Let us now praise Woody Allen.

I know how unfashionable that seems. Once upon a time, a Woody Allen film was an occasion, an event even – something to be longed for and anticipated and, once it arrived, to be seen more than once and savored.

These days, however, Allen has fallen into something approximating critical disfavor. My impression is that this is particularly true among younger critics, whose own youthful senses of humor weren’t shaped by the anarchic comedy – that Allen offered in his days as a stand-up comic in the 1960s, and then with early films such as “Take the Money and Run,” “Bananas,” “Sleeper” and “Love and Death.”

But even among colleagues closer to my age, I detect a certain weariness with Allen’s perpetual output. Since “Take the Money and Run” in 1969, he has averaged a movie a year. About to turn 75, he seems to have no less energy or imagination than he did in his 30s. Where his films once excited a certain keenness, I often read reviews of a new Woody Allen film these days that convey the attitude of, “Oh, give it a rest already.”

Yet, to me, his films just get better and richer: funny, certainly, but with an increasing sense of melancholy and emotional depth. While he continues to explore the subjects that have always fascinated him – the ephemeral nature of love, the meaning and absurdity and randomness of life – he also finds new and innovative ways to tell his stories and different styles in which to work.

Indeed, I would maintain that Woody Allen is the most significant independent filmmaker of his generation. While Allen himself often tells interviewers that only a tiny fraction of his own films satisfy him, I can’t think of anyone as prolific and profound at the same time, someone whose filmography contains as many memorable and significant films.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not arguing here that Allen has never made a bad film. I would point to, among others, “Anything Else,” “Melinda and Melinda” and “Cassandra’s Dream” as films that run the gamut from interesting failures to outright flops.

But you cannot name a filmmaker – a writer-director who has often appeared in his own films – with the kind of prodigious output Allen has had whose batting average is anywhere near as high. And he has done it while making exactly the films he wants to, working with what are, by today’s standards, tiny budgets and yet attracting the cream of the actors working in film today. Nobody, it seems, doesn’t want to work with Woody Allen.

Allen is frequently accused of making the same film over and over or being obsessed with only a couple of topics (the love of an older man for a much younger woman being one of them). Yet I would argue that, in fact, he has frequently experimented with story-telling techniques: from the mock-documentary (in “Take the Money and Run” and “Zelig”) to novelistic chapters (“Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Deconstructing Harry”), from edgy black and white (the underrated “Celebrity”) to sunset-drenched color (“A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy”).

He has used first-person narrators who talk directly to the camera (from “Annie Hall” to last year’s “Whatever Works).” He has experimented in drama, from the Chekhovian (“September”) to the Bergman-influenced (“Interiors”). He has made farces and comedies of manners, always injecting wry notes of social satire as throwaway gags that puncture balloons of pretension.

His subject matter – the unknowability of one person’s heart by anyone else, the inability of man to understand his place in the universe – is consistent exactly because it is so deep. I would compare him, in that respect, to such modern authors as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, both for the breadth of his seemingly narrow focus and for taking what once was an almost niche viewpoint (the American Jew in the 20^th – and now 21^st – century) and making it mainstream.

I almost never watch movie trailers online, usually seeing them only when I take my wife to a movie at our local multiplex. While there recently, a trailer began that made me sit up, mostly because it featured such a strong cast: Josh Brolin, Naomi Watts, Anthony Hopkins, Antonio Banderas. And then the title flashed on the screen: Woody Allen’s “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,” and my heart leapt. I’ve already RSVP’d for a press screening this week and can hardly wait to see it.

The prevalent attitude these days among critics seems to be “I’m so over Woody Allen” or, more likely, “Woody Allen is so over.” But I disagree.

Woody Allen is one of the great American filmmakers, whose achievements are unparalleled by any director before or since. As long as he keeps making them, I’ll keep seeing them – eagerly and with joyful anticipation.

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You usually hear the phrase “critic’s choice” referring to something that a critic is recommending.

But I confronted a real critic’s choice recently, one that more accurately reflects the odd dichotomy of this job.

It was a recent weekday morning and I had to choose between two screenings, both happening at the same time, both having what I thought was their final showing before they opened.

One was “Lottery Ticket,” a comedy starring Bow Wow, Ice Cube, Keith David and the dreaded Mike Epps, the unfunniest man in movies. It opens today in wide release.

The other was “A Film Unfinished,” a Holocaust-themed documentary about a Nazi-produced propaganda film about the Warsaw Ghetto that had been mistaken for a real documentary when it was discovered in a Nazi archive. It opened Wednesday in limited release.

That seems like a no-brainer, right? A serious critic goes to see the doc. Yet the demands of this job are such that I had to pause and weigh my options.

Why would I even consider “Lottery Ticket”? Well, for a couple of reasons.

For starters, I write for a couple of different publications, whose general audience would be interested in “Lottery Ticket.” And that’s part of this job: seeing the big movies and writing about them, no matter how terrible they look.

The diligent critic sets aside preconceived notions and goes in with a blank slate, judging the film on its merits. You never know whether “Lottery Ticket” could turn out to be another “House Party,” another seemingly teen-centric film that had more to offer than cheap laughs (no such luck with “Lottery Ticket,” as it turns out). I also do reviews on the radio each Friday, talking about the week’s big releases. “Lottery Ticket” definitely qualifies.

On the other hand, “A Film Unfinished” was being released in only a couple of theaters, eventually to roll out to arthouses in a trickle. And did I mention that it was a Holocaust documentary?

Still, that meant that, if it was good, my review could potentially bring it to the attention of a larger audience. It’s a film with no advertising or marketing budget (few docs do), which is almost the same as not being released at all. Millions of people are aware of “Lottery Ticket” from the TV campaign; it seems doubtful that anyone outside the narrow world of film critics, film festivals and Jewish arts organizations could tell you what “A Film Unfinished” is about.

I opted for “A Film Unfinished,” which turned out to be fascinating and which will be seen by, hopefully, thousands of people (I’m a realist). And I wrote a review.

As it turned out, there was a subsequent screening of “Lottery Ticket,” which I wound up attending and reviewing. It was no “House Party.” It was barely “Friday,” which is setting the bar pretty low.

But choosing between the two? That was surprisingly fraught with variables.

Oh well, it could have been worse: They might both have been available on the same day but at different times. Which would have meant seeing both in the same day. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

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I never saw Elvis live – but I saw him dead.

In the summer of 1977, after the King ingested that last deep-fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich, I was among the first to see Elvis in his coffin in Graceland. I was reminded of that this week, when the 33rd anniversary of his death rolled around, by my then-girlfriend Anne Hurley, who accompanied me on the journey.

It was the same year I spent working at a newspaper in Jackson, Miss., as the paper’s first full-time entertainment critic. Before the summer was out, I’d had the chance to see every major black music act working at the time. By the time my birthday rolled around that November, I had been fired for panning a concert by Anita Bryant at the Mississippi State Fair. But that’s another story.

When Elvis fell off a toilet and straight into rock’n’roll heaven, I was the reporter the paper called to drive up to Memphis to cover it.

But I didn’t want to go.

Why not? Well, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, I was broke, thanks to a weekly salary of $210 and a bizarre overtime system: The more hours I worked, the less I got paid per hour. Now this was 1977, the year after Jimmy Carter’s election supposedly heralded the rise of the New South. But the plantation mentality ruled at the Clarion-Ledger, a family-owned newspaper where I toiled (which, tellingly enough, had no black reporters).

And, being broke, the idea of trying to wrangle a hotel room in a town soon to be overrun with media was a daunting one. I had only recently received my first MasterCard (by lying about how much I made each year on the application) and I had a persistent fear of charging myself straight into the poorhouse. The paper wasn’t about to advance me any money; they wanted me to leave right away and there was no time to collect an advance. And I wasn’t convinced that, once I returned with a fistful of receipts, they’d actually repay my expenses.

The other reason was even more basic: At that point, I thought Elvis was a joke. A big, fat joke, figuratively and literally. Judging from photos I’d seen, Elvis had ballooned into pudgy travesty of himself; judging from what I heard from my friend Scott Greenblat (who worshipped the big E), Elvis’ shows had turned into a parody as well, with the massive, sweating, jump-suited star doing karate moves onstage to “Also Sprach Zarathustra” and singing things like “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

What did any of that have to do with rock’n’roll?

This, after all, was 1977, not 1957. I was reading stories in the paper everyday about a new musical movement called punk and a band called the Sex Pistols, who were tearing things up in England (though none of their records had made it to Mississippi at that point). I was still reveling in the frisky, yearning spirit of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” which was about everything that Elvis had failed to deliver on.

Elvis, on the other hand, seemed hopelessly passé. It seemed like years since he’d even had a song – something as energetic as “Burning Love” or “Suspicious Minds” – that didn’t make me want to hoot in derision. I understood intellectually what he meant to the history of rock’n’roll – but as far as I was concerned, he was a fossil, a living dinosaur who emerged from his cave to waddle on to the stage in Las Vegas once a year and excite the unenlightened masses of slack-jawed droolers, now in their 40s and 50s, who comprised Elvis’ faithful.

And here was my editor on the phone, insisting that I jump in my car and drive up to Memphis to cover the scene at Graceland.

“I don’t care what you think about his music,” he said. “He’s the biggest native son this state has. And we have to cover it.”

He wanted me to go to Memphis and stay for the duration. I didn’t want to go at all. We compromised, finally: I would go to Memphis the next day – the day after Elvis died – and do a color piece from the scene. I’d phone it in; then I could come home.

So, on the morning of Aug. 17, 1977, I found myself standing on Elvis Presley Blvd. in front of Graceland with what appeared to be 10,000 mourning souls. All around me, people were openly weeping; I had to stifle the impulse to giggle.

Somehow – and there always seems to be a somehow when you have a press card – I wound up in a little roped-off area just inside Graceland’s gates with the rest of the press. The heat was stifling: overcast, 90-plus degrees, with humidity to match. We in the press area actually had a little elbowroom with which to swing our notebooks and pens. The general public, however, were smashed together in a roughly formed queue just outside the gate.

And they began to drop like flies from the weather. One after another, people simply fainted from the combination of heat, humidity, emotion and standing upright for several hours without water. Before long, the fallen were being carried through Graceland’s gates and laid out on the grass.

I watched all this with impatient amusement, even as I scoped out the rest of the reporters. Most of them looked older than me and just as disgruntled at being there, sweating through their nice work clothes (I was in a golf shirt and jeans) while importuning the various security people for details, facts, anything they could use in their story.

Inveterate watcher of minor celebrities that I am, I recognized one of the other reporters: Bob Greene of the Chicago Tribune. I’d read a couple of his columns in Esquire and one of his books and recognized him from his picture. To me, he was a celebrity. And, since nothing else seemed to be going on, I started talking to him – and then interviewing him.

To his credit, he did actually talk to me – despite the fact that, like me, he was supposed to be there covering the scene and I was proving a major distraction. On the one hand, he had work to do; on the other hand, here was an obviously admiring younger reporter who wanted to talk to him, even as Elvis’ corpse was being put into place in Graceland’s foyer.

We watched the fainters being laid in rows in the grass, like the Atlanta train-station scene in “Gone With the Wind,” and talked about the bizarre level of devotion of Elvis fans. We must have stood there for an hour, waiting for something to happen and watching the bodies pile up. Finally, when my questions seemed to wander – “How do you get a job on a good newspaper like that?” – Greene politely disengaged himself, saying, “Nice talking to you. I’ve got to get back to work.”

Just at that moment, one of the Graceland security people came to the press holding pen and said, “OK, you can come in now.” Being an indifferent observer at best, I had no idea where they were taking us. A tour of Graceland? A dip in the pool? Were they about to serve us mint juleps, perhaps?

Dripping with sweat, we walked up the winding driveway, past the manicured lawn and away from the steaming horde of fans just outside the wrought-iron fence. I heard people in that crowd say, “Hey, why do they get to go? What about us?”

At the top of the driveway, there were enough bouquets to fill a flower show – a very kitschy flower show, to be sure, given the guitar-shaped arrangements and horseshoe “In Memoriam” displays that seemed like props from a bad movie.

Then, almost before I knew it, we were filing through the Graceland entry hall. The marble tiled floor and chandelier caught my attention for a moment when I entered – but then, of course, my eye was magnetically drawn to Elvis’ corpse, lying in state as it were, in the middle of the foyer.

I had never seen a dead body before, or at least not so well. Once, while doing a story at another newspaper about a medical school’s need for cadavers for anatomy classes, I’d been taken down and shown the holding tank. The professor whom I was interviewing pulled the cover off the top of the tank and, slowly, out of the murky depths, a fish-white body had floated to the surface, face-down.

Elvis, however, was butter-side-up. He was dressed in a creamy white three-piece suit, with a white tie over a silvery-blue shirt. His hands were folded across his ample midsection, his nails manicured and startlingly white. He looked bloated and waxy, not quite real – but then I never thought Elvis looked quite real, anyway.

And, before I knew it, I was past him, out of the air-conditioned foyer and back into the steam-heated August morning. To my left, as I walked back down the driveway to the masses, the line of press stragglers still shuffled its way toward its preview glimpse of today’s main attraction, even as the real fans looked on, waiting for their turn with the King, their sweat and tears indistinguishable on their moist faces.

Did I pause and think to myself, “Wow – I’ve just seen history”?

Get serious. I was in my 20s and thought I understood how the world worked. Elvis’ passing, as far as I could tell, was just the freak-show ending to a career that had changed the world at its start, then turned into a grotesque imitation of itself. It was several years before I developed a serious appreciation for what he’d accomplished in those early days of rock’n’roll. On that day, all he was to me was headline fodder.

All I wanted to do was to get my story written and get the hell out of Memphis. After interviewing a few weeping souls who were waiting for their own glimpse of the dear departed, I repaired to a diner in a strip mall across the street from Graceland, sat down and wrote it out long hand, then went to find a pay phone to call it in.

“You saw him?” my editor said incredulously, interrupting my dictation. “How did he look?”

“Fat and waxy,” I replied. “And dead.”

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Another appointment demanded that I leave the screening of “Eat Pray Love” before it was over, about 100 minutes into the film, just around the time that Julia Roberts, as wandering writer/spiritual seeker Liz Gilbert, had landed in picturesque Bali, in search of herself.

There, no doubt, she spent the next 40 minutes learning to forgive herself for choosing the wrong men. In that way, she would now be able to learn how to get involved with Javier Bardem, under tropical and sunset-lit Bali skies – and eat and pray that he’s the one to love.

I saw about as much of “Eat Pray Love”’s 140-minute running time as there is to the entire length of Ruba Nadda’s “Cairo Time,” just now expanding on the arthouse circuit (and VOD). The two films have similarities that can’t be overlooked – but I’ll take the quiet, beguiling “Cairo Time” over the picturesquely feel-good “Eat Pray Love,” thanks.

Both “EPL” and “Cairo Time” deal with solo American women abroad: Patricia Clarkson as the married magazine editor, Juliette, meeting her husband in Cairo; Roberts as the writer Gilbert, who finds herself - through food, prayer and romance – while traveling in Italy, India and Bali.

In many ways, both are interior films, seen from the points of view of women traveling by themselves. Juliette is supposed to meet her diplomat husband, who is called away from Cairo just before she arrives. She must fend for herself in a foreign culture that is not particularly female-friendly.

Roberts’ Gilbert is also taking a journey of discovery, following her escape from an unsatisfying marriage and further flight from a live-in attachment with an actor and spiritual seeker (James Franco) that quickly gives her the same feeling of being shackled as her marriage. So she’s out to circle the globe and find out who she really is, awash in guilt at leaving these men behind. As she moves through phases that include eating whatever she wants and then meditating until she’s more at peace, she narrates her life in a voiceover track that sounds like a Deepak Chopra book on tape, even as director Ryan Murphy sends her mind reeling back to her own unhappy past, which she sees afresh through new eyes.

In fact, Liz talks about it a lot – so much so that we really don’t need travelogue-like montages full of the kind of B-roll they unspool by the yard on the Travel Channel. You also get Liz experiencing all of the colorful local culture, though she seems too caught up in herself to really absorb it.

Unlike the peace-seeking missile named Liz Gilbert, Juliette in “Cairo Time” finds that her husband’s prolonged absence forces her to fend for herself, to use this time she suddenly has to see the Cairo she’s interested in. And so, instead of feeling like filler, the images of the city establish it as Juliette’s new environment, to be discovered on her own – or in the company of her husband’s friend and former associate, Tareq (Alexander Siddig).

Liz Gilbert flirts with a lot of men in “Eat Pray Love.” And Julia Roberts remains a romantic icon, a beautiful woman who, in this story, frequently lets herself be too easily won by men undeserving of her company. Undoubtedly it feels terrific when she finally lets herself fall for Bardem, the soul mate she’s been searching for. I’ll tell you after I see the rest of the movie.

Yet there’s something infinitely sexier about a kiss denied. It’s true in “Cairo Time,” in the temptation scene that comes to define the movie. The electricity between Clarkson and Siddig absolutely crackles, as each contemplates their obvious mutual attraction and the cost of giving in to temptation.

As a journey about the search for self, “Eat Pray Love” is easy to swallow if hard to digest, at 2:20 minutes. It’s like sitting in a warm bath – except that you run out of hot water a long time before you’re allowed to get out of the tub. Better you should immerse yourself in the heat and heart of “Cairo Time,” given the choice and the opportunity. 

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Everything you need to know about what’s wrong with the movie industry can be found on the cover of the issue of Entertainment Weekly that’s currently on the stands.

It’s less the appearance of Ryan Reynolds as Green Lantern (hot diggity, another comic-book movie – can’t wait) than the fact that EW has, essentially, given over the entire issue to Comic-Con, which is this coming weekend in San Diego and whose ripples will be felt for the entire year to come.

I’m not quite sure how we reached a point where Comic-Con became the engine that drives Hollywood but that is absolutely the case. Disney buys Marvel, films like “Green Lantern and “Green Hornet” and “The Avengers” slurp up the studio bucks – and the comic-book mentality grows like a cancer, in audiences and at movie studios.

Once upon a time, comic-book conventions – like “Star Trek” conventions – were the Land of the Dweebs, the home of the socially maladjusted and a sure-fire punchline for comedians. But these days, Comic-Con has become the kind of obligatory stop for the studios and TV networks that the CPAC convention is to conservative politicians or the NAACP convention is for liberal ones. It’s a prerequisite for success, a see-and-be-seen gathering at which the agenda for the coming year seemingly is set in stone.

A strong showing at Comic-Con bodes well for a film or TV show’s prospects. A weak showing spells potential doom, given the viral capability of the infinite number of bloggers who descend on Comic-Con, like 49ers to the gold rush (and to whom William Shatner famously urged, “Get a life,” in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch years back).

What’s missing, however, is any sense of proportion or context. This is Comic-Con – a fantasy convention for people whose lives are devoted to reading comic books and other forms of speculative fiction. The studios and TV networks are lining up to kiss the collective ass of exactly the crowd that has turned the movie industry into a special-effects factory making prefab product so undistinguished that “Iron Man 2” looks like a work of genius (to some critics).

These are, after all, comic-book movies (or sci-fi, horror or fantasy films that reach the same audience). Their audience is young and undiscriminating (in the sense that they still believe “The Dark Knight” was the shizzit) – and they somehow have taken over the thinking of the people who control the purse strings in Hollywood.

A steady diet of comic-book and zombie and other fantasy movies is like a steady diet of Big Macs for the mind and soul. Unfortunately, no one will ever make the “Super-Size Me” revealing the brain-deadening effects that overconsumption of these films is having. Yet it’s out there, slowly stripping audiences of their ability to focus on anything that doesn’t distract them with big flashes and booms and super-powers and the like. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which feeding this particular beast allows it ultimately to consume all our brains, and take over the culture.

Ah, Comic-Con: the tail that wags the entertainment dog. Would that we were able to brutally crop that particular tail. Instead, it’s being celebrated on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, as though it isn’t yet another harbinger of what is destroying movies that make you think and feel something other than the brief endorphin rush of cheap thrills.

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I dreamed the other night that I was the only one who could stop a plot that involved someone wanting to take over the world by unleashing an army of the dead.

Oh wait, no – that’s the Tea Party movement.

To be truthful, I just saw that whole “army of the dead” in a movie. Well, actually, a couple of movies. If you want a demonstration of the studios’ imagination deficit problem, just screen-hop at your local multiplex.

Let’s see – in “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse,” that angry redhead vampire played by Bryce Dallas Howard is turning as many new people as possible into vampires, building an army of the undead (or newly dead, depending on whether you’re a glass-half-empty kind of person) with which to attack, um, the crucially strategic town of Forks, Wash.

Which may or may not steal the thunder of Morgana La Fay, the evil sorceress played by Alice Krige in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” She, too, is eager to create an army of the dead to, apparently, take over New York. (Too late; tourist season is already upon us.)

Wait, how about this? People from opposing cultures – Air, Water, Earth – must team up against a rogue element, Fire in “The Last Airbender.” Almost as unlikely as the team-up of vampires and werewolves against that army of newborn vampires in “Eclipse.”

A story about a young apprentice learning mystical powers at the foot of an aging master? That would be “Last Airbender” – unless it’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

Characters who can whip their hands around in circles in front of their chests, martial-arts style, and create bolts of energy? “Last Airbender” again – and “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” - and even a little “Predators.”

Are there really so few plots to choose from?  Is there really such a shortage of action and fantasy tropes?

Maybe it’s just that  “Airbender” and “Eclipse” and “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” caught something in the zeitgeist, but that seems doubtful (although I frequently wish for the ability to fire plasma bolts – or any other kind of bolts – out of my fingertips).

But having seen the four films mentioned in the space of about 10 days, I have to stop and truly consider which film I’m talking about when I try to describe them because they are so similar. Sorting them is like untangling yarn in an elaborate knitting project.

And don’t get me started about zombies. I’ll never stop.

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If the movie year had ended last week, instead of just the first six months of the year, what movies would be the big contenders for awards?

It has, after all, been a fairly dreadful year for movies – or at least for studio movies. Indeed, this year seems to complete this part of the cycle in  which the studios give up all pretense of making serious films. For the foreseeable future, studio movies exist solely to churn audiences and popcorn through the multiplexes – with week after week of movies like “Leap Year,” “Jonah Hex” and “The Last Airbender.”

But look beneath the surface – in the arthouse theaters and the video-on-demand channels – and you’ll find the films that might just fill out the best-picture category when we get to the end of December. Even then, that particular top-10 - the best-picture category - looks to be pretty slim.

As I put this group together, I sorted out and set aside a handful of titles: “A Prophet,” “Ajami” and “The Secret in Their Eyes,” which may end up on lists but which were all foreign-language film Oscar nominees for 2009. On the other hand, I’m including two trilogies of films that actually first appeared as TV miniseries in other countries.

And if it seems too early, remember: By this time last year, “The Hurt Locker” and “Up” both had already been released. 

So here’s a quick rundown of the 10 best movies of 2010 – so far.

10. “When You’re Strange”: Directed by Tom DiCillo, this documentary about the Doors was a straight-forward telling of one group’s meteoric rise and precipitous decline in the face of massive fame. It featured lots of unseen, behind-the-scenes footage and told the story without either mythologizing or demonizing an important and influential rock band.

9. “Exit Through the Gift Shop”: Is this the documentary by street-artist Banksy? The documentary about him? Or the phony doc he made as an artwork to replace the real doc? Who knows? But this seemingly nonfiction film – about a street-art chronicler who manufactured himself as a street artist – is one of the year’s most surprising and entertaining.

8. “Greenberg”: Not everyone’s cup of tea, to be sure – but this misanthropic and low-key comedy from Noah Baumbach had something going on that was not to be missed. This was an uncompromising film about an unlikable and annoying guy, whose humanity still came through in a grating and subtle performance by Ben Stiller, as a guy who has a better answer for everything in life.

7. “The Eclipse”: Playwright Conor McPherson wrote and directed this beguiling and unexpected Irish ghost story, about a widower who volunteers at a local literary festival in a small Irish town and gets involved with a beautiful author. Filled with haunting romance and jump-out-of-your-seat scares, as well as a very funny performance by Aidan Quinn – and a truly gorgeous one by Ciaran Hinds.

6. “The Red Riding Trilogy”: A trio of directors each handled one full-length film in a trilogy by the same writer, about cops in a northern England town, stuffing their pockets and ignoring a serial killer in their midst. Sweeping over the 1970s and into the 1980s, the three share characters but tell three separate stories (as well as one larger tale). This British TV miniseries had a compellingly murky look and brutally cynical attitude about the corrupting nature of power. Definitely worth watching the trio of films back to back.

5. “Shutter Island”: Martin Scorsese’s film was a wonderfully overripe mystery-thriller set on an island mental hospital/prison in the early 1950s. Based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, it starred Leonardo DiCaprio has a U.S. marshal called to the island prison to help find an escaped prisoner. But the marshal begins to believe that, in fact, there is bad craziness afoot to make him think that he’s losing his grip. You rode this rich ride with eyes wide open and senses atingle. Great, weird pulp.

4. “Winter’s Bone”: One of the year’s best dramas is also one of its most gripping tales about one of its most unique characters. As played by Jennifer Lawrence, she’s a rural Missouri teen who has to step up and find her meth-dealing dad before he jumps bond and the county takes away the family home and property. In Debra Granik’s film, the girl makes a determined, tough-minded voyage to the core of family and a criminal enterprise in a film that never missed a moment of tension.

3. “Toy Story 3”: Not just the best animated film of the year, “Toy Story 3” is also one of the year’s best movies, period. It’s funny and visually rich and achieves an emotional depth that will surprise you. And it’s that rare sequel that tells its own story completely; you can enjoy it for what it is, without having seen either of the first two films. This is magical movie-making.

2. “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”: The publishing phenomenon of the century, the “Millennium” trilogy by the late Stieg Larsson has already been made into a very adult miniseries for Swedish television that first played in Swedish theaters in three parts and which will all play American theaters before the end of the year (the second film, “The Girl Who Played With Fire” opens Friday). The first of the trilogy, directed by Neils Arden Oplev, was a thriller at the level of “The Silence of the Lambs,” introducing one of fiction’s and film’s most fascinating characters – punk-hacker Lisbeth Salander, played with shadowy menace and grace by Noomi Rapace.

1. “The Ghost Writer”: Roman Polanski’s personal troubles returned to the headlines, just as his best film in ages hit theaters. Based on a novel by Robert Harris, this chilly, wind-swept tale captured the peculiar dilemma of a modern writer (Ewan McGregor) called in to finish ghost-writing the memoir of a recently retired British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan). But from the moment he arrives at the former P.M.’s compound on Nantucket Island, everything seems to fall apart. Polanski is the master of building details into suspicions and keeping you in tension for long stretches – before paying off beautifully. It’s hard to imagine a smarter, more involving film this year.

Then again, we’ve still got six months to go.

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Who gets to be a critic?

These days, just about anybody with a working computer, it seems. Or, in the case of Cody Gifford, anyone whose mom has her own TV show.

Legitimate, working critics are struggling to hold their places at publications around the country – while the print journalism world continues in freefall, unable to figure out how to survive in the new century. The Internet has provided a haven for many – and an outlet for many others who never were able to find an actual paying job at a print publication writing about film.

And then there’s cute little Cody Gifford, who is a film student in college and says that being young and ignorant is what qualifies him to be a critic: “As you get older, you get a little out of touch with contemporary films,” he says. “It’s not your generation anymore.”

Sorry, Cody, but just because you’re part of the generation at which dross like the “Transformer” films or “Grown Ups” is aimed – or that, unlike us old fogeys, you think those movies rock – well, that doesn’t qualify you to be a critic. I’m not of the generation for which “Citizen Kane” was intended, either, but I think I can offer an intelligent assessment of it as well.

Everybody, of course, is a critic. And now anybody can be a critic online, with the right software, a little computer savvy and an understanding of search-engine optimization.

And certainly, when I was Cody’s age, I was already writing reviews for newspapers, assailing the opinions of my elders, secure in the knowledge that I was infinitely hipper and wiser than some old coot in a newspaper office in New York (or, in my case, Minneapolis). I believed that they should give one of those jobs to me – and, eventually, worked my way into exactly that job.

The big difference between Cody and me – and I say this based on virtually no knowledge of Cody beyond his unfortunate parentage and his published remarks – is that he is a film studies major and I was a journalism major. I loved movies – but I also loved to write (still do, for that matter). Writing about movies was a bonus. Cody strikes me as being of the Ben Lyons school of film criticism: “Hey, I think movies are cool and getting to talk about them on TV is even cooler. Context? What’s that?”

I recognize now that I was probably in my 40s before I really hit my stride as a critic. But that didn’t mean that I wasn’t a-brim with opinions and confidence when I was in my 20s and 30s. I knew what I knew; I just didn’t know how much I didn’t know. The older I got, the more I wanted to delve into film’s past. And, the older I got, the more I recognized the continuum nature of films – that the films I saw as a kid and a teen and even as a young adult informed the films I saw in the present day and that they were all part of an ongoing history.

But when you’re as young as Cody Gifford, you believe that movies started when you started paying attention to them. What came before belonged to an older, irrelevant generation and had no connection to you. The movies you loved as kid were great because, well, you thought they were. Never mind that you were a kid and kids, by definition, have no basis on which to judge, other than a movie’s ability to evoke a sensation or provide immediate gratification of the simplest tastes.

It’s only when you get older that you gain an appreciation for films that evoke feelings and thoughts and begin to value them even more. It’s why kids love ice cream and fireworks and adults appreciate things like Scotch, steak tartar and the paintings of Picasso.

So who gets to be a critic? Well, as I said, just about anyone who wants to. But what makes a good critic is a sensibility that readers – yes, readers, not viewers – can understand. That sensibility is built on history – the critic’s personal history, as well as his understanding of movie history – and taste. Taste is created by exposure, by developing a sense of context about where a new film fits into the ongoing continuum that is cinema.

A good critic has that kind of breadth of understanding and taste, and that only comes with age. Not that you can’t be a critic when you’re young. But your tastes change and deepen with age, as does your frame of reference.

That’s not Cody Gifford’s fault. But that’s obviously not going to stop him, either.

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We’ve already had this discussion – that everything is political, even in the most mundane and inane of movies.

Still, what’s always amazing to me is how hard some people work at reading political meaning into works that had no such ideas in mind. Just because you can make a case for a metaphorical reading of a movie doesn’t mean that you should.

Consider the recent hoo-haw over “Toy Story 3.” No, not the mudfight over the fact that a couple of contrarian critics stood between that film and a 100-percent-positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That argument is too silly for words. There’s always going to be someone who hates a terrific movie for whatever reason – just as there will always be someone willing to offer a positive review (and a glowing quote) for a total stinker. That’s just human nature.

No, I’m talking about the guy who wrote a whole piece discussing his perception that, in fact, “Toy Story 3” was really a metaphor for the Holocaust. A segregated population, who wind up imprisoned and would rather be in the attic than wind up in the incinerator - get it?

I mean, yes, you can draw a parallel if you work at it. But do you need to? Do you want to? Really – doesn’t it trivialize the Holocaust to think that “Toy Story 3” is secretly retelling its story?

But some people aren’t happy unless they’ve got a reason to be upset. Recently, for example, a right-wing blogger got up in arms because several reviews of “Sex and the City 2” suggested that the film – with its flip depiction of Islamic conservative attitudes toward women and sexuality – would only serve to inflame passions against the West. I believe some critics referred to it as “a jihadist recruiting tool,” in what was obviously a jab that was meant facetiously.

After all, fundamentalists of all stripes – and not just Islam - don’t have much of a sense of irony, or humor. So radical Islamists don’t need the “SATC” gals to suddenly focus them on the perfidies of the West. We’re all infidel dogs in their eyes, no matter how liberal or conservative our politics. The only good American is a dead American – it’s not a matter of degree.

But the humorless right-wing bloggers, who really struggle with the notion of sarcasm, conflated these remarks as yet another example of political correctness run amok. Not only weren’t the comments taken as humor – they were lumped in with the perpetual left-wing cabal in Hollywood which exists solely to push an agenda of gay rights, widespread abortion and, of course, the curtailment of free speech for the right wing.

OK, some of the critics may have been serious in saying that the film was offensive to Islam – perhaps because it was. But I have to assume that the same critics would have pointed it out if the film had been offensive to Jews or Native Americans or Buddhists or, yes, Christians, which the right wing is convinced is the most put-upon and abused of ruling majorities.

Yet this particular blogger made the leap from an accusation of an attack motivated by political correctness to the fact that “SATC2” stiffed at the box office – then connected the dots to reach the conclusion that politically correct critics purposely killed “SATC2” with bad reviews because it presented an unflattering portrait of Islam. This, he argued, was why the movie was a bomb: It was a left-wing conspiracy.

Never mind that the audience could tell from the commercials that the movie was terrible and, as Samuel Goldwyn once said, they stayed away in droves. The critics weren’t all that much kinder to the first “SATC” film but the audience turned up for that one. Really – if critical blasts that included offended sensibilities made any difference to the paying public, “Transformers 2” would have imploded on the launching pad, too.

There simply isn’t much connection anymore between what critics say and what audiences pay to see. And the audience that pays attention to mainstream critics doesn’t take its political cues from print critics, in particular, who are a vanishing breed. If anything, print critics are even more timid about expressing political opinions in movie reviews – because right-wing readers tend to overreact to perceived slights and insults, then complain to the newspaper, which leads nervous newspaper editors to second-guess the critics).

So, to summarize: Sometimes, as the saying goes, a cigar is just a cigar. But never to a right-winger, who needs scant provocation to accuse Hollywood and its critics of liberal bias.

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Perhaps Hollywood is taking its cue from Diesel Jeans’ reprehensible advertising campaign, which advises people to “Be Stupid.”

How else to explain the blight that constitutes the current crop of summer movies? It’s not just that summer has become the silly season – it’s become the stupid season. And everyone seems willing to define quality downward, rather than say, “Hey, what the hell?”

Look at the frenzy over the casting announcement of Megan Fox’s replacement in “Transformers 3” – as if it mattered whether Fox is replaced by a model, a mannequin or an ottoman. Most of this blather had to do with why Fox was replaced (Because she can’t act? Because she’s a pain in the ass? Both of the above?) and whether the new girl had any talent to speak of.

Two thoughts spring to mind: First of all, does talent matter in this case, in either a micro or macro way? In the micro sense, obviously it doesn’t, if Fox was able to play the role. And obviously not in the macro sense either: The movies still would have been crap if the role had been filled by Dame Judi Dench. The next movie could be all CG (and probably should be), for all the contribution that human actors make.

And the second and more important point is this: Why are they making another sequel to two films which, future studies will show, can cause brain damage to anyone who watches them? That’s the important issue – that audiences and studios keep enabling Michael Bay to further degrade movies, as well as audiences’ expectations of them.

Naturally, that question was never asked, because the answer is so obvious: Quality doesn’t matter, if the movie makes money. While the dwindling number of indy and small-scale film companies still carry the torch for intelligent and edifying filmmaking, the studios have given up on making movies that matter or even ones that don’t insult the intelligence of the average adult because – again – adults don’t matter to Hollywood.

It’s a vicious circle, unfortunately, like the one that killed the American attention span. When the only films at the multiplex are garbage, then garbage is what will lead the box office. Which sends the message that, in fact, audiences want garbage.

The same thing happened to attention spans, and there’s probably a doctoral thesis – if not a book – to be written about this: In the period of one year in the early 1980s, both MTV and USA Today came on the scene, with shorter, peppier, less-detailed and less-demanding approaches to visual communication, and to  writing in general. When they became popular, everyone in a decision-making position made the counter-intuitive leap that people no longer wanted to take their time with anything.

Suddenly every movie was being edited like a music video. Continuity and patience were old news; fragmentation and instant gratification were the buzzword. Newspapers began dumping longer articles in favor of columns full of briefs. The quick read replaced the carefully considered article.

Before long, that’s all there was. I’m not saying there’s a direct correlation to attention-deficit disorder, but I’d be interested in a graph charting the rise in ADD in the past 30 years.

So it is with movies. Whether it’s CG or 3D, the $200-million spectacle based on a videogame or a lame TV show from the 1980s is now the king. Sure, there are smaller independent films poking their heads up at arthouses around the country – but most of them disappear in a week, or never make it there in the first place, relegated to the netherworld of video-on-demand, still the second-class citizenship of independent film.

This weekend it’s “Marmaduke” and “Killers” (no doubt a worthy addition to the growing filmography of Katherine Heigl comedy treasures) and “Get Him to the Greek,” the latest piece of product from the world of the overrated Judd Apatow. The summer lineup from the studios holds little hope for serious film fans (except for the insistent drumbeat for “Inception” – and seeing will be believing).

The only good news was a headline I caught the other day, about the collapse of studio tentpoles. Boo hoo: “Prince of Persia” couldn’t beat “Shrek 4” – and neither could “Sex and the City 2,” a movie that defines the word “over.”  Meanwhile, almost $40 million of tickets each were sold to “Prince” and “SATC2,” which tells me that there are still a lot of sheep who take their entertainment dumbed-down and glitzy.

No doubt some studio marketing genius is putting together a presentation right now, arguing that these films failed to match box-office expectations because they were too complex – and that audiences want movies that are even more lightweight, content-free and juvenile.

Which explains why “Battleship – The Movie” is already gearing up for production, soon to be followed, undoubtedly, by “Etch-a-Sketch” and “Tinker Toys.”

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