In an earlier era, De Felitta's obvious talent for audience-pleasing material (his previous movies include the Sundance award-winner "Two Family House" and the jazz documentary "'Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris") might have launched him on a career making big-budget romantic comedies with A-list stars. He may get that chance, but the fact that he's a relative outsider who struggled for years to make a $5 million indie — grabbing Julianna Margulies for a leading role about a week before shooting started — tells you something about Hollywood then and now. (I'm not saying De Felitta has anything to complain about; he doesn't. My point is that what used to be mainstream entertainment has almost become art-house fare.)

"City Island's" eponymous setting is a geographical oddity, a little fragment of New York City that's just offshore from the Bronx, in Long Island Sound. It may be stretching the truth these days to describe it as a "fishing village," as City Island native and correctional officer Vince Rizzo (Andy Garcia) does in an opening voiceover, but it certainly used to be one. Plenty of New Yorkers have never been there and couldn't find it on a dare. As Vince's clandestine gal-pal Molly (Emily Mortimer) observes when he tells her about the place, its name contains two words with opposite affects, words that seem to contradict each other. (De Felitta's characters have a Woody Allen-esque tendency to slip into quasi-literary authorspeak once in a while; for the most part, I find this endearing.)

Now, as for Vince's clandestine gal-pal — it's not what you think. It's definitely not what Vince's sharp-tongued wife, Joyce (Margulies, resplendent in a straight-haired wig and designer jeans), thinks. De Felitta relies on the hoariest of comic-confusion structures, one that goes back well beyond Shakespeare: We understand what's going on in the Rizzo household, but everybody in the story is fatefully deluded. Vince isn't sleeping with Molly, although there's a tender ambiguity to their relationship that I really enjoyed, exactly the sort of unresolved sexual tension that American movies rarely permit to linger in the air between people. They're in an acting class together (taught by a grumpus-oid Alan Arkin), as Vince pursues his long-abated dream of becoming the next Brando.

Vince and Joyce both think their daughter, Vivian (the lovely Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Andy Garcia's real-life kid), is away at college, when she's actually stripping for Asian businessmen at a bump-and-grind bar. They definitely don't know about the, um, blossoming sexual appetites of their wiseass son, Vince Jr. (Ezra Miller). All I'll say about that is that De Felitta breaks new comic ground here: fat-chick humor, made politically acceptable! And exactly who is Tony Nardella (Steven Strait), the buff young parolee whom Vince takes in, straight out of the prison where he works? Well, we know, of course — but Joyce is thinking, hey, her husband's probably stepping out on her, and this kid sure looks good with his shirt off.

All this begins as fairly broad humor, with the beats arriving like clockwork and the audience enjoying its privileged position. (All of them smoke! And all of them pretend they don't!) Gradually and almost imperceptibly, De Felitta ramps up the comedy of errors into a more painful and personal realm, where each character reveals a fundamental loneliness. To my taste, Garcia hams it up too much in portraying Vince as a comic working-class boob, but the scene when he finally confesses to Molly all the things he can't tell Joyce is perfectly lovely.

Margulies, always an arresting performer, gets to play almost every scene driven by high emotion — righteous anger, wounded pride, pure lust — and possesses each of them in turn. De Felitta is generous in providing mini narrative arcs to his supporting cast, and he gets terrific performances out of Garcia-Lorido and Miller in what could have been afterthought misunderstood-teen roles. All the family secrets must come crashing together, of course, in an implausible, if impeccably crafted, collision of botched confessions, mistaken identities, handcuffs and risqué outfits.

For me, though, it's Mortimer's delicate performance as Molly that lends this comedy its most profound sense dimension, by weaving through it a nearly invisible thread of tragedy. This rueful Anglo-wraith observer may or may not be burning an unrequited torch for Vince (I vote for yes), but either way she's pretending to be somebody she's not. That's also true of everyone else in the movie — and indeed all of us, De Felitta seems to suggest — but the members of the Rizzo family remain tied to each other, for better or worse. While they fight it out and lurch their way toward a happy-unhappy, comic-dramatic ending, Molly melts into the night, alone in the city and without an island to call home.

"City Island" is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with wider release to follow.

Just within the last two years, the recent outpouring of pictorial energy and formal innovation in Italian cinema is finally forcing itself onto the fringes of American culture. Matteo Garrone's bleak crime epic "Gomorrah" and Paolo Sorrentino's sardonic, operatic political saga "Il Divo" -- both available on DVD -- borrowed techniques from Italian (and Italian-American) filmmaking legends to bear on their scathing portrayals of contemporary Italy's social dysfunction. Luca Guadagnino's forthcoming "I Am Love," starring Tilda Swinton as a Russian trophy wife in a super-rich Milanese household, is a sumptuous, dazzling spectacle that recalls the best films of Visconti.

That brings us to "Vincere," the knockout new film by Marco Bellocchio, who might be the greatest living Italian director but at age 70 remains almost totally unknown on this side of the Atlantic. Sometimes it feels utterly pointless to call out yet another artfully made foreign-language flick amid the unending stream of pop-clutter. I get it: You've barely got time to answer work e-mails and read your friends' Facebook posts. Some Italian movie you've never heard of? Forget it. Well, if you care about movies, I'm telling you to carve out time for "Vincere," a strange and powerful blend of historical fact and dreamlike imagination that captures both the charisma and the murderous madness of the young Benito Mussolini.

Despite some documentary elements here and there -- Bellocchio interpolates both real and invented black-and-white newsreel footage, along with scenes from Chaplin's "The Kid" and a silent version of the Crucifixion, probably from D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance" -- "Vincere" bears no relationship to a standard biopic. For one thing, Filippo Timi's magnetic performance as the young Mussolini, who in the years before World War I was a socialist leader in the northern city of Trent, takes second billing. This film's undoubted star is the glittering Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Ida Dalser, Mussolini's first love (and presumed first wife) and the mother of his first child. It's the screen performance of the year so far, stretching from erotic infatuation and total submission to anguish, rage and total defiance.

But no, "Vincere" isn't a biopic of Ida either, even if she's the central character. The title simply means "to win" (I guess it sounds better in Italian), and Bellocchio assembles a host of disparate ingredients -- animations, on-screen titles and found footage, along with the dramatic scenes -- into a Brechtian collage that illustrates Mussolini's changing politics and sudden rise to power, rather than depicting it in straightforward fashion. Maybe Bellocchio is arguing that Ida's passion and money were key elements in Mussolini's transformation from socialist rebel to fascist power-seeker, and that there was a secret understanding between them, even after he abandoned her for his official wife, Rachele Guidi. But I'm not sure about that; he may just be marveling at their combustible and insane relationship, and the ways it reflects their combustible and insane historical epoch.

If there's a flaw in "Vincere," it's the fact that the film's first 40 minutes or so offers such a parade of show-stopping cinematography (it's shot by Daniele Ciprì) and high-octane histrionics that the second half -- focused largely on Ida's dreary captivity in a series of mental hospitals -- can't possibly compete. Of course, Bellocchio is hamstrung by history here: After Mussolini seized power in 1922, Ida apparently never saw him again, or at least not up close. She was relentlessly persecuted and institutionalized; if evidence of their purported marriage ever existed, it was destroyed. Their son, Benito Albino Mussolini, was forcibly adopted by one of his father's cronies. While Mussolini in his strutting, buffoonish Il Duce mode appears in the film only in historical newsreels, actor Timi gets a second bite of the apple, playing Benito Jr. as a young man, entertaining college friends with a rip-roaring impersonation of his dad's oratorical style.

It's not exactly breaking news that those who lust for power will do almost anything to anybody on the way up, including abandoning and destroying those who helped them get there. What makes "Vincere" so oddly memorable is its combination of explosive technique and intimate focus. Even in telling the story of a world-historical figure who led his nation into momentous evil, Bellocchio depicts him as a man who loved a woman and then betrayed her, precisely because she loved him so much and understood him so well. Tyranny, after all, begins at home.

"Vincere" is now playing at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York, with more cities to follow. It's also available on-demand via IFC In Theaters, on many cable-TV systems.

I should say up front that I haven't read Larsson's novel, which by some critical standards might disqualify me from reviewing the movie. On the other hand, that's likely to be the position of most viewers; even when you're talking about a foreign-language movie and a bestseller in translation, the audience for movies is many times larger than the readership for books. And to drag out the hoariest cliché regarding novel-into-film adaptations, the movie's always got to stand on its own feet. (For what it's worth, my colleague Laura Miller likes Oplev's movie better than the book. "It's an extremely faithful adaptation that focuses on the central story and characters and loses a lot of extraneous material," she tells me.)

What I see in Oplev's film of "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," made from a screenplay by Rasmus Heisterberg and Nikolaj Arcel, is a curious and intermittently compelling hybrid of styles and ingredients. At times it feels like a slick Euro-thriller with a sexy, stylish heroine, somewhat in the mode of French director Luc Besson ("La Femme Nikita"), and indeed it was the highest-grossing European release of 2009. It's also a serial-killer procedural and a moody neo-noir, whose atmosphere, pacing and photography sometimes suggest the Scandinavian art-film tradition. (At a daunting 152 minutes, "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is longer than all but two of Ingmar Bergman's films.)

But let's get back to those competing titles, which suggest some other ways that this story is internally conflicted. Much of the allure of "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" stems from its air of double or even multiple mystery. There are the plot questions: What happened to Harriet Vanger, beloved niece of one of Sweden's most powerful men, who vanished off a secluded island 40 years ago? Is the Vanger clan's Nazi-collaborator past somehow linked to a gruesome series of mutilated and murdered women? Then there's the question of who this story's real hero is: Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a classic hardboiled noir protagonist if ever I've seen one, or bisexual bombshell Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the computer hacker with a black leather jacket and a Flock of Seagulls haircut who becomes his stalker, sidekick and lover.

Again, I haven't read the book, but Oplev's film struggles to have it both ways, with a diabolical cleverness verging on schizophrenia. It's a tale of girl-power vengeance and female sexual autonomy, and it's a story about a rakish middle-aged dude who nails the hottest chick in the world. It's a story about "men who hate women" that revels in the most ghastly details of their most terrible crimes, and then pays them back in violent catharsis. None of this is new for the thriller genre, to be sure, which revels in the worst things human beings can do to each other, while officially moralizing about them. (Much the same could be said about Greek tragedy or "King Lear," of course.)

Oplev gets maximum results from his tremendous cast, and while the script supplies little background on either of his main characters -- who may be drawn together by the way they've internalized old wounds -- Nyqvist and Rapace make them seem closer to real people than archetypes. Awaiting a prison term for writing a libelous article about a leading industrialist -- yes, that's a criminal offense in much of the world -- Mikael is a handsome, world-weary loner of 40 or so. He's drawn in by aging Henrik Vanger's (Sven-Bertil Taube) mournful quest for the truth about his long-lost niece partly by the yearning for a payday and partly because he has nothing to lose, and nothing anchoring him to daily life.

But as Mikael begins to track the long-missing Harriet Vanger, he gradually becomes aware that someone else is tracking him. On probation for a mysterious crime deep in the past (to be revealed in due course), Lisbeth is initially hired by Vanger's lawyer to dig dirt on Mikael, and then is herself lured in by his investigations. She believes he was set up in the libel case, and while tracking the files and e-mails on his computer, she notices a disturbing pattern behind the Vanger case that Mikael hasn't detected.

Meanwhile, Lisbeth has her own men-who-hate-women problem: A leering probation officer (Peter Andersson) who first demands blow jobs in exchange for favorable reports, and rapidly escalates to violent sexual abuse. Throughout the film, Oplev tries to walk a fine line, depicting sexual violence -- and Lisbeth's equally violent retribution -- with a shocking frankness while striving to stay just this side of outright exploitation. I can totally understand Lisbeth's appeal for many female readers and viewers; she's a post-punk update of the "I Spit on Your Grave" rape-revenge fantasy, a merciless dark angel of 21st-century kick-ass feminism.

Rapace, a brooding beauty who won a Swedish Oscar for this performance -- and also appears in two more forthcoming installments of this series -- invests Lisbeth with a powerful, wounded dignity; she's much more than a Lara Croft-style cartoon. But there's no point denying that Lisbeth, as we see her here, is also a male fantasy, albeit one inflected with a contemporary brand of p.c. sexual ideology. When Mikael finds out she's been stalking him and bursts into Lisbeth's Stockholm apartment, he finds her in bed with another woman. But said Sapphic companion soon vanishes, and shortly thereafter Lisbeth is shacking up with Mikael on the Vangers' remote island -- platonically, at least until the night when she gets naked and climbs on top of him.

On one hand, there's nothing to complain about here: Sure, Mikael's a lot older, but he's plenty attractive, and Lisbeth's an adult who gets to make her own decisions. Wasn't the point of feminism, after all, that a gal gets to pick her own partners for her own reasons? Lisbeth initiates the relationship, and although Mikael clearly falls hard for her, he's smart enough to grasp that any claims of proprietorship will drive her away fast. As a portrait of a relationship between two individuals, "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is plenty cool. But I can't help feeling that in so many ways this movie is also an ingenious dodge, a device for getting its boomer hero into bed with a hot young quasi-lesbo biker babe while exclaiming, "Feminism yay! Sexual violence boo!"

However you respond to it, the fraught sexual and investigative chemistry between Mikael and Lisbeth is the most powerful ingredient of "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." The movie's second half is a capably executed but mostly by-the-numbers procedural, as the duo unlocks the Vanger family's murderous Nazi-related secrets. Cinematographer Eric Kress captures the severe Scandinavian countryside with a dreamlike clarity, and blends various textures -- computer images, flashbacks, vintage black-and-white photography -- into a compelling weave. I suppose the inevitable American studio version (apparently being scripted by Steven Zaillian for Sony as we speak) will transpose these elements to the Pacific Northwest or coastal Maine, along with -- who, exactly? George Clooney as the journalist? Jessica Alba as the wounded avenger? But capturing the atmospheric loneliness of Oplev's film will be tougher.

"The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" opens March 19 in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.

Even in the current parched landscape for foreign-language releases, at least 9 or 10 of the films in this year's Rendez-Vous will ultimately play American theaters, with more likely to follow. For many educated, middle-class Yanks, foreign films pretty much equate to French films, as antiquated as that conception may be in terms of world cinema. With rare and occasional exceptions, movies from Spain, Italy, Germany and Latin America simply can't compete in the United States market -- and even East Asia, with its vast population and multiple film industries, probably doesn't supply as many movies to American screens as the French. (The 2009 foreign-language box-office champ, as far as I can tell, was the supremely dull biopic "Coco Before Chanel," which typifies a certain strain of by-the-numbers French costume drama.)

If this phenomenon largely reflects France's distinctive post-World War II identity as the anti-America -- or, more precisely, as a nation deeply indebted to America yet paradoxically devoted to resisting its cultural and commercial hegemony -- it also goes back to the very beginnings of cinema. Since the days of Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers, France and the U.S. have competed for the role of first and foremost among filmmaking nations. It tells you something that the Lumières pioneered cinema as a medium for public exhibition, and then ditched it as a novelty with no future. Edison took a somewhat longer view, and made a mint by bootlegging the first important French film (Georges Méliès' "A Trip to the Moon") for American distribution.

Although the French lost the battle for global cinematic supremacy a long time ago -- so far in 2010, American movies have taken about 60 percent of box-office receipts in France -- the impression lingers around the world that French film is superior in terms of quality if not quantity. Do Jean Renoir, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard somehow outrank, I don't know, John Ford, Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg? I'm not sure how you even start to answer that question, but I'll tell you this much: No French filmmaker that I've ever met would even ask it. The two nations' cinematic traditions have profoundly influenced each other from the word go, but at this point French directors owe more to Americans than the other way around.

Whether French movies are "better," overall, is inherently a matter of taste. But even if you think they are, that largely reflects the extent to which the French have appropriated an American language and made it their own. The term "film noir" was of course coined by French critics and film theorists, and is now applied to movies made all around the world. But the phenomenon it described -- a moody, fatalistic crime movie, made on the cheap and embodying a dim view of human nature -- was invented in these here United States, during our mid-century reign as the alleged world capital of optimism.

France has one thing that we haven't had for a long time: a genuine "film culture" in which certain movies deemed important by the intelligentsia are discussed and debated extensively, despite their commercial insignificance. Of course you can see that occasionally in the American media; I imagine more people read articles about "Hounddog" or "Antichrist" than actually paid to see them. But in France, idiosyncratic national filmmakers like Arnaud Desplechin, Claire Denis, François Ozon or Christophe Honoré are understood by the Parisian educated classes as major cultural figures, even if most of their fellow citizens couldn't pick them out of a police lineup. It's difficult to come up with American parallels -- Paul Thomas and/or Wes Anderson? Noah Baumbach? Ramin Bahrani? -- who provoke any similar level of attention.

Ozon and Honoré both have new movies in Rendez-Vous this year, which Francophiles around the country will get at least a brief opportunity to see on the big screen. Their films are oddly similar, doleful explorations of motherhood, even if Ozon's "Le Refuge" is a character drama with tragic overtones and Honoré's "Making Plans for Lena" is fueled by edgy, neurotic comedy.

In "Le Refuge" -- which like many of Ozon's films is a meticulous, contemplative, somewhat oblique experience -- the beautiful Isabelle Carré plays a recovering junkie who hides out at her family's place in the country while waiting to give birth to her dead boyfriend's baby. In "Making Plans for Lena" (the French title actually translates as "No, My Girl, You Won't Go Dancing"), the beautiful Chiara Mastroianni -- she's the daughter of Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni -- plays a recovering divorcee who hides out at her family's place in the country while deciding if she can manage her two kids on her own. Seen together, they offer a snapshot of contemporary French anxiety about the nation's future, the shifting consciousness of its women and the fate of its children.

Christian Carion's spy adventure "Farewell," while it's well-acted and adapted from a fascinating piece of true-life Cold War espionage, exemplifies the kind of French commercial film that's better done by Hollywood. On the other hand, Lucas Belvaux's tense thriller "Rapt," which follows the harrowing abduction of a rich and decadent businessman, borrows elements of "24" and other contemporary TV procedurals, while also painting a compelling portrait of French society's uppermost edges. (I haven't seen Riad Sattouf's "French Kissers," a movie that purportedly offers a Gallic riposte to contemporary American comedies like "American Pie" or "Superbad.")

"Mademoiselle Chambon," a delicate love story starring Vincent Lindon as a dad drawn to his son's schoolteacher (the lovely Sandrine Kiberlain) was an unexpected surprise. Lindon also appears as a gruff Calais swimming teacher who takes a Kurdish immigrant under his wing in Philippe Lioret's "Welcome," a moving, organic exploration of rising anti-immigrant sentiment and its tragic consequences. Many more of the films in Rendez-Vous will reach theaters in coming months, including the Bond-gone-Gallic spy farce "OSS 117: Lost in Rio" (a sequel to the hyperactive but frequently hilarious "OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies"), Robert Guédigian's French Resistance drama "The Army of Crime," Michel Gondry's family documentary "The Thorn in the Heart" and a rerelease of Jules Dassin's 1959 melodrama "The Law," with Yves Montand, Gina Lollobrigida, Marcello Mastroianni and Melina Mercouri. 

Bong Joon-ho, the young Korean director whose international hit "The Host" offered a strange blend of monster movie, slapstick comedy and emotional family drama, may be just about ready to join Park on the world stage. (Bong, Park and Hong Sang-soo, who makes shambling, indie-ish character comedies, are drinking buddies and often presented as the three leading figures on the ambitious edge of Korean cinema.) Bong's new "Mother" --  which has already played the Cannes, Toronto and New York festivals -- lacks the zany pop impact of "The Host" and probably isn't destined to be a big smash, but it's a slippery, marvelously crafted drama that suggests the psychological thrillers of Hitchcock or Henri-Georges Clouzot transposed to present-day Korea.

At the core of "Mother" is the complicated relationship between a simple, perhaps mildly disabled young man named Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin) and his unnamed mother (played by Korean TV legend Kim Hye-ja), the widowed proprietor of a small flower shop. Both actors were previously unknown to me, but even as the plot of "Mother" spirals from normal domestic drama into nightmare, they portray the haunted nuance of the mother-son bond with extraordinary complexity and compassion. Do-joon's mother has grown prematurely old with worry, literally tormented by the thought that something terrible could befall him. (And so, of course, it does.)

As for Do-joon, he may be a socially maladroit, lovable-looking mop top who lacks an adult-level intellect, but that doesn't mean he's mindless or stupid. If Kim Hye-ja's wounded, scheming, half-mad performance is the showstopper here, running the gamut from Medea to Miss Marple to Lady Macbeth, Won Bin's may be even better. One of the keys to "Mother" is that Do-joon knows and understands more than he lets on, the whole way through the story, and feels the same conflicted emotions toward his mom -- love and loathing, intense yearning and a desire for independence -- as does any other post-adolescent male.

At this point in Bong's career, he seems to specialize in taking well-established narrative formulas -- the monster movie in "The Host," the police procedural in "Memories of Murder" -- and pulling them apart at the seams. This one you might call the wrong-man thriller. "Mother" has a slow and relatively genial opening, but a muttering, ominous undertone runs beneath it the whole time. Do-joon and his no-account best friend, Jin-tae (Jin Goo), get in trouble for attacking a group of rich and prominent golfers after a traffic accident, but the incident is only a comic preview of the tragedy to come. When a local schoolgirl is found dead -- the first murder local cops can remember -- Do-joon becomes an easy target. He was wandering the neighborhood drunk and alone, has no alibi, and walked right past the girl minutes before her death. He can't even remember how he got home, and when the police ask him to sign a confession, he does. Case closed.

Do-joon's mother is of course the only person in town who believes he is innocent, and in the face of public indifference and ridicule must turn gumshoe, defense attorney and shrink in her efforts to free him. Entirely alone, she must hunt down Jin-tae -- who seems to have disappeared, perhaps after framing Do-joon -- hire thugs, pursue missing witnesses and investigate the dead girl's family, which has secrets of its own. More important still, she must shake Do-joon from his prison lethargy and somehow jog his memory, since the evidence suggests he was very near the murder scene.

You could certainly describe "Mother" as an impeccably realized murder mystery, whose clues are so cleverly woven into the story that you won't see them until they all click into place. But Bong is pushing past the constraints of the genre into claustrophobic psychological portraiture: Kim's increasingly disheveled and obsessive character is both hero and monster, protector and destroyer. She is driven by the most basic of human emotions -- a parent's unconditional love for her child -- and also blinded by it, to the point that she barely notices her own amoral and ruthless behavior.

This is a radically different kind of movie from "The Host," which was constructed around a lovable if ridiculous group of central characters. Bong never allows us to fully understand Do-joon and his mother, let alone like them, and he preys on the misguided assumptions we're likely to make. Some viewers will find "Mother" a cold or mannered film by comparison, and I guess it is. But its combination of dazzling cinematic craft, psychological insight and black humor make this one of the year's moviegoing musts -- and even or especially at her most deranged, Kim Hye-ja's amazing mother is profoundly, passionately human.

"Mother" is now playing in New York and Los Angeles. It opens March 19 in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle and Washington; March 26 in Austin, Texas, Hartford, Conn., Honolulu, New Haven, Conn., Phoenix, Portland, Ore., Sacramento, Calif., and Santa Cruz, Calif.; and April 2 in Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Monterey, Calif., Nashville, Salt Lake City and San Antonio, Texas, with more cities to follow.

Although the charges and counter-charges in this case are pretty salacious, the furor is only partly about White and Baumbach. It's also about the uneasy symbiosis between film critics and the movie business, two organisms that feed off each other in an awkward dance of privilege, access and manipulation. L'affaire "Greenberg" is also heartening to many film journalists, in a peculiar way. It suggests, in the face of all available economic evidence, that what we do still matters. "I think it's almost a badge of honor to be occasionally disciplined or threatened by movie publicists," wrote Hollywood Elsewhere blogger Jeffrey Wells in a recent post. "Call it an oblique tribute to your tenacity or toughness of spirit or perceived influence."

If you need to get caught up on this earth-shattering dispute, valuable blow-by-blow histories can be found on New York magazine's Vulture blog and at The L Magazine. Mind you, calling this kerfuffle a tempest in a teapot might be demeaning to teapots. Neither Baumbach nor White is famous enough for anyone outside the self-regarding media bubble to care, and there were no First Amendment issues involved. (Getting to see movies for free is a perk, not a right.) In any case the worst of the nastiness has now been papered over: White will see the film this week after all, and Leslee Dart, a publicist with the powerful agency 42West, told Village Voice columnist Michael Musto that the decision to deny White entry to an early press screening was hers alone, and didn't come from Baumbach or Rudin. (It may be that Dart is taking a bullet for her clients, but that's exactly what publicists are paid to do.)

One thing that's clear in all this is that nobody expects White to like "Greenberg" too much. Although he's known for venomous diatribes against the films and directors he dislikes, Baumbach's last two films have proven to be especially irresistible targets. Here are the opening paragraphs from White's memorable review of "Margot at the Wedding":

Noah Baumbach makes it easy to dislike his films. Problem is, he also makes it easy for New York's media elite to praise them. Start with his style: "The Squid and the Whale" and Baumbach's new "Margot at the Wedding" are two of the decade’s most repellent movies. Visually, both look like mud; their smart-ass, low-budget affectations (shot by high-price cinematographers) bridge lo-fi mumblecore with Conde Nast hipsterism. This anti-aesthetic lays waste to the bromide that nobody sets out to intentionally make a bad movie; Baumbach does. His deliberate ugliness makes him the Lars von Trier of Brooklyn and the Hamptons.

Baumbach's characters -- picked from New York's self-punishing literary class -- are also repellent. Not since Woody Allen's Big Apple reign in the 1980s has a filmmaker so shamelessly flattered the professional classes in the guise of exposing them. Baumbach labels their tales with haughty movie titles that are actually New Yorker magazine short-story code, referencing a style of middle-class entitlement and smirk.

White goes on to describe the characters played by Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh (Baumbach's wife) as "skittish hateful chicks" and describes the director as a "cinematic enabler to New York's most obnoxious people," trafficking in "arrogance, conceit and ugliness." Other than that, though, he loved it!

Now, White isn't the first critic to be blacklisted, or threatened with blacklisting, over unpalatable opinions, and he won't be the last. In fact, White confirms that it's happened to him before. He was barred from a screening of Spike Lee's 1996 documentary "Get On the Bus," after a long-running feud with Lee and one of his publicists finally boiled over. The list of banned or almost-banned critics stretches at least back to the 1970s, and includes such luminaries of the trade as the late Pauline Kael, Judith Crist and the original TV-critic duo of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel.

There are various reasons why the White-Baumbach contretemps sparked such a Twitterific uproar. White's incendiary critical persona, and propensity for making enemies, have rendered him an object of fascination for many of his fellow film journalists. Indeed, IFC.com's Vadim Rizov did some admirable digging and comes up with a suggestive case that White's antipathy to Baumbach stems from an ancient feud with Baumbach's mother, onetime Village Voice critic Georgia Brown. White, Rizov says, should have recused himself on that basis from reviewing Baumbach's movies.

This history connects to Leslee Dart's most explosive claim. She told Movieline's S.T. VanAirsdale that White "has gone on blogs and in interviews and said that [Baumbach's] parents should have aborted him." Various versions of this have often been cited on the Internet, but hardly ever sourced. In an e-mail, White confirms that it stems from his 1998 review of Baumbach's "Mr. Jealousy," in which he suggested that other critics were praising the movie simply to curry favor with Baumbach's mother, and concludes: "To others, 'Mr. Jealousy' might suggest retroactive abortion." That's a mean-spirited and distasteful dig, to be sure, but Dart and others have distorted and repackaged it beyond recognition. (Although that review predates the New York Press' Internet archive, J. Hoberman of the Village Voice has unearthed it.)

Whether you see White as sinned against or sinning, he's in pretty good company. In a 1996 interview, Pauline Kael told critic Glenn Lovett that the notoriously prickly P.R. forces at Warner Bros. had barred her from various screenings in the '60s and '70s. "It's very embarrassing when your friends and colleagues are getting into a movie and you can't," Kael recalled. "On one occasion I was invited to a screening by mistake. When I got inside and sat down, I was asked to leave. On another occasion, when the studio publicist saw me, I was told the screening had been canceled. Later, I was told that as soon as I left the building, the screening was called again." )

When Judith Crist got her first job as a film critic in 1963, at the New York Herald Tribune, she almost immediately became famous for trashing a now-forgotten movie called "Spencer's Mountain," a youth-oriented hit that, she wrote, "for sheer prurience and perverted morality disguised as piety makes the nudie shows at the Rialto look like Walt Disney productions." Warner Bros. sent Crist a telegram disinviting her from all future press screenings, and one major New York theater pulled its ads from the paper. In a Time magazine article, an unnamed Hollywood source described Crist as a "snide, sarcastic, supercilious bitch," not language often encountered in print in those days. It was, of course, the making of her reputation.

Jami Bernard of the New York Daily News told Lovett she was personally banned from Disney screenings by then-corporate head Jeff Katzenberg for "the tone" of an interview she'd done with Eddie Murphy. Rod Lurie of Los Angeles magazine claims to have been "barred for life" by Warner Bros. for his immortal description of Danny DeVito as a "a testicle with arms: flailing, spinning little knobs" in his 1991 review of "Other People's Money." Chicago Reader critic (and Film Salon contributor) Jonathan Rosenbaum reports that Warner barred him from screenings for almost three years, solely over his refusal to narc on a fellow critic who had told him about a "secret" screening of the 1991 drama "New Jack City."

Ebert and Siskel were briefly barred from 20th-Century Fox screenings in 1990 after making fun of the studio's comedy "Nuns on the Run" during a joint appearance on "Live With Regis and Kathie Lee." Ebert's published review of the film for the Chicago Sun-Times is exceedingly mild, even regretful, and it's hard to say what the most ridiculous element is here: That Fox made a film called "Nuns on the Run," or that the studio was outraged that leading critics thought it was dreary and unfunny.

Judy Gerstel, a critic for the Toronto Star and Detroit Free Press, was dropped from several studios' press lists in the early '90s, apparently for her brutal takedown of Steven Spielberg's "Hook," which she described all too accurately as a "pseudo-Freudian, pop-psychology paean to fatherhood that's more an acting out of male menopause than a cinematic work of art."

Sometimes it isn't opinions that get film journalists shunned, it's simple information. In 1993, Jeffrey Wells reported a freelance piece for the Los Angeles Times on a stealth-preview screening of the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle "Last Action Hero," a screening Columbia Pictures denied had even taken place. He was banned and bullied by Sony/Columbia for some time, but the episode only cemented Wells' reportorial reputation, and got him five years as a  Times columnist and then an independent career as a popular film blogger.

There's no more reliable way to alienate the Hollywood studios than to report on film junkets, the assembly-line meet-and-greets in which an assemblage of journalists are flown into New York or Los Angeles, housed in luxury hotels at the studio's expense, and granted short, closely monitored interviews with big-name talent. (Like most major publications, Salon does not accept free lodging or transportation from movie studios.) Blogger and freelancer Eric D. Snider's 2006 report on a junket for Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center," "I Was a Junket Whore," is a classic of the genre -- right down to the tone of wide-eyed amazement -- but I could have told Snider from personal experience there'd be some payback.

David Edelstein, now the critic for New York magazine, recalls an episode in his own career that has pre-echoes of the White-Baumbach affair. It suggests how thin-skinned filmmakers can be, and how long they can hold grudges even when doing so is totally counterproductive. Edelstein saw Milos Forman's "Amadeus" in 1984 and hated the portrayal of the relationship between Mozart and his rival, Antonio Salieri. He wrote a withering review for the Village Voice that compared the film to "a Masterpiece Theater production of 'The Mark David Chapman Story.'" Apparently, this made Forman go ballistic. "But there was nothing he could do about it until, years later, he saw my review of 'Dangerous Liaisons,'" Edelstein remembers. "I wanted to make it clear that that 'Dangerous Liaisons' didn't feel like a period piece, and the one I could think of was 'Amadeus.'

"I had forgotten that Forman had his own version of 'Dangerous Liaisons' coming out, 'Valmont,' and reportedly he went crazy when he read this, taking it as a sure sign that I would come out with both guns blazing in my review of 'Valmont' -- why he cared I can't imagine." So Edelstein got a call from the New York publicist for "Valmont," saying that he "would not be admitted to the screening, and that they were going to pay attention to everything I wrote from then on." Edelstein asked some other critics to intervene on his behalf, and a few days later, another publicist called him back: "'For the record, you were never banned. We just have to schedule some more screenings.' I said, 'Come on. You called me and told me I was banned. You're going to tell me you didn't say that?' 'Yes, I'm going to tell you that.'"

"I find it fascinating that Milos Forman, whose movies almost exclusively deal with people being punished and martyred for mouthing off ('The People vs. Larry Flynt,' 'Amadeus,' 'Man on the Moon') -- he's all for free expression until it's directed at him."

I don't expect Armond White and Noah Baumbach to get past this dust-up and start exchanging holiday cards any time soon. But the only thing Baumbach, Rudin and company have accomplished this week is to make sure that lots and lots of people who'd never even heard of Armond White will now want to read his review of "Greenberg" next week.