Clay Pigeons isn’t a great film — it’s black and it’s a comedy, but never enough of either — but it is supremely interesting to watch. If nothing else, it demonstrates that the incredible talent displayed by Vaughn and Phoenix in Return to Paradise — as well the palpable chemistry between them — was not a fluke. These are two guys to watch.

A schoolbus full of children plunges into icy waters and sinks. That one event is central to two very different movies. Simon Birch builds to the bus crash, making it the culmination of a mystical plan of God. The Sweet Hereafter examines the aftermath of tragedy, how one town learns to cope with grief and the desire to assign blame.

Boogie Nights is unsentimental, unsympathetic, and decidedly unsexy. Its dehumanized characters revel in hard drugs, impersonal sex, and rampant consumerism. And yet these unpleasant characters never fail to intrigue.

None of these people seem particularly happy. So what makes them behave in these ways? What’s so missing in their lives that this makes up for it? 54 never tells us. Anita and Greg are devoted to one another and so refrain from indulging in the orgy around them, so why are they there? They certainly seem as miserable as everyone else. What do any of these people do the things they do?

Dare I even suggest we might be entering a new golden age of film? In a spring and summer of movies full of sound and fury and mostly signifying nothing, there have been a few surprisingly smart, thoughtful, grownup films, most simultaneously Hollywood-old-fashioned and forward-looking. Into that category I’d put Return to Paradise — a film that is sure to be remembered not only on its own merits but because it saw a remarkable early confluence of talent in Vince Vaughn, Anne Heche, and Joaquin Phoenix, all part of the new Hollywood vanguard.

Words like ‘bad’ don’t even do The Avengers justice. It’s time to haul out the big guns, like ‘appalling.’ The Avengers is jaw-droppingly appalling. This is quite possibly the worst movie Hollywood has ever produced — worse than Batman and Robin, which ascended to a pinnacle of awfulness I wouldn’t have thought could be surpassed.

Ever After is a frothy delight — it’s a little bit RenFest, a little bit Monty Python, and a whole lotta fun. A feminist updating of the Cinderella fairy tale, it never hits you over the head with its attitude and never takes itself too seriously.

I worship at the feet of Kevin Spacey, god of acting, now more than ever after sitting through The Negotiator. Directed by F. Gary Gray — who, not surprisingly, is a veteran director of music videos — The Negotiator is a frenetic, incohesive, pumped-up amalgam of Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, and The Fugitive, without the charm or suspense of any of them. Spacey is the only thing that holds it all together.