THE GOOD NIGHT
R, 93 minutes

Gary (Martin Freeman) is a young musician who was once a member of — and possibly the musical intelligence behind — a moderately well-known rock band, but that’s over. Now he is reduced to writing commercial jingles for his more successful ex-bandmate, Paul (Simon Pegg), who is a partner in a big advertising agency.

Gary is artistically frustrated and depressed because he has a nagging, hypercritical girlfriend named Dora (Gwyneth Paltrow) who wants him to be more of a go-getter, like Paul. After dreaming of a beautiful stranger named Anna (Penelope Cruz) who is his idea — and pretty much any man’s idea — of romantic and sexual perfection, Gary seeks to take up permanent residence in his dreams by seeking out Mel (Danny DeVito), a self-proclaimed expert on what he calls “lucid dreaming.”

The film, which is written and directed by Ms. Paltrow’s younger brother, Jake Paltrow, is not as bad as it sounds. In fact, in some ways it is quite good. Much of the writing is sharp and witty, and Mr. Paltrow is blessed with a terrific cast whose sense of comic timing adds appreciably to the laugh total. It is possible to enjoy almost everything about the movie except for its meaning.

Or rather its lack of meaning. Ultimately, Mr. Paltrow allows his dream world to fight the real world to a standstill, as if Gary’s preference for living in his dreams really could be something other than a childish delusion and a moral defection.

For a long time, powerful voices have been insisting on the rights of artistic fantasies to be treated on equal terms with artistic representations of reality. In the modish critical language of today, we are not supposed to “privilege” reality over fantasy. The reasoning seems to be that since there is no reality anyway (or if there is it is unknowable), reality has no right snobbishly to look down its nose at fantasy as something inferior. Both are just somebody’s version of the truth.

In fact, we all know that this, the pretense of an equality between the two, is itself a fantasy. People who can’t tell reality from fantasy are insane, and however much some people enjoy pretending to be insane in order to amuse us, they’re really not — and neither are they, in the end, very amusing. By pretending to treat fantasy as a rational alternative to reality, “The Good Night” ends up trivializing tragedy.

James Bowman

THE SEEKER: The Dark Is Rising
PG, 94 minutes

Empty, risible claptrap “The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising” is as muddled and self-important as its title. Based on a series of young adult fantasy novels by Susan Cooper (Harry Potter, what hast thou wrought?), the film tells the story of Will Stanton (Alexander Ludwig), a boy who learns he is the last of a group of evil-fighting warriors. If you care enough about what your kids put in their mouths that you try to minimize their exposure to McDonald’s, then you should care enough about what they put in their eyes to protect them from this film. Too boring to be mocked amusingly, the less said about this dud the better, but I’m paid by the word, so my apologies in advance.

Will is turning 14 and he feels alienated. His family has moved to a wee English village, he’s going through puberty (which all the locals talk about incessantly), and he’s the only blond in a family of nine brunettes. His estrangement increases when he learns that he’s the super-powered Seeker, charged by the cleverly named Old Ones (who are indeed old) to collecting the six signs that will stop the dark from rising. Like Ash in “Pokémon,” he’s gotta catch ’em all! And he does! The Dark doesn’t rise!

This is hardly a surprise when you realize that the Dark is more directly threatened by a lack of imagination and a threadbare budget, and that it consists almost entirely of Christopher Eccleston wearing a black rag over his face, waving a sword, and occasionally emitting a foul, black wind. Padded with slow motion and bloated with shots of ominous clouds and cutaways to ravens, “The Seeker” contains less than five minutes of protein-filled story and 89 minutes of wobbling fat. Would you let your kids eat something like that?

Grady Hendrix