Cheat Sheet

UNAVOIDABLE

SHOOTER Rated R; opens March 23

Marine scout sniper Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg) could nail a gnat a mile away in a high wind. So he's just the guy to help government officials catch a presidential assassin--and then to be blamed for the killing in a high-level double cross. The film, which is basically Rambo with a higher IQ, is best at giving plausible instructions on how to assemble and detonate weapons of movie distraction. Wahlberg, so muscled up he looks as if he's ready to explode, is serious and committed to the action genre. He could be that youngish star movies have been looking for ever since Sly, Arnold, Jean-Claude and Jackie got too old to beat up bad guys.

UNNECESSARY

TMNT [TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES] Rated PG; opens March 23

When the four amphibious ninjas with Renaissance-artist names migrated from comic books to the big screen in 1990, they spawned a $6 billion frenzy for such delights as turtle-packaged frozen pizza, turtle shampoo and talking turtle toothbrushes. In the first sequel since 1993, Leonardo and pals have morphed into CGI. The movie's O.K. but probably not worth the hassle of shelling out for action figures afterward.

UNMISSABLE

MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON

Three DVDs; $29.95

"Ahead of its time" is an overused phrase, but Norman Lear's soap-opera satire, which debuted in 1976, would work on HBO today. Louise Lasser is the eponymous housewife, anesthetized by TV and horrified by the "waxy yellow buildup" on her kitchen floor. The show immerses you in a surreal, quaint-but-sordid small-town setting that makes Desperate Housewives look like Leave It to Beaver.

If You Liked 300, Try ...

NEW SCHOOL GOD OF WAR II PlayStation 2 Sure, Xerxes thought he was a god. You really are one in this game, the war god of the ancient Spartans, ripping your way through a roster of mighty mythological foes, including the Colossus of Rhodes and, yes, even Zeus.

OLD SCHOOL THE HISTORIES By Herodotus We owe most of what we know about Thermopylae--and that line in the movie about fighting in the shade--to Herodotus, the "father of history." In The Histories, he recounts the whole arc of the war with the Persians, whose arrogance proved to be their undoing.

REVIEW Talking 'Bout Your Generation

AS A SATIRIST CHRISTOPHER Buckley hasn't been overly ambitious in choosing his targets. (Unscrupulous tobacco lobbyists? Oh no he didn't!) But his new book, Boomsday, has some teeth--or at least some menacing dentures. Cassandra Devine is a 29-year-old blogger who has had it with the government bankrupting her generation to support legions of increasingly long-lived baby boomers. "Someone my age will have to spend their entire life paying unfair taxes," she rants, "just so the Boomers can hit the golf course at 62 and drink gin and tonics until they're 90. What happened to the American idea of leaving your kids better off than you were?"

Cassandra's solution is a bill that would provide baby boomers with financial incentives to commit suicide--or "Voluntary Transitioning"--once they hit 70. Granted, the fiscally responsible management of Social Security isn't the stuff of which pulse-pounding plots are fabricated. But there's something good-naturedly world-weary--with a whiff of Waugh and Wolfe--in the way Buckley spins his wonky premise into a story about how the absurdities of Washington demand even greater absurdities in response. And Buckley (who, for the record, is 54) has an endless facility for mimicking the glossy rhetoric of political spin in a way that lays bare its atrocious underlying hypocrisies.

With reporting by RICHARD CORLISS, Lev Grossman, Amy Lennard Goehner, James Poniewozik