Some things are different. No more Nazis — it is now a Cold War and the guys on the other side are the Soviets. And there may be enemies at home. A harmless-looking professor could be a Red. Or maybe it is the agents of the U.S. government who are the bad guys when they see enemies who are not there. And teenagers are acting wild. Some of them speed by in jalopies and some of them slick back their hair, drop out of school, and ride motorcycles.

But some things are the same. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford, for the fourth time) still packs a mean punch and carries a bull whip. He still has a way of getting himself into and out of trouble. He still hates snakes. And he is still a lot of fun to watch.

As always, we start right in the midst of the action. A motorcade of soldiers is approaching a “Hanger 51” Army base in Nevada that is shut down for a test of an atomic bomb. But it turns out not to be what it seems. They are Soviet spies and they want Indiana to find something in storage there (Indy fans will enjoy seeing a familiar item in one of the crates). This time, the artifact everyone wants is a crystal skull from South America that, according to legend, will grant great power to whomever returns it to its home. The Soviets are led by Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett, severe in an impeccable uniform and a ruthlessly aerodynamic bob), a specialist in the paranormal.

Instead of being congratulated for escaping from the Soviets, Indy becomes a “person of interest” to the FBI due to “this charged climate” and is suspended from his job. When he gets a message from a young man on a motorcycle who looks like he just rode in from the set of “The Wild One” that his old friend Professor Oxley (John Hurt) has been captured, Indy and the young man (“Transformers'” Shia LeBeouf) set out to rescue them.

Ford brings it. He is vitally and vibrantly present every moment on screen. He gets the a-word issue out of the way early on with a wry response to “we’ve gotten out of worse before” — “We were younger then.” He can still throw a credible punch and he has an even better and deeper sense of who he is as an actor and who Indy is as a character dealing with his own issues of aging. Moving the characters forward in time provides many opportunities for fresh and intriguing details that are instantly evocative of the past and lightly resonant for today’s circumstances as well. LeBeouf, Ford, and Karen Allen, who makes a welcome return as Marian, Indy’s best leading lady, have terrific chemistry. The stunts are thrilling and brilliantly paced, and the script, the first three-quarters of it, anyway, if not up to the level of the first Indiana Jones film, is at or better than the other two. The old-school effects are far better than the brief CGI. The unscripted real-life bug swallowed as an ad lib by Rene Belloq in the first movie was far more effective than an army of man-eating ants made from pixels in this one. John Hurt is underused as the addled Oxley as is Ray Winstone (“Beowulf”) as a fellow traveler in more than one sense of the term. And it is a little too long, but that is understandable. Ford, Allen, producer George Lucas, and director Steven Spielberg enjoy spending time with Indiana Jones and don’t want to say goodbye. We feel the same way.

Print and new media writers debate the pros and cons of writing about movies online, where everyone’s a critic in a roundtable from Cineaste, a leading publication on film.

In introducing the Critical Symposium on “International Film Criticism Today” in our Winter 2005 issue, we maintained, with a certain resigned pride, that “critics at independent film magazines have virtually complete freedom, and a generous amount of space, to express their opinions if they are willing to endure the relative (or, in some cases, total) penury that results from being unaligned with the corporate media.” In recent months, American critics, having been fired, downsized, or bought out by a host of publications, are realizing that even making compromises with their corporate employers does not guarantee them a job. Given the current economic malaise, the role of online criticism has become increasingly prominent. There has also been, at least in certain quarters, an intensification of the occasional friction between print critics and the denizens of the blogosphere. In a typically ungracious broadside in The New York Press, Armond White wailed that “Internetters…express their ‘expertise,’ which essentially is either their contempt or idiocy about films, filmmakers, or professional critics. The joke inherent in the Internet horde is that they chip away at the professionalism they envy, all the time diminishing critical discourse.”

One goal in coordinating this Critical Symposium on “Film Criticism in the Age of the Internet” was to chip away at some of the hyperbolic rhetoric exemplified by White’s jeremiad.

Twenty-three participants respond to these questions:

1) Has Internet criticism made a significant contribution to film culture? Does it tend to supplement print criticism or can it actually carve out critical terrain that is distinctive from traditional print criticism? Which Internet critics and bloggers do you read on a regular basis?
2) How would you characterize the strengths and weaknesses of critics’ blogs? Which blogs do you consult on a regular basis–and which are you drawn to in terms of content and style? Do you prefer blogs written by professional critics or those by amateur cinephiles?
3) Internet boosters tend to hail its “participatory” aspects–e.g., message boards, the ability to connect with other cinephiles through critics’ forums and email, etc. Do you believe this “participatory” aspect of Internet criticism (film critics form the bulk of the membership lists of message boards such as a film by and Politics and Film) has helped to create a genuinely new kind of “cinematic community” or are such claims overblown?
4) Jasmina Kallay, writing in Film Ireland (September-October 2007), has claimed that, in the age of the Internet, the “traditional film critic… is losing his stature and authority.” Do you agree or disagree with this claim? If you agree, do you regard this as a regrettable or salutary phenomenon?
Some of the advantages of online criticism:
1. Ability to read broadly and deeply — no more being limited to whoever happens to write for the local paper or to the reviews of movies currently in release.
2. A wider range of coverage from a wider range of perspectives. Mike D’Angelo, who went from his own site to Esquire, calls it “the freedom to define your own audience, both in terms of what you choose to address and how you go about addressing it. If you have no editor, maybe nobody’s catching your occasional lapse into self-indulgence; at the same time, though, neither is anybody shooting down your prospective ideas on the grounds that readers don’t give a damn about Guy Maddin or Hong Sang-soo.”
3. Immediacy and vitality of online writing.
4. Interaction and responsiveness between critics and between critics and their readers.
Advantages of print:
1. Editing. As J. Hoberman of The Village Voice puts it, “On the one hand, blogs are spontaneous and unedited; on the other, blogs are spontaneous and unedited.” (NOTE: The Village Voice has let go some of the country’s best film critics.)
2. Difficulty of finding the best that’s out there. Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek says, “Internet criticism has made a significant contribution to film culture in that it’s opened the door for a wide range of voices. But as we’re all seeing, it’s opened the door too wide: There are so many film enthusiasts–if not actual professional critics, either former or current–writing on the Web that now we’re faced with a great deal of noise. Let’s not even talk about the zillions of film bloggers who aren’t worth reading–who cares about them? The bigger problem is that many of the people writing about film on the Web are knowledgeable and have pretty interesting ideas. Unless you’re really systematic about checking up on all of them regularly, there are too many to even read, so good people get lost.”
Be sure to check out the list of recommended online sources for movie reviews and features.

Home Movie Day is October 18, and everyone from Martin Scorsese to John Waters is urging all of us to participate.
The Center for Home Movies collects, preserves, provides access to, and promotes understanding of home movies and amateur motion pictures.
For my parents’ 25th anniversary, I organized all of our family’s home movies, going back to the 1930’s. For their 50th, my sister had them put on DVD for each of us. No matter how well we know those images, there are always surprises (and not just how young and beautiful everyone was). Footage of our communities and the places we visited remind us of how much has changed.
Contrary to all of the jokes about how endlessly boring other people’s home movies are, there is an extraordinary poignancy and even art in many of them. Long before the days of YouTube and “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” people were recording their families and occasions and archives of these films are beginning to be available online. One of the acknowledged greats of home movies is Robbins Barstow. His 30-minute film of his family’s trip to Disneyland in 1956, one year after it opened, is an engaging artifact of an era and an almost-impossibly functional family. Twenty years earlier, Barstow and his brothers made a home movie version called “Tarzan and the Rocky Gorge” that is reminiscient of the marvelous “Son of Rambow” its verve and imagination. Barstow’s recollection of the making of that film and its sequel 38 years later is a delight. ” Watching these visual records of little pieces of our lives served as a real bonding instrument,” Barstow says. Home movie day should inspire everyone to get out their movies and watch them together to remind everyone in the family about where you’ve been and those you love.

The Washington Post reports that a new Hallmark Hall of Fame movie for CBS called “Unorthodox” is currently filming in Washington DC:
Great to see Hollywood getting into spirituality! The crew that set up Wednesday on Georgetown’s Cambridge Place for a one-day shoot was filming “Unorthodox,” a made-for-TV movie about a young D.C. doctor who is pressured to marry the widow of his Hasidic rabbi brother in accordance with ancient levirate law. Neighbors couldn’t help but chuckle, though, that the filming went on well past sunset — and into the start of Yom Kippur, when the observant are supposed to abstain from working. Oh, well!

40 dads, 6 experts, 9 months, and 80 minutes.

Being Dad is a sort of “what to expect while SHE’s expecting,” a man-to-man welcome to fatherhood from “a guy’s point of view.” This guys talking to guys about the stuff guys think about, from “that sexy girl I married is turning into what?” to “I have to be, like, responsible now?”

Being Dad isn’t a how-to guide. It doesn’t push an agenda. And it’s not a medical textbook with minute-by-minute explanations of the anatomical changes happening to your baby.

Instead, we blend interviews with new dads from around the country with plain English advice from experts. Much quicker and less painful than the average labor, the 80 minute-DVD offers wisdom, humour and even a few tissue-box moments.