Why would anyone alive and alert in the city of New York who hasn’t yet seen The Hurt Locker not want to attend tomorrow night’s (i.e., Thursday, 3.5) 7 pm showing at Lincoln Center? What could possibly constitute stiff competition, outside of theatre tickets or a secret meeting at a hotel with someone married?

The Hurt Locker is “less a combat picture than a thriller about the risks and intoxications of professional passion,” N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott wrote the other day. “The main character, brilliantly played by Jeremy Renner, is consumed by his work, at once meticulous in his techniques and reckless in the way he deploys them. In this respect he resembles [director Kathryn] Bigelow, who turns the discipline of action filmmaking into a kind of visceral visual poetry.”

I’ll admit that the $20 per ticket cost might deter me if I was on the fence for this or that reason. $20 per viewing is a little rich for me. For anyone. For any movie. I wonder what’s so damn special about the Film Society of Lincoln Center that they get to charge this amount?