K.C.Bailey/Columbia

Nick (Michael Cera) and Norah (Kat Dennings) in Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist

Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist opens up on what appears to be the same street where Juno was filmed. This is no accident. Like Juno, it also stars Michael Cera as a sensitive young man somewhat befuddled by women who throws himself into his hobby as a way to deal with the outside world. Here, that hobby is playing and listening to music. And like Juno, the leading lady is a sharp-talking brunette who might be a little too aggressive for him but still has a heart of gold.

The comparisons aren’t terribly flattering for Nick & Norah, which doesn’t have the thematic depth or scintillating dialogue of its predecessor. But it does have Cera, who continues to play a variation of his wonderful Arrested Development character (no complaints from me), and Kat Dennings as Nora, who’s endearing and compelling. In fact, the scenes with just the title characters are pretty wonderful, as they slowly come to realize they like each other, despite some holdover feelings for old exes.

The problem is the movie keeps tearing us away from our protagonists and focusing on those exes or other friends, who can’t match Nick and Norah in the personality department. This is a bit unusual, as most romantic comedies feature sidekicks that are at least as interesting and quirky as the leads. Not so here, and so the inevitable scenes designed to keep our lovers apart quickly grow irritating.

I was also a bit surprised that director Peter Sollett, who made the wonderful Raising Victor Vargas, doesn’t capture the vibrancy and specificity of Manhattan nightlife. This feels like it could’ve been made in any city. And am I the only one who was consistently surprised at how the characters kept driving around New York and, even more amazingly, kept finding parking spaces? At least the wall-to-wall music is good, befitting a movie that’s about how people find each other in a song. If it had focused just on that, we might have been talking about moving beyond Juno, instead of falling short.

Lionsgate

Bill Maher outside the Vatican City

Bill Maher has gained a devoted following with his HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher. His intellectually skeptical approach to politics and other issues, combined with healthy doses of humor, have made him a darling of many. Now he’s decided to take that platform to another level and take on religion. Yes, all religion.

Maher’s thesis is that religion is not only wrong but decidedly harmful, not only for the people who practice it but society as a whole. He argues that the only proper perspective is doubt, and that anyone who claims any certainty on faith is deluded. To clear up that delusion, he hit the road with a film crew in tow to interview people around the world (though mostly in the U.S.) and challenge them to justify their beliefs. Snippets of those interviews make up the bulk of his new documentary.

For someone who celebrates doubt as much as he does, Maher is certainly sure of himself. This reaches its nadir in the movie’s closing minutes when he offers his own sermon of fire and brimstone. Images of the most awful religiously motivated atrocities (a plane flying into the World Trade Center features prominently) intercut with Maher deploring all religions and calling on the atheists of the world to stand up for themselves.

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KerryBrown/MGM

Simon Pegg and Megan Fox try to imagine themselves in a much better movie

a) utterly wastes the comedic talents of Simon Pegg, one of the funnier guys working in movies today.
b) has its main character be an utter jerk and idiot except when he suddenly needs to be warm and sensitive. Flip a coin before each scene to figure out which personality he’ll be.
c) has entire scenes revolving around a pig running through a high-class reception and an irritating dog flying out a skyscraper window. Those are two different scenes, by the way. Apparently, animals in motion are comic gold.
d) assumes chewed-up food and naked transsexuals are inherently hilarious.
e) is marketed as a comedy even though most audiences will laugh twice. Maybe three times if they’re drunk.

And that's one guaranteed way to lose friends and alienate people.

Focus Features

Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, and Brad Pitt shooting Burn After Reading

If there's a trait I hate to see in a film critic it's the willingness to dismiss with little thought a film that doesn't immediately reveal itself. So when I sense that tendency in myself, I feel a little guilty.

Take the Coen brothers. I was a fan in college but eventually decided that I'd seen all their tricks and lost interest. College seems like the right age to appreciate their stuff, and while I always wished they'd attempt something a little more ambitious with their obvious gifts, that mythical film has never materialized. I kept watching their movies up through Intolerable Cruelty, the one with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, the one with the asthma inhaler gag, the one with the rapid fire conversations that -- I remember noting -- I'd like to watch again one day, separate from the rest of the film, if possible.

But it was the last straw. The Coens were no longer an auto-see. I skipped The Ladykillers.

Even No Country for Old Men, which I watched in the ritzy digs of Lincoln Center during the New York Film Festival, felt to me like an exercise of their technical abilities -- their way with storytelling mechanics more than anything else -- and an exercise that sustained a good hour before it drifted into pretensions I didn't believe.

But after a quick dismissal and the subsequent guilt, I gave it more effort. Everyone else was. It seemed only fair. Revisiting No Country for Old Men didn't turn me around, but it reminded me that their exceptionally well-crafted films do offer certain pleasures, like the pleasure of releasing a shoelace from its knot. But when the knot seems to exist for its own sake, when it seems to have been created only for me to unravel -- gee, thanks -- I'm inclined to use the scissors and get it over with.

Burn After Reading isn't generating the same critical dialogue that No Country for Old Men did, for whatever reason. As our sample of quotes in the grid attest (which are not, of course, representative of the universe of criticism; they're just our faves), this one is disappointing to many people who see it as the return to a lesser form. Me, I'm not sure they ever strayed very far.

But when Michael Sicinski, Mike D'Angelo, Victor Morton, and Karina Longworth actually sort of agree that Burn After Reading has merits and find plenty to roll around in (a couple of them placing it among their favorite films of the year!), maybe it's worth a little more time, even while steeling myself against the the aroma that's always steaming from the Coens stew: that we the viewers -- and especially we the critics -- are one of the joke's many butts. To bark in all caps at the idiocy of other reviewers, to complain that some of the film's detractors in Toronto* were "people who like to spend a lot of time bitching," is reminiscent of its own noisiest characters.

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Dreamworks

Let's suppose for a minute that it's OK for a movie to be completely, flat-out, sponge-brained preposterous.

A woman rings up Shia LaBeouf, tells him the FBI will be at his door in 3, 2, 1 -- boom -- enter the FBI. This woman continues to be prescient, wait, not just prescient but able to control every object in Chicago that runs on 'lectricity. She can dial any phone, swing any crane, and reverse any El. She can put messages on the screens at McDonald's, flip the traffic lights to Mr. LaBeouf's favor, and dispense orders from the FBI's fax machine. I bet she could even update your Facebook status without your knowledge. She's just that connected.

Fine. Let's accept that. She rings up Mr. LaBeouf -- Jerry, a regular guy who works at Copy Central -- to tell him that he's "been activated," which is a euphemism for being framed by a disembodied, preternaturally connected female voice. Jerry is to meet up with Rachel (Michelle Monaghan) who's been comparably activated. The voice tells them to drive to such and such and do something, and since they're running from the FBI, having been framed, this trip involves not a leisurely drive but a massive car chase, shown with such fast cutting that I began to feel somewhat activated myself by the end of the first big crash-up.

Here's my problem. In real life, a menace that's everywhere and unescapable would be terrifying. But in movies, it's the locatable killer who generates more suspense. A man with an axe is bound by the laws of physics, so our minds calculate where he might be. Behind the door? In the basement? Out back? The killer who's everywhere -- in your dreams, your brain, your walls and drains and household appliances -- has it too easy.

Eagle Eye isn't a horror film, but the same principle applies. I don't mind that it makes no sense. I mind that it makes no suspense. (Har har.)

Thanks to her impressive reach, the voice is able to coerce Jerry and Rachel into a mission against their will and, I must say, one that could have been accomplished by simpler means. Billy Bob Thornton and Rosario Dawson -- two cogs in this Rube Goldberg machine -- are the straight-talking authorities pursuing our coerced pair of everypeople. As they were in The Fugitive, the cats and mice are likable in this film. For his previous movie, Disturbia, director D.J. Caruso borrowed heavily from Hitchcock's Rear Window, and this time he's consciously mining North by Northwest (a man is roped into a scheme he cares nothing about) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (a set piece is built around a musical crescendo). And by the end he even folds Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey into the mix.

Say, where is the menace in 2001? He's everywhere, it seems. The HAL-9000 computer has a red glowing eye in every part of the ship. But the points of tension in Kubrick's film, the iconic conflicts between man and machine, generate suspense by constraining HAL's location: the astronauts step into a docked pod so HAL won't hear them, negotiate with HAL to get back into the ship, and dismantle HAL by entering his physical memory.

Eagle Eye isn't so carefully considered, of course, and it has only one layer of metaphor to 2001's two thousand and one. It's built around a single, reasonably clever analogy that says we're all slaves to something that I shall not reveal in this review. You'll have to see the film. But if answering that question sustains your interest, you're a more activated person than I.

David Lee

Omar Benson Miller and Matteo Sciabordi star in Miracle at St. Anna

Two years ago, directors Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood got into a pissing match about Eastwood’s two Iwo Jima films. Lee was upset that there wasn’t a single African-American soldier in either movie, arguing that Eastwood was perpetuating old Hollywood stereotypes that denied the role of black soldiers in WWII. Eastwood responded by saying that Lee should “shut his face.”

Skip ahead two years to Spike Lee’s rejoinder, a 160-minute war story entitled Miracle at St. Anna. It focuses on the Buffalo Soldiers of the 92nd Infantry Division during the Italian campaign of 1944. Though he doesn’t paint all the black infantrymen as upstanding heroes, Lee obviously wants to hail the bravery of those soldiers too often ignored in official histories, as well as highlight the endemic racism that existed both in the Army and back at home. That worthy goal unfortunately results in didactic exposition and dialogue that sound like the script was written by a clumsy historian rather than a skilled screenwriter.

It doesn’t help that the movie’s plot revolves around a Holy Fool character, a private named Sam Train who, early in the film, finds a young Italian boy talking to himself in a barn. Though the two can’t speak to each other, they quickly bond over chocolate, and Train commits his whole being to the boy’s safety. Much of the movie takes place in a small Italian village where a quartet of black soldiers have been separated from their unit and taken up residence. While there, they flirt with the one pretty local woman, interact with the Italian Partisans, and seem strangely unconcerned about whether the Nazis might suddenly show up.

There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense in Miracle at St. Anna, but there’s a lot to appreciate, too. I love how Lee and cinematographer Matthew Libatique use desaturated colors to beautifully convey the historical time period without resorting to black-and-white or sepia-toned. There are several scenes inside buildings that contrast light and shadows in gorgeous ways. The movie also ponders the deeper spiritual themes of good and evil in times of war, even questioning the idea of how God could perform a small miracle and yet allow so much destruction (pay attention to everything that happens at the St. Anna church). I’m a sucker for those kinds of metaphysical debates.

On the acting front, Derek Luke is stiff as the stand-tall sergeant, but the other primary actors are solid, especially Omar Benson Miller as Train. While there’s not a single believable aspect to his character, the relationship between Train and the boy still packs a punch. Strangely, Lee has cast several high-profile actors in surprisingly small roles, so don’t go in expecting Joseph Gordon-Levitt or John Turturro to get much screen time.

With all the film’s flaws (the poorly constructed battle sequences are another), I would’ve grudgingly admired Lee’s latest if not for a risible frame story set in 1983 that seems designed merely to set up some kind of emotional ending. The only emotion I felt, though, was disgust, and the closing credit song of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” didn’t help any. He may have the whole world, but let’s not blame him for this movie.

Jessica Miglio/Fox Searchlight

Brad William Henke and Sam Rockwell in Choke

“I’m ok, you’re ok” burst into American consciousness in the ‘70s and has become a mantra of sorts for millions. But no one really believes that crap. It’s more “I’m ok, and you’re a selfish a-hole who needs to stop talking so loud on the damn phone.” One of the bracing things about Choke is that its main character, Victor, doesn’t even try to pretend he’s ok. He’s a sex addict, and he’s proud. He takes advantage of almost everyone around him, and he doesn’t lose a wink of sleep over it. He makes money by forcing himself to choke in front of wealthy diners, hoping they’ll save him and then, feeling a sense of connection, start sending him cash. Amazingly, it works.

His life, though, is a shambles. His mom is moving up the floors of a mental illness facility (up is bad), and she doesn’t even recognize him anymore. And the only people he hangs out with are other sex addicts who, once they find genuine relationships, don’t really need Victor’s caustic friendship anymore. But one day he bumps into a caring, pretty doctor at the facility. Even better, he finds his lust turning into genuine ... well, maybe not love but something approach affection. Oh yeah, he also might be the son of God.

This unlikely setup would be almost impossible to take if it didn’t have Sam Rockwell (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) and Kelly MacDonald (No Country for Old Men) in the lead roles. Rockwell sells the stylized narration and dialogue (courtesy of the novel by Chuck Palahniuk) as if it was a loaded used car, and MacDonald conveys a vulnerability that humanizes the entire story. And truth be told, some of the movie is hilarious, particularly the scenes set in a Colonial living museum.

Unfortunately, that’s not enough. The repeated flashbacks with Victor as a boy and his mom are pointless. Not only does Anjelica Huston as the mom seem bored, these attempts to add some kind of emotional depth to Victor’s condition are as phony as his choking condition. The Jesus metaphor is equally hollow, serving only to distract us from the somewhat three-dimensional chracters on screen. Worst of all, the film loses its nerve, abandoning the humor and actually embracing the “I’m ok, you’re ok” philosophy. After 85 minutes of cynicism, that cliche is a bit hard to, uh, swallow.

James Bridges / Roadside Attractions

When Tim Robbins isn't twitching or faking an accent, I kind of like him. When his characters clinch their jaws or go all crazy in the head, I can't stop thinking, "Now, what's he supposed to be again?" And by the time I uncock my head, I realize that I've missed some important dialogue.

Point is, he's a normal dude in The Lucky Ones, and it makes all the difference. Three American soldiers are on leave from Iraq -- Rachel McAdams, Michael Peña, and Robbins -- and the plot conspires to keep them in the same car as they drive across the US en route to home and loved ones. It helps, therefore, that all three have enjoyable personalities. They're not in the least bit twitchy.

It's clear from the start, from the way these soldiers begrudgingly embark on a road trip in the face of air traffic hiccups, from the way the hand of the screenwriter keeps appearing like the wires on a flying saucer, that the film is a lightweight, quite a change from Neil Burger's previous film, a heavy confection called The Illusionist. But the light touch fits the story, which favors the simple emotional bonding of three people who don't know each other over the trite wartime lessons of movies like Stop-Loss. One of Burger's almost invisible successes is designing his characters as a balanced contrast of ages, genders, and attitudes linked only (only?) by common experience in Iraq and the scars they have to show for it. And a need to get across the country.

The film shifts smoothly between light comedy and light tragedy -- thoughts of suicide are very real one minute but something to chuckle about later -- much more easily than it navigates the hairpin turns of the plot. When you need to plant an RV full of beautiful sex workers at a rest stop, or when you need a tornado to cure a character's impotence, you've lost your purchase as a screenwriter.

But the three road-trippers somehow remain true despite the many elbows in their highway, and even the melancholy ending feels natural and poignant, which half-way through I would have thought to be impossible. The film avoids simple bromides about the war, families, or the soldiers who oscillate between them, yet in a subtle way the conclusion has an attitude toward all three.

Sony Pictures

Patrick Wilson and Samuel L. Jackson in Lakeview Terrace

Twenty minutes into the new film Lakeview Terrace, I wrote in my notes, “Is this a ‘neighbor from hell’ story? I hate those.” Yes it is, and yes I do. The movie tries to trick us at the beginning, since the first person we meet is Abel Hunter (an expectedly strong performance from Samuel L. Jackson). That’s significant because usually the first character in a narrative is our hero, and Abel doesn’t seem like a villain. Initially, at least, he’s a strict but loving father. But when the interracial couple Chris (a surprisingly good Patrick Wilson) and Lisa (the always welcome but unfortunately underutilized Kerry Washington) move in next door, Abel quickly turns into the nastiest s.o.b. who’d ever show up at your housewarming party.

There are the consistent, not-so-subtle digs about Chris being white. The security lights shining in Chris and Lisa’s bedroom. Their air conditioning mysteriously breaking down. And that’s all in the first act. Before long, Abel is flaunting the immunity he has from being a cop, cutting down their trees, and sexually humiliating Chris at a bachelor party. If Lisa had a dog, it’d be a goner.

The movie wants to say something about race, particularly how black men can feel threatened by interracial relationships. But Abel’s character is so punitive that we quickly come to hate the way he consistently pushes Chris’s buttons, and the backstory the script provides for Abel is no excuse. Besides, director Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men) has never been known for his subtlety.

Even those flaws can’t prepare you for the ludicrously awful last twenty-five minutes, which combine a wildfire, several guns, and a well-timed ringing cell phone. That the movie has the gall to arbitrarily gloss over its one interesting conflict is indicative of the film’s bankruptcy.

Zeitgeist Films

Kim Rivers Roberts and Scott Roberts in Trouble the Water

Over Labor Day weekend, a major hurricane seems to have just missed New Orleans. But exactly three years ago, when another strong-but-not-record-breaking storm just missed New Orleans, much of the city was under water a day later. The national lack of curiosity about how and why that happened, after the arrival of a storm that was well beneath the supposed limits of the levee system, is astounding. When they speak about it publicly, government officials most often blame Mother Nature while critics of those government officials blame the lack of leadership in a time of crisis.

If you drove your car at 75 miles per hour down the highway and the wheels flew off sending your family into the ditch, you'd expect a better answer than, "Well, 75 is really fast." Or: "It's horrible that the ambulance took an hour to arrive." Yes, but. Nearly every American lives within reach of a major piece of infrastructure built by the same group who designed and built those levees, the Army Corps of Engineers. So you can even set aside compassion, if you want, and tether your inquiry to good old fashioned self-interest. Our mysterious national lethargy doesn't arise from either impulse.

Trouble the Water, a documentary by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, exposes one small part of the tragedy and highlights the fact that the storm was just one chapter in a story that continues to this day. It's the story of Kimberly and Scott Roberts who didn't have the means to get out of New Orleans before the hurricane arrived. They rode out the storm, and the movie's buzz has centered around the footage that Kimberly shot as the water rose to the rafters of her Ninth Ward home. It's a compelling eye-witness account, even though the picture is as jerky as a video camera in a hurricane, but the footage serves mostly as the introduction to a movie whose heart lies beyond the storm and beyond New Orleans proper.

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