"A Man Apart" is basically a revenge tale set somewhere on the backlot of the "Traffic" set. Diesel plays a DEA agent who uses streetwise tactics to fight the drug war along the Mexico-California border. We learn immediately that he's not the kind of guy who plays by the rules. (Are they ever?) He and his partner, Larenz Tate, are working with Mexican cops to bust a kingpin they've been tracking for seven years. When the bust finally goes down in Tijuana they, as Americans, are not allowed to have assault rifles like the rest of the Mexican cops. Diesel works his way around the prohibition with a little 9-millimeter friend. And of course he's the guy who nabs the baddie.

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But it's really a low, low movie, the kind of thing that makes you feel bad for liking it. It's moralistic about drug use, but at the same time weirdly glamorizes it by working so hard to make the movie itself so hip. (This is the kind of picture where even the buffoonish cops wear vintage Levi Sta-Prest jeans.) "Spun's" meta-message -- if there is such a thing -- is that drugs are bad, but you probably want to do a lot of them for a while so you can make some cool art or something. In fact, just say "crystal" and the dopest actors in Hollywood will run toward you.

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"Laurel Canyon" is a movie about seduction and temptation and lust, but at its center it's an intricate character drama about what it means to be emotionally responsible. Frances McDormand plays Jane, a record producer trying to get a hit out of an English band in her home studio. Jane is in her 40s, smokes pot and sleeps with the much younger lead singer of the band (Alessandro Nivola).

Jane's son, Sam (Christian Bale), is an uptight psychiatrist who has rejected Jane's cocktails-in-the-pool California lifestyle for an East Coast education and prim fiancée Alex (Kate Beckinsale). When Sam and Alex move back to California with their twin rolling suitcases, they end up in Jane's house with the band. Piece by piece, Alex finds herself drawn to the band, its music and its libertine frontman. Meanwhile, Sam starts to fall for an Israeli doctor at his hospital (Natascha McElhone).

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"Amandla!" extends that tingly Martin Luther King moment for an hour and a half. Lee Hirsch's documentary about the role music and especially freedom songs played in the 50-year struggle against South African apartheid takes on a massive subject. The central point of the film is that you can't separate the songs from the movement, and that through the songs you can uncover the story of the struggle. It's a beautiful movie about the power of music, about the power of being right. In a way, you shouldn't even read about this movie. It has to be heard.

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The script went over better than she could have possibly imagined. Six months later, Colombani began shooting "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not" with Audrey Tautou, the pixie-faced charmer who starred in "Amélie."

Colombani's love-drunk thriller plays with Hollywood conventions. From its start, it seems like a sunny romance, centered on an affair between art student Angélique and Loïc, a married cardiologist who is expecting a baby with his wife. But halfway through, the movie flips and reverses, like "Rashomon" or "Run Lola Run," going back in time and showing a much darker version of each event. Angélique, it seems, suffers from erotomania, or a delusional obsession with a man who doesn't actually know she exists.

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There will never be a good movie with a character named "Smoke."

"Biker Boyz" is about fast motorcycles and the tough dudes -- and even tougher chicks -- who soup them up in illegal street races. Unfortunately, it's about more than that. It's also about fathers and sons, about hubris and respect and about learning lessons. There are not enough explosions for this kind of movie.

There are, however, a lot of wheelies and donuts. There is also more than one scene with a woman whose breasts might hop out of their harness and run away to star in another movie. And Kid Rock wears a studded dog collar. All of this is a way of saying that "Biker Boyz" manages to burn rubber and your soul.

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It's a tough place, this Detroit, riddled with murderous thugs and crackheads with inflamed STDs. Nick Tellis (a shaggy Jason Patric) is one of the good guys. He's been suspended from his undercover narcotics job for shooting a psychotic druggie and accidentally hitting a pregnant woman. The force, however, now needs his undercover contacts to help sort out an investigation. A fellow undercover has been beaten and shot dead, and the police have run out of leads.

Tellis doesn't want back in, and his shivering wife (Krista Bridges) doesn't want him to go -- she'd rather have him at home with their beautiful baby. But as Tellis says, the welfare and the pension aren't cutting it. He makes a deal: He'll look at some files, just this once, if the captain will promise him a desk job.

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The story is plodding and spare, and the movie seems to take forever to unfold, but the forward motion, such as it is, comes from three pieces of unfinished business: Monty has to figure out if his girlfriend is a rat, say goodbye to his dad and his childhood buddies, and decide whether he's going to skip out on his sentence.

Goddamned Spike Lee. The guy is probably one of the 10 most talented filmmakers of his generation -- for his energy, his ambition and that climatic scene in "Do the Right Thing" alone -- and this is what he does with it? A clumsy, oh-well story about the moral quandary of a drug-dealing recidivist who more or less deserves to go to jail? There are pieces of "25th Hour" that are exhilarating -- a scene in which Monty busts on every ethnic group in New York; a club scene where Philip Seymour Hoffman finds the guts to take Anna Paquin up on a dare -- but they only suggest how much life is missing from the rest of the movie.

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"Personal Velocity" is a film with strong actresses and wonderful intentions -- mostly. It mercilessly deletes four portraits from the book, and then trims the fat off the remaining trilogy. Doing so, it has details to burn. A character "bought a pair of beige separates and took a job at an insurance agency." A precious little girl in the corner of the screen says, "Come here, you fucking cat."

But something about "Personal Velocity" seems clumsy, and maybe even venal. In a way, it plays like a dated feminist tract, one of those works that wants to show women making tough decisions and being emotionally resilient, but is at root about them being screwed over by men. You might call it victim art. Publishers Weekly said it a different way, positing that reading Miller's book "is a bit like watching the Lifetime channel with the sound off."

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Campbell Scott plays Roger, a yuppie advertising writer who sets off on a bender after getting dumped by his boss, Joyce, played by a sparkling Isabella Rossellini (does she ever not sparkle?). Dragged along for the ride is Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), Roger's 16-year-old nephew, who has dropped in on him while visiting New York to look at colleges. Nick has heard that Roger is something of a ladies' man, and he wants nothing more than to learn how to get rid of his own nagging virginity.

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"They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?"

"No, man, they got the metric system. They wouldn't know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is."

-- Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta in "Pulp Fiction"

"What did they do to this fish? Batter it to death?"

"Fish and chips, mate. National dish."

"More like a natural disaster."

-- Samuel L. Jackson and Robert Carlyle in "Formula 51"

Say whatever you want about Quentin Tarantino -- that he ripped off too much stuff, that he's shaky on race -- but at least the guy watches movies. He borrows structures from cool Hong Kong filmmakers, actors from obscure blaxploitation flicks, and tracking shots from Scorsese. Tarantino's the filmmaker of the nod.

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That was my agenda. And contrary to what I learned in my crappy journalism school, I didn't really care if I was breaking some sort of rule about hallowed objectivity: Journalists, film critics, readers -- everyone has an agenda. Just like Michael Moore.

He's made a career out of it. His first film, "Roger & Me," targeted General Motors for bankrupting his hometown, Flint, Mich. Moore's television shows, "TV Nation" on NBC and "The Awful Truth" on Bravo, went after rich people and corporations. His bestselling books cover similar territory; "Stupid White Men" is particularly critical of George W. Bush.

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"24 Hour Party People," directed by Michael Winterbottom ("Wonderland," "Welcome to Sarajevo"), is based on real life and is about, in concentric circles of importance, British music, the Manchester music scene, Factory Records, Joy Division and the Happy Mondays, the Hacienda dance club and, finally, Tony Wilson.

The movie starts with Wilson, on a hillside, in the '70s, with a silly haircut and a hang glider. Wilson is a real-life TV reporter and host for Granada Television, a local station in Manchester. He will continue to work on TV, but will also become one of the principal owners of the influential independent label Factory Records -- home to great graphic design and the postpunk quartet Joy Division, which after the death of its lead singer, will become New Order. Plus, he's going to open England's most infamous nightclub. But first, he is going to crash into the hillside.

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And that's about all you think about in "Men in Black II." Because there are a few good things about this comedy-sci-fi-action-buddy flick blockbuster wannabe. But the best thing about it is that wherever you are, the air conditioning in the theater is probably working.

What happened? Barry Sonnenfeld directed the first "Addams Family" movie in 1991, and he followed it with "Addams Family Values" two years later. And together, until whenever "I Dream of Jeannie" hits the big screen, the two of those films, with their hokey gusto and their bleak, lighthearted jokes, represent the highest achievement in an entire genre of summer films: movies extracted from kitschy TV shows. (The first Addams film was also spun off into one of the greatest pinball games ever made.)

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All this is another way of saying that the best parts of "Dogtown and Z-Boys," a documentary by Stacy Peralta about skateboarding in the mid-'70s, are when we get to watch a bunch of scruffy teenagers roll along asphalt streets, concrete playgrounds and backyard pools. There's something so carefree about the way these kids move. Life for them is about surfing and skating, about hanging out with friends, about getting as low to the ground as possible and looking cool. Seemingly unspoiled by parents, jobs or thoughts of the future, these kids are having too much fun to even realize the cameras are watching -- or that someone is waiting to buy a piece of them.

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Professor Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) gives piano lessons at a Vienna conservatory (yes, the movie takes place in Austria, and director Michael Haneke is German-born, but its focus on sex and intellectual rigor is French all the way). She's a harsh teacher who looks blankly out the window while her students play, then belittles them for missed notes, or tells them they'll never be good enough.

It's a pretty drab existence for Professor Kohut, made worse by the fact that she's seemingly sacrificed everything else for her art. Haneke, adapting a novel by Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, puts her in a shabby apartment with her ridiculously domineering mother (Annie Girardot). They fight nonstop. Her mother treats her like an untrustworthy teenager even though she's coming up soft on 40. And weirdly -- or not, since I don't pretend to be European in my outlook -- at the end of the night the two of them climb into the same bed.

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It's no surprise when Rafael's heart fails him. And it makes sense that two weeks in a hospital bed allow him to come to a pretty simple solution: "Drop the fuck out."

Argentinean director Juan José Campanella's "Son of the Bride" is about a lot of things, but at its core it's about a man's midlife crisis. A witty script, a fleet camera and a pitch-perfect cast keep the movie from being dragged under by the selfishness of its central character. Rafael (Ricardo Darín) has problems that a lot of people would like to have. He owns a popular restaurant, lives in a drop-dead modernist apartment and sleeps with a beautiful young girlfriend. You want to know what the hell he's complaining about.

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There is an almost Aristotelian division among the classes. Executives enjoy the privilege and luxury of a rich, technological society. The proletariat consumes competitive sports. And a few ferocious athletes distract everyone in contests of spectacle and violence.

Sound familiar?

It should. And not because of the recent World Economic Forum meetings, nor the Super Bowl.

No, fans of pulpy, big-budget B movies will remember this as the future predicted in Norman Jewison's violent, dogmatic 1975 film "Rollerball."

The movie, based on a short story by William Harrison, combined a nihilistic political allegory with lots of violence perpetrated by men with bushy moustaches who zoomed around a wooden track on roller skates and smashed faces with studded leather gloves. It was not an ambivalent film. Bad men wore impeccable suits, worked in buildings that looked like they were designed by Eero Saarinen and were always accompanied by vaguely menacing classical music. The star player (James Caan) loved freedom, Texas and a good, solid cross-check.

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Kevin Reynolds's new film version of the novel is also about revenge. It's also about true love -- and sword fighting. To say the film doesn't quite recapture the thrill of the novel is like saying that soda pop doesn't really have the same kick as heroin.

That's a shame, not because the film betrays the plot, or because it zooms over a lot of its unsavory pleasures, but because the novel actually has a lot of smart, complex things to say about revenge. It's also a hell of a lot of fun to read.

Reynolds has exactly one note to sound on revenge, and it's not very interesting. His point is that justice is more rewarding, mercy trumps both and love melts away hatred. Or something like that.

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