh, he’s heard that one before.