Hurt Locker, The (2008)

Another French paean to amour fou and the existential sainthood appertaining to madmen and criminals — so what’s not to like?

A visual feast designed to make more palatable the movie’s dubious theology.

An extended dirty joke — that is, a very funny though obscene movie whose humor is, alas, inseparable from its obscenity

An interesting and intelligent take on the social and cultural dislocations caused by the Czech Republic’s assimilation into the globalized economy

A slacker comedy with some tentative and swiftly-disregarded pretensions to seriousness

I think I shall have to develop a shorthand designation for pictures like A Walk on the Moon, directed by Tony Goldwyn. We may call them tales of the Spiritual Adulterer. These started coming out in the mid- to late-1960s and have continued in uninterrupted spate since then. Their purpose is to sell us on…