Few terms make the professional book reviewer recoil like the term “first novel.” Am I to be subjected yet again to carefully measured, climate-controlled, Iowa Writers Workshopped prose in which not a word is wasted, everything is either vaguely sadness-washed or delicately precious, we build to a quietly devastating moment of clarity, and I am extravagantly bored?

A new first novel out of Australia being published by the fledgling imprint of Spiegel & Grau, though, made my soul tingle. It’s A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz, a busting bronco ride of philosophical jokes, outrageous crime sprees, unlikely schemes, and comic set pieces. At 530 pages, it’s a wrist-buster, but also a furiously entertaining adventure.

The plot is very much beside the point, but the story begins in prison, where Jasper Dean is being held as a riot percolates. Teasingly, Jasper begins to sketch out why he’s there (his cynical outcast father, Martin Dean, has disappeared, possibly because Jasper killed him) and then backs into a long, long backstory of who made Martin: his criminal mastermind brother, Jasper’s uncle Terry Dean. Terry became a national legend because of his viciously idealistic campaign to clean up sports by assassinating anyone caught cheating–everyone from steroid freaks to horse-race fixers. Martin chose an opposite path, becoming a national pariah by trying to help everyone in a series of starry-eyed schemes that backfire and sow chaos. At one point Martin gets an observatory built on a hill outside of town, uplifting everyone for a while, but its powerful telescope winds up disused and pointing back down into town, starting a fire that burns it down (and kills Terry).

The point to Toltz’s sweeping, madcap, continent-hopping tale of the human need for love, immortality and dirty jokes is his hilarious side riffing on, for instance, a master criminal’s definitive how-to book on crime (containing such chapters as “Motiveless Crimes–Why?’ and “Crime and Fashion: Balaclavas Are Always In”), a nutty love affair in Paris (”She had a lot of hair. It went down her back. It went into my mind. It covered her shoulders & my thoughts”), the downside of child-rearing (”To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility”) and vindictive females. You know you’re in trouble when you not only catch your girlfriend crying, but holding a jar under her face as she does so and confessing, in a reference to the guy she dated before you, “I’m collecting my tears because I’m going to make Brian drink them.”

Walking away from the Coen Brothers film of No Country for Old Men, you may have a couple of questions. For instance, why is the film set in 1980? And what does it all mean? In Cormac McCarthy’s novel, it’s obvious why the story takes place in 1980. The reason is Vietnam. Most of the characters served there; it’s where they learned about the value of human life, or lack thereof.

The sheriff’s deputy, examining a crime scene that ended up in a shootout, says, “It must of sounded like Vietnam out here.” When Moss (played by Josh Brolin in the film) buys ammo, he thinks, “the box of shells contained almost exactly the firepower of a claymore mine.” The sheriff (the Tommy Lee Jones character) tells Moss’s wife that “he’s goin’ to wind up killin somebody,” to which the wife responds, “He never has.” The sheriff points out, “he was in Vietnam,” and the wife says, “I mean as a civilian.” That dry distinction—that killing in war doesn’t count—is ironic.

When Carson Wells (the Woody Harrelson character) is killed by Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem in the film), Chigurh thinks about “the body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country,” as well as all the people he has assassinated, which underlines the point that killing leads to more killing. The sheriff thinks about how “I was supposed to be a war hero and I lost a whole squad of men. They died and I got a medal.”

COMMENTARY Editorial Director John Podhoretz has castigated the film as nihilist. But if you measure McCarthy’s ironic tone in the book, you might come to another conclusion. Possibly McCarthy is taking the extreme, Catholic stance that all killing is wrong, from capital punishment to war to abortion. The book takes place seven years after Roe v. Wade, five years after the fall of Saigon, four years after the restoration of the death penalty by the Supreme Court. It’s a year when the idea that state could sanction killing has begun to take root. The sheriff, in the book as in the film the voice of wisdom and restraint, expresses a sad resignation toward the death penalty from page one on, and a portion of the book that isn’t referred to in the movie might be the key to understanding McCarthy’s moral.

Remembering a conference in Corpus Christi, the sheriff thinks, “Me and Loretta…got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that. I ain’t even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I told her that and she looked at me funny. She thought I was sayin somethin bad about em, but of course that’s a high compliment in my part of the world. She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I don’t like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I don’t think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she’ll be able to have an abortion. I’m goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she’ll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.”

McCarthy has a vision of an America that fosters what Pope John Paul II called a “culture of death;” these men come back from Vietnam, where they learned to kill, then apply their killing skills on a country that is killing fetuses and condemned prisoners and will soon give the okay to killing old people and the weak. The remorseless assassin Anton Chigurh is the natural consequence of a culture of death: A harbinger of unchecked killing.

1. Michael Clayton. (90 percent favorable rating on the movie review website Rotten Tomatoes). Billed as a realistic walk through the corridors of power, Michael Clayton winds up being a tepid, lugubrious, and preposterous thriller—art-house Grisham. George Clooney plays a kind of lawyer who doesn’t even exist—though he works for a huge law firm, he runs around the greater New York area doling out expertise on criminal cases, immigration issues, family law, and a dozen other specialized areas. Can you picture big law firms sending out sneaky hit teams to take down anyone who might testify against them, even though that person might have told any number of others what he knows? Can you picture firms hiring mugs to blow up cars? Would a hit squad be so dumb that the car is primed to blow up at a seemingly random moment rather than when the ignition is turned on? And finally: if a car exploded and there was no body in or around the car, would a lawyer (or even the stupidest guy in your high school woodworking class) assume that the driver of the car was dead? Like a lawyer who falls asleep during his closing argument, Michael Clayton saves its stupidest trick for last: the wheezing old gag that goes, “Aha! As I just tricked you into giving an incredibly detailed confession, I was recording the whole thing on this little gizmo!”

2. Grindhouse (81 percent favorable rating on Rotten Tomatoes)—It’s two, two, TWO movies in one: the first, Robert Rodriguez’s bloody, intentionally amateurish zombie flick parody Planet Terror, is a great success: There’s no denying that it meets or even exceeds its goal to be unwatchably awful, one of the worst movies of the year. Not this year: 1974. You have to be pretty meta to convince yourself you’re enjoying a rotten movie, though. The second part of the double feature, Quentin Tarantino’s talky but enjoyable Death Proof, doesn’t make the mistake of thinking bad writing is good writing if the whole thing is nestled between ironic quotation marks.

3. Enchanted. (93 percent). Great trailer! A story about an animated princess from a Disney movie who winds up as a real person wandering the mean streets of New York sustains its single joke for almost two solid minutes. After that, it’s just Splash with taffeta—but without Tom Hanks or John Candy. The unshaven, barely conscious TV soap star Patrick Dempsey turns out to be the prince of the city. Which, again, like every other plot point, was clear from the trailer. Every so often the movie breaks into song, but none of the lyrics are as funny and tongue-in-cheek as the ones from actual Disney cartoons like The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast.

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The highly entertaining sci-fi flick I Am Legend stars Will Smith as the last man left in New York City (and maybe on earth) after a cure for cancer mutates into a virus that kills 90 percent of the population and turns 99 percent of the remnant into flesh-eating zombies, is likely to be the big winner at the Christmas box office. Those who enjoy tracking blockbusters more for their allegory than their grosses, though, may relish the movie’s timing because of its surprising subtext about how religion and science can co-exist.

Call this the first movie of the post-stem cell-debate era. After last month’s wonderful news that genetically matched stem cells could be developed without embryos, liberals were flummoxed (and maybe angered) by the news that, when it comes to medical ethics and science, Bush-era America actually could walk and chew gum at the same time. No embryos means no embryo destruction, therefore no moral problems with the stem-cell research of the future.

Smith plays a soldier/scientist immune to the virus that has destroyed humanity and turned Manhattan into a postapocalyptic wasteland where deer and other wildlife run free but there is no sign of another human being. In a twist on the grimy despair of last year’s similar Children of Men, Smith’s character has hopes of using his own blood to concoct a serum that will reverse the effects of the virus and turn the zombies back into ordinary people. He’s an atheist who believes that science, and science alone, holds the key to the future. But in a third-act twist, it turns out that religion and blind faith will have equally important roles to play if there is to be a cure–you might also use the word “salvation”–for humanity.

A few select critics and industry types (Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner was among those in attendance, on the arm of his husband, Entertainment Weekly’s critic Mark Harris) were finally shown director Tim Burton’s long-gestating big-screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Grand Guignol Broadway opera Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street last night at Lincoln Square on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. (The film opens on December 21.) Though macabre violence is at the heart of the story, Burton takes it too far. I haven’t seen a bloodier film since Hostel: Part II.

Stage directors challenged to deal with Sweeney’s throat-slashing make a virtue of not having cinematic special effects at their disposal; I once saw a production in which an opened artery was conveyed by a red ribbon set free to flutter at the throat. Burton’s Sweeney paints the town, the screen, and maybe the whole multiplex red. Even Brian De Palma’s brutal Iraq film Redacted, which realistically depicts a Jihadist beheading a kidnapped American serviceman, doesn’t depict the actual throat slashing, though a woman in the audience screamed when I first saw that film. Burton does.

As played by a riveting Johnny Depp, Sweeney makes arteries gush like fountains, with stage blood spattering his face and arms and even the camera lens, then dumps the bodies to the cellar with sickeningly awful noises as the corpses plummet to land head first on a cement floor. Women at Lincoln Square were seen covering their eyes during some of the goriest moments.

Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece, to my mind one of the towering works of art of the 20th century, is a delicate balance of the comic, the horrific and the tragic, and it loses some of its comic pull when its violence is this explicit. The movie is rated R, but it isn’t hard to imagine a faithful version that would earn a PG-13 if it left the slashing largely to the imagination. And that would suffice.

Your reaction to the film version of Atonement, which opens December 7, may depend on whether you can be shocked twice by the same revelation.

Ian McEwan’s superlative 2001 novel starts with a fusty Victorian framework — a country house, an upstairs-downstairs flirtation and a mislaid letter — that McEwan soon charges with eroticism. The tale gradually expands into both a harrowing war story and a decades-spanning meditation on morality. Keira Knightley, who grows thinner in each movie and is now approximately the width of a parenthesis, stars with James McAvoy (who played Idi Amin’s doctor in The Last King of Scotland) in a sumptously decorated and expertly photographed vision of the novel directed by Joe Wright, who also guided her to an Oscar nomination for Pride and Prejudice a couple of years ago.

Wright’s Atonement is a fine effort that left me largely unmoved, possibly because the two greatest strengths of the book are absent. First is McEwan’s devastatingly precise and unnerving prose, which invariably makes you shiver at the terrible things that haven’t even happened yet and for which Wright has no real equivalent apart from a somewhat overused audio motif of a prewar typewriter’s keys slamming like ammunition being locked and loaded. Second is McEwan’s much talked-about pull-the-rug-out ending, which has little effect on you if you know it’s coming.

There’s a reason why surprise-twist stories rarely hold up well the second time around: You lose interest in the characters as people because you begin to see them as mere tools of the plot.

French movies aren’t much in vogue with American audiences anymore–the Edith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose, which has earned $10 million here, is the only French movie of the year to find much success, and it’s the first Gallic offering since 2001’s Amelie to do that well.

But this week brings Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding, the third attempt this year by American filmmakers to pay homage to French filmmakers. Earlier this fall, Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited went to India in imitation of the languid air and saturated colors of Jean Renoir’s 1951 family drama The River. Chris Rock’s surprisingly measured I Think I Love My Wife, a remake of the 1972 Eric Rohmer drama Chloe in the Afternoon enlivened by Rock’s acid standup-style observations on the frustrations of marriage, presents a typically French story of a businessman with a successful marriage flirting with adultery without either bunny-boiling theatrics or door-slamming farce.

Equally indebted to Rohmer is Baumbach’s new film, his first since the triumphant release of his autobiographical The Squid and the Whale. Margot at the Wedding features Nicole Kidman in the title role of a woman who goes to the beach house of her semi-estranged sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh) a few days before the titular nuptials and finds herself unable to conceal her dislike of her crude prospective brother-in-law (Jack Black). From the film’s title, which winks at Rohmer’s Pauline at the Beach (Baumbach also dubs the sister Pauline), to its washed-out look to its rumpled unstylish costumes to its depressed intellectuals politely jabbing away at each other’s most vulnerable spots, it has the trappings of Rohmer down cold.

But Margot at the Wedding offers more than that. There is a boisterous American quality to Baumbach’s work that lights a fire under the style of Rohmer, who is frequently content to let the story inch forward or even pause as everyone contemplates the scenery. In Baumbach’s script, strange deadpan wit and skewed observations enliven the conflicts, which aren’t limited to one or two quandaries but tumble in from every direction due to misunderstandings and feuds among siblings, cousins, neighbors, spouses, and lovers. There is a subtle wit to Rohmer, but Baumbach’s film actually makes you laugh. The Woody Allen of the 1970’s would have been proud to have made this film.

Midway through I’m Not There, director Todd Haynes’s soon-to-open film fantasia in which Bob Dylan is played by six different actors to signify different phases in the life of the Bard of Hibbing, the Australian actress Cate Blanchett pops up—and as was the case with her appearance as Kate Hepburn in The Aviator, Blanchett makes it immediately clear that this is an Oscar™ role.

Though Blanchett is strenuously coiffed and made up to look like Dylan, with a frizzy wig and Ray-Bans and loose-fitting shirts, never for a moment do you forget that this is Cate Blanchett Acting The Hell Out Of This Role. The clatter of Blanchett’s acting drowns out everything around her.

Within the cubist style of the movie, it isn’t particularly surprising to see a woman play Dylan—he’s also played here by a black kid calling himself “Woody Guthrie.” To have a black kid portray the larval Dylan makes a kind of sense, since, as a troubadour in training, young Robert Zimmerman cooked up a Guthrie-like legend for himself to hide his shame over his white middle-classness while singing about Blind Willie McTell. But there is nothing feminine about Dylan in this movie.

And yet, Blanchett’s wisp of a figure and porcelain cheekbones make it impossible to forget this is a drag performance. In a scene in which her Dylan chases an Edie Sedgwick-like object of obsession around a park, she doesn’t seem remotely masculine. She gives off no sexual hunger, no sense of need. In the end, all Blanchett ever needs in any film is our rapt attention.