Some more reporting from the land of the moving image:

Leatherheads is a colorless comedy (literally—the sepia-toned photography turns 1920s America into a perpetual autumn of burnt leaves, mud, and crabgrass), although not without a few brightspots. Directed by and starring George Clooney, it offers a glimpse of the early tumultuous days of professional football, when the players had to compete with the more popular college market. The film is rudderless and a trifle boring, although a few of the visual gags (a human shape emerging from a slough; a grazing cow taking notice of a scrimmage game) are well executed. With Renee Zellweger, John Krasinski, Jonathan Pryce.

My Blueberry Nights is Wong Kar-wai’s first film to use the English language, though it makes rather better use of his favorite language of all—the language of love. Except for the unusually coarse image, the film has a seductive surface—everything seems to be lit by neon lights, traffic lights, candlelight. It’s a film to get lost in. Lawrence Block collaborated on the screenplay, and it resembles a good short story—lightly plotted, but rich in detail. Wong’s game plan is to cast a moody spell based entirely on shared experience. If you’ve ever been kicked in the groin by love, you will empathize with these characters. With Jude Law, Norah Jones, Natalie Portman, Rachelle Weisz, David Strathairn, and, in a particularly arresting cameo, Cat Power.

Shine a Light is Martin Scorsese’s transcription of a Rolling Stones benefit concert, shot over the course of two nights at New York City’s Beacon Theatre. Well-covered from a multitude of angles by a cadre of celebrated cameramen (among them Albert Maysles of Salesman and Grey Gardens fame), the film nevertheless feels a bit too smoothly tooled, edited for efficiency rather than style. In fact, it isn’t really apparent until the final tracking shot that we are watching a Scorsese film. Still, the movie is a gilded gift to Stones fans, and there are charming, off-the-cuff moments, as when Charlie Watts, visibly exhausted after an intense drum solo, looks straight into the camera and issues forth a sigh of relief.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a low-budget video documentary that highlights the tension between Intelligent Design and Evolutionary Theory in the college classroom, makes no apologies for siding with the underdog (in this case, I.D.). For the first half of its running time, it launches a withering attack against Big Science for dogmatically cutting off certain areas of scientific inquiry. Supplemented by illustrative cartoons and hijacked newsreel clips, and hosted by a dryly poker-faced Ben Stein, the movie resembles one of Michael Moore’s combustible essay films, although it lacks Moore’s scope and organizational skills. (Though Stein proves himself a more thorough arguer than Moore.) The film scores points here and there, but it attempts to cover too much in too short a span, and winds up slightly wide of the mark. Still, as right-wing agitation, it serves a definite purpose. The issue is once again on the table.