Also new this week
Shark Night 3D
(Horror, PG-13, 91 minutes). A weekend at a lake house goes horribly wrong for a group of college kids that find out their freshwater getaway is infested with sharks.
Rating: Not yet reviewed.
Info for Parents: Rated PG-13 for sexual references, violence, thematic material, partial nudity and language.
Apollo 18
(Sci-fi horror, PG-13, 91 minutes). The premise here is that the viewer has stumbled upon footage of NASA's aborted mission to the moon, which reveals the "real reasons" the U.S.
hasn't ventured back to the moon.
Rating: Not yet reviewed.
Info for Parents: Rated PG-13 for disturbing sequences and language.
The Hedgehog
(Comedy drama, not rated, 98 minutes). Paloma decides the world
doesn't understand her and she will kill herself before her 12th birthday, but changes her mind after meeting several kindred spirits. Based on the novel "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" by Muriel Barbery.
Rating: Not yet reviewed.
Also new this week
The Trip
(Comedy, not rated, 109 minutes). A newspaper assigns Steve Coogan to do an article about dining in the north of England. When his girlfriend begs off the tour, he recruits his old friend Rob Brydon to drive along, and the two set off in Coogan's Land Rover. They eat a great many meals, hardly seem to notice them, and spend most of their time trying to one-up each other in a series of really quite good imitations of Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Woody Allen and many others. Curious, whimsical, fun.
Rating: HHH
OK for all ages
Cars 2
(Animated, G, 106 minutes). Pixar's track record has been close to impeccable. But the weak link in the chain, at least from a narrative standpoint, has always been 2006's "Cars," with its two-dimensional talking autos and hokey, borrowed tale of small-town life. It was bright and zippy, though, which was enough to appeal to the little ones, and it became a merchandising juggernaut. So sure, why not make a sequel? Trouble is, "Cars 2" is such a glossy bore, it makes the original look like it ought to rank among Pixar's masterpieces by comparison. What has set the studio's films apart from all the other animated fare is story: It's paramount. "Cars 2" tries to encompass many kinds of stories at once, none of which is terribly clever or compelling. There's an international grand prix for Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) to compete in, a spy spoof and a message about the importance of alternative fuel sources. And one of the biggest mistakes of all was placing Mater, the rusty, aw-shucks tow truck voiced by Larry the Cable Guy, front and center. Still, Pixar mastermind John Lasseter's film is shiny, colorful and pretty, which should keep the young ones happy. Michael Caine, John Turturro and Emily Mortimer co-star.
Rating: H1/2
Info for Parents: Rated G for general audiences.
Winnie the Pooh
(Animated, G, 63 minutes). When the filmmakers of "Winnie the Pooh" were tasked by the Walt Disney Co. with creating a new story about the honey-loving bear two years ago, they had no interest in computer-generating Pooh and his friends. They also wanted no part in projecting Pooh's latest Hundred Acre Wood adventure in three dimensions or upgrading his classic bound storybook to a tablet computer. Instead, directors Stephen Anderson and Don Hall sought to faithfully return Pooh to his hand-drawn origins for a feature film reminiscent of the 1960s' Pooh shorts, while also appealing to kids who've grown up with the action of "Toy Story" and "Cars." "Winnie the Pooh" marks the first time the Hundred Acre Wood residents of A.A. Milne's beloved books have marched into theaters since 2005's "Pooh's Heffalump Movie."
HHH1/2
Rating:
Rated G for general audiences.
Info for Parents:
OK for 10 and older
Spy Kids 4:
All the Time in the World
(Action, PG, 104 minutes). "All the Time in the World" is a tepid tween comedy built on gimmicks and bad time-keeping puns. Good guys and villains are always promising to "stop his clock" or "punch his clock." Agent Marissa Wilson, played by Jessica Alba, is another in a long line of Cortez clan counterintelligence officers. She's retired and has a baby with her new husband who has two kids - Rebecca and Cecil (Rowan Blanchard and Mason Cook) who don't like their stepmom. That's because they think she's keeping secrets from them, which she is. Only when
stepmoms' nemesis, Tick Tock (Jeremy Piven) gets out of jail and joins up with the masked super-villain "The Timekeeper" do the kids' learn Marissa's secret and find themselves caught up in her mission. Dad (Joel McHale, who doesn't register) does a "spies among us" TV show titled "Spy Hunter," and he doesn't even know he's married to one. Rodriguez only needs the script to take us from one gimmick to the next, and his lack of attention to it shows.
Rating: H1/2
Info for Parents: Rated PG for mild action and rude humor.
The Smurfs
(Comedy, PG, 86 minutes). The little blue trolls with the mushroom homes and aggravating theme song invade Manhattan in a bright, broad live-action, computer-animated comedy. It may not be the family film least insulting to its audience's intelligence this season, but "The Smurfs" has brains, heart and style, which will endear it to adults as well as young viewers. Through one of those handy portals that conveniently appear whenever mythical characters need to land in Nowadays U.S.A., Papa Smurf and half a dozen of his blue brood wind up in Central Park. Hot on their trail are eeeeevil wizard Gargamel and his cat, Azrael.
Rating: HHH
Info for Parents: Rated PG for some mild rude humor and action.
Older 13s
Another Earth
(Drama, PG-13, 92 minutes). The possibility that there's another version of you out there - and of me, and of everyone we know - provides the mind-teasing premise here. It's heady stuff, the kind of notion you'd toss around with your friends after too many beers and achieve no satisfactory answers, then go home and have strange dreams. But such philosophical fodder is contrasted with an achingly personal tale of loss and redemption. These two conflicting dynamics comprise the feature debut from Mike Cahill, who serves as director, co-writer, producer and cinematographer. Cahill co-wrote the script with Brit Marling, who's also the film's star. Marling has a natural beauty and an immediacy to her emotions that make her impossible to stop watching. Her character, the MIT-bound Rhoda, crosses paths in a deadly car crash with William Mapother as an acclaimed composer. Years later, she tries to make amends with him, as a second version of our Earth inches ever closer.
Rating: HHH
Info for Parents: Rated PG-13 for disturbing images, some sexuality, nudity and brief drug use.
Captain America:
The First Avenger
(Action, PG-13, 126 minutes). The last Marvel Comics setup for next summer's all-star blockbuster "The Avengers" finds Chris Evans starring as the World War II fighting hero. Evans brings an earnest dignity and intelligence to the role of Steve Rogers, a scrawny kid from Brooklyn with dreams of military glory. But scientist Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) sees something special in him and enlists him for a daring experiment. Through some high-tech injections, Steve is transformed into a supersoldier known as Captain America. But he isn't the only one who's juicing: Hugo Weaving plays the former Nazi leader Johann Schmidt, aka Red Skull, who's formed his own splinter group and built some intimidating weapons.
HH1/2
Rating:
Info for Parents: Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action.
Colombiana
(Action, PG-13, 108 minutes). A brawny B-action picture with a gorgeous, graceful woman wreaking havoc at its center: Yup, this is a Luc Besson movie. Zoe Saldana stars as Cataleya, who saw her parents killed in front of her when she was a 9-year-old schoolgirl living in the slums of Bogota. Fifteen years later, with the help of her Uncle Emilio (Cliff Curtis), she's transformed herself into a highly efficient professional assassin in the United States, but she still seeks revenge against her parents' killers. Over-the-top bad guys spew generically menacing lines and hot women parade around in bikinis and lingerie: It's all big and silly. But Saldana manages to earn our sympathy, as the script allows her to convey a surprising amount of emotion and inner conflict.
Rating: HH1/2
Info for Parents: Rated for PG-13 for violence, disturbing images, intense sequences of action, sexuality and brief strong language.
Cowboys & Aliens
(Action, PG-13, 118 minutes). Director Jon Favreau's genre mash-up is more a mush-up, an action yarn aiming to be both science fiction and Old West adventure but doing neither all that well. The filmmakers start with a title that lays out a simple but cool premise: invaders from the skies shooting it out with guys on horseback. They wound up keeping the story too simple, almost simple-minded, leaving a terrific cast led by Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford and Olivia Wilde stuck in a sketchy, sometimes poky tale where you get cowboys occasionally fighting aliens and not much more.
Rating: HH
Info for Parents: Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of western and sci-fi action and violence, some partial nudity and a brief crude reference.
Crazy Stupid Love
(Romantic comedy, PG-13, 118 minutes). For a movie that intends to be rooted in a recognizable and insightful reality, this features an awful lot of moments that clang in a contrived, feel-good manner. At the same time, it also has its share of moments that hit just the perfect, poignant note, with some laughs that arise from a place of honesty. When you assemble a cast that includes Steve Carell, Julianne Moore, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, you're already on the right track. Carell stars as Cal, a nebbishy fortysomething whose high-school sweetheart, Emily (Moore), announces that she's slept with someone else and wants a divorce. Drowning his sorrows nightly at a local bar, Cal finds an unlikely mentor in Jacob (Gosling), an expensively dressed womanizer who gives him a makeover. It seems unlikely Jacob would even give this guy the time of day in real life, but Gosling is charismatic as hell and surprisingly funny in the role. He also has a great, flirty chemistry with Stone as the one woman who sees through his game.
Rating: HH
Info for Parents: Rated PG-13 for coarse humor, sexual content and language.
The Help
(Drama, PG-13, 146 minutes). A class act like this is rare enough in Hollywood. Coming at the tail end of summer blockbuster season, it's almost unheard of. It's the sort of film that studios typically save for the holiday prestige season in November or December, when Academy Awards voters start thinking ahead to the films they want to anoint. Come awards time, many of them likely will be thinking of "The Help," whose remarkable ensemble of women offers enough great performances to practically fill the actress categories at the Oscars. From its roots as a collaboration between lifelong friends Kathryn Stockett, who wrote the best-selling novel, and Tate Taylor, the film's writer-director, through the pitch-perfect casting of Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and their co-stars, "The Help" simply seems to be blessed. It's hard to imagine a better movie coming out of the screen adaptation of Stockett's tale of friendship and common cause among black maids and an aspiring white writer in Jackson, Miss., in 1963.
Rating: HHH1/2
Info for Parents: Rated PG-13 for thematic material.
Midnight in Paris
(Comedy, PG-13, 94 minutes). Woody Allen has found the right time and the right place with this, his lightest, funniest and most-satisfying movie in a long time. Shooting a full film in France for the first time, writer-director Allen has crafted a pastry-light romantic fantasy with virtually no dramatic pretensions, unlike the comic dramas and even outright tragedy that has dominated his work for the last eight years or so. Allen presents a wide-eyed-with-wonder view of the City of Light that nicely complements his story of an American writer (Owen Wilson) who pines for the 1920s Paris of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. All things seem possible here, so when the impossible starts to happen, it's easy to slip into the clever conceit Allen uses to test his protagonist's devotion to a nostalgic dream of days past. "Midnight in Paris" bears similarities to 1985's "The Purple Rose of Cairo" and 1990's "Alice," in which Allen used magical elements similar to those he employs here. The new movie has little of the heft or pathos of those earlier ones, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. Rachel McAdams co-stars as Wilson's fiancee, with Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody and a scene-stealing Alison Pill among the strong, well-cast supporting players.
Rating: HHH
Info for Parents: Rated PG-13 for some sexual references and smoking.
One Day
(Drama, PG-13, 104 minutes). Maybe it was all more resonant, more poignant on the page: the many highs and lows and major life shifts that occur during the decades-spanning friendship/romance between Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess). But here they feel so cursory and rushed, it's as if we're watching a filmed version of the CliffsNotes of David Nicholls' best-seller. The central conceit is this: Em and Dex meet after a long night of post-college graduation partying on July 15, 1988. "One Day" keeps coming back to that one day, year after year, and checks in with them as they date other people, forge careers, share awkward dinners and basically wait around until the inevitable July 15 when they'll be together. Big, weighty moments are thrust before us - and these should be serious hanky moments - but since the emotional groundwork hasn't been laid for them, we're not moved. We're just not there yet. Emma and Dexter feel more like ideas, types, rather than fleshed-out characters, so the supporting players who supposedly play crucial roles for them barely register either. It's a handsome misfire, though. And it's all the more curious coming from Danish director Lone Scherfig, whose last film was the excellent "An Education" (2009), which was nominated for three Academy Awards including best picture.
Rating: H1/2
Info for Parents: Rated PG-13 for sexual content, partial nudity, language, some violence and substance abuse.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
(Action, PG-13, 130 minutes). If last year's "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1" marked the beginning of the end with a gripping feeling of doom and gloom, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2" wraps things up once and for all on a note of melancholy. Oh, it's dramatic, to be sure: gorgeous, somber and startling as the young wizard faces his destiny and fights the evil Lord Voldemort. But the end of this staggeringly successful movie franchise, an epic fantasy saga spanning eight films during the past decade, provides a necessary emotional catharsis for Harry and for us. Even those who aren't ardent Potterphiles might find themselves getting unexpectedly choked up a couple of times. This is the place where all the narrative and emotional threads must converge and tie up at last. While "Deathly Hallows: Part 2" offers long-promised answers, it also dares to pose some eternal questions, and it'll stay with you after the final chapter has closed.
Rating: HHH1/2
Info for Parents: Rated PG-13 for some sequence of intense action violence and frightening images.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
(Action, PG-13, 105 minutes). Silly humans. We're so arrogant. We see a cute, cuddly baby chimp, assign all kinds of familiar characteristics to it and raise it with the loving playfulness we'd give our own children, only to find that the creature's unpredictable and ferocious animal nature wins out in the end. If the documentary "Project Nim" didn't serve as enough of a warning for us earlier this summer, now we have this blockbuster, which is sort of a prequel and sort of a sequel and sort of a reboot. Mainly, it's a spectacle. Sure, it might be trying to teach us a lesson about hubris. But mostly it's about angry, 'roided-up chimps taking over and wreaking havoc. This is not a complaint, mind you. This seventh film in the "Planet of the Apes" series rises to such ridiculous heights, it's impossible not to laugh out loud - in a good way, in appreciation. There's big, event-movie fun to be had here, amped up by some impressive special effects and typically immersive performance-capture work by Andy Serkis (Gollum from the "Lord of the Rings" films). But the idea that director Rupert Wyatt and writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver truly had anything serious in mind seems rather disingenuous. James Franco stars as the scientist whose drug tests to find a cure for Alzheimer's lead to the birth of the super-smart Caesar. Freida Pinto and John Lithgow co-star.
Rating: HH1/2
Info for Parents: Rated PG-13 for for intense and frightening sequences of action and violence.
Sarah's Key
(Drama, PG-13, 111 minutes). Cuts back and forth between a tragic story involving the Holocaust and a more trivial, feel-good story about a modern-day reporter. It's an awkward fit and diminishes the impact of the story set earlier. A modern-day writer (Kristin Scott Thomas) investigates the Nazi roundup of Jews in Paris, and discovers an unexpected personal connection. In French and English, with English subtitles.
Rating: HH1/2
Info for Parents: Rated PG-13 for thematic material including disturbing situations involving the Holocaust.
Mature high-schoolers
30 Minutes or Less
(Comedy, R, 83 minutes). If this has indeed been The Summer of the R-Rated Comedy, with each new movie striving to one-up its predecessors in getting down and dirty, then we're going out with a whimper here. And that's ironic, given that the movie is all about something - or someone - going out with a bang. From the phoned-in ("The Hangover Part II") to the fantastic ("Bridesmaids"), "30 Minutes or Less" falls somewhere in the mushy midsection. Like "Horrible Bosses," it's got a shaggy, sloppy vibe and characters who are in way over their heads, but it's not nearly as consistently funny. It's actually got more in common with the "The Change-Up" in that it's frustratingly uneven, despite some appealing moments of buddy camaraderie. Jesse Eisenberg stars as a slacker pizza delivery man who's kidnapped, then forced to wear a bomb and rob a bank, by a couple of doofuses (Danny McBride and Nick Swardson). Aziz Ansari plays Eisenberg's best friend and reluctant accomplice.
Rating: HH
Info for Parents: Rated R for crude and sexual content, pervasive language, nudit and some violence.
The Change-Up
(Comedy, R, 112 minutes). When you've got Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman - two masters of deadpan improvisational comedy - bouncing off each other, you should theoretically just be able to let the cameras roll and follow them wherever they take you. With a screenplay from Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, who wrote the original "The Hangover" you should already be in pretty good shape. But the too long film from director David Dobkin ("Wedding Crashers") is all over the place in tone, veering awkwardly from some daring comic moments to feel-good sappiness and back again in hopes of redeeming some semblance of edginess. Learning lessons is what body-swapping movies are all about. Here, Bateman plays Dave Lockwood, a successful Atlanta lawyer who is married with three kids. His childhood best friend, Reynolds' defiantly single Mitch Planko, spends his days doing bong hits in his man cave and his nights bedding as many random women as possible. Each insists the other guy has the better life. After too many drinks one night, they wake up the next morning and poof! They've switched bodies, which leads to some predictable but amusingly executed fish-out-of-water scenarios.
Rating: HH
Info for Parents: Rated R for strong crude sexual content, strong crude language, some graphic nudity and drug use.
Conan the Barbarian
(Action, R, 102 minutes). No one ever turns into a giant snake. That, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with this remake: The knowing sense of big, ridiculous fun that marked the 1982 original is gone, and in its place we get a self-serious series of generic sword battles and expository conversations. Fight, talk, fight, talk, fight, talk, then an enormous throw-down followed by a denouement that dangles the possibility of a sequel (dear God, no) - that's the basic structure here. And yet, despite seeming so simplistic, director Marcus Nispel's film is mind-numbingly convoluted. The fact that it's been converted to a murky, smudgy, barely used 3-D doesn't help matters. While the original "Conan" - the movie that signaled the arrival of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a bona fide movie star - looks extremely dated nearly 30 years later, it still functions just fine as both an epic adventure tale and an admitted guilty pleasure. There's very little that's pleasurable in this new "Conan," aside from allowing us to ogle the muscular, 6-foot-5 physique of up-and-coming action star Jason Momoa. Rachel Nichols, Stephen Lang and an over-the-top Rose McGowan co-star.
Rating: H
Info for Parents: Rated R for strong bloody violence, some sexuality and nudity.
Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
(Horror, R, 100 minutes). Size shouldn't matter when it comes to scary creatures. After all, plenty of people are terrified of rats and spiders. Yet savage and ugly as the tiny monsters are in this remake of a 1973 TV horror movie, they're not as frightening as the filmmakers would have you believe. These wee beasties are not all that interesting, either, and frankly, neither is the movie. Producer and co-writer Guillermo del Toro and director Troy Nixey manage a lot of creepy atmosphere in their story of a couple (Guy Pearce and Katie Holmes) and a young girl (Bailee Madison) menaced by nasty little things that swarm up from beneath the mansion they're restoring. With the girl at the heart of the tale and del Toro's name the big selling point, the filmmakers want you thinking of the movie as a cousin to his masterful "Pan's Labyrinth," another story of a girl caught up in a world of fantastical terror. This is an awfully tame cousin, though, the creatures uninvolving and their antics more irritating than petrifying.
Rating: HH
Info for Parents: Rated R for violence and terror.
Final Destination 5
(Horror, R, 95 minutes). Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) is a young guy whose premonition causes him, his ex-girlfriend (Emma Bell) and six others to flee a bus before the bridge they're on collapses. He has seen the amazing 3-D-blood-on-the-lens ways they're all going to die - impaled on a sailboat mast or by a stack of re-bar, squished by a falling convertible, drowned in the bus. But they're not even done mourning their dead colleagues (they were headed for a corporate retreat) when the survivors start dying off. Death diva Tony Todd ("The Candyman") shows up as a coroner who explains that they "shorted death" - and death always counts the till at the end of a disaster. The elaborate terminal exits drew more script attention than the characters or anything else. Without a moral component to the tale, we're just treated to perfunctory killing effects and stunts and gore, which make fans of the genre dutifully hoot and holler and applaud.
Rating: H1/2
Info for Parents: Rated R for strong violent and gruesome accidents, and some language.
Friends With Benefits
(Comedy, R, 104 minutes). Director and co-writer Will Gluck ("Easy A") has crafted a hyper, R-rated, postmodern rom-com that laments the genre's saccharine falsehoods while ultimately falling prey to the clich�s it strives to upend. The dialogue is snappy and the plot makes efforts for emotional realism, but the story is a familiar one: romantically exhausted friends (Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis) try to forge a sexual relationship without emotion. They have terrific comedic timing and look great in bed together, but don't have enough friction for real chemistry. Woody Harrelson, Patricia Clarkson and Richard Jenkins lead a strong supporting cast, but Gluck's film is too smooth for the realism and mockery it seeks. Its best parody comes in a film within the film, a mock rom-com with Jason Segel and Rashida Jones. Easily superior to and far smarter than the earlier released "No Strings Attached."
Rating: HH1/2
Info for Parents: Rated R for some violent content and brief sexuality.
Fright Night
(Horror, R, 121 minutes). This violent and violently funny vampire tale covers no new ground, sporting the same jokey tone as the original. But there's a quirky sensibility we might attribute to director Craig Gillespie, who gave us the gently twisted "Lars and the Real Girl." "Fright Night" can also boast of having the best vampire-villain in ages: The bushy-browed Colin Farrell was born to wear fangs. The story? Kids and adults are disappearing. But the economy's bad and foreclosed houses are everywhere. And besides, as Charley (Anton Yelchin) says, "Nobody lives in Vegas, they just pass through." That makes this the perfect spot for a vampire killing spree. Charley pays no attention to the warnings of his nerdy friend, Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). But Charley soon has reason to become just as suspicious of their new neighbor as Ed. Jerry (Colin Farrell) is a hunk who seems to do a lot of home repairs on his tract house - at night. Charley can't tell the cops or tell his mom (Toni Collette). The bulk of the movie is Charley trying to outrun and outsmart a very clever, ruthless vampire, a bloodsucker who deals with the suspicious the same way he deals with everybody else - with a bite.
Rating: HHH
Info for Parents: Rated R for bloody horror violence and language including some sexual references.
The Guard
(Comedy, R, 96 minutes). In a cinematic world so awash either in corporate flatness or high-art pretension, John Michael McDonagh's film is a proud, foul-mouthed exception. Brendan Gleeson plays Sgt. Gerry Boyle, a sardonic Irish police officer who describes himself as "the last of the independents." An expected drug shipment brings FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) to Boyle's Galway shores. While the philosophical smugglers (Mark Strong, Liam Cunningham, David Wilmot) lurk, Boyle and Everett investigate. A thoroughly entertaining buddy-cop film sets in between the opposites: Everett a suit-clad professional; Boyle an offensive, far more reluctant keeper-of-the-peace. The excellent Ennio Morricone-style score by the band Calexico hints at the Western mythical tones: Boyle is a comedic lone gunman of veracity. It's a great role for Gleeson and Cheadle serves as a top-notch straight man. It's also a late, promising directorial debut for McDonagh, the older brother of the playwright and "In Bruges" writer-director, Martin McDonagh. They share a fondness for ruthlessly unsentimental absurdity.
Rating: HHH
Info for Parents: Rated R for pervasive language and violence.
Horrible Bosses
(Comedy, R, 98 minutes). This raunchy buddy comedy wallows in silliness - gleefully, and without an ounce of remorse or self-consciousness - and even though you're a grown-up and you know you should know better, you will be happy to wallow right along as well. It's a film that's wildly, brazenly stupid - but also, you know, fun. Because like "Bad Teacher," "Horrible Bosses" knows exactly what it is and doesn't aspire to be anything more, and that lack of pretention is refreshing. It isn't trying to say anything profound about society or the economy or the fragile psyche of the post-modern man. It's about three guys who hate their jobs and want to kill their bosses. And really, who among us hasn't pondered such a plan? Naturally, no member of this trio is nearly as clever or sophisticated as he thinks he is. Together, they bumble and bungle every step of the way and occasionally, by accident, they get something right. But the dynamic between Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day as they bounce off each other is cheerfully loony, and the energy of their banter (which often feels improvised) has enough of an infectious quality to make you want to forgive the film's general messiness. Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell and Jennifer Aniston, as the titular bosses, are clearly enjoying the freedom of playing such showy, inappropriate characters.
Rating: HHH
Info for Parents: Rated R for crude and sexual content, pervasive language and some drug material.
Our Idiot Brother
(Comedy, R, 90 minutes). Paul Rudd hops from one sofa to another to another as the title character, and that's sort of what the film itself does, too. Rudd stars as an amiable, ambling dude named Ned who has no real goals in life; what he does have is a guilelessness that consistently gets him into trouble, both with his family and with the law. He has a knack for always saying or doing the wrong thing, even though he always means well. Director Jesse Peretz, working from a script written by his sister, Evgenia Peretz, and her husband, David Schisgall, follows him as he bumbles his way from one situation to the next with no great momentum or sense of character evolution. Ned grows increasingly irritating to his hippie farmer ex-girlfriend (Kathryn Hahn), the three sisters he mooches off of (Emily Mortimer, Elizabeth Banks and Zooey Deschanel) and to us. But then supposedly once they've all shunned him for causing so much inadvertent damage, they take him back because they realize what a positive influence he is in their lives. It makes no sense - there's a gap of logic and emotion that's hard to overcome.
Rating: H1/2
Info for Parents: Rated R for sexual content including nudity, and for language throughout.
