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Chain-smoking writer-director’s fourth feature, Punch-Drunk Love is the most acute evocation of nicotine nerve-jangle I’ve ever seen, eighty-nine minutes of anxiety in search of a lasting, deep drag.

Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) is one more confused member of Anderson’s bestiary of self-loathing SoCal curiosities. A distributor of novelty toilet plungers, he lives in a constant state of dread. He repeats, “I’m a nice guy” when confronted, shying back like a cat to a corner, yet he acts out, beating up inanimate objects when he can’t put words to feelings. A houseful of sisters (led by the insistent and wonderful Mary Lynn Rajskub) reminisce compulsively, and in chorus, about how they used to humiliate him when he was small, and how he once threw a hammer through a window when they teased him as “Gayboy.” “You remember us calling you Gayboy? You got so mad!”

There’s more seemingly random complication in this strange and lovely romantic comedy (of sorts), involving frequent flyer miles, a discarded harmonium and pudding, and the arrival of the too-good-to-be-true Lena Leonard. As Lena, Emily Watson is a bedeviled kewpie, glistering mad blue marbles for eyes, all purr and pursed lips, primed for the possibly of romance. A subplot involving a vengeful phone sex entrepreneur finds Philip Seymour Hoffman chewing through profanity like sheets of glass. Story’s not the heart of the picture, though. Settle into your seat, and something happens in the first couple of shots, a sudden burst of inexplicable mayhem, a sledding horizontal incitement, though a shock of sparks and friction, that sets the tone for the picture to come.

From those first moments you know you’re in for an aggressive portrait of disconnection and externalized inner chaos that will either disturb or annoy the shit out of you. It’s a comedy about OCD with OCD. For me, it’s the 32-year-old director’s best picture. Why? Because I can cite you a half dozen influences or parallel bits of art and it still won’t give you a clean picture of what Anderson does, not with Sandler’s persona, but with Sandler himself. His performance is frightening, spot on, utterly haunted. Oscar? Don’t laugh. Won’t happen, but it’s not unworthy. Great acting? Actually great typage, as the French call casting a role to type.

Anderson’s widescreen images (shot mostly with post-dusk grain by cinematographic co-conspirator Robert Elswit) posit Los Angeles as a quietly sad, almost mystical place, with an almost Jacques Tati-like grace, with the San Fernando Valley standing in for the hateful “modern” suburbs of Tati’s 1958 Mon Oncle. The assaultive portions of Jon Brion’s percussion score even resemble a passage of music from Tati’s Playtime. Sandler spends almost all of the picture in a dorky blue suit, reminiscent of Tati’s Hulot, who is also very tall and always kitted out in a khaki raincoat. Or is it Jerry Lewis, the spastic klutz in a stage costume? There are other citations I prefer to suggest while Anderson connives to be the surrealist of Sherman Oaks, less sociologist than spatial analyst. Shots comprised of silhouettes and shadow, with blinding light in background, a little past magic hour, as well as daylight shots of bleaching white light and geometric near-abstractions are reminiscent of painter Richard Diebenkorn’s grids of light and surface. In deep night, the look is akin to that in Gregory Crewdson’s photography, with bizarre, stylized light sources emanating from darkness. There’s a 99c Store sequence straight out of photographer-panoramist Andreas Gursky’s work, and Anderson also makes intelligent comic use of objects abruptly entering and exiting the frame, a familiar tic in the work of Bill Forsyth (Local Hero). Intentional or not, these likenesses suggest the intricacy of the movie’s visual style, rather than the self-indulgence some reviewers have suggested.

Like Lars Trier, with his divide between his lustrous, anally-precise pre-Dogme 95 and his showily gritty post-Dogme movies, Anderson dispenses with much of his Altmanesque gliding camera, except in scenes where the camera nudges, urges characters forward. There are intentional technical infelicities that hype the aggro, such as purposefully sloppy camerawork to the point of the camera bumping up against a character and soldiering on, with the sounds of scuffling represented as muffled poundings as if Sandler were hitting the microphone itself.

Amid the grandiloquent emotional distress, there’s always Anderson’s knack for cracked cadences, including the hilarious-in-context lines “Hang up again and you’ll see the trouble you’ll make”; “What’s with the piano, what’s with the pudding?” and “Sir, I’m going to crack your fucking head open.”

You don’t need a plot synopsis for Punch-Drunk Love, just curiosity. In a notorious interview with Patrick Goldstein in the L.A. Times advice after the release of Boogie Nights, Francis Coppola offered Anderson a piece of advice: "This is the one moment when you have it, when you can do whatever you want to do," the unrepentant maverick director told him. "It's the one moment when you have a clean slate, with no stigma attached. And even if your next movie makes $400 million and gets eight Oscars, you'll still have to fight battles that you'll never have to fight right now. So whatever you want to do, do it now." He’s still doing it, God bless the scamp. Pass the pack.

Abandon, Steven Gaghan’s directorial debut after his Oscar win for writing Traffic is an oft-assured variation of Paramount’s woman-in-jeopardy genre; Gaghan’s ear for the language of intelligent people makes for several quietly hilarious character turns. On a quaint small-town college campus, Katie (Katie Holmes) is a straight-ahead grind who’s almost put the disappearance of her polymath boyfriend Embry (Charlie Hunnam) behind her after two years. Aside from being a supersmart almost cartoonish hottie with Sting-tousled, surfer hair, he’s also rich, and there are powers who want him declared dead, so the police case is re-opened. Townie cop Handler (Benjamin Bratt) asks the questions; Katie does the best she can not to break down under all the pressures she’s assuming.

Gaghan’s astute at casting actors that suit his dialogue, and there are character turns to spare in the film. The ineffable Zooey Deschanel, as a randy pal of Katie’s, is a complete delight, and Melanie Lynskey, as a breathy, resentful classmate, steals every scene she’s in. Cinematographer Matthew Libatique (Requiem for a Dream, Tigerland), who works wonders with purple and blue and gray and green, is also a whiz at skin tone and texture, displaying the flaws in Holmes’ lovely face, making her more human, more beautiful, with each lingering close-up. “My entire body feels like rusty metal and I’m seeing things,” the recklessly articulate Katie tells psychiatrist Tony Goldwyn. Or as another of her scarily bright schoolmates sums it up, “They think it’s a coltish vulnerability but it’s just self-obsession. It’s about the missing dad and validation. She just needs a friend.” A canny strategy: Gaghan offers an on-the-nose analysis of our troubled heroine, but makes it spooky-funny in the mouth of a jealous character.

We’re angry, right? I’m not telling you my politics, but I’m telling you that Michael Moore is a dogged polemicist, a provocateur who puts the many television networks to shame merely by asking questions that are never asked by corporate media or are buried in the newspaper. This is the kind of inquiry that could never even enter the brain of the doddering Barbara Walters.

Confrontational, grandiloquent, petty, daring, marvelous, blackly sublime, Bowling for Columbine is a flawed treasure. Michael Moore takes measure of our culture of fear, and what sort of rage fuels our gun-happy land. Darkly funny despite Moore’s intermittent overreach, its great value is in speaking what’s on America’s mind without the intercession of politicians or mass media. At a time when social critique is dismissed as “unpatriotic,” Moore manages to draw out the rifts in our culture, while creating brilliant entertainment as well.

There are some unfortunate glitches, such as a montage of war casualties ending with footage of the second plane striking the world Trade Center. I think it’s a misguided scene, but Moore’s umbrage is never less than vital. That which makes us seethe may well be art, flaws and all. While Moore is sometimes self-important, Bowling for Columbine is an important document for fearful times.

E-me: Can a flawed messenger still convey a troubling message?