I'm more encouraged by the saplings: new music groups, tiny new venues, entrepreneurial musician-composers who aren't waiting to be discovered but are instead building their own Establishment.

Still, you can't complain about the number of movies being made. Never have the means of making movies been so accessible to so many. The problem is getting bodies into seats.

Every year, I'm depressed that so few of the documentaries I've loved break through.

A critic often has to play the role of coroner, dissecting a work to find out why it died (or never lived).

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.

The rise of video on demand will make it possible for small movies to earn back costs via $9.95 24-hour rentals and for people in cities without independent cinemas to see the kind of movies they never have before. That's great - but on the other hand, that's TV.

King Arthur is profoundly stupid and inept.. then there's Clive Owen, rising above it all. Aloof yet watchful, the actor cultivates an inner stillness that is perfect for faintly ironic brooders. He neither distances himself from this risible material nor pulls out the stops and opens himself to ridicule. His King Arthur tells us little about Arthur, but much about protecting one's flank. The mark of a box-office king?