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"Drillbit Taylor" is the first movie off the Judd Apatow Productions assembly line that seems like the product of an assembly line. In other words: "Drillbit Taylor" is to Judd Apatow as "Harry and the Hendersons" and "*batteries not included" were to Steven Spielberg. My review is here.

Perhaps I'm overestimating the influence of The Commercial Appeal and underestimating the cinephilia of the Mid-South audience, but I tend to think that foreign-language and "art" films that open in Memphis without a review are doomed to attract even fewer customers than they would otherwise, especially when the foreign films aren't from France and the art films aren't from Miramax.

For that reason, it's extremely frustrating to me when Malco books such a film without letting me know in advance, so I can see the movie and tell readers about it in the newspaper on opening day.

For example: Today, two foreign-language films, "The Band's Visit," from Israel, and "Caramel," from Lebanon, opened with little warning at Malco's Ridgeway Four.

Two "romantic comedies" (more or less), separated by seven decades of time, an equally wide chasm of technique and a veritable grand canyon of cultural differentiation, will be screened in unintentional competition tonight (Thursday, March 20) at Memphis' premier art museums.

The 1938 screwball masterpiece "Holiday" plays at 7 p.m. at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, 4339 Park. Dixon director Kevin Sharp will introduce the film, which tends to be overlooked in favor of 1940's similarly witty "The Philadelphia Story," also based on a play by Philip Barry, which reunited the "Holiday" team of director George Cukor, screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart and stars Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn.

Meanwhile, at 7:30 p.m. over in Overton Park, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art hosts the first local public screening of director Aaron Katz's Brooklyn-based 2007 "mumblecore" movie "Quiet City," which I wrote about here. The movie -- a no-budget, do-it-yourself exercise in naturalism, in contrast to the Golden-Age-of-Hollywood polish of "Holiday" -- was supposed to have been shown March 6, but a distributor snafu caused the screening to be rescheduled for tonight.

Like the film it's from, the above, literally "monolithic" image from "2001: A Space Odyssey" is redolent of both death and transcendence -- an end and a beginning. Did Arthur C. Clarke ever think of this scene -- or of Stanley Kubrick's film in general -- while he was on his deathbed in his beloved Sri Lanka? (After all, the movie -- released at the height of hippiedom in 1968, when it was viewed by many young truth-seekers in an altered state of consciousness -- was advertised as "The Ultimate Trip.")

As reported in this story Tuesday in The Commercial Appeal, two "road movies" -- with Samuel L. Jackson and Bernie Mac in one, and Justin Timberlake and Jeff Bridges in the other -- have stopped in Memphis this week to shoot scenes at The Peabody, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and other (mostly predictable) locations.

The stories of Dr. Seuss rely on an economy of line, both in their clever rhymes and their witty drawings. The new CGI adaptation of "Horton Hears a Who!" -- a book that, when you think about it, is essentially a children's variant on the classic science-fiction theme of "first contact" -- respects this, to a point. I'm not as enthusiastic about "Horton" as many of my colleagues, but it's certainly an above-average film (family or otherwise).

In the 1931 jaw-dropper "Night Nurse," Barbara Stanwyck is stripping down to her underwear in a hospital locker room so she can try on her new uniform when she notices a leering medical intern leaning in the doorway.

"Oh, don't be embarrassed," he says. "You can't show me a thing. I just came from the delivery room."

That line is more than risque; it's essentially gynecological in its suggestiveness. And it's typical of the lurid content to be found in the five startling "pre-code" sizzlers of the early 1930s gathered in "TCM Archives: Forbidden Hollywood Collection Volume 2," an awkwardly titled but must-see three-DVD set released March 4 by Warner Home Video.

Memphis movie fans with a taste for (Karo corn syrup-plus-red food coloring) blood and (prosthetic) guts might want to make a road trip to Nashville for the 7th annual Full Moon Tattoo and Horror Festival, March 21-23 at the Nashville Airport Marriott Hotel. (Apparently, one ballroom at the hotel will be devoted to horror movies, comic books and related interests, and another ballroom will be devoted to the art of the tattoo.)

The rogues' gallery of scare-flick celebrities scheduled to attend the event is impressive. The guest of horror, er, honor is director George A. Romero, who will host a midnight March 21 screening of his latest zombie movie, "Diary of the Dead," at Nashville's famous art-and-revival house, the Belcourt Theatre.

If you want to argue, as many do, that the decade of the 1970s represents the high point of American cinema history, you might want to pitch "Payday" to the unconvinced after you're through citing such familiar milestones as "Chinatown," "Nashville" and "Taxi Driver."

Released in 1973, "Payday" -- which stars Rip Torn, in perhaps his greatest role, as a reckless Country-and-Western singer -- was all but ignored at the time of its release and remains relatively unknown today. Perhaps that's why it still seems so fresh, even as it provides a textbook example of the attributes that became hallmarks of anti-Hollywood filmmaking after the smash success of the French New Wave-influenced "Bonnie and Clyde" in 1967.

With its location shooting and low-budget authenticity; its freewheeling sexual frankness and similarly loosey-goosey storytelling structure; its antihero attitude; its detail-nailing fascination with life on the margins of the American mainstream; its random violence; and its almost nihilistic message, "Payday" is a pure 1970s product, yet it's dated only by its fashions and slang. It's a movie Johnny Cash might have loved during his craziest, pill-popping days, and a messy lump of coal compared to such polished,future country-music productions as the Cash biopic, "Walk the Line." Find out for yourself: "Payday" recently was released on DVD, for the first time, by Warner Home Video.

"Married Life," the new movie from native Memphis filmmaker Ira Sachs Jr., opened Friday (March 7) in New York and Los Angeles.

From March 14 to April 4, the Sony Pictures Classics release will expand to Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, Minneappolis, Dallas, Houston, Seattle, Denver, Miami, Atlanta, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Portland, Austin, Salt Lake City, New Orleans, Kansas City, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Nashville and Little Rock.

Then, on April 11, "Married Life" will open in Memphis, along with Sacramento, Jacksonville, Omaha, Tulsa, Columbus and Spokane. (Yes, that's the level we're on. Ouch.)

"Diary of the Dead" -- or "George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead," to give the film its auteur-validating official title -- demonstrates that the horror master who created the cannibalistic zombie genre 40 years ago with "Night of the Living Dead" still has plenty to say.

"Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day," a comic novel by British author Winifred Watson, was published in 1938. If a film adaptation had been produced at that time, it might have been a "My Man Godfrey"-style classic. Unfortunately, this is 2008, not 1938, so instead of a nimble and contemporary antic farce for the mass audience, we get a lavishly appointed flat-footed period piece aimed at the "art house" crowd. My review of this film -- in which Frances McDormand is transformed from an Ugly Duckling who is described as "Oliver Twist's mom" is to an object of desire in high society -- is here.

Also opening today is Brazil's "City of Men," a sort of companion piece to the acclaimed and popular "City of God" (released in the U.S. in 2003), which also was set in the desperate, crime-wracked hillside favelas of modern Rio de Janeiro. The new movie's gritty atmosphere and cultural specificity are fascinating, but the plot and inspirational message are underwhelming. My review is here.

Also today, I review "Diary of the Dead." A slight expansion of this review can be found here at The Bloodshot Eye.

Perhaps the most legitimate, successful and even meaningful function of movies is to show viewers things they otherwise would not see.

This is true even of a highbrow period piece like "Atonement," in which Keira Knightley emerges, drenched and shimmering, from a garden fountain. It's especially true of a movie like "10,000 BC," described in its press notes as "a sweeping odyssey into a mythical age of prophesies and gods, when spirits rule the land and mighty mammoths shake the earth."

As a movie reviewer, I'm thankful that film writing, unlike music journalism, isn't riddled with scores of ridiculous terms intended to splinter even marginal genres into specialized, reader-alienating mini-classifications: emocore, electroclash, Nu metal, ghettotech and so on.

One music-inspired term has caught on, however. To the apparent distress of some of the style's practicioners, "mumblecore" is the name now commonly used to refer to a recent spate of low-budget and often lo-fi American independent films about jobless white twentysomethings seeking (and often rejecting) connection in Brooklyn, Chicago, Boston, Memphis and other places inhabited by artsy young people with access to camcorders and willing if non-professional actor friends.

If the mumblecore movement had inspired as much box office as it has alternative-press ink, such John Cassavetes-inspired "Slackavetes" auteurs as Boston's Andrew Bujalski ("Funny Ha Ha") and suburban Illinois' Frank V. Ross ("Hohokam") might be Spielbergs. The reality, however, is that few of the films have received any real exposure outside of major cities, except on DVD.

The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art will change that on Thursday (March 6) and Sunday (March 9) when it screens two of the better-known movies of the type, Aaron Katz's "Quiet City" and Joe Swanberg's "Hannah Takes the Stairs," the latter described as "the mumblecore equivalent of 'Gone with the Wind'" by J. Hoberman of The Village Voice.