Now and then a perfect storm of current events, trends, casting and personalities collide to create the right movie at the right time. Consider the cultural clouds on the horizon:

		"Thank You for Smoking" Rating: R for language and some sexual content Starring: Aaron Eckhart, Robert Duvall, Katie Holmes. Director: Jason Reitman. "Thank You for Smoking" Web site

New public smoking laws make it harder to light up anywhere.

High-profile lobbyists take a beating in courts and on the front pages of the papers.

The TomKat pregnancy is manna from paparazzi heaven.

In a mostly PC world, there are those who question what they perceive as an over-sensitivity regarding references to some groups and individuals.

Hollywood couldn't have bought a better moment to unveil "Thank You for Smoking," a fun, thought-provoking social satire by director Jason Reitman. Based on the novel by Christopher Buckley (son of author and political commentator William F. Buckley), "Thank You" is an equal-opportunity offender that neatly dices and slices the overbearing attitudes of fuming smokers, antismoking zealots, lobbyists, politicians, Hollywood and the news media.

Thank you, "Thank You," for not doing what too many "issue" pics too often do. With subtlety, nuance, plot points and humor, the film offers cogent commentary on hot contemporary issues without banging the audience over the head with the message. In "Thank You for Smoking," no one smokes a cigarette, the highly paid and manipulative tobacco lobbyist is the good guy, the socially conscious enterprising reporter and the health-conscious senator are the villains, and we're reminded through our own laughter that nicotine addiction causes slow disgusting death by cancer.

It's a comedy.

In his first feature-length film, Reitman (son of director Ivan Reitman) directs with a light touch that never gets in the way, spotlighting a clever script he adapted with Buckley.

With dimpled chin, broad shoulders and a confidently optimistic air, Aaron Eckhart is well cast as Nick Naylor, point man for the cigarette-industry-funded Academy of Tobacco Studies. Hoping to be a positive role model for his son, he works hard to be the best in the business of providing Americans with new and better reasons to light up.

The movie opens with Naylor on the set of "The Joan Lunden Show," facing a sickly young smoker who's bald from chemo and a hissing studio audience. He's such a polished spinmeister that by the commercial break, he has them convinced that pharmaceutical research financed by tobacco taxes is curing the boy and antismoking activists in search of a martyr want the boy to die.

Superior actors abound in supporting roles. William H. Macy is a hoot as a tongue-tied senator who takes on Naylor in a congressional hearing and takes a beating. Robert Duvall gives old-school Southern charm to his wheezing tobacco mogul, Sam Elliott wheezes louder as a former Marlboro Man dying of lung cancer, and Rob Lowe is absolutely quirky as a powerful Hollywood agent negotiating with Naylor to finally get more cigarette smoking into the movies.

Fortunately for Katie Holmes she's all the rage, what with her tabloid romance with Tom Cruise and a fortuitous oversight during media screenings of "Thank You for Smoking." Her few-seconds sex scene with Eckhart was accidentally not shown to film critics, who speculated in print that protective Tom might have had something to do with the missing scene. It's all good for Holmes, because she offers little more than a cute face and a controversy in an otherwise well-cast film.