E-Mail This Article to a Friend X-hibitionist critics Plus: The Hole truth at Northampton BY GERALD PEARY

A female friend thought she had me pegged. "Your reviews are so predictable," she lectured me. "You like any film that’s left-wing and has pretty young women." Well, many left-wing pictures leave me cold. But yes, this critic’s libido can definitely be at play when watching a movie, and when I’m writing about it. Still, delicate reader: I’m not the only reviewer who gets aroused in the dark, and it’s not only drippy straight guys, and it’s not only guys. Recall Pauline (I Lost It at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) Kael, who decades ago wrote openly and brazenly about Hollywood hotties Paul Newman and Warren Beatty. Hugs for Pauline!

Critics are given license to unzip in The X List: The National Society of Film Critics’ Guide to Movies That Turn Us On (Da Capo Press). I promise you a genuinely raunchy anthology, one that’s finely edited by Jami Bernard of the New York Daily News. Bernard’s own essays are a splendid place to start, her acknowledgment of the allure of all-time sex kitten Ann-Margret in Bye Bye Birdie (1963) and also her championing of the conniving, nymphomaniac first Mrs. de Winter, the unseen Rebecca of Hitchcock’s 1940 classic, over timid-girl second wife Joan Fontaine.

Boston critics are nicely represented in the book, beginning with the Boston Herald’s James Verniere and his wonderful chronicle of his Catholic-lad infatuation with cult actress Barbara Steele in Black Sunday (1960), "a gothic-erotic fever dream, a kinky Russo-Italian mix of violence, cleavage, bondage, and vampirism." Phoenix film editor Peter Keough is another child-of-the-Vatican gone awry, lusting after Ingrid Bergman’s Sister Mary Benedict in The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945). Our own Chris Fujiwara sets his scopophilic peepers on the unknown Susan Denberg of Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), in which "she wears a startling low-cut blouse and adopts a bland pose of infinite sexual availability." The Globe’s Ty Burr thinks back amusingly to his post-college employ as a "Cinemax sex-movie content appraiser," where he rubbed up against the joys of Young Lady Chatterley (1977). Me? I’m in there with the pretty young girls, mooning about pubescent Drew Barrymore and sharing dinner with porn actress and world gang-bang champ Annabel Chong.

Alex Karpovsky’s The Hole Story had an "in-progress" screening at last spring’s Independent Film Festival of Boston, but it was worth a drive to the recent 2005 Northampton Film Festival to see the completed version. Take note of an important, talented, and original filmmaker in our midst. After weary years as a Boston-based editor of corporate and karaoke videos, Karpovsky achieved this feature, and what a feature! It’s a kind of "mockumentary," but so much more, as there’s little "mock" in this fictionalized non-fiction work and lots of drive and spiritual-existential ambition.

Karpovsky himself plays the central character, a satirized version of his own lost self. He’s a desperate video director pitching a silly cable TV series. Paid for from his own pocket, the project takes him to frozen-tundra Minnesota: it’s an obsessive Albert Brooks movie in Fargo land. The Hole Story can be hilariously funny, but it also dares ask, and seriously, why the hell are we on this earth? Karpovsky’s movie needs a distributor. It needs to be shown in theaters in his own Hub.