When the dust settles from this 2007 summer of sequels, one movie will stand above all others. For originality and excitement and action and special effects and flat-out fun, the hands-down winner is Transformers (Dreamworks/Paramount). When all is said and done, I'll be surprised if this testosterone-injected thrill ride doesn't finish as the top-grossing movie of the year.

We'll never know what Adrienne Shelly might have accomplished, had her life not been tragically ended by an unsolved murder in New York last fall. We can all savor a glimpse of her talent, however, by seeing Waitress (Fox Searchlight), the movie she wrote, directed and co-starred in, which is expanding to over 500 locations this Friday (May 25). Known for her performances in Hal Hartley's The Unbelievable Truth and Trust, this New York-born artist had directed several films previously -- including 1999's I'll Take You There, starring Ally Sheedy, and supernatural thriller Sudden Manhattan in 1997 -- but Waitress would have been her breakthrough ... had it not become her sad farewell.

I suspect that America's highbrow film critics aren't going to uniformly love Shrek the Third (Dreamworks). As with second sequels from The Matrix Revolutions to X-Men: The Last Stand to the current Spider-Man 3 (Sony), familiarity breeds contempt with critics. In my estimation, familiarity with  this loveable ogre and Fiona, Donkey, Puss in Boots and all the rest is why this movie will be so well-liked by moviegoers everywhere.

If Steve Carell and the gang from NBC's The Office showed up in a Wes Craven slasher movie, it would play a lot like Severance (Magnolia Films), a clever, funny film that melds typical workplace BS and horror flick conventions. It is set to open on about 35 screens this Friday (May 18) and has a chance for PTA success and box office success as it expands. From its opening sequence -- of a middle-aged, overweight man and a pair of well-endowed beauties running from a masked killer -- to its gruesome conclusion, the movie operates both as a spoof and a social commentary on workplace politics, and it never fails to entertain.

There is no question in my mind that 28 Weeks Later (Fox Atomic), the searing sequel to Danny Boyle's remarkable 28 Days Later, will stand head-and-shoulders above every horror film released this year.  It takes the rage virus that decimated England in the 2003 international hit, and adds a haunting familial twist, creating what may be the most visceral, shocking and flat-out scary movie ever made.

Paris has "20 arrondissements," or neighborhoods, each with a distinct personality. Each of them receives 5 minutes of unique attention from some of the world's finest directors in Paris, Je T'aime (First Look), a remarkable little film that is not to be missed.

My favorite aspect of Spider-Man has always been the fact that his alter ego Peter Parker is a nerd. A nebbish. As played by Tobey Maguire, he's the kind of guy you wouldn't look twice at -- let alone expect him to save the day in a form-fitting red-and-blue suit. For my taste, Spider-Man 2 had a great villain (Alfred Molina as Doc Ock), but there was too much Spidey soul-searching. Is this really worth it? Why don't I get better press? What if Mary Jane finds out?

Man does not live by highbrow movies alone. Sometimes, it's fun to check your Academy Award sensibility at the multiplex door and see a good B-movie. On the Friday before Spider-Man 3 (Sony) is unleashed upon the world, Lionsgate is giving us just that with The Condemned, starring "Stone Cold" Steve Austin

While watching the new Thinkfilm comedy The TV Set, which opened quietly at eight locations on April 6, I was reminded of an interview I conducted with David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos. He told me that when he was pitching his mob show to the networks, more than a few high-powered TV execs suggested that he eliminate the fact that Tony Soprano goes to a shrink.  Leave it to network TV guys. They always seem to miss "the point."

I'm a sucker for a good police or courtroom procedural -- big fan of CSI, Law & Order, Cold Case, etc. -- so I had a great time with Gregory Hoblit's Fracture (New Line), starring Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling. It's an absorbing showcase for two of the best actors around -- an Oscar winner and an Oscar nominee -- but also an intelligent, entertaining cat-and-mouse thriller.

Filled with good intentions and New Age mumbo-jumbo, The Last Mimzy (New Line) is an awkward, but likeable family film that harkens back to E.T. with a dash of Bill Nye: The Science Guy. Directed by New Line studio head Robert Shaye, who hasn't filled that role since 1990's Book of Love, Mimzy is far from perfect, but may charm tweens by not talking down to them.

As you may know, I've got a long career as a sport broadcaster, and I'll confess upfront that I'm a sucker for a good inspirational sports movie. Hoosiers, Rudy, Miracle, Remember the Titans, Friday Night Lights -- if these movies don't make you "squirt a few," then your cardiologist should open you up to see if you've got a heart. In fact, I would argue that inspirational sports movies are a lot like pizza and sex. Even when they're bad, they're still pretty OK.

There's something oddly appropriate about IFC Films's Believe in Me entering limited release on the same day that the wildly original 300 hits America's multiplexes. This little basketball movie from writer/director Robert Collector is as mainstream and traditional as 300 is cutting edge, and there's room for both of them in the marketplace.

Frank Miller's graphic novel about the legendary stand of the ancient Spartans at Thermopylae comes to life on the big screen thanks to director Zack Snyder's directorial virtuosity. This is the wildest, bloodiest, most visually striking and flat-out fun moviegoing experience in ages. 300 (Warner Bros) is light years more engaging than such similar epics as Gladiator and Troy, and it will be hailed as an immediate classic.

When I have written about Zodiac (Paramount), David Fincher's film about the infamous serial killer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay area in the late '60s and early '70s, I have often mentioned my concerns about the running time. Two hours and 40 minutes is a long time for anyone in the Ipod/Blackberry/YouTube/Nintendo Wii generation to sit in a movie theatre. After seeing the movie, let me assure you that every one of the 160 minutes pays off.

Jim Carrey just can't seem to "get serious." When the rubber-faced star does comedy, he can't seem to miss. From the original modestly-budgeted Ace Ventura ($72.2 million) to Dumb and Dumber ($127.1 million) to Liar Liar ($181.4 million) to Me, Myself & Irene ($90.5 million) to How the Grinch Stole Christmas ($260 million) to Fun with Dick & Jane ($110.3 million), when the movie is going purely for laughs, Carrey is money in the bank.

Gus Van Sant has spent most of his career as a cutting-edge auteur. He has certainly made more mainstream fare -- movies like To Die For, Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester -- but he is at his best when blazing an original path. From the gritty underbelly of drug addiction in Drugstore Cowboy to the lonely life of gay hustlers in My Own Private Idaho to the flat-out avant-garde sensibility of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues to the impressionistic meditation on a Kurt Cobain-like rocker of Last Days, Van Sant may have the most interesting resume of any director working today. He has championed a young filmmaker named Cam Archer, and, after seeing his debut feature, Wild Tigers I Have Known, I can see why.

I want to begin this review with an admission. I like the 2004 film The Notebook. I can't be alone  in that because it delivered a domestic gross of $81 million, but it is a schmaltzy chick flick. What can I say? I'm a sucker for the sentimental stuff.

In writing a review of Happily N’Ever After (Lionsgate) due on just under 2,400 screens on Jan. 5, it's valuable to look at the state of movie animation. Hollywood tested moviegoers' interest in animation in 2006. Four of the Top 10 movies of 2006 were of the animated variety with Cars ( No. 2 at $244 million), Ice Age: The Meltdown (No. 6 at $195 million), Happy Feet (No. 7 at $179 million and still going) and Over the Hedge (No. 9 at $155 million) leading the way. There were some misses though. Everyone's Hero ($14 million), Ant Bully ($29 million) and Doogal ($7 million) were among the disappointments.

I'm a sucker for Rocky. I saw the original film when I was 11 years old, and it stayed with me for weeks. My brother and I perfected the one-arm pushups, drank raw eggs, and, if there'd been a side of beef handy, I'm sure we would have spent long hours beating it into submission.

Children of Men (Universal) has not been recognized by any of the critics groups or by the Hollywood Foreign Press, and, for the life of me, I cannot figure out why. It is the work of a virtuoso director at the top of his game, and it may be the most visually striking and precisely executed vision of the future since Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Sci-fi fans and film junkies take note -- this is a modern masterpiece.

Projected Box Office: $65m

In 1992, Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs hit the arthouse circuit and delivered about $3 million in domestic box office. Two years later, he unleashed the revolutionary Pulp Fiction into the world, and it was a critical success, a box office sensation and even scored an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

If I was going to design the perfect film for the first weekend in January, I would probably come up with something along the lines of Code Name: The Cleaner (New Line). It's a big, dumb, funny, popcorn movie with a lovable, engaging black star, and it's going to appeal to urban audiences and even suburban families.

Yimou Zhang's Raise the Red Lantern (1991) is one of my all-time favorite foreign-language films, and his remarkable, 2004 Oscar-nominated House of Flying Daggers is among the most electrifying foreign films of this decade. So I went into his new film Curse of the Golden Flower (Sony Classics) with very high hopes.

In 1970, 37 members of the Marshall University Thundering Herd football team were killed along with coaches and boosters in a plane crash near Huntington, WV. Generally regarded as the worst tragedy in the history of American collegiate athletics, it is an unexpected source for what may be the most inspiring motion picture of the holiday season.

Writer/Director Bill Condon was in the audience at the Imperial Theatre on Broadway on December 20, 1981. His love for the incredible Michael Bennett Broadway production Dreamgirls shines through in every frame of his film adaptation, and the result is the best motion picture of 2006.

The History Boys, Deja Vu, The Fountain and Bobby each deal with history. I'll tell you where two of the four go wrong.

Don’t look at me. That is the message of the three movies I saw this Friday: Fast Food Nation, Casino Royale, and Happy Feet.

Will someone tell my why Mark Forster, now on his fourth accomplished Hollywood feature, still feels he has to prove himself as a director?  Stranger than Fiction has production design coming out its sprocket holes, affecting, technically impeccable performances (like Napoleon pastries:  crisp and flaky on the outside and filled with fabulous sweet goo) and superbly staged, surprisingly large-scale stunts.

And for what?  For a quirky little comedy that feels like it’s stuck in the Sixties.

Borat is the latest incarnation of a character older than Christ: the mischief-making trickster god of Classical mythology, half-man, half-goat, the Romans called Satyr, the Greeks called Pan, and Shakespeare called Puck.   

This creature is not evil or malicious.  He likes you.  He likes screwing with your head.  And he likes sex. 

“No ideas but in things.”
--William Carlos Williams

“The world is everything that is the case.”
--Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Why is a tree more beautiful than a babbling brook?  Or anything that babbles for that matter?”
--Woody Allen

Years ago, just before the release of Stephen Frears’s first big Hollywood feature The Grifters, the director of the then-celebrated My Beautiful Laundrette, and the now-celebrated The Queen, came to UCLA to give a talk.  The first question was:  “How do you pick your scripts?  And then how do you work with them?”  Frears answered, “I’m illiterate.”  He refused to elaborate.  I think I finally understand what he meant.  Bear with me.

This weekend, The Prestige and Flags of Our Fathers both offer about twenty minutes of film that’s worth ten bucks and two-and-a-half hours of your time to see.  In one case, those minutes point to a more focused and relevant version of the movie as it might have been.  In the other, they point to a different movie entirely.  But what a movie.

Little Capote

This weekend I saw two movies that were "literary" in very different, maybe even opposite, ways. Little Children, adopted from the novel Little Children, made me think about what I was seeing by giving me room (time and space) to ask questions. Infamous, adopted from George Plimpton's book about Capote, tried to answer my questions as soon as they formed. Both approaches are rhetorical, and live more comfortably on the page than the screen. A movie that gives you time to think risks boring you. A movie that takes time explaining loses its immediacy. In this case, one of the trade-offs was worth it.

The top two films at the box office this weekend were The Departed and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that one of these films will sweep the Oscars next year. The other film is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning.

I know what you're thinking – TCM's gotta take home something at the Oscars, right? I mean, both films are very, very similar. Both are remakes. Both stories are very specific to their locations. Both films are about a family – what that means and how even the most messed up families still may be tighter than those that are considered "normal". And finally, both star Matt Damon as a chainsaw weilding killer. That part may not be true – I have not seen TCM: TB yet.

GET OFF ON THE DEPARTING BUS

Two Democratic Visions by New Yorkers

Has anyone noticed that the triple-entendre refrain, "Oh, we all get it in the end..." of the song that caps off John Cameron Mitchell's erotic musical comedy ShortBus is the moral of Martin Scorsese's The Departed? I have. And now I'm going to try to tell you why it's important.