By PHIL VILLARREAL, Arizona Daily Star

Dennis Quaid has a secret about making good sports movies. He makes sure they're not sports movies."I've done probably six of them that I think directly could be called sports films and fit the criteria. For me, they have got to be about more than the sport," said Quaid, 54, in a recent phone interview from Phoenix.

The first black man to win the Heisman Trophy, as well as the first to become the top pick in the NFL draft, Ernie Davis was a titan well worth remembering on film.With his remarkable work on the football field, he did more to advance civil rights than most people realize.

It would seem that if you tossed Ridley Scott, Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe in a jar and then shook it, a fascinating movie would spill out.Add an intriguing Middle Eastern espionage premise, and you're talking Oscars.So it's a wonder that "Body of Lies" squanders all of those ingredients in a dry, convoluted mess.

In the land of the blind, the visionary director is king.

If you liked "Superbad" and "Juno," loved fragile everyteen Michael Cera in both and are aching to see his next seminal high-school coming-of-age comedy, uh, don't."Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist" is stupefyingly inane, a movie that will let you down harder than a breakup by text message.

Ed Harris sure has watched his share of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and James Stewart Westerns.The star and director of throwback Western "Appaloosa," Harris plays Virgil Cole, a decisive lawman with rawhide skin and a trigger finger that's matched in speed and accuracy only by his mouth.

Romance novelist Nicholas Sparks is so hot right now that Hollywood producers are optioning his grocery lists.The Richard Gere-Diane Lane swooner "Nights in Rodanthe" follows Sparks' "Message in a Bottle," "A Walk to Remember" and "The Notebook." "Dear John" is set to come out next year.

"Choke" is no "Fight Club," but in a world of far too few Chuck Palahniuk movie adaptations, it suffices.Few writers capture the despair of the masculine ego with the writer's verve or insight.Palahniuk's "Fight Club" and its film adaptation was a primal scream of rage against materialism and corporate mind control.

As neighbors go, the aphorism-spewing, face-hiding Wilson from "Home Improvement" is at one end of the spectrum. On the other is Abel, Samuel L. Jackson's racist cop in "Lakeview Terrace."

"The Women" is a remake of a movie from the 1930s, but it seems like a throwback to the Stone Age.The film preaches that when a man cheats on his wife, it's only because she didn't lavish him with enough attention.Huh? I've always thought men cheat because their wives neglected the ironing or were late at getting dinner on the table.