All the world's a stage, Shakespeare tells us, but just imagine what kind of nightmare it would be if that were actually true. Jean-Claude Van Damme, played by Jean-Claude Van Damme in Mabrouk El-Mechri's JCVD, doesn't have to imagine if it were true, because for him it is; worse, he doesn't even get to pick the kind of stage he's on or the part he's playing. ... JCVD fakes you out from the jump and doesn't stop, opening with a one-cut action sequence set to the pulse and pound of Baby Huey's 8-track soul-funk version of Curtis Mayfield's "Hard Times: "So I play the part I feel they want of me/ And I'II pull the shades so I won't see them seein' me ..."

And during the opening, Van Damme, older and slower but still possessed of the skills to pay the bills, kicks and punches and shoots his way through a legion of stuntmen until everything goes wrong. And it's been going wrong for a while, and it's a good thing Van Damme still has the skills to pay the bills because Van Damme has bills to pay: IRS arrears, child support, court costs. On-set, he's getting no support from his director, a truculent young Hong Kong hotshot who doesn't want to hear Van Damme's complaints, insulting him in untranslated rants: "Just because he brought John Woo to America, he thinks he can rub my dick with sandpaper?" Van Damme needs this job; he needs every job. And so, the weary and aching Muscles from Brussels endures, bearing the heavy load of life like a '80s Atlas on unsteady ground in the new millennium.

I contend we are both atheists; I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. -- Stephen F. Roberts

In Religulous, stand-up social commentator Bill Maher doesn't just assert how he believes in one less god than many of us, and he doesn't just craft bold, bizarre and hilarious moments of comedy and discussion with the help of director Larry Charles (Borat). More importantly, and more intriguingly, Maher states the film's thesis in an introduction filmed at Mediggo, the prophesied location of the final battle of Armageddon as written in Revelation; Maher, much like author Sam Harris does in his excellent (if dry) book The End of Faith, proposes that religious belief, in an age of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, actively endangers humanity through encouraging conflict, promising rewards for irrational behavior, justifying artificial divisions and enabling other unfounded and unkind forms of thinking. Or, as Maher succinctly puts it early on, "When Revelations was written, only God had the power to destroy the world. ..."

And then the opening titles kick in, a montage of Maher globe-trotting in search of people to talk to, and as the guitar riffs of The Who's "The Seeker" ring out, we recognize that we're going to get plenty of sizzle along with the steak in Religulous, lots of showbusiness to liven up the soul-searching. Like most documentaries dealing with weighty matters, though, the concern in Religulous isn't that there'll be no sizzle with the steak but rather if there'll be steak to go with the sizzle; does Religulous have the right ratio of factual points to funny punch lines, a balanced mix of context and comedy?

Outwardly confident yet quietly insecure, 18-year-old Venkatesh Chavan climbs into a tree and stares at a pristine pool. He's a domestic worker at a nearby hotel in the Indian coastal city of Panjim, Goa, and he's ambitious enough to know that he wants something more, even if he doesn't know what, exactly. He performs his duties, meets his considerably younger friend Jhangir Badshah to sell plastic bags to earn extra money, studies the untouched pool and the surrounding, uninhabitated house and garden grounds, and retires for the night.

Boiled down to its essence, The Pool, which opened in New York earlier this week and will expand across the country in the coming weeks, is an apparently obvious tale that unexpectedly yet inexorably immerses the viewer in the lives of four characters that, like the pool itself, are deeper than they appear from the surface.

Venkatesh, for example, gives the appearance of an industrious young man, though he's constantly late for work and is bored by his daily routine. Opportunity comes knocking when a young woman (Ayesha Mohan) and her father (Nana Patekar) show up at the pool. The girl is insolent and rebellious, the man is gruff and stern. She reads intently, he tends impassively to the garden. After a period of observation from his perch in a tree, Venkatesh follows the man and quietly makes his presence known as the man shops for garden supplies at a nursery. Soon enough, the man, who is never named in the film, hires Venkatesh to help him in the garden, where he is introduced to daughter Ayesha.

Paris 36 tries to do a dozen different things, and does none of them well. But even that description may not be harsh enough, because it makes the film sound ambitious. It's not. Director Christophe Barratier, whose The Chorus was a quality rendition of an age-old formula, doesn't even pretend to give much thought to any of the disparate elements he assembles here. This is one of those middlebrow period-piece comedies that mistakes frenzy for energy and spotless soundstage gloss for visual style. It may play well with certain audiences for whom "arthouse" is synonymous with "no explosions," but there's really nothing to see here.

Well, in theory there's a lot to see, including but not limited to the following: a would-be portrait of the French Popular Front in the 1930's; the story of a bunch of unemployed workers banding together to put on a show and save a historic theater; the tragedy of an old workhorse (Gérard Jugnot) who loses custody of his accordion prodigy son to his cheating wife when the theater first closes down; a romance between a communist rabblerouser (and stagehand, and actor!) and a singing ingénue (Nora Arnezeder) taken under the wing of a fascist loan shark (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu); the spiritual rebirth of an old orchestra conductor who has spent the last 20 years alone with his radio; a no-talent comic (Kad Merad) who sinks to performing for the Nazis after being booed off stage by everyone else, though he is of course much too lovable to actually be an anti-Semite.

Starring Michael Cera and Kat Dennings, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist is a light, slight, fleet-footed teen comedy of romance and indie rock; there are logic holes in it, and lulls, and moments that seem devoid of sense, to be sure, but there are also moments in where Cera or Dennings will smile and your momentary doubts and disagreements are washed away and your head is filled with a sense of gladness, not despair, that you're watching our young, happy hipster heroes on screen. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist combines the shaggy-dog sprawl of an early John Hughes film with the blunt talk and softly-rounded feelings of the Apatow comedies, and if it did not have leads as charismatic and tonally correct as Cera and Dennings, it would be very close to dead in the water; however, since it does, it isn't.

Taking place in some movie version of Manhattan where parking is always immediately available and everyone over 25 has, apparently, been executed Logan's Run-style, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist begins as Nick (Cera) is trying, and failing, to get over his breakup with the tedious-yet-tempting, hot-yet-hateful Tris (Alexis Dzienia), leaving lengthy messages on her phone and exquisitely sequenced mix discs at her door. Tris laughingly discards Nick's most recent effort into the trash at school; sarcastic-but-sweet Norah (Kat Dennings) retrieves it, as she's done for several of Nick's discarded offerings: "He makes the best mixes ever." The fact that Nick's latest effort is labeled "The Road to Closure, Vol. 12" tells you that Nick has strong feelings, and, in this case, weak vocabulary skills.

The modern romantic comedy has long treated novelty like a venereal disease, fleeing any thought of invention as it foists the same tired, rigid formula on viewers content to consume familiar pap dressed up in slightly different duds. Still, if the average studio rom-com offers little of worth aside from the occasional endearing performance (and no, I don't mean you, Ms. Bullock), there's something even more noxious about the strain of ethnic-indie romances pioneered by 2002's smash hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which charmed audiences by taking recognizable conventions and spicing them up with broad, brash stereotypes. It's this subgenre to which Everybody Wants to Be Italian belongs, since Jason Todd Ipson's film is a lovey-dovey fantasy in which every character is an Italian cliché save for the two protagonists, who both pretend to have descendants in the Old Country because they think the other does. This posing-as-an-Italian conceit is fluffy silliness, and barely mined for humor or drama, as the writer/director instead introduces this central plot point and then immediately relegates it to the far background of his unoriginal tale of two unlikely people discovering that they're, in fact, soul mates.

When the worlds of Washington, DC political intrigue, infidelity, fitness centers and internet dating intersect and collide in a darkly hilarious fashion, you must be watching a film by the Coen brothers. Burn After Reading, Joel and Ethan Coen's follow-up to last year's critically lauded award winner, No Country for Old Men, was actually written by the duo as they were adapting No Country, but the two films couldn't be more different.

The colliding worlds in Burn After Reading involve a CIA analyst named Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), who's summoned to a top-secret meeting only to find out that the secret is he's being demoted due to his drinking problem. Cox blows a gasket and quits rather than taking the demotion, planning to spend his new-found spare time working on his memoirs and refining his drinking. Cox is married to Katie (Tilda Swinton), a icy pediatrician with the worst bedside manner imaginable, and she's less than sympathetic to her husband's life crisis.

Jamie Bell makes the best of a bad situation as Hallam, the titular teenage protagonist of Mister Foe, whose anger, resentment and paranoia drive him from his father's remote Scottish Highlands estate to the streets of Edinburgh in search of solace. Hallam's mother recently drowned in the loch behind the house, the apparent victim of a freak boating accident, and his dad (Ciarán Hinds) has moved on and married his former secretary Verity (Claire Forlani), whom he was seeing before his wife's untimely passing and whom Hallam believes is a gold-digging hooker responsible for mom's death. Bell conveys the kid's withdrawn distrust through restless body language and wary glares, while at the same time flashing steely, cocky defiance during Hallam's confrontations with dad and Verity, as well as nonchalant, gregarious charm in the company of others. His performance has a multifaceted vitality to it, equal parts wounded puppy dog and plucky fighter, and might have carried director David Mackenzie's follow-up to Asylum (adapted from a novel by Peter Jinks) were it not for the fact that the film doesn't treat its subject as a real person, but rather as a term paper-ready vessel for narrative themes of voyeurism and Freudian longing.

"One night in Bangkok and the tough guys tumble..."
-Murray Head

Don't ask me what happened to the real Nicolas Cage, because I don't know where he is.

I don't know what happened to the man who left Las Vegas, or the man who made Donald Kaufman into such an endearing figment of imagination, or the man who stole diapers as he stole hearts. All I've seen of late is a face, a name, a profile, a character, the artist formerly known as Nic Cage, an entity on auto-pilot and damn near self-parody that knows what he looks like and sounds like and makes do with that alone.

In Bangkok Dangerous, a remake by the Pang Brothers of their own 1999 thriller, Cage-Or-Something-Like-Him plays an assassin, perhaps the most laconic one this side of Forest Whitaker in '99's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and he is so reliably aloof throughout, so divorced from the proceedings that it almost becomes its own form of entertainment... which is certainly helpful once genuine entertainment refuses to show up to any other degree.

Long awaited in the wake of his 2005 debut Brick, Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom is a magic trick of a film; the second it's over, you want to see it again so you can try to catch how you were tricked, but you also want to see it again so you can return to the joy and wonder of being wrapped up in the nimble, deck-shuffling hands of a born showman. Watching it at first, some of The Brothers Bloom's creative and thematic elements seem like they're on loan from Paul Thomas Anderson (opening narration by Ricky Jay, pop-whiz-bang camera work, the troubled-but-tender relationship between the two brothers) while others feel as if they've been cribbed from Wes Anderson (deadpan confessions, whimsical set design, a parallel-universe setting where people still travel to Europe by steamship). The truth is, as much as The Brothers Bloom may feel like it's cribbing from other films at first, this is Rian Johnson's movie, and even if my more dreary and discerning critical faculties told me the final act goes on, perhaps, a beat too long, my inner moviegoer was sitting bolt upright, smiling, bright-eyed and carried away.

Brothers Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and Bloom (Adrian Brody) have grown up on the make, in a world of, as Jay's stage-setting narration puts it, "... grifters, ropers, faro fixers, tales drawn long and tall. ..." Stephen builds cons; Bloom gets close to the marks. Stephen's work on their scams is a weird, lucrative form of self-expression; as Bloom puts it, "My brother writes cons the way Russians write novels. ..." Bloom's work on their schemes is a weird, lucrative form of self-loathing; Bloom learns early on that playing a part means never having to be yourself, that he, when " ... being as he wasn't, could be as he wished to be." Stephen wants more. Bloom wants out.