It’s just like *Uptown Girls,* where Dakota Fanning gets a new nanny and her life just gets turned upside-down topsy-turvy wacky. Except that this takes place in that battlefield of class warfare, Mexico City, where pretty little white girls get kidnapped for ransom, and not on the Upper East Side, where you get a free pretty little white girl with every purchase from Manolo Blahnik.

David Duchovny, why won’t you love me? I love you, and not just because you’re the best thing in *Connie and Carla* even if your devastating intelligence and wry wit is nowhere to be found and all we’re left with is that amazing smile. And even *that’s* not onscreen anywhere near enough.

‘I’ve thumbs-downed a hell of a lot of movies to get to this point,’ she purrs. ‘I’ve been on what the movie geeks refer to as a roaring rampage of reviewing. But that’s nothing to what I’m gonna do now. Now, I am gonna trash *Bill.*’

Now, my travels in Texas are limited to two stopovers in Dallas-Forth Worth Airport barely long enough to run the 18 miles to the other side of the airport to catch my connecting flight. But I’d bet good money anyway that there’s a statue — maybe in Houston, maybe in San Antonio — of Sam Houston on a rearing horse with his sword drawn and held high in the air, looking all inspiring and ready for battle and just about to yell ‘Remember the Alamo!’

I’m sure every movie critic gets this at some point: ‘How can you sit through all the crap?’ I can’t speak for all critics, obviously, but for me, even the crap is fun. A bad day at the movies is better than a good day doing almost anything else. There are movies that try that dictum, though, and *Ella Enchanted* is one of them.

I guess the idea is that if a hitman nicknamed “The Tulip” is (theoretically) amusing, then a retired hitman nicknamed “The Tulip” who’s gone domestic and loves vacuuming the house in bunny slippers must be (at least theoretically) downright freakin’ hilarious. Would that it were so. Even more tedious than its predecessor, this mob “comedy” … more…

I guess I’m starting to catch up a bit to the bizarrity that is Charlie Kaufman’s brain. Not that I didn’t love *Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,* but I was only 50 percent blown away by it. Like how something of the surprise is spoiled when you know there’s a ‘twist’ in a film even if you don’t know what the twist is, just knowing that a movie is written by Kaufman prepares you for the fact that it’s going to be odd and discomfiting and off-kilter, and so because you’re *expecting* that, the impact of the oddness is lessened a bit.

I don’t have a terribly impressive personal track record with Lars von Trier’s films — I haven’t seen all of them, but those I have seen have, at best, left me less than satisfied. So it was with limited expectations that I went in to *Dogville*… and expectations, at that, that were mostly along the lines that I was in for something half intriguing and half annoyingly experimental.

I couldn’t even begin to tell you what *Hellboy* is about, but unholy crap is it cool. It’s like geek soup, a goulash — ghoulash? — of everything that makes a movie neat and nerdy and like so totally awesome. Just the opening sequence alone has it all: black magic, cartoon Nazis, an icy Nordic blonde in leather, a geeky Fox Mulder-type paranormal investigator, weird machines that spin around and make the kind of disturbing throbbing noises that you know means they’re futzing around with the fabric of the universe in a bad way, freaky guns that look more like hair dryers than guns, portals into other dimensions, candy bars, a cute little red devil thing, and Rasputin.

Well, it’s no *The Rundown,* that’s for sure, and *The Rundown* wasn’t much to speak of except for The Rock and his charm and his charisma and his big toothy grin. He’s still got that movie-star It here, but It ain’t quite the same thing surrounded by action junk that thinks it’s serious drama. The Rock’s costar this time out is a big wooden stick, which is certainly an improvement over Sean Patrick William Michael George Henry Scott, but in all other aspects, this film cannot be said to be an upswing in The Rock’s Hollywood career.