Daniele Thompson's Avenue Montaigne — originally titled Orchestra Seats — is a pop-French movie-movie paradigm.

It is January, Hollywood's graveyard shift, when the misconceived, orphaned crap saved up on the studio shelves all year gets thrust into theaters.

However you come at it, the second half of Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima diptych is more than a war movie.

Here we are again, in the Hollywoodland that looks in the mirror and sees whole-grain liberal goodness, where hot-topic crises in the Third World are plumbed for their dramatic juice.

It's a miracle that anyone still grieves for the Kennedys' Camelot — after daddy Joe's candidacy-purchasing habits have been long-aired, after JFK's responsibility for the destruction of Vietnam and the terrorist assaults on Cuba have become simply matters of documented fact, after Oliver Stone's hagiographic liturgy has faded from the Blockbuster shelves.