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.

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

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.

Along with my peers, I gripe about the increasing number of superhero films, and I'm sad that so many critics so uncritically use words like franchise, which should be reserved for your local Burger King.

I have a female colleague who gets annoyed that Tina Fey seems to go out of her way in her movies to deride her looks, as if she weren't such an attractive woman.

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.