TERMINAL BY PETER KEOUGH

This Steven Spielberg effort is the film equivalent of airline food: pre-packaged, portion-controlled, tasteless, nutritionally suspect, and tending to cause gas at high altitudes. Hanks, in one of his worst performances, plays Viktor Navorski, a funny Eastern European in the tradition of Andy Kaufman’s Latke and Robin Williams’s Vladimir in Moscow on the Hudson. Viktor arrives at JFK just as his homeland of "Krakozhia" (which apparently has no cities, since all flights there bear the destination "Krakozhia") collapses in a coup. As a result, he’s a man without a country and must live in the limbo of the airport’s international arcade until the situation changes.

An ironic inversion of Hanks’s role in Cast Away, demonstrating the deeper isolation of the so-called global village and the culture of rootless mass consumption? If only. Somehow, Spielberg manages to make a film about airport security and immigration policies in the post–September 11 world that’s devoid of any topical or political relevance. As for the existential trauma of disenfranchisement and anomie, one look at Jerzy Skolimowski’s 1982 Moonlighting shows up the scene in which Hanks runs heartbroken from monitor to monitor watching news broadcasts of his country’s collapse. And for a sour aftertaste, check out Catherine Zeta-Jones as the flight attendant/call girl/love interest embodying Spielberg’s creepy misogyny (note to the director: avoid romance and comedy). Only Stanley Tucci prevails as the head customs officer and the villain of the piece (i.e., the only one who doesn’t recite platitudes).