Early on in the documentary Religulous, stand-up comedian/political commentator Bill Maher states his thesis -- ''Religion is detrimental to humanity'' -- and then spends the rest of the movie hopping around the world, trying to prove it.
The problem with most movie romances -- the thing that makes so many of them tough to sit through -- is that you're usually just waiting for the couple to get on with it and realize they're made for each other, so you can go home and continue about your business.
Only the meanest of grouches can resist a talking-animal movie. But no one, absolutely no one, is immune to the charms of a talking-dog picture. Even a film as shabby and humdrum as Beverly Hills Chihuahua, which never musters up the wit and beauty of a single frame of Lady and the Tramp, is not without its pleasures.
The home video release of the summer blockbuster Iron Man (Paramount Home Entertainment, $40 for the two-disc DVD and Blu-ray versions, $35 for the single-disc) comes packed with as many cool goodies as Tony Stark's armor. The movie, of course, is smashing entertainment, taking a not-so-popular comic-book and turning its characters into household names.
File this under the pleasant surprise category: Election, Alexander Payne's superb satire of American politics set in a high school, will get the high-definition treatment on Blu-ray disc on Jan. 20 -- Inauguration Day -- courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment. Other catalog titles the studio is preparing to release on the format include Ghost, the Farrelly Brothers comedy The Heartbreak Kid and last year's Oscar-nominated Into the Wild.
Jasira Maroun, the 13-year-old Lebanese-American girl at the center of Towelhead, endures an endless number of indignities, humiliations and transgressions during the two-hour movie: racial epithets, cruel classmates, an abusive father, a pedophilic neighbor.
If the word ''cool'' hadn't already existed, it would had to have been invented for Paul Newman, who died Friday at age 83 after a long battle with lung cancer.
SMALL SCREEN Friday Night Lights (9 p.m. Wednesday, DirecTV) -- You pathetic Luddite fools still clinging to 20th century technology have to wait until February, when West Texas' sexiest, if not necessarily most skilled, high-school football team returns to NBC. But if you've got DirecTV's satellite service, you can see Friday Night Lights' third season debut on channel 101. Dillon High has a new principal, a new quarterback and a whole new set of illicit romances to stew over.
Towelhead, the film directorial debut of Alan Ball, is just as provocative and disquieting as his previous work (he wrote American Beauty and created HBO's Six Feet Under and True Blood). It may even be more unsettling. Right from the opening scene, in which a man helps his 13-year-old stepdaughter with a bit of personal hygiene he has no business whatsoever conducting, the movie rattles you, makes you squirm in your seat.
For further proof that actor Shia LaBeouf is a Hollywood superstar in the making, check out Eagle Eye, a ridiculous wrongly-accused-guy-on-the-run thriller in which the actor spends most of his screen time running, and yet still manages to hold the movie together. Barely.
In one of the new featurettes found on The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration Giftset (Paramount, $70 DVD, $125 Blu-ray), actor Alec Baldwin compares the first film in the trilogy to a drug. ''When it's on, you're gonna watch it whether you want to or not,'' he says.
SMALL SCREEN Heroes (9 p.m. Monday, NBC) -- Returning to the air for the first time since the Hollywood writers' strike cut its second season abruptly short 10 months ago, this energetic sci-fi series tries to make up for lost time with a slam-bang two-hour episode that clears up one bunch of questions at the same time it asks another. Chief among the former: We're finally going to find out what secret that mysterious Angela is keeping.
Has Neil LaBute lost it? The writer-director of merciless provocations such as In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors and The Shape of Things is suddenly one movie away from hack status. In his last film, a remake of The Wicker Man, he had Nicolas Cage running around slugging women in the face while dressed in a bear suit.
Since its premiere at last year's Tribeca Film Festival, The Man of Two Havanas, Vivien Lesnik Weisman's documentary about her controversial father Max, has been screened around the world, from Arkansas to Rhode Island, Germany to Switzerland.
Revered by anyone who grew up in the 1980s, writer-director John Hughes' first three movies -- Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Weird Science -- are emblematic of the decade of tall hair and synth pop. Although the films have been previously released on DVD several times, the new High School Flashback Collection (Universal, $40), which collects the trilogy in a metal tin shaped to resemble a high school locker, marks the first time the movies have received any substantial supplements.
The first time Robert De Niro and Al Pacino acted in the same movie (The Godfather Part II), they never appeared onscreen together. The second time they co-starred in a film (Heat), they shared just one meaty scene.
SMALL SCREEN It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (10 p.m. Thursday, FX) -- The five slackers at the heart of this viciously funny show have continually set new standards for sitcom sociopathy: posing as Vietnam vets to get free drinks, sleeping with one another's mothers for revenge, starting sweatshops and stealing dumpster babies. Now, opening their who-would-have-believed-it fourth season with back-to-back episodes, they've reached a new comic frontier -- cannibalism. Not for the squeamish or vegetarian...
Filmmaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen have always liked to sprinkle a dash of misanthropy into their comedies, taking more than a little delight in the dire dilemmas of their protagonists, mired in circumstances usually of their own idiotic making.
The women in The Women are wealthy New Yorkers who spend their days shopping, getting their nails done, gossiping, having lunch -- wait, does any of this sound scarily familiar? Writer-director Diane English (from TV's Murphy Brown) spent 13 years trying to get this remake of the 1939 George Cukor satire off the ground, and she managed to do it the same year Sex and the City became a movie. How's that for bad timing?
SMALL SCREEN Fringe (8 p.m. Tuesday, Fox) -- When a jet lands at Boston's Logan Airport with no signs of life, the FBI quickly rules out the most likely cause -- airline food -- and decides there's only one person who can figure out what happened, a scientist known as our generation's Einstein. Unfortunately, he's been locked in the nuthouse for the past 17 years. This new series is as weird and engrossing as Lost, and not coincidentally created by the same executive producer, J.J. Abrams.
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