Coming-of-age comedy with airs. Jesse Eisenberg for all intents and purposes plays an extension of his pretentious youth in The Squid and the Whale, a virginal egghead (“I read poetry for pleasure sometimes”) obliged to take a minimum-wage summer job at a Pittsburgh amusement park while awaiting admission to the …
In their heyday, studios employed dozens of comics, screenwriters, and animators, whose job it was to take an active interest in cranking out absurdist comedy. Most of them did so without overstepping the characters they worked so hard to create. Television had long ago reached the point where crazy comedy …
A raunchy comedy with integrity from star and cowriter Kristen Wiig. The movie is unquestionably from a female perspective, a quality that is pervasive but never exclusive. Wiig plays Annie, a heart-ravaged, recession-broken middle-ager struggling to maintain an emotional parallel with her best friend whose life is on the up-and-up. …
Battle of the sexes update. A bout of drunken casual sex, sans condom, results in a result; and after abortion is given no more thought than it would have been given in 1957, the pair of "completely different people" set about to make it work when it makes no sense: …
A hedged bet, marital comedy cum action thriller, with a “boring” New Jersey couple enlivening their stale marriage by getting themselves mistaken for high-stakes blackmailers. Tina Fey will never in her lifetime use up the eternal gratitude she earned for her role in the 2008 presidential campaign (the faux Palin), …
Computer cartoon available, but not imperative, in 3-D. Admittedly the Universal logo, our planet on a blanket of stars, looks good in 3-D, and the closing credits have some fun with the extra dimension, trying with the aid of an outthrusting steel tape measure to see how far off the …
Harmless fun, like a machine gun that shoots jelly. The plot is as innocuous as the most cookie-cutter sitcom - former bad guy Gru must go undercover to expose current bad guy, and must also deal with personal issues. (One of his daughters wants a mom, another falls in love.) …
There is a kind of achievement in (graphically) depicting a sexual relationship between an adult man (Alexander Skarsgard) and his girlfriend's 15-year-old daughter (Bel Powley) in a way that makes it feel neither predatory nor twisted, just oddly matter-of-fact. Whether it is a thing worth achieving is another question. The …
Mike Judge, the Office Space man, never mind the Beavis and Butt-head man, goes blue-collar at a food flavoring factory, where his fund of observations of workers on the job proves skimpier. The owner and central character comes close to a complete cipher, although Jason Bateman’s flat-tire facial expressions serve …
A vacuum tube that chuckles. Breast and penis and poo poo gags, a cute baby, lots of bar chatter, and insufferably glib Adam Scott as a New Yorker who has a kid outside marriage with his sex buddy Jennifer Westfeldt. She has great cheekbones, also wrote and directed, but this …
With their best days residing down memory lane, producers Ivan Reitman and Dan Aykroyd resort to recycling their own garbage. Fanboys were outraged and feminists thrilled over news of an all-girl remake of the alleged comedy classic. Credit the filmmakers with neither group leaving hungry. A pussy fart joke replaces …
Director David Koepp once made a pretty good straight ghost story, Stir of Echoes, and with this he has made a pretty good comic ghost story. A misanthropic dentist (bringing to mind the always-looking-down-in-the-mouth punch line) has a near-death experience under general anesthetic for a colonoscopy, which for some reason …
Kristen Wiig’s performance adds a new dimension to frazzled, but the closer the former skit-comedian inches toward big screen stardom, the more far-flung her choice of star vehicles becomes. Dumped by her boyfriend and unable to maintain a job writing descriptive blurbs for a New York magazine, Wiig feigns suicide …
A skit comedian who works best in five-minute spurts produces and stars in a feature length film based on a short story. It’s The Children’s Minute when a pair of spiteful teenage girls play matchmaker for one of their fathers (Guy Pearce, as a nowhere-near recovering alcoholic) and an invisible, …
Battle of the sexes update. A bout of drunken casual sex, sans condom, results in a result; and after abortion is given no more thought than it would have been given in 1957, the pair of "completely different people" set about to make it work when it makes no sense: …