Shaolin Soccer was worth the wait. It's a sweet, giddy, sometimes grotesque rush of a movie, instantly forgettable, but still the happiest ninety minutes I've spent in a movie theater this year. After you see it, you should check out Roger Ebert's terrific review, which amounts to nothing less than a manifesto by our best living film critic as to why it makes sense to give three stars to a film like, say, Hidalgo or Shaolin Soccer, and only two stars to Dogville.

I've probably said this before, but those who dismiss Ebert as a television clown without reading his reviews are missing out on some of the best criticism of any kind being written in this country today. Ebert draws upon a vast love of film and an equally vast reservoir of common sense and erudition, and he never allows himself to become carried away by the sound of his own voice. (For a counterexample of this sort of verbal intoxication, see every single review by Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times. Or any of my own reviews. But I love Elvis Mitchell, too.)