Critics of all stripes spend far too much time fawning over what they think should be fawned over (or what they think will make them look smart), and too little time caring about the arts. Not so with Kyle Smith, who makes no attempt to sugar coat his feelings about the current crop anti-war movies being peddled by Hollywood’s increasingly boring elite:

Normally Hollywood stars are like goldfish – content to be stared at as they swim through their little castles and contemplate their treasure chests. Ooh, looky! Fresh new gravel!

But when major news floats above their heads, up on the surface where the real world begins, Hollywood can’t restrain itself. Loooook . . . delicious little flakes of Importance. Surely I can nibble safely on this stuff? Mmm, tasty. Can I have another bite? And another? And another?

Goldfish don’t know when to stop eating, and neither do Hollywood stars. This fall Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Tom Cruise, Robert Redford, Susan Sarandon, Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron are going belly up at the box office after gobbling up too much reality about the Iraq War. “Rendition” and “In the Valley of Elah” are already dead in the water, while surveys show that “Lions for Lambs,” which opens Friday, is arousing about the same level of interest as you’d expect from “Charles in Charge: The Imax Experience.” Meryl Streep stars in two of these movies, in an act of uncontrolled cinematic gorging unseen since “Super Size Me.”

Not that you’d notice, because you’re going to see “Bee Movie” and “American Gangster” instead. The sages say this is because the Iraq Pack movies are downers, or because the public prefers entertaining to provocative, or because they’re sick of yammering about Iraq. Conservatives point out that Americans don’t like going to anti-American movies any more than new mothers with baby pictures like being told their kids are ugly.

All true. But here’s what’s even more true: these movies are awful.

It gets better, he refers to Lions for Lambs as the “My Dinner with Andre of war movies” and compares Rendition to a “sixth grade film stip from an Iranian school.” A wickedly devastating critique of not just some apparently dreadful movies, but of the shallow uninspired Hollywood culture that made them possible. Read the whole thing.