Spacey is thrilling in the Bridge Project production of “Richard III” now at BAM under the visceral direction — smoke, drums, blood — of Sam Mendes. He reveals why one goes the extra mile to see certain plays, those with marquee names. He’s not just good. He’s a pro, and his craft and commitment blaze.

Richard, Shakespeare’s wannabe king, craves the throne with psychopathic bloodlust. The show opens with Spacey seated (crumpled, really) center stage, already hissing his disgust at the turn of events, already plotting his sanguinary path to royalty. No one, not woman nor child, will hinder him. And, in various murderous schemes, they don’t.

How he hungers for the station he believes is his. With roar and spittle, rafters-rattling rage, Spacey claws the air as he manipulates his executioners and the credulous innocents. He wipes the sweat from his head and brow with an ever-present handkerchief. Many are on to his madness, while others don’t catch his winks and smirks, sly, acid asides that signal a lurking fiend.

This production has toured the world, rewarding Spacey and his cast bounding confidence and mastery of the text. While the cast is uniformly excellent, Spacey in particular seems to relish his comfort with the role, eliciting great variety and nuance. He flings some lines like rotten fruit he’s bitten in to. He crunches down on others, gnawing, growling.

Mendes’ stagecraft includes drum corps, projections, video screens, smoke and piles of bloodstained attire. (Between scenes during the climactic battle, if you’re close enough, you can see Spacey smearing fake blood all over his face and shirt in the dark.) The blood is important, and it’s never excessive. This is the blood king, after all, the killer crown.

Richard’s fate is foretold, and Mendes devilishly delights in his king’s demise. (It’s Grand Guignol spectacle.) But before that Richard has snapped in the heat of a losing fight. Famously he shouts, “A horse, a horse. My kingdom for a horse!” Spacey embodies Richard’s insanity here, howling, spinning out of control, sword flailing, soaked in blood. Doomed.

“Often identified as the artist who successfully translated Abstract Expressionism into three dimensions,” the catalog says, Chamberlain clearly had fun making his epic welded collages. Novel and frolicsome, most of the sculptures are provocative in the best way: People don’t know how serious to take them, how much they can smile as they regard, say, a tree of super-polished steel that towers over them (a work that regaled at a recent Chamberlain exhibit at the Gagosian, much superior to the Guggenheim show).

Kids will like his work. Some of the larger pieces, smashed, contorted car metal, could have popped from the trash compactor in “Star Wars.” Even adults have to nip the urge to stroke some of the tangled, burnished surfaces, especially the vintage car parts that have been beautifully airbrushed despite being mashed violently together. Titles include “Rooster Starfoot” and “Lord Suckfist.”

The sculptures are visually voluptuous. Folds and gleams of mostly car metal, some of it rusted and dejected, some of it resuscitated with fresh paint, all of it jaggedly bundled, slightly dangerous. Variation abounds. Take the simple oil barrel that’s been telescoped and painted in red, pink and yellow. It’s lovely, and ghastly, a utilitarian runt. There are palm-size sculptures. There is warped metal boasting a broken tail reflector, a victim of the violence, all that crunched, exquisite violence.

Much has been said about the similarities between Suzanne Collins’ young adult book “The Hunger Games” and the Japanese novel “Battle Royale,” which was made into a graphically violent, often banned cult movie in 2000.

Kinji Fukasaku’s film is a hard R away from Ross’ pretty lightweight divertissement. It’s a gleeful splatterfest, a dark comedy that disposes of its teen protagonists, who are fighting for their lives, sometimes with a tinge of pathos, sometimes with tortured melodrama, sometimes with a snigger and a wink.

I haven’t read either novel, but both movies are set in grim dystopias, where selected groups of school-aged teenagers are set out in the wilderness to kill each other until only one survives. He or she is the “winner” of the games.

It’s a twisted conceit. And yet, as the phenomenal sales of the “Hunger Games” books alone prove, audiences get a charge from the perverted spectacle of young people being slaughtered — or more accurately the charge of the hunt. But the age bracket of the teens savagely killing bear an undeniable novelty.

“Hunger Games” lays out far more complicated game rules than I’m interested in. Simply said, both films force a certain number of teens to fight and battle one another to victory. Alliances are made, friends are wiped out, kids crack up, others stay poised and lethal.

The non-fighting citizens in “Hunger Games” have to watch the games on TV, a satirical nod to our reality television culture. “Battle Royal” also bears the tinge of satire, that of rigid bureaucratic culture.

“Hunger Games” is the more nuanced of the pictures. There are more rules, more character dynamics, more intricate world-building. But “Battle Royale” might be the more exciting movie. It’s not just the weaponry the kids are given — hatchets, crossbows, shotguns — but the blunt treatment of the characters’ deaths.

Ross pussyfoots, but then again he’s making a lowest-common denominator blockbuster that has to return (and has, spectacularly). “Battle Royale” has well earned its “age 15” rating, what with hangings, beheadings, impalings. Yet of the two movies it’s the one with a character desperately crying, “How can you kill each other so easily?” That makes most sense of all.

“The Grey” starts as a group of oil roughnecks take a short plane ride in the arctic winds that turns disastrous. The vessel goes down and there are about eight survivors, including star and eventual pack leader Liam Neeson, whose character knows so many useful things that he even can even soothe a dying man to his death — coax him into the dark while assuaging his terror. (“You will get warm …”) And like that, the man dies, almost on cue.

Neeson fortunately knows a lot about wild wolves, too, because, alas,  the plane has crashed in the vicinity of a wolf den, a teeming hive where wolves are on the prowl, sniffing supper in the nearby humans. For reasons explained, the burly, growly Neeson is something of a wolf expert, learned in the animals’ behavioral and instinctual urges.

The wolves are wily and hungry and they start chomping off men (a great cast) one by one until the crew is alarmingly small. All the while Neeson entertains internal soliloquies about faith and fate sprung from his childhood. Is there a God that deserves our faith? Is survival this difficult worth fighting for?

It could’ve been hokum in the context, but it’s credible and moving, largely because Neeson brings such conviction to the role. He’s so much better in action films like this and “Taken” than comical huff-puffery such as “Clash of the Titans.” He has a rugged gravitas, and he’s focused, commanding, invested. He plays for keeps.

“The Grey,” whose title speaks to the snowed-out environment as much as to Neeson’s existential dilemma, might be faulted for tracing an “And Then There Were None” template, but it packs a gratifyingly nihilistic ending. It boasts one of the best fade to blacks in recent film. Director/co-writer Joe Carnahan knows where to end it. Right where it hurts.

Pity the patron who enters the theater late or who decides to continue his whispered conversation with his seatmate one opening movie credit too long. Invariably a codger or an old biddy will turn and demand hushitude, now, this instant, lest one wants their head removed in a single chomp.

I’ve experienced this culture of terror on several occasions at matinee screenings in all of MOMA’s three auditoriums. Cell phones, crinkly bags, talking, seat hunting have all raised hackles, and, devoid of decorum, the response is never pretty.

A conscientious moviegoer — I am, gulp, a discreet husher, but I don’t spit my rebukes like poison darts — I’ve never been busted at MOMA, nor have I ever hushed in those theaters. There’s the retirement brigade to take care of that. I’m not being ageist. I’ve witnessed only geriatric patrons admonishing the racket-makers. (Of course, they aren’t rackets; more like common rustles.)

I have a nightmare of arriving late, entering the gloom looking for a seat and being shouted down. I would start and shudder and weep and flee. I don’t know how the hushees survive, sit and watch a movie after being scolded so.

I don’t know how the screamers themselves do it without curdling guilt. I told a woman at the IFC Cinema the other day “Can you turn off your phone?” as the movie had fully begun. She gave a solicitous “Sorry,” and I had a stomachache the rest of the picture.

At MOMA I tense up when someone walks in late, invariably carrying a noisy plastic bag and talking well above a whisper to one’s companion about where to sit.

“Excuse me, would you please be quiet!” grumbled a fellow to a pair seeking seats this week. Soon after, when a MOMA employee generously escorted an elderly woman to a front row seat after the show had started, a crotchety man yelled “Sit down!” at the staffer, who coolly ignored the dragon breath — the smartest response I’ve seen to these surly cineastes.

Stare long enough, and your eyes might go gently cross-eyed. Or a flash of vertigo could overtake you, however briefly. The constellation of dots you’re gazing at might also begin to buzz, ever so slightly, as if there’s a battery pack behind the canvas. These dots are alive.

Those are some of the sensations you can get standing before one of Damien Hirst’s planes of colored spots at the Gagosian Galleries during “Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986 — 2011.” The abstract grids of primary colors become dancing fields of flatness. Certain colors pop out competitively and command your view.

Happy, veering on vapid, the spot paintings are almost laughably accessible, art without danger, if not without history. Some of the smaller dots bring to mind festive cupcakes, or those candy buttons on paper tape from childhood.

The bigger dots, the ones on gigantic canvases, gleefully recall the spotted tarps from the game Twister. These larger paintings, displayed in a hangar-sized room (at W. 24^th St.), don’t leave you dizzy, granting the eye and the brain a respite from the smaller canvases’ pointillist clutter.

You can dismiss these studies in color as frivolous, but they assume their own aesthetic right with post-Warholian heft. The paintings are mass-manufactured things, but no less provocative or pretty for it. Their pop whimsy is infectious.

Entering the gift shop, you can either sneer or chortle at the spotted goodies, a shameless push of polka-dotted consumerism. The store peddles buttons, key chains, t-shirts, mugs, clocks and, for a wee $735, a skateboard deck riddled with spots. It was the skateboard, ridiculous and divine, that dropped my defenses and had me rolling with it.

The exhibit is showing simultaneously at all 11 Gagosian Galleries, from New York to Hong Kong, Athens to Beverly Hills. It runs through Feb. 18 at the three Gagosians in New York.

Chad Harbach’s debut novel “The Art of Fielding” is good, very good. It’s about life, baseball and literature, in that order, and even someone like me, indifferent to deeds on the diamond — to, well, the art of fielding —will glean riches from this sprawling book.

Harbach’s a firm traditionalist, not unlike his peer (and fan) Jonathan Franzen (who’s the superior writer). He finds grace in an implacably linear narrative form and stubbornly plain language — a great writer, he’s no poet — and it suits his unvarnished story about a group of college ball players, their loves (books, girls — and men), ambitions on the field and off, family, friendship and, yes, Herman Melville.

It’s not flawless. Things move in a leisurely fashion and sometimes you wonder if the amount of pages dedicated to a scene is really commensurate with its importance.  A few parts are flabby. Characters have distractingly knobby surnames — Skrimshander, Starblind, Affenlight, Loondorf, Suitcase — that are perhaps meant to be comic but are more like groaners.

Harbach’s triumph is how he seamlessly weaves the messy private lives of his likable young characters — including that of a superlative shortstop who seems to be losing his magic touch — with breath-holding drama on the field, and it’s consistently bracing. The book oozes the love of the game without fetishizing it. Even I found myself rooting for the home team (the Harpooners, a la “Moby Dick”).

“The Art of Fielding” is a first book that feels like a fifth book. It’s full of wisdom. Save for the college president, who I could see played by an older George Clooney, the story is about youth and figuring out who you are and what you’re going to do. These kids don’t know, but neither for that matter does the president. Life’s a game on and off the field — the book almost necessarily stoops to that cliché. But it works in a tale like this, suggesting that we work our hearts out practicing the game, if never mastering it.

I’m quick to call the middlebrow mediocrity “The Descendants” rashly overrated. “A Dangerous Method” — a stifling chamber drama that’s as stiff as a sepia photograph. “My Week with Marilyn” — a mushy trifle. Lars Von Trier’s weirdly hailed “Melancholia” (is it really his “best” film??) — inexcusably misshapen (the movie flatly doesn’t work). An otherwise conventional children’s bore that’s much too long, “Hugo” only came to life during scenes animating the work of silent movie wizard Georges Melies.

(What have I liked? “Pina,” Wim Wenders’ exquisitely rendered look at the dance of Pina Bausch, was nourishing art, and the silent bauble “The Artist,” cutesy as it can be, didn’t offend. The Iranian domestic drama “A Separation” was riveting. Some older titles: “Midnight in Paris,” “Ides of March,” “Moneyball,” “Bridesmaids.”)

All this disappointment serves as a fat yellow caution sign. Now I’m wary of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “Shame,” to name a few.

I got suckered the other day. After a deluge of critical plaudits, I saw Spielberg’s Oscar-baiting “War Horse,” and damn I want my money back. Like most of the movies described above, it’s not a terrible work, it’s just a superfluous one. I can’t fault it for feeling like it’s based on a children’s book, since it is, but Spielberg does little with the material except stage it often beautifully. It’s a rote work, freeze-dried and hung up like a pretty picture.

There’s ghastly warfare and some horsies (and men) die, but it’s not all that bad. Amid it all is cornpone humor and cornpone valor and mighty pronouncements and emotions fluttering on gusts of John Williams’ thrusting score. Old-fashioned and overly long, it would try a kid’s patience. I have to quote David Denby, when he calls “War Horse” “bizarrely unimaginative.” He also, wisely, makes fun of the movie’s squawking impish goose, a barnyard critter that seemed to have walked off the set of “Babe” and lost his way, waddling onto the sun-drenched grounds of the squarest movie of the year.

I’m a mild fan of the series — I recall loving the second chapter, directed by John Woo (I was alone with that opinion, too) — so this isn’t an I-don’t-get-it, wrinkly-nosed huff at a cynical popcorn action blockbuster. This is a genuine say-what? to critical quotes like this from Roger Ebert, who granted the movie 3.5 stars: The movie “is a terrific thriller with action sequences that function as a kind of action poetry.” That’s the least of it. Other critics have authored small rhapsodies that swoon and twinkle. The movie earned a spot in the 90 percentile at Rotten Tomatoes.

The writers are wise enough to avoid “masterpiece” terrain, knowing what they’re dealing with — a whiplash-kinetic, mega-budget Tom Cruise vanity vehicle directed by Pixar whiz Brad Bird. That said, that’s pretty strong pedigree for an action picture. Cruise doesn’t fool around with work he’s produced, and Bird has shown swoops of genius with Pixar flicks like “The Incredibles” (this is his first live-action film).

I’m one of the few people who actually likes Cruise’s on-screen persona, no matter what it is. He’s a classic silver screen specimen, a humanoid formulated to be a movie star and all that that definition entails (including a spectacularly sui generis personal life). I even liked him in “Vanilla Sky.”

So it’s not a Cruise bias that had me bored, yawningly so, during “MIGP.” The whole enterprise felt routine, been there, done that. I won’t (can’t really) limn the convoluted plot, but the action set pieces, the reason we’re there, rarely scraped novel, save for the now-well-known bit with Cruise scaling the tallest building in the world, in Dubai. Even that fell flat. You knew he wasn’t going to fall, and anyway didn’t he scale some monstrous skyscraper in the last installment? Cruise is joined by Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton and Simon Pegg to make a crack spy team. The physical chemistry is fine, but the writing — all those wisecracks and piquant badinage — could have used a serious polish.

There’s abundant tension in the movie — your breath will cease when, say, Cruise plummets a car head-first down several stories (he lives, unscratched, indeed perfect, in this most implausible of actioneers) — but it only works on a watery visceral level. I never cared about the characters, and besides I knew our heroes at worst would take a flesh wound from a bullet. I didn’t demand much from this “Mission: Impossible.” I  just hoped it would have delivered something the critics promised: a teeny thing called fun.