Cheat Sheet

UNAVOIDABLE

SPIDER-MAN 3 Opens May 4

The year's first surefire blockbuster lives up to its hype. Having saved Gotham while battling a severe case of teen angst, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is now a citywide celebrity as Spidey, with a swelled head to match. Enter a mess of nemeses, some old (James Franco as Harry Osborn), some new to the film series (Topher Grace as Venom, Thomas Haden Church as Sandman). For all the zippy fights and persuasive visual effects, SM3 is essentially a relationship movie, and a very sensitive one, about male-female and male-male bonding--it must set an all-time record for action heroes in tears. Mostly, director Sam Raimi's juggling act works. This is his most intricate and gripping "web cast" yet.

UNDERWHELMING

DREAMGIRLS Rated PG-13; on DVD May 1

It won all sorts of awards for Jennifer Hudson, and Lord knows it's got zazz. But Bill Condon's movie about a Supremes-like girl group lacks the thrill and threat of the 1981 Broadway musical sensation on which it was based. The picture has a second-half sag, maybe because it added so many new songs and story lines to accommodate all its stars. Nice try, guys; near miss.

UNMISSABLE

PLANET EARTH

On DVD April 24

Nature shows are meant to be educational, but face it: we watch them to ogle wild places and cool animals, preferably eating other cool animals. We want to be awed. This 11-episode BBC DVD set is organized by ecosystem, from deserts to the poles, and the $25 million budget secured such awe-inspiring sights as a deep-sea light show by an electrified vampire squid. It's a breathtaking window on the earth's vastness and most secret corners.

VIRAL-VIDEO WATCH

Will Ferrell's THE LANDLORD--a 2-min. tiff with a potty-mouthed, not potty-trained rent collector--notched nearly 15 million downloads at funnyordie.com

Everything you hate about movie trailers is sent up in mashups like 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT COMMANDMENTS, a fake ad for a teen comedy with Moses on youtube.com

Alanis Morissette proves she understands irony in a spoof of the slutty Black Eyed Peas video MY HUMPS sung in Morissette's signature pensive style on youtube.com

REVIEW

The Great White Jewish North

MICHAEL CHABON'S NEW NOVEL is a Raymond Chandler-- style pulp mystery set in a bizarro alternate universe where (as supposedly really almost happened) Alaska, not Israel, was designated as the Jewish homeland. Your hero is Meyer Landsman, a drunk and divorced detective working the case of a murdered drug-addicted Hasidic chess prodigy. As premises go, this one is half-baked, hard-boiled and frozen solid all at the same time.

Chabon's prose is so awesome, it's a crime not to quote it. "Look at Landsman," he writes, "one shirttail hanging out, snow-dusted porkpie knocked to the left, coat hooked to a thumb over his shoulder. Hanging on to a sky-blue cafeteria ticket as if it's the strap keeping him on his feet." There's hardly a mot here that's not juste. Likewise, a cartoon dog evokes "the obscure unease that Pluto has always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy."

So there's not much that Chabon, who won a Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, can't do with words. But he's almost too clever: there's something too cute about The Yiddish Policemen's Union, the kind of cuteness that a really passionate writer drops from time to time when there's serious work to be done. Chabon may be incapable of writing a bad book. But it's still not clear if he can write a great one.

With reporting by RICHARD CORLISS, Lev Grossman, Rebecca Winters Keegan, James Poniewozik