Here's a dirty little secret: sometimes film critics don't want to see movies. It's true. When we start out, ambitious and full of energy, we'll sit through any old thing, but after a while, when the formulas begin to wear on you, you can smell a turkey from watching the trailer. Sometimes you can smell a stinkbomb just from the title alone. I thought, for fun, I'd go over some titles I haven't seen and give you an idea of what might go through a critic's head. Of course, some of this is self-justification for not being able to see every single movie that comes through town. Frankly, it's impossible for one person to do, and so we resort to a porcupine-like defense, just in case anyone asks us about a movie we haven't seen: "It looked terrible."

Here's one: How to Cook Your Life (1 screen). What is that? Without even looking, it sounds like a bunch of actresses on a single set with too much dialogue, probably a lot of violin music and tears. And what could it mean? Why would I want to cook my life? It sounds painful, doesn't it? (It's really a film by the German director Dorris Dorrie about trying to equate cooking with Zen philosophy.) Then we have Hitman (9 screens), which irritated critics to no end, but seems to have pleased a fair number of moviegoers. Question: how many hitman movies have you seen in the past five or ten years? Is there an actor working today who hasn't played a hitman? What kind of brass cojones must it have taken to actually use the title "Hitman" on a middling, forgettable piece of work like this one?

Advance word has been positively gushing for Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead -- our own Erik Davis called it "a film that's exceptional in every way -- from its execution to its acting" while Jeffrey M. Anderson felt it deserves to be on "the list of the year's best American films" -- and New Yorkers flocked to the two Manhattan locations where it opened on Friday. It earned an average of $34,600, according to estimates compiled by Leonard Klady at Movie City News. ThinkFilm Company will expand it steadily over the next few weeks.

Klady says that "the bloom is definitely off the rose for documentaries," citing the poor returns for Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains and How to Cook Your Life as evidence that "the industry has effectively killed the layer of the golden egg with too many non-fiction movies ... that cannot sustain even a niche crowd at the multiplex." Jimmy Carter pulled in just $1,320 per screen at seven locations for Sony Pictures Classics and How to Cook drew about the same ($1,480 per screen at four locations) for Roadside Attractions, according to Klady. Another doc did good business on just one screen for distrib The Weinstein Co. -- Pete Seeger: The Power of Song earned an estimated $12,500, per Box Office Mojo.

Distributor Roadside Attractions had more pleasant news for a fiction feature, however: Bella, the Audience Award winner at Toronto last year, finally opened on 165 screens and did very nicely, averaging $7,390 per locale, according to Klady's estimates. Other new limited releases struggled to find audiences: Music Within ($2,790 average on 17 screens), Mr. Untouchable ($1,950 per-screen at 26 locations), Rails & Ties ($2,160 average at five locations), Black Irish ($1,650 average on four screens) and Slipstream ($970 at six locations).