Sure, the filmmaker can say, “Oh, I planned to make it a trilogy all along.” Tell me another.

There are exceptions, but not many of them. Still, I’m willing to add “Men in Black 3” to the very short list of third outings that actually work – better by far than the second film, perhaps even better than the first.

The director once again is Barry Sonnenfeld, but the key player here is one who isn’t even mentioned in the credits. While the writer of record is Etan Cohen, two other (and probably better) writers are listed on IMDB: David Koepp and Jeff Nathanson, both of whom have lengthy lists of strong films on their filmographies.

But, really, I don’t care who gets the credit: The point is that the script is better for this film than either of the previous two. The first one had the disadvantage of being an origin story: trying to tell an actual story, while introducing the universe of the comic books on which it was based. The second one was simply a rehash of the first with a slight twist, bigger special effects and weaker jokes.

But “MIB3” actually has a solid plot, one with credible sci-fi roots and twists but also one with heart. It throws off the jokiness in which this series has been mired to create action and adventure built in service to story, rather than vice versa (as has been Sonnenfeld’s curse as a director).

The film begins with a prison break by an alien known as Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement of Flight of the Conchords), who doesn’t appreciate his nickname: “It’s just Boris,” he growls, as he dispatches victims with large, thorn-like stakes that shoot out of his palms. He shows up in New York and grabs a time-travel device that allows him to go back to the day in 1969 when he was captured by a member of the Men in Black corps: Agent K.

In the present, K (Tommy Lee Jones) and J (Will Smith) are on Boris’ trail, even as J complains about how emotionally closed-off K remains from his partner. But when Boris jumps into the past, the present undergoes a major change: J wakes up the next morning to discover that K has not only disappeared but that no one except him seems to remember the crusty senior agent.

The only trace of him: a commemorative bust at headquarters, marking his death in the line of duty battling Boris in 1969. Oh yeah – and the invasion from Boris’ planet that threatens to wipe out Earth is imminent, though it was something K had prevented in his original encounter with Boris.

After a bit of exposition with the MIB’s new chief, Agent O (Emma Thompson, very funny but criminally underutilized), J figures out that he has to travel back to 1969 to search for Boris, rescue K and save the Earth.

Thankfully, the script (and, more important, Sonnenfeld) refrains from making a big deal about how silly/groovy 1969 was. Aside from a couple of hippie jokes, the major plot points involve the 1969 New York Mets and the first moon landing, without making a big to-do about how quaint the past seems. There’s even a very clever and tasty sequence involving Andy Warhol and The Factory (kudos to Bill Hader of “Saturday Night Live,” who plays Warhol with more than a bit of his Stefon character).

Otherwise, the main reason to hop back in time is to cast Josh Brolin as the young Agent K – in other words, for Brolin to play a young Tommy Lee Jones. And he does – brilliantly so, the same way Rob Lowe channeled Robert Wagner in “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.” Brolin captures Jones’ laconic delivery and steely squint. But he also helps the viewer (and Agent J) imagine what Agent K might have been like before he became the world-weary, terse fellow that Jones embodies.

The film also includes the marvelous Michael Stuhlbarg as an alien who can see all times on the continuum at once, as well as all the possible outcomes for any approaching moment. It’s a clever device, ingeniously deployed – sort of a variation on what Kurt Vonnegut called the chronosynclastic infundibulum in “The Sirens of Titan.” He becomes a valuable ally for K and J – and the target of Boris’ wrath.

Ultimately, what gives “MIB3” its heart is Smith, who has always been the battery that powers these films. It’s not just the action – which is fast, exciting and funny – but the emotional depth he brings. He still is best when reacting to Agent K (Jones, to be truthful, is barely in the movie), but he shows us something more here.

Sonnenfeld is who he is, which means that the film is littered with unnecessary bits of visual bric-a-brac that only slow things down (i.e., his cutaways to period living rooms watching the moon launch during the climactic battle). For a change, however, his reflexively jokey style is held in check.

As a result, “Men in Black 3” may just be a better film than the original, which came out in 1997. I’m as surprised as you are.

Spurlock’s topic is masculinity, masculine vanity and the slice of the Venn diagram where they intersect. He breaks it down mostly by varieties of body hair: the hair on your head (or the hair that’s NOT on your head), mustaches, beards, body hair and the notion of the metrosexual.

The approach is the same with each segment: Have a series of talking heads (celebrities and otherwise) offer observations on the topic, then home in on one particular person who offers an extreme or ultratypical example of the subject.

With mustaches, for example, he lets the commentators give their opinions, then shaves his own mustache, which he’s had for eight years. (As someone who shaved off his own mustache of 30-plus-years duration a couple of years ago, I can testify that it’s a startlingly personal moment.) When he points it out to his preschool-aged son, the boy bursts into tears.

For the beards segment, Spurlock finds his comfort zone of weirdness: a guy named Jack Passion, who is a world-champion beard grower. Passion explains his own vitamin regimen to promote and maintain beard growth and fullness and is shown traveling to a beard competition in Germany, which (spoiler alert) he wins.

There’s the pro wrestler who has to shave his entire body almost daily in order to get into the ring; the guy who runs an old-school barber shop and despairs of the incursion of “hair stylists”; the fellow who makes hairpieces (or, to use the current terminology, hair systems) for bald men; and a metrosexual.

The latter is a young New York salesman who is a Sikh and wore a turban well into his high-school years. He cut his hair as a teen and now consults a variety of specialists (including an eyebrow-threading salon) to sculpt exactly the perfect look to give himself the kind of confidence he lacked as a teenager.

For expert witnesses, Spurlock brings in both social scientists and comedians (including Zach Galifianakis, Adam Carolla and Paul Rudd) to offer what amounts to easily deduced conclusions: Men do this stuff to feel good about themselves and, on a more genetic level, to attract partners to procreate and continue the species.

His framing device is a visit to a spa by Jason Bateman and Will Arnett, who banter aimlessly as they get facials, massages and the like. The pair are listed as executive producers, probably for exactly that participation. Spurlock doesn’t need them.

Some have criticized this as being a glorified reality show that could just as easily have been on TV. But most reality TV lacks Spurlock’s sly attitude or willingness to give the eccentric the chance to truly explain themselves, rather than simply letting them appear foolish.

“Mansome” isn’t deep – but then, it’s about vanity, the definition of shallowness. It never bores, however, and frequently entertains.

That sensation is captured perfectly in Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom,” as wonderfully odd and formal a film as Anderson has made. Even in Anderson’s detail-oriented obsession with symmetry and control of his images, he manages to let the unpredictability and volatility of young love burst through at unexpected moments.

Anderson’s film, opening in limited release Friday (5/25/12), is, ostensibly, a comedy. But its humor and its joys are never the obvious sort that most movie comedy uses as oxygen. If anything, there’s a certain giddy airlessness to Anderson’s films in general – and to “Moonrise Kingdom” in particular. And yet that cinematic hypoxia creates its own kind of high, if you can adjust to the altitude.

Not everyone can – nor will everyone want to. No doubt Anderson will be tarred once again with the brush of quirkiness, as though he were some camera-toting Zooey Deschanel, shooting whatever struck his fancy and giggling about it afterward. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Rather, Anderson has a story to tell and a very specific way he wants to tell it. He’s not disregarding the audience; he’s simply not pandering to it. The audience has to meet him halfway. If they do, they’ll find a rich, strange parallel world – essentially another corner of the same universe in which the characters of his other films dwell (including the stop-motion figures in “Fantastic Mr. Fox”).

Set on an island that feels like New England (though Anderson makes a point of never mentioning which state we’re in, other than an Andersonian one) in September 1965, the story is centered on two preteens: Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward). Suzy lives on the island with her parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) and her three younger brothers. Sam is a regular summer visitor to the island as a member of the Khaki Scouts (a Boy Scouts analog), which has an island encampment, run by Scoutmaster Ward (Edward Norton).

Sam “resigns” from Scouts, escaping from his tent to meet up with Suzy (with whom he has been corresponding during the school year). Their epistolary relationship has struck sparks of youthful romance, though neither of them is all that sophisticated about what that entails (because it’s 1965; with 12-year-olds today, forget about it).

Sam packs enough camping supplies to live on their own; Suzy’s contribution is a battery-powered portable record player, a kitten in a carrier, and her favorite record (a 45 by Francoise Hardy). They swim, Sam catches fish and cooks and they make halting forays into romance. This amounts primarily to hugging and kissing, followed by a little French kissing (relatively tentative) and her invitation for some light petting: “You can touch my top if you want,” she says, standing in front of him in her bra and shorts. He complies by solemnly laying his hand on her breast, as though feeling for a heartbeat.

Their disappearance causes an uproar among the island’s adults: Scoutmaster Ward, the Bishops (who are both lawyers) and the local police chief (Bruce Willis), who is having a slightly sad affair with Mrs. Bishop. The search turns into a hunt and the hunt, eventually, into a chase. Alliances are formed and broken, as different adults find themselves drawn to this romance of young souls in a hostile world. Toss in an approaching hurricane and an unreliable dam and you have the makings of what passes for drama in a film as carefully assembled as Anderson’s.

I say assembled not as a pejorative but as a descriptive. Each scene, even each image, seems to have been considered and reconsidered before Anderson committed it to film. To some, the shifting color scheme (and the schematic colors), the framing of each moment, the period flavor of the dialogue (as carefully wrought as the Coen brothers’ in “Miller’s Crossing,” only more innocent) will undoubtedly seem mannered, rather than considered, pretentious rather than inspired. The only moments when the camera and the characters bust loose – if only momentarily – are about that rush of feeling that new love can bring about, when the world seems so rife with sensation that you feel as though you will explode if you don’t run, jump or otherwise toss inhibition to the wind.

Even the score is deliberately chosen, consisting mostly of work by composer Benjamin Britten and the songs of Hank Williams, as odd a musical couple as you’re likely to find. Williams’ songs have an alternately upbeat and mournful, lovesick quality; Britten’s work arouses all sorts of feelings, ultimately giving what might seem like a trifle about young love the gravity of a life-or-death situation (which, to the characters, it is).

Those choices, too, can be second-guessed as arch or inspired. That, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. Anderson’s filmmaking is like that of some eccentrically driven visionary, hoping to extract big feelings out of the smallest moments. And he does.

In part, the film works because of the casting of the kids. It’s not just Jared Gilman as Sam or Kara Hayward as Suzy, though they are nearly perfect. Gilman has the slightly bleary intensity of a young River Phoenix, who he resembles, despite his Buddy Holly/Elvis Costello glasses. There’s a determination, a set to the jaw, that is offset (or, perhaps, underscored) by his obviously lunatic passion for Suzy.

In contrast, Hayward has a certain steely quality, tempered by a fiery tendency to unleash violence on her tormenters. She can shift from girlish reticence to fierce female warrior at the mention of the scissors she used to stab a Khaki Scott who has come to capture the young lovers.

The adults are as good as the kids, with Willis giving a particularly subtle and even heart-breaking performance as the quietly lovelorn police chief who feels a surprising connection to young Sam. Murray and McDormand are a peppery couple; Murray blends aloofness and authority in a way that still can’t mask the roiling emotions he is trying to keep in check. McDormand is the wife who may still be his partner but has stopped being his lover, except out of obligation – and is always a mom underneath.

“Moonrise Kingdom” is a masterpiece that perfectly captures an imaginative world that springs wholly from the mind of Wes Anderson, with nary a false move. But its pleasures require the viewer to give up preconceptions of what a movie ought to be and simply surrender to Anderson’s vision.

A Senegalese actor who grew up in France, Sy gives a performance that is incredibly vibrant, underlined by a certain sadness. He fairly bursts off the screen, playing a character that is an embodiment of undirected life force, one who gradually learns to focus his energy to make him someone truly to be reckoned with.

Sy plays Driss, an unemployed immigrant in Paris who initially is just looking for someone to sign his form, acknowledging that he’s applied for jobs, so he can collect unemployment. Fresh out of jail after a six-month stint for robbery, he catches the eye of Philippe (Francois Cluzet), who admires Driss’ willingness to look at Philippe as a person, rather than a good deed.

Philippe is a millionaire; he’s also a quadriplegic, in the market for a new caregiver. We see the other applicants, all offering noble reasons (or worse) for wanting to work for Philippe, who lives in an amazing chateau in the center of Paris. Driss, however, doesn’t offer him pity; he treats him as an equal, rather than an employer or, worse, a cripple in need of pity.

Driss finds himself unexpectedly employed, living in luxurious surroundings and achieving an intimacy with his employer that few friends ever reach. Their relationship as boss-worker evolves to friendship that opens new vistas for both of them in ways neither could anticipate.

Based on a true story, “The Intouchables” is a movie that already has been tarred with the condescending brush of American critics who mischaracterize it as patronizing to the character of Driss. One went so far as to wrong-headedly invoke the inaccurate specter of racism and to use the term “Uncle Tom,” which seems like a willful misreading, through a particularly uptight lens.

The title (a clumsy one, at best, blending English with the French word for “untouchable”) refers to both characters: the drastically disabled man, who essentially is shut away from society; and the immigrant, part of a group with whom the country’s natives have, at best, an ambivalent relationship.

In this film by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, both have been marginalized – and each man gives the other something. For Driss, raised on the streets, it’s not just a brush with classical music and art museums, but a sense of his own possibility in life, beyond what he’s already done. For Philippe, it’s re-engaging with life in ways he’d given up on since the paragliding accident that cost him his mobility.

It’s a distinctly American response to view this through the prism of race, simply because the characters are black and white. The relationship between these men has to do with class; race never enters into it. It’s a story of rich and poor, immigrant and Frenchman. Viewing it through an American lens on race ignores the reality of the story.

It’s neither condescending nor patronizing; it’s simply human, beautifully so. The give-and-take between Philippe and Driss is honest and sharply humorous; each has a wit that tends to the inappropriate, which bonds them in ways that have nothing to do with race, social status or anything else, other than a shared ability to laugh at things that might appall others.

Cluzet, who looks more like Dustin Hoffman with age, gives a wonderfully dry performance as a rich man trying to regain control of a life that suddenly slipped from his grasp. It’s a terrific bit of acting, accomplished only with his face, his head and, most particularly, his eyes, which can be amazingly expressive.

As noted, Sy is like a force of nature in this role, capable of introspection but also of dazzling energy. A scene in which he breaks loose on the dance floor to the sounds of Earth Wind & Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland” is one of the most merry in recent memory: an explosion of physical joy in an environment that has been sapped of it.

Uplifting, life-affirming and funny – they’re among the best words to describe “The Intouchables.” Ignore the nay-sayers; this is a film that will touch your heart in the most direct way imaginable.

But this genre of horror film is played out – or at least this slight, rarely unnerving effort makes it seem so. Sanchez follows the horror-movie template. And while he doesn’t show us ghosts, he wants us to believe in evil spirits and a kind of demonic possession without doing much to convince us.

The title character, Molly (Gretchen Lodge), is a newlywed who moves back into her remote family home with her groom, Tim (Johnny Lewis), after their wedding. Almost immediately, something seems hinky; their burglar alarm goes off in the middle of the night and they can hear noises on the main floor as they huddle nervously at the top of the stairs. Needless to say, there’s nothing there – or at least nothing they can see.

Tim is a truck driver who is gone for long stretches on the road, leaving the skittish Molly at home alone. Molly and her sister, Hannah (Alexandra Holden), do scut work at a big-box store, cleaning windows, spills and the like. Oh, and Molly is a recovering heroin addict, fresh out of rehab at her wedding, haunted by memories of her late parents – her father in particular.

It’s not giving away too much to say that she has serious daddy issues; so does her sister. It won’t take long to guess what they are. The only real questions raised by the slowly – very slowly – unfolding plot is when (not if) she’ll go back to using narcotics and whether the events we see are real or just the product of a drug-addled imagination.

There’s no trick to tweaking an audience’s nerves in a movie like this. Just put a video camera in the main character’s hand instead of a flashlight – make that a video camera that offers a night-vision feature – and make its viewfinder the audience’s point of view. Then have that character slowly – very slowly – search her own house in the dark. Rather than showing something jumping out of the dark, instead have the character scream, drop the still-running camera and continue to scream, moan and otherwise imply fear and pain off-camera, while the audience watches what is, essentially, a still-life image of an empty room. To quote the always relevant Count Floyd, “Oooo – scary!”

Lodge is a seemingly fearless actress, given that she does most of her acting alone and, frequently, naked. And when she gets physically violent with Lewis, it will make you cringe. But cringing is very different from engaging with the movie as a whole. In that sense, “Lovely Molly” rarely goes anywhere unexpected – and hardly anywhere that’s actually frightening.

Instead, it’s a disciplined, controlled and ultimately disappointing drama of family tension and murder. The crime does not go unpunished, but the punishment seems mild to the point of nonexistence.

Nadezhda Markina plays Elena, second wife of Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov), a retired businessman of means. They live in a posh penthouse apartment in Moscow, sharing the same bed from time to time but keeping separate bedrooms.

Their individual children are the only source of friction in their lives. Her son Sergey (Aleksey Rozin), from a previous marriage, is an unemployed ne’er-do-well with a teen-age son and a baby; Elena helps them out financially, but it’s a sore subject with Vladimir, who wants nothing to do with Sergey. When Elena asks him for money to help Sergey’s son Sasha get into college to avoid the army, Vlad refuses.

Elena, in turn, disapproves of Vlad’s daughter from his first marriage. Katya (Yelena Lyadova) is a drug-taking party girl who lives off Vlad’s money but rarely comes to visit him.

Then Vlad suffers a heart attack – and announces to Elena that he’s finally going to write a will. Said document will leave her their apartment and an annual annuity – but will bequeath the bulk of his money to Katya. And no, once again, he will not help Sasha with the college funds.

So Elena, who met Vlad when she was a nurse and he suffered an attack of appendicitis, begins to think the unthinkable. How can she get rid of Vlad before he writes that will – with the lawyer set to arrive the next day?

This is the kind of material James M. Cain would have devoured easily, turning it into a twisted tale of murder, deception and betrayal. Director Andrei Zvyagintsev, on the other hand, wants to do something more subtle, invoking the law of unintended consequences. In the end, Elena unwittingly constructs her own prison, with the threat of arbitrary violence apparently lurking in her future. But not necessarily.

It’s slowly wrought and not very satisfying, given what’s come before. Zvyagintsev sets up antagonists, then has them shake hands and return to their neutral corners. After an entire film of quiet, staid camerawork, he springs a sequence at the end of violence and darting, handheld imagery meant to shock us with its revelation. But it’s not shocking, only random – and unsatisfying, to say the least.

His cast is solid, with Markina particularly resourceful as Elena, pragmatic yet appalled at the same time, about her willingness to do what she sees as her only way out.

But “Elena” is too even, too bloodless (in all senses of the word) to be as rewarding as it ought to be. It’s a story about someone creating herown personal hell and being forced to live in it. But hell doesn’t seem particularly unnerving at the end.

When I saw Tanya Wexler’s “Hysteria” last fall at the Toronto Film Festival, I enjoyed it for its perspective on how far we’ve come in terms of our attitudes toward women having control over their own bodies.

Eight months later, “Hysteria,” a charming comedy to be sure, suddenly feels dramatically relevant to current events – particularly the right wing’s attacks on women’s reproductive rights. When Maggie Gyllenhaal, as a forward-thinking woman in 1880 London, voices her belief that, in the not too distant future, women will be able to have the final say about their own welfare, you listen and think, “Hmmm – apparently not yet, as far as some people are concerned.”

Wexler’s film, from a script by Stephen and Jonah Lisa Dyer, is very funny about, um, touchy subjects. Oh, let’s just get it out there: This is a movie about the invention of the vibrator and women seizing the reins of their own pleasure. And it’s set in the Victorian era, at a time when conventional wisdom had it that women could only be satisfied by, as one character puts it, “the introduction of the male member.” If then.

The film’s story centers on Dr. Mortimer Granville (a wonderfully proper Hugh Dancy), a modern-thinking physician struggling against a medical establishment mired in the age of bleeding and leeching. Fired from his most recent post for insisting on following the tenets of germ theory, he struggles to find a new job – until landing one with Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), whose private practice specializes in treating upper-class women.

Specifically, he deals with what he says is an epidemic of “hysteria,” a then-popular diagnosis only for women. Its cause was thought to be “a wandering uterus” and its treatment is what Dalrymple refers to as “pelvic massage,” performed on clothed women with their drawers off and their feet up in stirrups, under a drape. Dalrymple keeps at it for 45 minutes or so, until they achieve a paroxysm – in other words, he’s finger-banging them until they reach orgasm. In the name of medicine, of course.

It’s a lucrative practice but he’s got his hands full, so to speak – which is why he needs to add Granville as his assistant. The new young doctor proves so popular – and the practice grows so busy – that Granville manipulates himself right into a case of carpal tunnel syndrome.

As Dalrymple’s assistant, Granville lives with the doctor and his family, including his daughters, Charlotte (Gyllenhaal) and Emily (Felicity Jones). Charlotte is a crusader, who works with the poor at a settlement house, much to her snobbish father’s disapproval. Emily, on the other hand, studies phrenology and winds up engaged to Granville, who seems destined to take over his future father-in-law’s practice. In his spare time, Granville visits his adoptive brother, the wealthy and notorious Edmund St. John-Smythe (Rupert Everett), whose hobby is that new-fangled science of electricity.

The plot eventually ties Edmund’s electrical tinkering with Granville’s wrist and hand problem: At one point, while holding a prototype electric feather duster, Granville finds instant relief from pain, thanks to the gadget’s vibrations – then makes the leap that this device cold be the salvation of his medical career, if applied to his patients’ tender areas. Meanwhile, he discovers that, in fact, he is more attracted to the rebellious Charlotte, with her progressive ideas about women and the poor, than he is to the more sedate Emily.

Loosely based on history (the first vibrator was marketed as “Granville’s Hammer”), Wexler’s film deals with topics which the period characters have no way of expressing in words. Women’s sexuality? Impossible. Women as equals to men? Ghastly. Women taking control of their own needs and well-being? Certainly not. (Meanwhile, in 2012, the state of Kansas has made it legal for pharmacists to deny contraceptives to women if it goes against the pharmacist’s religious beliefs.)

The film manages to be naughty without being smutty. This is, after all, a movie about the invention of the vibrator, about male doctors manually stimulating women for the women’s pleasure (though it’s not labeled as pleasure, and the doctors regard it as exhausting physical labor). The jokes aren’t exactly innocent but manage to be witty without being exploitive.

Much of that comes from Wexler’s approach – and from the performances. There is nary a jot or tittle of sexual longing or hunger from the men – and most of the women are too proper to call it what it is. If anything, the humor comes from the perpetual British reticence and sense of propriety, even in a situation in which the most basic human desire is at issue. Dancy is particularly enjoyable as the earnest, put-upon doctor who just wants to help people, despite the numerous obstacles placed in his path.

Pryce is equally good as the rigid and proper doctor, as concerned with social standing as with healing. Jones makes an attractive but pragmatic Emily, while Gyllenhaal has exactly the kind of juice and vitality that everyone else works so hard to tamp down.

If the plotting at the end gets a bit complicated and rushed, well, that’s a minor quibble. Otherwise, “Hysteria” is an engaging comedy of manners, about a time when its subject was not discussed by the well-mannered.

They are the members of the Child Protection Unit, charged with investigating everything from runaways to sexual abuse. Their daily work brings them in contact with some of society’s saddest cases because their clientele includes its youngest, most vulnerable victims.

Le Besco, who also appears in the film, was inspired by a documentary on the real CPU. She interviewed its members, then cowrote her script based on the experiences she’d been told about. Her film encompasses the day-to-day lives of the members of the CPU squad, whose cases seem to come and go with surprising speed and disheartening regularity.

We see the squad members interviewing victims and perpetrators, coaxing or browbeating confessions or statements. A little girl will casually mention that, while bathing her, her father “scratches” her bottom. A teen offhandedly mentions offering sex in exchange for a cell phone; a mother dragged in for shaking her baby viciously in public says that her older son (who looks to be about 3) is easier to get to bed at night when she gives him a handjob.

In between, we get a taste of the interaction between the members of the squad – between the group as a whole and between partners. It’s obviously intense work, creating similarly fraught bonds between colleagues. One pair – played by Marina Fois and Karin Viard – shares secrets about their personal lives, serve as each other’s confidantes and, ultimately, wind up with bitter recriminations against each other.

The humor of these officers, however, is defensive, combating the tragedy and absurdity of otherwise unsettling situations. It’s gallows humor, to be sure – and it usually accompanies those rare moments when the squad is able to prevent a tragedy, rather than clean up after one.

The tension sometimes derives from struggles within the precinct itself. It might be the departmental hierarchy (the narcotics squad is given preference over CPU) or the commander’s unwillingness to step in to make a difference when he might. Each member of the squad brings his or her demons to the job; it’s hard to tell what might set an officer off.

Le Besco also offers a glimpse of the home life of the officers, where spouses have no interest in hearing about life on the job. But these are cops who can’t help bring their work home with them. It could be anything from a raid on a gypsy encampment to take the children – who are being trained as pickpockets – into custodial care or watching a rape victim give birth to stillborn child, from which DNA will be taken to charge her attacker.

The director has a large and varied cast, all of whom bring different facets to the job. Fois is the tightly strung cop who urges Viard to leave her unfaithful husband, while hiding her own anorexia. Joeystarr is the mixed-race tough guy with a tender heart for abandoned children. Frederic Pierrot is their long-suffering squad leader, who must serve as buffer between hot-tempered cops and their chilly chief (Wladimir Yordanoff).

The film’s one flaw is Le Besco herself. She plays a photojournalist who is embedded with the CPU to shoot their daily doings. At first given the cold shoulder, she gradually is accepted, becoming involved with one of the squad members. But her presence distracts from, rather than illuminates or adds to, the reality of the film.

Without her, the film might be 10-15 minutes shorter and even more headlong than it is. Even so, “Polisse” is gripping and powerful, an unsentimental look at a thankless job where the victories are hard fought and all too rare.

Did I say offensive? Put it this way: If you don’t have a sense of humor about race, religion, ethnicity, sexuality and gender, here’s a movie that will easily induce anger or worse.

If, on the other hand, you can find the risky humor in a throwaway visual gag in which an anti-Semitic despot plays a Wii game based on Palestinian terrorists killing Israelis at the 1972 Munich Olympics (complete with a feature that offers the shooter “Jew-dar” to find his targets), well, this is the movie for you.

I will admit that I gasped and then giggled at the audacity of what is a tossed-off sight gag. And I was laughing regularly throughout this film, which was directed by Larry Charles and written by Baron Cohen and three others. Is it uneven? Of course – so are all of his films. But his hit-to-miss ratio is as high as that of the Zucker brothers in their “Airplane” heyday.

No one is safe from Baron Cohen’s sting, starting with the rulers of Arab countries, admittedly a demographic that can stand having fun poked at them. But he’s just as rough on the people who show up to protest dictators’ appearances at the U.N. And vegans and liberals and the CIA. And Brooklyn hipsters. And American tourists. And Arab expatriates. And the media. And celebrities… and … and …

Well, as I said, Baron Cohen casts a wide net. He seems to have something wildly nasty to say about everyone – but he always seems to say it with a charming smile. He’s an equal-opportunity offender.

In the film, he plays Admiral General Aladeen, supreme ruler of the Middle Eastern kingdom of Wadiya. He’s ready to execute anyone who questions his authority or his knowledge of current events or even anyone who simply makes him a little uncomfortable. Sure, his people hate his brutally dictatorial ways; that’s why he has a double to take his place in public, the better to be assassinated in his stead (since attempted assassinations seem to be a part of his daily life).

And most of them, apparently, are being orchestrated by his uncle, Tamir (Ben Kingsley), who should have taken the throne when Aladeen’s father died. When Aladeen is summoned to speak to the United Nations about whether or not he has nuclear weapons, Tamir plots to secretly kill him and replace him with a dim-witted goatherd, who will be manipulated into doing Tamir’s bidding (including opening Wadiya’s rich oil reserves to international development).

But Aladeen escapes from his kidnapper and winds up homeless (and beardless), the object of compassion of a politically progressive young woman named Zoey (Anna Faris). She takes him in, giving him work in her extra-crunchy natural foods co-op in Brooklyn.

Old habits die hard, however, and Aladeen’s attitudes are deeply entrenched. Yet exposure to Zoey (and eventual attraction to her) ultimately changes Aladeen, even as he plots to infiltrate the Wadiyan stronghold in Manhattan and replace his replacement in time to foil Tamir’s plot to declare democracy in Wadiya.

The plotting here is more structured than the free-form approach in “Borat” and “Bruno,” both of which felt like they were scripted in the editing room. The story is simple, to be sure, a clothesline on which to hang a variety of comedy sketches. In one, for example, Baron Cohen and Jason Mantzoukas, as Aladeen’s only ally in America, take a helicopter ride over Manhattan to do surveillance on the hotel where the Aladeen imposter is being kept. Trying to seem like typical tourists, they instead scare the crap out of their fellow passengers, who think they’re planning the next 9/11.

Baron Cohen’s jokes about the co-op’s customers and employees are scabrous and deliciously observed, blending rudeness, visual gags, unexpected violence and other elements to create laughs. Similarly, his exchanges with Zoey are consistently funny because of Faris’ wide-eyed affect and Baron Cohen’s ability to say outrageous things without seeming to be making a joke.

In that respect, “The Dictator” is a deft satire – right up to its climax, in which Aladeen gives a speech about why he hates democracy and casually skewers American attitudes and actions of the past dozen years.

Baron Cohen admittedly is not for all tastes – but if you can swing with him, “The Dictator” is a vastly entertaining comedy.

The 1984 book, by Heidi Murkoff, is a perennial best-seller for its witty but honest assessment of the changes that women go through when they’re pregnant, the effect that has on her partner – and the subsequent transition of their relationship and their lives once the baby arrives.

But what writers Shauna Cross (who wrote the limp “Whip It”) and Heather Hach have come up with is like a melange of weak TV-movie pregnancy plots. The writers split the focus between three couples expecting babies, one couple that’s adopting and one single woman who confronts an unexpected pregnancy after a one-night hook-up. In that way, the writers and director Kirk Jones are able to focus almost completely on the clichés, without having to actually get very deep with any of the stories.

Let’s see: There’s Cameron Diaz as a personal trainer who’s the star of a “Biggest Loser”-type TV show. She winds up pregnant with her boyfriend (Matthew Morrison), one of the professional dancers on a “Dancing with the Stars”-type show.

There’s Elizabeth Banks, married to Ben Falcone (the air marshal from “Bridesmaids”); she runs a boutique that specializes in supplies for the breast-feeding mother (just so her assistant can say, “We’re going to need more nipple cream”). Her husband, a dentist, is the son of a famous NASCAR driver (Dennis Quaid), whose latest wife, Brooklyn Decker, is also pregnant. Just to be really trite, the son has daddy issues, because Dad never let him win at anything.

(Let’s not even get into the likelihood that a woman who looks like Banks would be married to someone who looks like Falcone, a funny guy to be sure but, really? When we later learn that, in fact, he was a one-time contestant on Diaz’s weight-loss show when he weighed 100 pounds more – no way.)

Then there’s a photographer (Jennifer Lopez) and her advertising-man hubby (Rodrigo Santoro), who are infertile and adopting a baby from Ethiopia. Finally, there’s a pair of food-truck entrepreneurs (Anna Kendrick and Chace Crawford), rivals and former high school pals who connect one night, with not-unexpected results.

Wait, you’re saying – where does Chris Rock fit in to this (because he’s so prominently featured in the commercials)? He’s part of the “dudes group,” a bunch of dads who get together regularly to take their kids to the park and let off steam: What happens in dudes’ group stays in dudes’ group. How hilarious is that? They’re drafted to help Santoro understand what he’s in for when his baby arrives. Even the presence of Rock and Thomas Lennon can’t elevate the weak writing.

What you’ve got is a series of sketches, variations on a theme, none of them too long, none of them in any way original – and very little of it amusing. Jones doesn’t need to think, just to mix and match, hopping from couple to couple without pausing for character development or story (since the plotline is already baked in).

The only one who actually finds the funny is Banks. Rock gets off a couple of decent lines and so does Megan Mullally, who shows up playing herself on the same “Dancing with the Stars” spoof. Several other people show up as themselves as well – Whitney Port, Dwyane Wade – and their presence alone is supposed to trigger laughs. It doesn’t.

“What to Expect When You’re Expecting” is like a Whitman’s sampler, in which every piece turns out to be a stale chocolate-covered cherry – the ones you bite and then sneak back into the box when no one’s looking.