The way to criticize a movie, Godard famously said, is to make another movie. In that sense "Punch-Drunk Love" is film criticism. Paul Thomas Anderson says he loves Sandler's comedies--they cheer him up on lonely Saturday nights--but as the director of "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia" he must have been able to sense something missing in them, some unexpressed need. The Sandler characters are almost oppressively nice, like needy puppies, and yet they conceal a masked hostility to society, a passive-aggressive need to go against the flow, a gift for offending others while in the very process of being ingratiating.

In "Punch-Drunk Love," Sandler plays Barry Egan, an executive in a company with a product line of novelty toiletries. Barry has seven sisters, who are all on his case at every moment, and he desperately wishes they would stop invading his privacy, ordering him around and putting him down. He tries at a family gathering to be congenial and friendly, but we can see the tension in his smiling lips and darting eyes, and suddenly he explodes, kicking out the glass patio doors.

This is a pattern. He presents to the world a face of cheerful blandness, and then erupts in terrifying displays of frustrated violence. He does not even begin to understand himself. He seems always on guard, unsure, obscurely threatened. His outbursts here help to explain the curiously violent passages in his previous film, "Mr. Deeds," which was a remake of a benign Frank Capra comedy. It's as if Sandler is Hannibal Lecter in a Jerry Lewis body.

Most of Sandler's plots are based on predictable, production-line formulas, and after "Punch-Drunk Love" I may begin seeing them as traps containing a resentful captive. The quirky behavior may be a way of calling out for help. In "Big Daddy," for example, the broad outlines are familiar, but not the creepy way his character trains his adopted 5-year-old to be hostile. At one point, ho, ho, they toss tree branches into the path of middle-aged in-line skaters, causing some nasty falls. The hostility veiled as humor in the typical Sandler comedy is revealed in "Punch-Drunk Love" as--hostility.