Downtime

By Jeremy Caplan, RICHARD CORLISS, Lev Grossman, Belinda Luscombe, Romesh Ratnesar

Cheat Sheet. What you won't be able to avoid, what you should see--and what you should skip

UNAVOIDABLE

FALLING MAN By Don DeLillo, 246 pages

Novelists just can't seem to keep their ink-stained mitts off the Sept. 11 attacks, can they? Those senseless acts cry out for a powerful, sense-making fictional narrative, but nobody seems to be able to give them one. The latest to miss the mark is perennial top seed DeLillo, above right, whose Falling Man is about a lawyer who escapes the Twin Towers, wanders uptown in a daze and moves in with his estranged wife. DeLillo's tone is crushingly earnest--has he made a joke since 1985? His characters speak in leaden faux profundities, and they're so sunk in post-traumatic ennui you can barely tell them apart. One day a great novel will rise from the ruins of the Twin Towers, but it's not Falling Man.

UNNECESSARY

CATCH & RELEASE Rated PG-13; on DVD May 8

Jennifer Garner: adorable. Timothy Olyphant: hot. This movie: neither. After Garner's wedding day becomes instead her fiance's funeral (doesn't that just scream romantic comedy?), she moves in with his three wacky friends, all of whom have a crush on her. Luckily, only one of them is good looking, which simplifies things enormously. Juliette Lewis, in full crazy-hippie-chick glory, almost saves the movie. Almost.

UNMISSABLE

PAN'S LABYRINTH

Rated R; on DVD May 15

Spain in the war-torn '40s is the setting for this anti-Franco, pro-magic fairy tale. If you were wondering what all the critical rapture and Oscar nominations were about, make your move now. Guillermo del Toro's fable is definitely not for kids, but it is a fable--about a child (Irana Baquero, above) who escapes from real nightmares into an eerie, fulfilling wonderland--that is as potent and scary as the great early Disney cartoon features. Except there is no happy ending.

MUSIC REVIEW

Wilco Gets Happy

"I should warn you when I'm not well," sings Jeff Tweedy midway through Sky Blue Sky, the sixth studio album by Wilco, the protean band Tweedy has fronted for a decade. Over the years, Tweedy's brooding lyrics--fueled by battles with anxiety and addiction--have often overshadowed the spare beauty of his songwriting. But Sky Blue Sky is bright and affecting, mixing doses of '70s soul on tracks like Side with Seeds and Hate It Here with the sun-drenched guitar rock of Impossibly Germany and What Light, on which Tweedy advises, "It's alright to be frightened." Die-hard Tweedyites might howl at such signs of Wilco's mellowing. But mellow still sounds pretty good to the rest of us.

THE BLACK SWAN

By Nassim Nicholas Taleb 366 pages 60-SECOND SYNOPSIS

How Random Events Shape Us

We spend our lives "engaged in small talk, focusing on the known," while Black Swans-- dramatic, unpredictable events--shape the course of history, says mathematical investor turned philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Sept. 11, World War I and the Wall Street crash of 1987 are all demonstrations that "the world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown and the very improbable." A follow-up to his Fooled by Randomness, about the role chance plays in life, The Black Swan is a provocative macro-trend tome in the tradition of The Wisdom of Crowds and The Tipping Point. Taleb draws on history, philosophy and psychology to suggest that our love for simplistic explanations blinds us into thinking we understand how things work. What to do? Look for ways to foster serendipitous developments (like discoveries--good Black Swans) while preparing broadly for disaster.