There are plenty of conflicting versions of events in Gibson’s nightmarish breakup saga. There are the he said/she said reports of violence. In his statement, Gibson claims that it was precisely because Grigorieva was holding their child that he slapped her, alleging that she was “so rough and erratic with her movements I feared for Lucia’s safety.” There are, of course, the spectacularly racist, sexist, physically threatening telephone conversations, purportedly with Gibson. At one point Grigorieva says, “You were hitting a woman with a child in her hands. … Breaking her teeth, twice, in the face, what kind of man is that?” and gets the reply, “You fucking deserved it.” There are the differing accounts of how Grigorieva got the cuts and bruises she was publicly sporting on her face after their blowout. Gibson claims they were the result of her “impulse control disorder characterized by the repeated urge to pull out one’s own hair.” He says that “during our relationship Oksana often had scratches and bald spots on the side of her head as a result of this disorder.”

Grigorieva, whose penchant for going through lawyers like they’re pretzels and lack of concern over whether doing tonight’s “Larry King” might hurt her custody case, certainly doesn’t come without her own set of questionable, self-preserving tactics. But here’s what we do know for sure about Gibson: that the actor, who has a proven record of “belligerent conduct,” admits he slapped his girlfriend hard enough to whack out her veneers. Just take that in for a moment. Suppose she was “hysterical.” Suppose he was genuinely afraid for his baby. Suppose, as he says, he “did not hit her with a closed fist … did not punch her in the face or in the temple.” Was his action then justified, perhaps even necessary? Is there ever a moment where it’s OK to hit your girlfriend? Sorry, I meant slap, because if your palm is open it’s not assault, right? Oh wait, actually it is.

Nowhere in his statement does Gibson say that Grigorieva struck, or even attempted to strike, either him or their baby. He made that choice, and then, aw, shucks, said, “I do not believe I handled the situation as well as I should have.” Whatever we choose to believe about any other elements of this tale, the fact now stands that the guy admits he smacked his girlfriend when she was not being physically theatening to him. And it’s all too easy, when talking about abuse, to go down the road of justifying violence based on the likability or lack thereof of the victim, or to quibble over whether the abuser’s fingers were curled or not. But you don’t have to close your hand to be an abuser. And just because Mel Gibson doesn’t seem to know that doesn’t mean the rest of us are similarly gullible.

Granted, Tyson is a notorious deadpan wit, and that drug money remark might have been a joke. But he’s still a convicted rapist, and Galifianakis and company had no problem acting with him a couple of years ago. There’s something about this “Hangover 2″ thing that doesn’t pass the smell test. It seems, at the very least, yet another example of the selective outrage that fuels controversy-driven entertainment coverage, and Hollywood posturing generally, with actors, directors, producers, studio bosses and other players working themselves into a righteous snit about certain people and offenses while giving others a pass.

If artists should be publicly censured and denied employment on the basis of offenses they commit in private life, how come Gibson is a pariah right now for threatening and hitting his ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, while Alec Baldwin, who verbally abused his 11-year-old daughter on the phone, lashed out at a photographer, and has a long record of frightening behavior toward his ex-wife Kim Basinger, is currently one of the most beloved figures on network TV?

And while we’re keeping score, how is it that Roman Polanski — in theory a pariah after fleeing the United States to avoid prosecution on charges of drugging and raping a barely adolescent girl — got a 2003 Oscar as Best Director (in absentia) and a standing ovation, while a 1999 honorary Oscar for director Elia Kazan was preceded by months of protest over Kazan being a rat for the House Un-American Activities Committee? One wonders, how many of the actors that made a big show of sitting on their hands when Kazan got his award applauded loudly for Polanski four years later? And does anyone doubt that if Polanski offered Galifianakis the lead role in his next film that the actor wouldn’t happily accept? Or that if Tyson invited Galifianakis to his birthday party, that he’d show up with a bottle of Jagermeister, then re-enact the infamous punch-out from “The Hangover” while guests snapped pictures with their cell phones and posted them on Twitter?

Why is Lindsay Lohan, substance abuser and intoxicated driver, borderline-unemployable right now, but Kate Moss, a one-time cokehead blasted as a toxic role model for young women, still a sought-after model, appearing in a Valisere lingerie campaign and on the cover of Bryan Ferry’s new album “Olympia”? And how is it that Charlie Sheen, who was accused of strangling his wife Brooke Mueller and holding a knife to her throat on Christmas Day, 2009, is still the star of the CBS sitcom “Two and a Half Men,” and recently signed a new contract guaranteeing him two more years of employment? And if indeed a star’s repugnant private life should affect the public’s perception of him, why is Sheen’s sitcom beating “Dancing with the Stars” in the ratings?

A bit of voice-over from the Vietnam epic “Apocalypse Now” applies here: “Charging a man with murder in this place is like giving out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.”

It might be an absolutist position, but I’ll go ahead and state it here: I don’t care how horrendously a person behaves behind closed doors. Knowing what swine they are informs but does not veto my appreciation of their work, if in fact I appreciate that work to begin with, and even if I don’t, the gossip, arrest reports and tortured personal history add flavor to what I know, or think I know, about what such people do and represent. But the private melodrama never becomes the whole story for me — partly because of that whole, pesky “Judge not lest ye be judged” thing, but also because when we feast on these headlines, we’re treating selective knowledge as the whole story. We have no idea whether Tyson, Gibson, Baldwin, Lohan, Moss or anyone else are truly among the worst-behaved creative types in the entertainment industry, or just the ones that happened to get caught.

I’m reminded here of a revealing comment from Tom Hanks. During an interview about 10 years ago, I joked that it seemed strange that Hanks was treated as a model of moral rectitude, when for all we knew he could have a collection of severed heads in his basement. Hanks fixed me with a chilling psycho stare and hissed, “Who told you?” Then he laughed and said, “I’m kidding. But yeah, it is weird. Why am I Mr. Nice Guy? Because that’s who people say I am. That’s my image. Nobody really knows what people are like behind closed doors.”

Americans are the most irritating of hypocrites: binary-minded, easily distracted scolds. We have trouble holding opposing thoughts in our heads at the same time, and we stay furious only until the next outrage pops up in the media cycle. We have staunch positions on what constitutes right and proper behavior, but only for certain people — the people whose behavior we happen to consider beyond the pale, for whatever subjective reason — and we reserve the right to give a pass to whoever we like, whenever we please, and to come up with pretzel-logic rationalizations justifying our inconsistency. And we’ve got no problem taking a nuanced view of morally challenged artists as long as they’re not raising hell in the present day. That’s why some journalists in the early ’90s could warn that the soon-to-be-late rapper Tupac Shakur was setting a poor example for America’s youth by keeping company with drug dealers and gun-toting fools, then pen rhapsodic appreciations of Frank Sinatra, who kept company with mobsters and used his influence with them to secure union votes for John F. Kennedy.

This ongoing spectacle of the entertainment industry censuring certain artists over their private misdeeds while ignoring or rehabilitating equally troublesome characters is pathetic. Violence, substance abuse, self-destruction and general prickishness is a blight on humanity, but it’s a blight that should be dealt with by police and judges, not the media or the public. Either the criminal justice system is working properly or it isn’t. And whether it is or isn’t, the offenses or alleged offenses have nothing to do with an artist’s work, or right to work, much less our ability to engage with and appreciate said work.

Instead of either/or, how about both/and? Baldwin is a hot-tempered, maudlin, navel-gazing bozo, and one of the great character actors and improvisational comics alive. Mel Gibson is an anti-Semite, a sexist, a homophobe, and very possibly a deranged religious fanatic; he’s also one of the few bona fide movie stars of the last three decades and the most brilliant action filmmaker since Sam Peckinpah. Polanski is a great director and a sex offender. Kazan was a great director and a rat. Lohan and Moss are substance abusers and arresting beauties whose most interesting work probably lies ahead of them. Sheen is a master of droll self-parody and an unexpectedly charming sitcom star, and a wife-abusing scum that should be behind bars right now. If I cared enough to hypothesize an ideal future for Sheen, I’d picture him serving several years in prison for assaulting his wife, preferably in maximum security with the hardest of hardcore felons, then moving over to HBO, playing himself.

And while we’re on the subject, Joan Crawford was a child abusing harpy and a great screen star. William S. Burroughs shot his wife in the head and wrote some of the most important fiction of the mid-20th century. Norman Mailer stabbed his wife with a pen knife, behaved like a bullying doofus every chance he got, and compiled a body of work, fiction and nonfiction, that makes most contemporary writing seem weak and safe.

What about any of this is hard to understand?

She was talking about Mel Gibson. Say what?

Foster and Gibson have a long history – they appeared together in 1994′s “Maverick” and costar in the someday-to-be-released Foster-directed comedy “The Beaver.” So it’s understandable that a director and star, one with a nearly impossible-to-promote movie, would want to do as much damage control as possible for her project. It’s even somewhat laudable to stand by a friend with a tarnished reputation. But when the friend in question is someone accused of spousal abuse, threats, and the most vicious, appalling of sexual and racial slurs, maybe she’d want to distance herself a little. When said friend already has a colorful history of drunk driving and accusing the Jews of being “responsible for all the wars in the world,” is that really the corner she still wants to be in? She doesn’t have to call for his head on a plate – a woman so famously guarded in her private life surely knows how to get off a polite “no comment” or even a shrugged “I really can’t say.”

Yet Foster’s suspect loyalty to internationally acclaimed, unrepentant creeps doesn’t end with “the most loved man in show business.” She’ll soon be heading to Europe to costar in “The God of Carnage,” directed by Oscar-winning child rapist Roman Polanski.

When you look at their canons of work, it’s understandable why anyone might leap at the opportunity to collaborate with artists like Gibson or Polanski. Polanski in particular has made some of the most haunting, powerful films of the modern era. And Foster did not, like a slew of Hollywood heavyweights, sign the widely circulated petition in support of Polanski last year. But what would it take for one of the most powerful women in the film industry, a director herself, to say no thanks, I’d rather not do business with people whose track record is littered with abusive behavior?

It’s tempting to see echoes of Foster’s personal history in her often puzzling career choices. The woman who famously played an exploited teen in “Taxi Driver” is working with sex offender Polanski? The woman who inspired an assassination attempt starring as a gun-toting vigilante in “The Brave One?” Must … resist … over analysis.

Yet even when she’s not aligning herself with rageaholics and fugitives, Foster’s cinematic track record is something of a head scratcher. Her powerhouse glory days of movies like “The Accused” and “Silence of the Lambs” are now two decades in the past. She did a neat turn in “Inside Man,” but “Flight Plan,” “Panic Room” and “Nim’s Island” doesn’t exactly amount to a stunning body of recent work. (And if you want to blame it on her age, note that Laura Linney, Joan Allen, Hope Davis, Patricia Clarkson, Mary Louise Parker and a slew of other actresses of Foster’s generation seem able to find challenging, award baiting roles in quality films.) Foster can pick and choose. And often, she chooses dreck.

So maybe she’s not the best source to be dispensing backhanded compliments to her “Panic Room” daughter, Kristen Stewart. At the Elle honors, Foster told E! reporter Marc Malkin, “She’s a great person, and I’m not surprised she’s gone on to do great things. But I am surprised she is an actress. I felt like, Nah, she won’t because she really doesn’t have the stereotypical personality. Anybody who has a brain doesn’t. That tells you how smart Kristen Stewart is.” And let’s remember she said this, by the way, at an event honoring actresses. Well, we can’t all be as smart as you, Ms. Foster.

Perhaps the oddest thing about Foster, however, is how she continues to be lauded as an icon. Aside from publicly thanking “my beautiful Cydney who sticks with me through all the rotten and the bliss” three years ago, she’s steadfastly never acknowledged her personal life or relationships, which, frankly, for somebody of her power and influence, is pretty cowardly. She’s made a string of forgettable to downright offensive movies. And she thinks Mel Gibson is “incredibly loved.” So why are organizations like Elle handing her accolades? Why are fans, especially women, especially women who fell in love with her sometime around “Bugsy Malone” not coming out and saying, she is no longer our role model? She surely still has talent and depth, but look at what she’s said and done for herself lately. And hold the applause.

Best known so far for his 2005 gals-versus-troglodytes horror film “The Descent,” Marshall belongs to an intriguing new generation of British directors who combine a pop sensibility with a traditional level of craftsmanship. “Centurion” brings him together with Irish actor Michael Fassbender (of “Hunger” and “Fish Tank”), a tremendously good-looking rogue who’s going to become a huge star if his intelligence and good taste don’t get in the way. Fassbender fills the Crowe-Gibson role here as Quintus Dias, a Roman centurion who leads a small group of comrades deep into the Scottish wilderness after their legion has been ambushed and shredded by a band of bloodthirsty Pictish barbarians.

Except that Marshall never allows us, or even Quintus, to feel anywhere near that comfortable about who the good guys and bad guys are. Like most other soldiers, Quintus is fighting for his personal honor, for his comrades, for a commander he loves and respects. He doesn’t care one way or the other about the abstract ideal of the “pax Romana” — bringing order and civilization to a distant, violent land — and he comes face to face with the fact that the Picts, the native Celts of northern and western Britain, don’t want any part of it.

Of course we’re rooting for Quintus and his men to get out of their ancient-world Big Muddy and come home again. They are decent and honorable soldiers (with one notable exception), and in the grand tradition of war movies, they come from all over the multiracial and multiethnic Roman Empire: There’s a Greek, an African, a Middle Eastern tribesman, a Roman street tough and a guy who dreams about buying a farm in the Tuscan countryside if he ever gets out of this shithole.

But as “Centurion” progresses, it’s tough to avoid the sensation that these guys are in the wrong place at the wrong time. If we believe the lurid stories told by Pictish king Gorlacon (Ulrich Thomsen), his people have suffered from Rome’s rape-and-pillage policies for years, and let’s say that as the story unfolds his desire for vengeance becomes highly understandable. He sends his most fearsome warriors after Quintus and his men, led by the Mata Hari-like Étain (Olga Kurylenko), a mute and bloodthirsty female warrior. (Women sometimes did go to war among the Celts, but I don’t know how many of them had two-toned hair and Cleopatra-style eye makeup.)

If “Centurion” is a blend of old-school action movie, historical fable and outright fantasy, Marshall handles all those elements ably. Fassbender gives a tremendously demanding physical performance and makes a charismatic hero who is faced little by little with the realization that all the moral certainties of his world have melted away in the British mud and blood and snow. (Quintus is supposed to speak Pictish, but unless my ears deceive me, Fassbender is speaking the Irish Gaelic he most likely learned in school. The Picts presumably spoke a language closer to Welsh or Breton.)

Into the fantasy category falls Quintus’ liaison with an exiled Pictish witch named Arianne, played by the gorgeous English actress Imogen Poots (and I really hope she can become a star with that name). It’s a lovely but not entirely convincing interlude, suggesting that individuals — Quintus, you, me, Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz — have the option of escaping from history. Part of Marshall’s genius lies in the fact that you’re free to enjoy “Centurion” as a rousing, high-integrity B movie. But I’m afraid he’s also preaching an inescapable historical gospel on how the vanity and corruption of powerful empires lead them to learn the same painful lessons, over and over again.

“Centurion” opens Aug. 27 in Boston, Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Seattle. It opens Sept. 3 in Atlanta; Denver; New Haven, Conn.; St. Louis; San Diego; Santa Cruz, Calif.; and Washington, with more cities to follow.

If you’re a glutton for punishment and really want to know the contents of the sixth audio tape, released yesterday, the L.A. Times has a pretty accurate picture. If you were wondering how long it would take for someone to put “you should just smile and blow me” on a T-shirt, then E!Online has your answer. And finally, if you identify an itty bitty bit with Mel Gibson and think he’s got “righteous rage,” CNN is the place to go.