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Herzog has been making brilliant films since the late '60s, and frankly it's a bit of a pain in the arse keeping up with such a prolific director.

However, if you are a fan of his features and staggering documentary work, "Lessons of/in Darkness" demands your immediate attention.

The film is essentially a birds-eye view (often quite literally) of the plague of oil-choked death, fire, chaos and destruction that resulted from the brief but grotesquely internecine technological blitzkrieg of the Gulf War. Herzog, of course, takes particular interest in the seeming madness of the crews of mercernary American firefighters that are putting out the oil well fires across the deserts.

Various points on the conflict and its aftermath inevitably bubble to the surface, but arise without overt proselytizing. The images do the majority of the talking.

And they are eye-popping. Startling, frightening visuals that stand out even in the Herzog canon -- great vistas of blackness and glowing terror that would make any sci-fi director soylent green with envy. They are accompanied by little else: brief interstitials, an almost nonexistent, terribly serious Herzog narrative and a ghostly and elegiac score.

The short interviews with individuals who suffered are heartbreaking, perhaps all the more so due to their brevity.

See this.

Todd Solondz is a man with an axe to grind.

A very big axe.

Like his two previous features, "Storytelling" is a tale of suburban dysfunction. The movie is populated by unloveable losers and those that exploit them; the inhabitants are either the freakish and ignorant or the depraved and sadistic.

Unfortunately his latest film is billed as a comedy, but even an uncomfortable chuckle seems inappropriate in the depressing wake of this vituperative two-part 'expose' on the nature of truth.

And while that lofty theme is only intermittently and haphazardly explored, Solondz is unquestionably successful in what one imagines was a primary objective -- to shock the audience with an unabashed combination of sexual taboo and craven human instincts.

He's enlisted their services before to much better effect.

"Happiness," a painfully funny and scary film, offered a twisted sliver of hope that the family at its center would endure after it weathered a series of bizarre interpersonal storms and scandals. Conversely, "Storytelling" is little more than a loosely collected series of flimsy vignettes concerning a remarkably vain, cruel and flawed group of people that cannot possibly survive.

Or two such groups. Solondz reportedly took inspiration for his "uneven diptych" from the highly regarded films "Carnal Knowledge" and "Full Metal Jacket," ignoring the fact Kubrick's film didn't just haphazardly explore hypothetically related themes in two entirely unrelated narratives, but developed a series of characters and had them weather the stresses of battle later in the film.

In "Storytelling," the parts feel like rough drafts of two different, though no less repugnant movies, and at times it is painfully obvious that Solondz just didn't have enough material or inspiration to make one good movie. Unfortunately, the ugly subject matter is mirrored by the film's uninteresting camera work, about as solid and distinguished as a South American soap opera.

The performances -- from a cast of principals who have nearly all appeared in brilliant comedies -- range from overbearing to underwhelming, not surprising considering the bewildering and sometimes pointless lines they have been given to speak.

A dream sequence involving the burning and crucifixion of the mother and father and an appearance on Conan O'Brien is futile and embarrassing, and Solondz's examination of racial and sexual attitudes is almost as foolish as the offensive 1986 stinker "Soul Man."

Solondz spares no expense in relating his bleak belief that life trapped between the malls is a living hell for anyone with any sort of sensitivity. Only those who view life through the prism of soft-drink commercials (jocks, cheerleaders) and traditional values (soccer moms, dads at the barbecue grill, guidance counselors, hardworking housekeepers) stand any chance of happiness, but only because they are basically morons.

But Solondz's maverick status is sealed by what has become his unsettling calling-card: Even the have-nots -- the disabled, the poor, the shmoes, "queers" and failures -- are also despicable. In his films the outsiders don't deserve your pity. They are as self-serving and stupid as everyone else, and even murderous.

Solondz fleshes out the misanthropic round-up by making the few characters with real intelligence in the film -- a precocious younger brother, a Pulitzer Prize winning professor -- predators that use their wiles predominantly to humiliate and defile the weakest people around them.

Not surprisingly, there is a palpable sadness throughout the film, which is perhaps the most obvious emotion one would feel in the face of such freakish malevolence. And despite the unrelenting onslaught of depressing episodes, Solondz bilious wit is not entirely suppressed.

He is a preternaturally equal equal-opportunity offender. One of the films few pale joys is that the characters occasionally voice what amount to fierce critiques of the film's excesses virtually in real time.

And there are occasional moments when the satire is not entirely heavy-handed; American Beauty, a deserving target, has its most mawkish and sententious moment cleverly lampooned, and its title is bastardized for the "American Scooby" documentary that is the centerpiece of the second half. (In an extended, oblique pun, "American Movie"'s Mike Schank appears as the "Scooby" cameraman.)

Oddly, there is little that distinguishes the preachy humanism of the Oscar winning film from Solondz's strident, smarmy brand of outing social hypocrisy.

And whatever treatise on fact and fiction was intended, ostensibly how an artist's evocation of truth can become more powerful than the truth itself, is ultimately obscured by a very angry young man's swipe at all of God's creatures.

Solondz's nihilism and hatred may be explained by what he has suffered at the hands of the world around him. His films undoubtedly bear the stamp of pain experienced first hand. It's just that the average 16 year high-school art class junkie with a Pettibone fixation might be able to show you the same thing that "Storytelling" does with a few crude drawings. Life sucks.

Fukasaku's first film. A minor but not insignificant work, strongly influenced by 40s American noir and gangster films.

The story, set in Japan, centers around a group of miscreants and career criminals, among them a spy, prostitute, and three Americans: a GI, a racketeer, and his wife. They are blackmailed into robbing a U.S. Army payroll by a ruthless Yakuza boss. The boss himself is a victim of double-dealing and treachery; virtually everyone involved has a hidden agenda.

The story is fairly compelling, exploring the vast intersection of racism, opportunism and sexual frustration that grew in what essentially amounted to U.S. occupation in the post-war period.

The film is well paced, shot in a crisp, alluring black and white with attention to period detail. The film is not unlike THE KILLING, from director Stanley Kubrick.

But unlike Kubrick's masterful tale of a heist, that despite meticulous planning, unravels through human folly, HIGH NOON FOR GANGSTERS has acting that is often downright miserable.

And the fault may lie with the ambition of the script. Japanese and American actors speak both English and Japanese (the film has Japanese subtitles as well) and while the Asian actors handle both languages with aplomb, the Americans can barely act in their own language.

Perhaps Fukasuku had an imprecise grasp of the English language at the time, or simply didn't envision the film playing to American audiences. Which is unfortunate, as the film's moral center is the complex character of Tom -- a violent, sexually voracious black GI who finds inner peace with a "half-breed" prostitute -- portrayed by an actor who lacks the resources to even play a part with no lines.

The resolution is violent and explosive, but mostly numbing. If Tom had been a little more believeable, the film would have had a sense of tension and pathos that would have elevated it (and the ending) to a much greater status; but Fukasaku's prodigious output that followed more than offered him the chance to improve upon his first effort.