“You just want your movie to get out there,” says Gary Wheeler, director of the award-winning film The List, disagreeing with the notion that the Fox Faith label is a kiss of death. “I think that Fox, as a distributor, is also learning about the market; and they have a sincere desire to stay in this market, and hopefully make better and better films. So I think what they’re doing now is using the Fox Faith label as more of a seal of approval to Christians; and then when it’s released in Blockbuster or other places, it then comes under Fox Home Entertainment. So I think where they’ll end up is that Fox Faith will come to be seen like the Dove Awards, or a Movieguide recommendation. But for the general market—for the Wal-Marts, the Targets—you’ll see things come from Fox Home Entertainment.”

The more I think about this, the less I think that the film is a defense of shady governmental policies justified in the name of fighting evil. From my perspective, the film is sympathetic to Batman’s decisions, but ultimately argues that his choices remain not only wrong, but fruitless and even destructive. And this, I think, accounts for the broad appeal of The Dark Knight: it is complex, as I noted in my review, yet still remains balanced. It can see our pragmatically-fueled political reality for what it is—without having to come down squarely on one rhetorical side or the other, allowing plenty of room for an audience (and individuals) to react, to think, and to reflect. Such room for thought exceeds whatever biased clap-trap our other sources of political commentary are offering these days. In an election year when major media outlets are turning news into mere entertainment and talking-head blather, mere Hollywood entertainment is offering up one of most meaty analyses of “what interests us and frightens us” that we’ve yet seen.

In 1970, United Theaters opened the original Southcenter theater—the last 70mm Cinerama-capable single-auditorium moviehouse built in the United States. It seated over 1200, and featured a sloped floor and an 88 by 32-foot curved screen. I specifically remember waiting in line years later to see Raiders of the Lost Ark during my second college summer break. The theater was actually too state-of-the-art, and had trouble finding films big enough to grace its enormous screen; it was demolished in 2002. Thanks to AMC Entertainment, Southcenter now has a new multiplex, the AMC Southcenter 16. So what does state-of-the-art mean these days? 100% digital projection. This theater couldn’t screen a 35mm print if it wanted to… because there are no film projectors!

There’s little doubt in my mind, after all is said and done, that—for the filmmakers—moviemaking really is all about the story… even though they might not have thought through the cultural satire very deeply. And yet my own personal experiences with Disney’s very effective, entertaining, and enjoyable commercial ventures leave me convinced that moviemaking is also very much about good business. If Pixar didn’t make good movies with broad commercial appeal, they’d still be just another footnote to entertainment history… as would Disney. And I really doubt their success is purely accidental. Still, is director Andrew Stanton right that cynical critics like me read far too much into all this stuff? Probably. Almost definitely.

“I don’t get offered scripts that much,” says the irascible Wallace Shawn, “because filmmakers don’t like me that much. I get a certain number of scripts in the course of the year, and the scripts that nauseate me I don’t do. And the ones that are left over, I do, basically. In other words, there are quite a few that disgust me and that offend me too much, and that seem to me to make the world a worse place. And the ones that are left, I do.” So this makes everyone want to ask: Where does the Toy Story franchise fit on the Shawn disgust scale, and what does he really think of Kit Kittredge?

Dan Merchant is an ordinary guy… as ordinary as a guy can be, that is, if you’ve spent several years working in TV production, put everything you own in hock to make your own movie, spent months walking around the country with inflammatory and contradictory bumper stickers pasted onto your coveralls, and then assembled it all into a powerful, moving, insightful, often hilarious, and yet somehow good-hearted skewering of the religious debates that have gripped America’s politics for the last two or three decades. We daresay: if Dan Merchant’s Lord, Save Us From Your Followers gets much exposure, Bill Maher’s Religulous—which has now slipped to this fall’s release schedule—is going to look quite petty by comparison.

In Sergei Bodrov’s latest film, Mongol, the director gets inside the head of Genghis Kahn so that we understand a little about what made him tick. And he’s well aware that getting touchy-feely about despots isn’t popular. “Look,” he says. “Don’t you think it’s kind of ignorant to judge people who lived eight hundred years ago, who were fighting on horses with swords, after what’s happened in the 20th Century? It was the worst century, and the most inhuman. You had two world wars, the Holocaust, Nazi camps, Stalin’s camps, nukes, chemical weapons. It was insane and cruel, just the worst century in history. And you’re still just talking about the cruelty of the guy?”

“I think our film helps to educate kids,” says Chris Bell, director of the upcoming documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster. “I showed it to about five hundred high school kids in Toronto, and a lot of those kids came up to me and thanked me for telling them the truth and not hitting them over the head with statements like they hear in commercials—like, ‘Steroids will shrink your balls.’ Then there’s the one with the statue of David falling apart, and it says, ‘Steroids won’t make you a great athlete, they’ll destroy you.’ But then they watch Barry Bonds hit 756 home runs and they’re thinking, ‘Will it really destroy you?’”

A product of the 1970s and the San Francisco Art Institute, Errol Morris became an overnight sensation with 1988’s The Thin Blue Line, a film which examined the case of Randall Dale Adams, on death row for the murder of a Dallas area police officer… and eventually led to his release. “It’s hard for me to even imagine how people experience my films,” he said while promoting his new film, Standard Operating Procedure. “I’m so involved with thinking about them and making them. It’s always been my hope that they can be taken on lots and lots of different levels. They can be taken as just entertainment. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. They are, after all, supposed to be movies.”

In The Visitor, long-time character actor Richard Jenkins plays Walter Vale, an emotionally-repressed professor and widower who discovers life and love through a chance encounter with illegal Syrian immigrants in Manhattan. The film is about numerous things: music, change, the ways in which “home” can become an alien place; and how being a visitor allows you to see things in a new light. Courtesy of a local publicist, I spent about twenty minutes in a downtown Seattle hotel suite chatting with Jenkins about a wide variety of topics, from his favorite experience on stage to his two-scene role in Silverado. It was a fun talk, as Jenkins has had a long and colorful career on the stage and screen.