By BARRY PARIS, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Spike Lee has long been America's most serious black filmmaker, never lacking or shying away from a tough racial agenda. Time, now, to eliminate the word "black" from that appraisal: Lee's agenda in "Miracle at St. Anna" is no less racial-historical yet far more ambitiously universal than ever before.

For comparison purposes, conjure a mental image of Niagara Falls and the huge hydro plant there that generates 2,300 megawatts of electricity.

If you take Agent 007 and add 110 gags, you get Agent 117 -- complete with elements of James Bond and Inspector Clouseau as well as a few rogue genes from Maxwell Smart and Austin Powers -- in "OSS 117: Cairo Nest of Spies."

In "Run Fatboy Run," Simon Pegg plays a lovable ne'er-do-well who leaves his pregnant fiancee (Thandie Newton) at the altar but eventually regrets his mistake. In order to win her back, he has to prove himself better than the rich American fitness freak (Hank Azaria) she now plans to marry. How else to do that but to run -- and beat his rival -- in the London Marathon?

Sexual and artistic angst has long permeated the love stories of French and Italian filmmakers. Now comes writer-director Hong Sang-soo with a South Korean counterpart to the European existential romance.

They're heroes of many a well-fought bottle, and they are not going gently into the dark night of Tom Collins' "Kings."

Love and cigarettes are both hazardous to your health, but what's really lethal is singing about them, as we discover in one of the most eccentric musical dramedies of this or any millennium.<