It starts off with rather nuanced language, and by the time it's done, I'm still not entirely certain, but I get an emanation of a penumbra of a feeling that Michael Medved was slightly--just slightly--disquieted by Brian DePalma and Mark Cuban's Redacted:

Meanwhile, Libertas notes that it's not exactly filling theaters, in even in bluest of the blue states, either.

A year ago, when I wrote "The Era of Big Cinema Is Over" for Tech Central Station, I was inspired by a comment that George Lucas made to Variety that Hollywood should produce lots of low-to-medium budget movies, rather than big zillion dollar blockbusters, like Star Wars (just to pick an ultra-successful cinematic franchise entirely at random). And this is the result: Hollywood is now producing relatively inexpensive movies for itself far more than pleasing audiences and selling tickets. But how long can this game go on?

Related: Ross Douthat writes that concurrent Hollywood misfire Lions for Lambs is "like watching Sean Hannity debate Jane Fonda after they both spent the whole day together sniffing glue."

(Via Small Dead Animals, which dubs Douthat's cyanoacrylate-laced bon mot the quote of the week.)

Update: Libertas's Dirty Harry takes one for the team and watches Redacted so you don't have to:

Every performance in the film is excruciatingly bad, and all because DePalma made three decisions so stupid he should have his Directors’ Guild card revoked. First, he cast people who can’t act. Second, he put in their mouths melodramatic, overwrought dialogue straight out of an Ed Wood film. Finally, because of the single camera gimmick, he’s left with bad actors spouting lame dialogue he can’t edit around. By eliminating the option to cut into his scenes he removed the most powerful tool a director has and that’s the power to edit a good performance using the best pieces of each take. In other words, DePalma stupidly painted himself into a corner of having to choose the scene that sucked the least.