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George Clooney stares at a goat in The Men Who Stare At Goats.

** Pirate Radio

Written and directed by Richard Curtis. With Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tom Sturridge, Bill Nighy, Nick Frost and Kenneth Branagh. (R)

During the British invasion just about the only place the English could hear rock music on the radio was, ironically, on pirate stations that broadcast from boats anchored outside British territorial waters. While the stations tried to stay one step ahead of the law they had their own internal squabbles, culminating in a shooting that rocked the industry. That would make a great movie, but it seems Richard Curtis (Love Actually) is only interested in love these days, or at least sex. Unless you share his interest in which groupie is sleeping with which DJ — and enjoy the handheld simulation of a ship at sea — you'll be better off watching reruns of "WKRP in Cincinnati" than Pirate Radio.

Curtis goes the Almost Famous route, seeing the shipboard antics through the eyes of a teenage boy named Carl (a bland Tom Sturridge) whose glamorous mum (Emma Thompson) has sent him to be watched over by his godfather Quentin (Bill Nighy), the station manager overseeing a motley crew. Among them is the Count (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a character inspired by the American Radio Caroline DJ, Emperor Rosko, who soon bristles at the return of the glamorous Gavin (Rhys Ifans), whose velvet jackets equal Quentin's in Carnaby Street splendor. This one-sided rivalry is forgotten until the Count decides to avenge a bit of romantic treachery against another DJ by challenging Gavin to climb the mast. Meanwhile, Carl tries to lose his virginity and, to paraphrase Phoebe Cates in Lace II, figure out which one of these bastards is his father.

Back on shore, where the camera is firmly anchored to a tripod, an evil government minister (Kenneth Branagh) is plotting to sink Radio Rock, even if it means killing them all (an outrageous accusation that has no basis in fact), aided by a henchman named Twatt (Jack Davenport, deserving much better) so that Curtis can make something like 8,000 "Twatt" jokes. A couple of lines come straight out of the "Blackadder" style book, cruel reminders of what a great comedy writer Curtis once was. But as Love Actually attests, he was never a good DJ, and the soundtrack for Pirate Radio is even more hackneyed, a parade of No.1s that the hipper albums tacked on the walls put to shame.

*** The Men Who Stare at Goats

Directed by Grant Heslov. Written by Peter Straughan, based on the book by Jon Ronson. With George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges. (R)

Far closer to reality is The Men Who Stare at Goats, the incredible true story of the U.S. Army's paranormal training camps where soldiers practiced bending spoons, bursting clouds and killing goats with their minds. One of Ronald Reagan's pet projects, the First Earth Battalion's dream of less lethal warfare — for our side, anyway — devolved into the practice of torturing prisoners with the theme from "Barney" during the war in Iraq. They say that comedy equals tragedy plus time, but has enough time passed for an Iraq War comedy?

In screenwriter Peter Straughan's tidy fictionalization of journalist Jon Ronson's exposé, Ewan McGregor plays a newspaper reporter who meets a self-proclaimed Jedi named Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) who claims to have been part of a clandestine military unit of warrior monks, here called the New Earth Army, led by Vietnam vet-turned-hippie Bill Django (Jeff Bridges). Cassady is a composite of several subjects in Ronson's book, but Django is a stand-in for Jim Channon, a retired lieutenant colonel who was a consultant on the film. Their nemesis, played by Kevin Spacey, is based on notorious CIA psychiatrist Sidney Gottlieb, who dosed unwitting soldiers with LSD and later trained soldiers to visualize unseen objects through ESP.

With parts tailor-made for the stars' talents — Clooney, crazed and fidgety; Spacey, crazed and nasty; Bridges, now and forever The Dude — The Men Who Stare at Goats is pretty funny, and yet there's a nagging thinness about the material. In the best scene, a squabble between rival military contractors at a gas pump erupts into all-out war. It's a moment of bitter satire, saying more about the current morass than all the earnest handwringing and fingerpointing that has consumed the many films that have attempted to take on this war and failed.

** The Box

Written and directed by Richard Kelly, based on the short story "Button, Button" by Richard Matheson. With Cameron Diaz, James Marsden and Frank Langella. (PG-13)

After stumbling disastrously with the epic Southland Tales, Richard Kelly, the wunderkind director of Donnie Darko, has pulled back and made a restrained, mainstream thriller with The Box. That's what Warner Bros. would like you to believe, anyway. The truth is that The Box is just as nutty as anything else Kelly has ever made. Kelly continues Richard Matheson's parable, previously dramatized for the '80s "Twilight Zone" series, adding a paranoid conspiracy, dead-eyed UFO worshippers and pools used as transportation portals. You expect someone to exclaim, "The Human Resource Exploitation Manual — it's a cookbook!"

Kelly has set the story in his childhood home of Richmond, c. 1976. Like Kelly's father, Arthur Lewis (James Marsden) is an engineer at NASA, and like his mother, Norma (Cameron Diaz) has suffered an injury resulting from malpractice; their son (Sam Oz Stone) risks suffering the worst possible fate for a future filmmaker. They are visited by a mysterious stranger (Frank Langella) who offers them a box: Push the button and they will get one million dollars, but someone they don't know will die. The financial obstacles the Lewises are facing seem unintentionally comical — they're losing a break on their son's private school tuition and Norma needs an operation so that she can jog again. And once we find out that the folks giving them all this bad news are tied to a conspiracy, it hardly seems that they are the architects of their own doom.

Kelly may not have thought this through, but he comes on like an overeager tenth-grader who wants you to know that he's read No Exit — he even problematizes the "someone you don't know" part of Matheson's equation, Arthur asking, "What is it to know someone?" Meanwhile, people's noses keep bleeding and Arthur is beset with two more life-or-death tests (while button-pushing is women's work). Late in the game it dawns on him that this life we think we are in is actually Purgatory, and after sitting through The Box you may be inclined to agree.