Can Another Earth’s Brit Marling carry her movie?

Brit Marling, the lithe, stunning co-writer and star of Mike Cahill’s Another Earth, plays Rhoda, a 17-year-old who is celebrating her acceptance to MIT on the same night that a new planet is discovered. Called Earth 2 by the denizens of Earth 1, this planet will prove to house a…

A uniquely Freudian entry in the body-switching comedy canon, The Change-Up stars JasonBateman as anal-retentive lawyer/family man Dave, and Ryan Reynolds as Dave’s classically anal-expulsive stoner/playboy childhood friend Mitch. One drunken night, Dave admits that he’s secretly jealous of Mitch’s life of reckless indulgence. Thanks to some hazy mechanics involving…

The Change-Up: Guys pee, swap bodies, and discover their true selves

Crazy, Stupid, Love isn’t crazy enough

Captain America ignores its roots for easy money

Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby for Marvel Comics in 1941, Captain America was among the first American comic books intended as an explicit work of patriotic, political propaganda: The cover of the first edition, available months before Pearl Harbor, famously featured the titular costume hero punching out Adolf…

Horrible Bosses, directed by Seth Gordon, is an ensemble comedy about how our tough economic times have destroyed white-collar, white-male masculinity. Three high school friends–weakling dental hygienist Dale (Charlie Day), chemical company accountant Kurt (Jason Sudeikis), and unspecified corporate drone Nick (Jason Bateman)–are, at 40-ish, each facing intractable career obstacles…

Horrible Bosses: White man’s lament

Bad Teacher and the downside of equal rights in Hollywood

It’s 10 minutes before a human character appears on-screen in Green Lantern, a personality-free franchise-launcher that opens this weekend. Via a heavily CGI’d prologue, we learn that The Universe is patrolled by a group of multi-species warriors called The Green Lantern Corps–with each member issued an actual camping lantern, which…

Midnight in Paris: Woody Allen’s way-back machine

A deceptively light time-travel romance, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris uses fairy-tale devices as a way to get to the filmmaker’s familiar themes. A nebbishy screenwriter who longs to publish a novel, Gil (Owen Wilson) is working on a book set in a nostalgia shop–much to the open frustration of…

Bridesmaids: A movie made worse by and for me

Arthur: Russell Brand is no Dudley Moore

Jane Eyre: Cary Fukunaga’s version stresses the pursuit of independence

Paramount, distributor of David O. Russell’s The Fighter, celebrated the helmer’s Best Director Oscar nomination by placing a “For Your Consideration” ad on the cover of Variety, touting him as “the comeback of the year.” It was an odd choice of phrasing, considering that The Fighter, Russell’s first feature to…

Another Year, the tenth feature-length British soap written and directed by Mike Leigh, concerns a year in the life of Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), the happiest post-middle-aged married couple in the whole of the London suburbs. Heading into their fifth decade together, Tom and Gerri are healthy…

Fully devoid of the fantasy contrivance that often sets an Ivan Reitman film (Ghostbusters, Dave) in motion, NoStrings Attached is extremely narrow in focus: It’s “just” about two people in lust struggling to put away their respective baggage in order to have a real relationship with each other. Adam (Ashton…

Tracking the parallel trajectories of three employees laid off from cushy corporate jobs at the same Boston-based manufacturing conglomerate, The Company Men is transparent in its ambition to capture The Way We Live Now from a sensitive, equitable — rather than a withering and satiric — point of view. Writer/director…

Derek Cianfrance’s divorce drama Blue Valentine is the story of how a couple (Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams) travels from too-cute introduction to irreconcilable differences in just over half a decade. Starting with the present-day married-with-kid Dean and Cindy, Cianfrance weaves long flashbacks of Dean and Cindy’s early days through…