Briefly noted

There's something in the air as winter yields to spring that makes Northeasterners want to get up and go. I'm not immune. But before I go Westward ho, a few small things.

Building on a stronger-than-usual March, April starts off with not one but two good movies. Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, a return to form for the brazen Dutch filmmaker, may be better than good; it rattled by so quickly at a screening I attended I may need to see it again, to verify that the shot of adrenaline it gave to me that first time was no fluke. It's the flip side of his Soldier of Orange (1977), an epic examination of Dutch resistance fighters during World War II; here, the resistance is complicit in corruption and betrayal, and a Nazi's loving arms may be the most secure refuge for Rachel (an astonishing go-for-broke performance by Carice van Houten), a Jew who goes from one perilous situation to another once her family is wiped out on an informant's tip (Lives of Others co-star Sebastian Koch is the helpful blackshirt). Paced like an especially gripping graphic novel, Black Book races from one hair-raising, white-is-black and black-is-white, reversal to the next; I was wrung out, but completely satisfied, after its 145 minutes came to an end. Verhoeven's sensational (and sensationalist) Hollywood career, including personal favorites Robocop and Total Recall, fizzled out with Hollow Man. But this reunion with screenwriter Gerard Soeteman, his collaborator on Soldier and the still-shocking Turkish Delight (an Oscar nominee, which Black Book should have been), Spetters, and The Fourth Man, is a house afire. Sony Pictures Classics releases it on Apr. 4.

Like Zodiac, The Hoax (Miramax, Apr. 6) dives into Seventies-era paranoia, but director Lasse Hallstrom has a looser, funnier story to tell. Richard Gere, who idles as a good guy but comes alive in sleazier parts, has a good one as Clifford Irving, who, feeling unappreciated by New York's publishing establishment forged a memoir by Howard Hughes and did jail time for the deception. The book was a fraud, but it wasn't altogether a cheat. The author and his put-upon aide de camp, Dick Susskind (Alfred Molina), did solid research, which, in a clever adaptation (by William Wheeler) of an Irving memoir, made them ripe for manipulation by Hughes and the Nixon administration. To further explore the Hughes mindset, Irving actually "becomes" Hughes, via makeup, which pushes him that much closer to the brink. Harrowing in spots--it was fascinating to observe a screening room audience of journalists egg Irving on in his deception--The Hoax is a wryly cockeyed story of literary shell games that spin out of control for the players and the played.

My theatergoing was bound to strike a reef, and I crashed into Charles Busch's Our Leading Lady, a wan attempt by the author to move beyond knowing movie spoofery. Like Busch, it's a drag. The show-within-a-show conceit didn't get much better with the Kander and Ebb-ish musical comedy Curtains, which expends some terrific performers (including David Hyde-Pierce, Debra Monk, Karen Ziemba, and Edward Hibbert) and two or three decent numbers on a shapeless and not-very-funny mystery storyline badly in need of some of The Drowsy Chaperone's snap. Better, though, for plays and musicals to find subjects other than plays and musicals. The Pirate Queen has an interesting one, but discretion and an Apr. 5 opening date prevent me from saying more, except that I may not have the right chromosomes to appreciate a feminist-lite historical potboiler with song lyrics like, I kid you not, "She's confused about her gender," which are more 21st century Oprah than 16th century Ireland.

Last Sunday was a triple-witching night of TV series and season finales. We'll miss HBO's Rome, which was forced to telescope a lot of history into its second and alas final season, but emerged as good television, if never as great as I had hoped. Co-stars Kevin McKidd (the next James Bond?), Ray Stevenson, James Purefoy, and Kerry Condon will all move onto other assignments, and Lindsay Duncan secured her position as the most otherworldly actress of our time, seemingly channeling oracles and spectres and scaring the bejesus out of Polly Walker, the second coming of Joan Collins. Maybe Slings and Arrows will surprise us with a fourth series but the delightful Canadian show ended on a high note with its King Lear finale; the droll and good-hearted program is a must for anyone who appreciates theater and is worth moving to the top of your Netflix queue. Battlestar Galactica, meanwhile, ended a third solid season of intrigue with a few puzzles that will have to wait till 2008 to solve. I promise to be back before that, though.