You won't be reading reviews of the dystopian sci-fi flick Aeon Flux in the papers today because it wasn't screened for the press-and, given that it cost the GDP of a small country and that Charlize Theron and the director, Karyn Kusama, are critics' darlings, this could mean but one thing: A stinker. A weapon of mass destruction. A planet-killer. Folks, I'll never understand studios. Aeon Flux is not that terrible.

Richard Curtis, the writer and director of Love Actually, is brilliant at many things, but his genius, I submit, is for thrusting characters into situations in which they feel driven to humiliate themselves. Which is why we love them, especially when it's all in the name of love. He is the Bard of Embarrassment.

It's hard for comic actors used to pulling faces just to be on screen, but Tina Fey does a good job. I liked watching her. The part, though, isn't filled in. When Baker announces that she's gotten too used to the madness of Afghanistan, that she's worried she's thinking of it as normal, the sentiment comes out of nowhere. The dramatic arc in "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" is nonexistent. The movie evaporates in the mind like water in the Afghan desert.

It's easy to say "This year in art sucked." After all, about 85 percent of all shows of contemporary art are bad. But 85 percent of all art made in the Renaissance was bad.

The movie's only serious criticism is reserved for Baker's television network, which doesn't think Americans care about Afghanistan - kind of hypocritical given this film's lack of substance.

Argo might well be studied as a bait-and-switch masterwork: In showing the capture of the American Embassy in Tehran, Ben Affleck first made a fetish of authenticity, then served up a shamelessly Hollywood, and wholly fictional climax, then capped the whole thing off with a coda that was essentially a tribute to his movie's authenticity, complete with side-by-side photos of the actors and their near-identical real-life counterparts. Well done, sir!

You won't be reading reviews of the dystopian sci-fi flick Aeon Flux in the papers today because it wasn't screened for the press-and, given that it cost the GDP of a small country and that Charlize Theron and the director, Karyn Kusama, are critics' darlings, this could mean but one thing: A stinker. A weapon of mass destruction. A planet-killer. Folks, I'll never understand studios. Aeon Flux is not that terrible.