IN THEATERS Election

What makes Alexander Payne’s “Election” one of the year’s best films isn’t just its sterling performances from Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick, but its sharp insight into human nature.

This is a film where greed is a character without billing, and lust for success underscores everything. On the surface, the film may appear to be just another high school movie about high school students living high school lives, but director Payne wanted more — much more — and he got it.

His film stars Witherspoon as Tracy Flick, a driven blond bombshell whose willingness to do anything, absolutely anything, to win a high school election not only mirrors past presidential bids, but local politics as well.

That’s part of the film’s brilliance — it understands that high schools are microcosms of a world gone mad. In Payne’s hands, greed and success, failure and deceit, lust and hypocrisy all bubble up to form the falsely bubbly Tracy, a dynamo of sheer will that cannot be stopped by anyone — not even her teacher, the sexually frustrated Jim McAllister (Broderick).

At once a satire and a tragedy, “Election” takes a long, hard look not just at Tracy, but at everyone: school administrators, teachers, students — the world at large. And yet it’s never meanspirited. Payne is simply a voyeur standing with his camera at the center of the action. Just as Todd Solondz did in “Happiness,” he allows the truth to rear its ugly head without fear or persuasion. For audiences, that’s a gift that shouldn’t be missed.

Grade: A

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me

Can one swing if one’s mojo has been stolen? Can one shag, baby?

That’s the titillating question raised in the new Austin Powers film, “The Spy Who Shagged Me,” a raunchy, sometimes hilarious sequel to 1997’s “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.”

The first film sent Powers (Mike Myers) and his bad teeth reeling from the 1960s into the 1990s, but not “Shagged.” “Shagged” wisely teams Powers with the beautiful CIA agent Felicity Shagwell (Heather Graham) before sending both back to the ’60s. There, Powers tries to save the world from a death laser appropriately called “The Alan Parsons Project,” while also fighting to reclaim his mojo.

Yes, his mojo, which Dr. Evil (also Myers) has stolen. It’s a rich set-up that includes a never-ending barrage of jokes that constantly refer to the plumbing behind one’s mojo, while surprisingly missing a terrific opportunity to feature Bob Dole in cameo.

Still, in spite of some dull moments and a convoluted plot that holds its shape as well as lava in a lava lamp, most of the jokes in “Shagged” are funny, some even inspired, particularly in the film’s second half, when Myers hits his shagadelic stride and truly cuts loose.

Wisely, this new film focuses more on Dr. Evil, whose 32-inch psychotic clone, Mini-Me (Verne Troyer), comes with his own mini-scar, mini-bald head and mini-Mr. Bigglesworth. He gets some of the film’s biggest laughs, particularly when he takes on Powers, who, in the end, is nothing more than a silly take off on James Bond.

Which brings us to naming the film’s next installment: “View From a Shag,” “Goldshagger” or, if Powers has the energy, “Octoshag.”

Grade: B

ON VIDEO

Enemy of the State

One of the best thrillers of the 1970s was Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation,” which featured Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert who mistakenly becomes involved in a privacy-violation nightmare.

The film was effective not only because it dealt with larger issues — particularly the right to privacy — but because it raised one central, paranoid question: What if we all are being bugged?

Twenty-four years later, that same question resurfaces in Tony Scott’s “Enemy of the State,” which stars — that’s right — Gene Hackman as a paranoid surveillance expert who eavesdrops on others while living in a bug-proof environment remarkably similar to his hovel in “The Conversation.”

Happily — surprisingly — “Enemy of the State” is good entertainment, a fact that can be directly attributed to its competent script and excellent cast, spearheaded here by Will Smith, who proves he can carry a film.

In “Enemy,” Mr. Smith goes to Washington, all right, but he may have wished he’d gone elsewhere. As Robert Clayton Dean, a D.C.-based labor attorney, Smith unwittingly becomes involved in a government cover-up led by a ruthless NSA official played by John Voight. When Smith’s life is threatened, he’s forced to run, only stopping near film’s end to team up with Hackman in a risky effort to turn the tables on Voight — and, naturally, on the government itself.

The result is a smart, briskly paced film whose action never lags.

Grade: B

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His film reviews appear each Monday and Thursday in the NEWS. Tonight on WLBZ’s “News Center 5:30 Today” and “News Center Tonight,” he appears in The Video Corner.