NEIL AND PREY

A Merry Christmas to all! Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Song Sung Blue...

...and Anaconda...

...now in the multiplexes.

MAIDENHEAD REVISITED

Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Judd Apatow's comedy classic The 40-Year-Old Virgin...

...now getting a re-release in the multiplexes in celebration its 20th anniversary, if you can believe that.

NATURAL HORN KILLERS

In the multiplexes this weekend:

Death of a Unicorn--Paul Rudd plays Elliot, a lawyer, who is enroute to the home of his megarich employers, where he's on the verge of a massive promotion. With him is his sullen daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega), perfectly well aware that she's being used as a prop to show what a good family man Elliot is, to help him clinch the deal. They're both still bereaved over the recent death of his wife.

Driving up a mountain road to the remote home, Elliot hits and injures what appears for all the world to be a baby unicorn. Just as the creature is establishing a psychic bond with Ridley when she touches its horn, Elliot bashes it in the skull, meaning to put it out of its misery, and also to get the hell to the meeting for which he's already late.

They carry the body to the palatial home in the back of their rental SUV, but if you guess that their encounter with single-horned magical equines isn't over, you'd be right. The movie takes off from its literal-minded opening into a satire of the wealthy, their bottomless capacity to self-justify, and the similar capacity for toadies like Elliot or the rich family's manservant Griff (the excellent Anthony Carrigan)--to justify enabling them. The employers, you see, are in the pharmaceutical biz, and they--Dad Richard E. Grant, Mom Tea Leoni and cloddish son Will Poulter--soon realize that the creature's horn is a virtual panacea offering a cure for cancer, among other miraculous properties.

Written and directed by Alex Scharfman, Death of a Unicorn is strikingly funny and exciting. It also carries a tinge of sourness, but this is true of most satires. Rudd's obsequious, cowardly character is deeply unlikable for much of the film's length, but this is offset because, of course, Rudd himself is one of the most naturally likable actors on the planet.

In the same way, Scharfman offsets the (justified) bitterness of the satire with monster-movie elements--even some gore--and a dash of New Age mysticism. And he plays fair by the rules of these genres. It's also nice to see unicorns rescued from My Little Pony-style cutesy insipidity, and depicted as badass.

The Penguin Lessons--From horned horses to flightless birds: here's the second movie in less than a year set in South America and based, however loosely, on the real-life friendship between a foundling penguin and a bereaved aging man. Last summer we got My Penguin Friend, with Jean Reno. Despite Reno's undeniable star presence, some gorgeous scenery and the endearing title character, this new effort is a big improvement.

Steve Coogan plays Tom Michell, a cynical, lazy, emotionally shut-down English professor at a private school for upscale Argentine boys in Buenos Aires in 1976. On a weekend in Uruguay, he's walking on the beach with a beautiful woman he's met dancing, and they come upon an oil-slicked Magellanic penguin. 

Mostly to impress the woman, Michell takes the poor creature back to his hotel and they clean him up. Things don't work out with the woman, but Michell finds himself stuck with the penguin, smuggling him back into the school and trying to keep him a secret from the strict Headmaster (Jonathan Pryce). Eventually the bird, dubbed "Juan Salvador Gaviota"--the Spanish name of Jonathan Livingston Seagull--becomes a classroom teaching aid and a beloved mascot.

Juan Salvador also triggers a spiritual reawakening in Michell, who connects through him with the family of a cleaning lady at the school. The Junta has just taken over, and people are being "disappeared" off the street in broad daylight; Michell finds himself unable to remain apolitical.

Despite a couple of Monty Python references early on--the Pythons had a long and noble history with penguins--this Brit film isn't a broad comedy. At the beginning we're told that "This story is inspired by real events," whatever that may mean; the script by Jeff Pope is based on a memoir by the real-life Michell. Directed by Peter Cattaneo of The Full Monty--one of the very best poignant Brit comedies--The Penguin Lessons has laughs, but it's also character-driven and melancholy; in the long run it could fairly be called a tearjerker.

It's hard to imagine the movie working as well as it does with anyone but Coogan in the lead. As in the terrific Philomena (2013), he plays an elaborately ironic, acerbic poseur whose reserve is gradually and reluctantly broken down by a guileless fellow being; the penguin serves almost as well as Judi Dench in this role. But Coogan never gets sappy. He lets the marvelous bird melt us, then he dries the movie out again.

GHOSTS AND DEMONS AND EVEN WILDER YET

Opening this weekend:

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire--This fifth feature in the franchise begins with a nice macabre episode set in 1904, like something from a creepier version of Disney's Haunted Mansion. This is followed by an extended chase through the streets of Manhattan, as the current Ghostbusters pursue, in the "Ectomobile," an eel-like flying dragon spirit up from the sewers.

It's a reasonably diverting start, and the movie goes on to deploy, in addition to Paul Rudd and Carrie Coon and the kids from 2021's Ghostbusters: Afterlife, most of the available stars from the 1984 original. Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, Williams Atherton and Bill Murray show up--no Sigourney Weaver or Rick Moranis, alas--and not just in cameos but with fairly substantive screen time. I was disappointed that the all-woman crew from the much-maligned and underrated 2016 version wasn't invited to this party, but apparently fans are still traumatized.

Anyway, the old vets here are good company--Murray with his peerless sardonic line readings, Akyroyd with his gee-whiz delivery of expository gibberish. A couple of new adds, like Patton Oswalt as an authority on the occult and Kumail Nanjiani as a clod who sells Aykroyd the spherical ancient artifact that serves as the McGuffin, also get into the proper, uhm, spirit of things.

On the whole the movie, directed by Gil Kenan from a script by Kenan and Jason Reitman, is an enjoyable lavish no-brainer. The closest it gets to any emotional weight is an intriguing plot strand in which the teenage heroine (Mckenna Grace) bonds, seemingly romantically, with a teen ghost (Emily Alyn Lind) after she's forbidden to go 'busting until she turns 18; the actors manage a touching rapport even through the special effects prism.

But if Frozen Empire--which concerns a horned demon with freezing superpowers imprisoned inside the McGuffin--doesn't feel like a home run, it may be the result of too much wholesomeness. The teen romance and bickering family dynamic didn't quite feel like Ghostbusters to me, somehow. What made the '84 film seem new was its mix of extravagant, big-budget special effects spectacle with the snarky, irreverent slacker sketch-comedy of Murray and the other stars. Only when Frozen Empire taps into this sensibility does it truly thaw out.

The movie is dedicated to Ivan Reitman, director of the original, and this film, like several of the others, includes a nod to Cannibal Girls, Rietman's 1973 shocker starring the impossibly young and adorable Andrea Martin and Eugene Levy. I hope it makes fans seek out that amusing low-budget creepshow; there's a movie that doesn't suffer from too much wholesomeness. 

Late Night With the Devil--Here's another wry paranormal chiller set in New York, although it was conceived by the Australian brothers Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairnes and filmed in Melbourne. The premise is that we're watching the 1976 Halloween episode of a syndicated talk show, a perennial also-ran in the ratings to Johnny Carson. Desperate for a sweeps win, the recently widowed host (David Dastmalchian) stacks the guest list with a hokey stage psychic (Fayssal Bazzi), an Amazing Randi-type skeptic (Ian Bliss), and a psychiatrist (Laura Gordon) and her patient, an angelically smiling teenage girl (Ingrid Torelli). This girl was rescued from a cult and just might be possessed.

From the set to the music to the "More to Come" break cards, the Cairnes Brothers truly capture the look and feel of anything-goes '70s talk shows to a degree that will be nostalgic to those of us who remember them. The movie also evokes sources of the period from The Exorcist to Network (Michael Ironside provides stentorian narration in the manner of Network's Lee Richardson), and the soundtrack includes the likes of Flo & Eddie's "Keep It Warm."

The "found footage" conceit is quickly strained; the supposed "behind the scenes" sequences are pretty cinematic and helpfully narrative. But after a while you accept it, largely because the acting, especially the haunted yet game showmanship of the excellent Dastmalchian, keeps us involved.

It's a little scary, but mostly Late Night With the Devil is, like Network, a tongue-in-cheek satire of TV business culture, with ripe lines like "Ladies and gentlemen, a live television first, as we attempt to communicate with...the Devil. But not before a word from our sponsors." I also loved the implication that no amount of supernatural power could overtake Carson in the ratings in those days. Apparently even the Devil couldn't do that.

At Harkins Shea...

Remembering Gene Wilder--This documentary, directed by Ron Frank, does indeed fondly remember the late comedy great. Frank makes Wilder himself the narrator, using audiobook excerpts from his noirishly-titled 2005 memoir Kiss Me Like a Stranger.

Born Jerry Silberman in Milwaukee, he grew up trying to make his mother laugh, and later drew inspiration from the mental patients he worked with while serving in the U.S. Army. He wanted, he says, something a bit "wilder" for his stage name when he started acting in New York. Cast in Brecht's Mother Courage and her Children at the Martin Beck Theatre in the early '60s, he met leading lady Anne Bancroft's future husband Mel Brooks, who later cast him in The Producers.

From there, we get a chronicle of some of the highlights of Wilder's movie career--not all of them; Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx and Start the Revolution Without Me, for instance, are passed over. But there's terrific material on Bonnie and Clyde, The Producers, Willy Wonka, Young Frankenstein, his relationship with Richard Pryor, his scenes with the sheep in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (he says that Allen told him that he wanted to do a version of Sister Carrie with a sheep instead of Jennifer Jones), and more. My own favorite of Wilder's characters, Jim aka The Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles, is very well represented here.

Talking heads include Brooks, Carol Kane, Mike Medavoy, Alan Alda, Ben Mankiewicz, Rain Pryor, Harry Connick, Jr., Eric McCormack, and Willy Wonka's Charlie Bucket himself, Peter Ostrum, as well as Wilder's widow Karen Wilder, all speaking with unmistakable love. They tell good stories, but the real joy is simply the big dose of Wilder's utterly sui generis blend of innocent sweetness and strangled volatility. If the clips in this movie don't make you smile, you may need to see a doctor.

ANTY CLIMAX

Opening this weekend:

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania--Paul Rudd, aka Scott Lang, aka Ant-Man, is taking a little hiatus from front line superhero duty. On inactive status with The Avengers, he's written a book, so he's giving readings, and hanging out with family, and smugly basking in celebrity. That's the set-up, in a few quick scenes in San Francisco, for this third eponymous Ant-Man feature.

Then, thanks to science experiments by his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) gone wrong, Scott and Hope Van Dyne, aka The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) get swept into the "Quantum Realm," along with Cassie, Hope's Mom Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) and dad Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). The Quantum Realm is a subatomic micro-verse teeming with life in which Janet was stranded for decades.

Thus Janet knows the turf, and she knows that the people there are ruled over by the tyrannical Kang (Jonathan Majors), a dimensional conqueror who she marooned in QR before she escaped. Kang would like very much to be reunited with Janet. Far-out fantasy adventures ensue.

Director Peyton Reed seems to pays heavy homage to the original 1977 Star Wars; the Quantum Realm is full of cousins of Tusken Raiders and Jawas. There are also strong echoes of the Avatar flicks, of Zardoz, and of Dr. Who, and maybe a thematic hint of Horton Hears a Who.

This is yet another Marvel entry featuring alternate universes; it has a somewhat similar look to Sam Raimi's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness from last year. As with that film, I went in with the feeling that the This-That-Or-The-Other-verse conceit that the Marvels have leaned on so hard in recent years is of limited sustainability, as it has a tendency to dilute the dramatic stakes.

On the other hand, also as with Multiverse of Madness, taken on its own terms Quantumania is perfectly enjoyable. The visuals, however derivative, are elegant, witty and well-executed, and the glamorous cast is in pleasant form. Rudd's sly, subtle clowning is always good company, and he carries the movie effortlessly.

The best performance, however, is by Jonathan Majors, from The Last Black Man in San Francisco. His Kang is quiet, subdued, even sad, as if haunted by the joyless drive to conquer and rule. As with Christian Bale's Gorr in last year's Thor: Love and Thunder, Majors brings a needed edge of serious, almost tragic menace that helps to ground this silly sci-fi spoof.

DOWNSIZING II

Check out Phoenix Magazine online for my reviews of The First Purge and the remarkable documentary Three Identical Strangers. Also opening this weekend:

Ant-Man and the Wasp--Conspicuously absent from the cosmic struggles of April's Avengers: Infinity War was Ant-Man. But the Marvel superhero, here teamed with his flying counterpart of the title, is kept very busy indeed in this sequel to his 2015 debut.

Ant-Man's form-fitting suit allows him to instantly resize himself, and other objects, from tiny to giant. His superpowers also include the ability to communicate with and command ants, like Aquaman can with fish, and this proves surprisingly handy at times.

He's had several alter-egos since his debut in 1962 in Marvel's Tales to Astonish, but in the movies he's Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) a high-tech burglar given the suit by inventor Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), the original Ant-Man. Hank's daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) takes over the similarly diminutive persona of The Wasp, who also has elegant working wings, from her long-missing mother Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer).

Scott's been under ankle-bracelet-enforced house arrest in San Francisco since his mischief in 2016's Captain America: Civil Wars. He's days away from completing his sentence when Hank and Hope press him back into service as Ant-Man, on the chance that Janet could be rescued from the subatomic limbo in which she was lost when Hope was a child.

There's also a super villain in the mix, a spectral figure called The Ghost, hidden in what resembles a HAZMAT suit. The Ghost is creepy looking, but for my money doesn't make as much of an impact on the movie as the buffoonish comic villain, a shady tech dealer played by the reliable Walton Goggins. Other vets in the cast, like Michael Pena, Laurence Fishburne, Bobby Cannavale and Judy Greer, contribute solid bits as well, and Randall Park is especially funny as an officious FBI man.

But as with Ant-Man the first, Rudd carries the picture--his combination of craggy looks and brash, boyish, unembarrassed silliness connects immediately with the audience. Lilly's Wasp is chic and likable, but essentially a "straight" foil for Rudd, and while Douglas is allowed to score some points off his younger costar, it's Rudd's reactions to these zingers that really get the laughs.

The director of the first film, Peyton Reed, has wisely been returned to the helm for Ant-Man and the Wasp. Once again Reed uses shifts in perspective to create imaginative, sometimes brilliant parody of grandiose superhero action, and even to generate a casual surrealism, with an office building suddenly the size of a briefcase, or a Hello Kitty PEZ dispenser suddenly the size of a tractor-trailer. He stages a San Fran chase-scene finale reminiscent of, but far crazier than, Peter Bogdanovich's 1972 What's Up, Doc?

There's method to the madness, however. As wild as the slapstick is, Reed's touch is disciplined; he never lets the story get away from him, or the characters go fully farcical. Like its predecessor, like Guardians of the Galaxy and like last year's Thor: Ragnarok, Ant-Man and the Wasp is yet another Marvel movie played as a full-on comedy. But it isn't a sketch comedy. That makes it, maybe, a little less funny than Thor: Ragnarok, but also a little more substantive.

Opening today at AMC Arizona Center:

Bleeding Steel--Jackie Chan stars as a Hong Kong cop doing battle with genetically-modified super-mercenaries while trying to protect the scientist responsible for them. The plot spans years, takes our hero to Australia, and involves a caped villainess, a Frankenstein-like villain, a stage magician, a mesmerist witch, and a long-lost daughter.

Written and directed by Leo Zhang, this actioner is preposterously convoluted, and the English dubbing has a stilted sound. But on its own conventional terms it's well-executed. It lacks, however, the light-footed drollery of Chan's Hong Kong vehicles from the '90s, and there aren't nearly enough of his magical martial arts set-pieces.

About midpoint, we get a short but fun sequence in which Chan uses the stage magician's props, followed by a good confrontation between Chan and the villainess on the roof of the Sydney Opera House. But, probably because of the star's age, much of his other footage is taken up with standard and rather tedious car chases and shootouts.

Jackie Chan is one of the world's great movie stars, but we don't go to see him for this sort of routine cops-and-robbers stuff. Of course, his appeal doesn't derive only from his astounding physical feats, either. It's also in the comically harried, frantic manner with which he performs them, and that gets more pronounced, and funnier, with age. But Bleeding Steel doesn't exploit this potential enough.

No doubt it's also because of Chan's age that much of this movie's screen time is devoted to a younger costar, a cocky but bumbling fellow (Show Lo) who's trying to help. At one point, a thug actually says to this guy "Who do you think you are, Jackie Chan?"

SUPERFEUD

Opening this week: 

Captain America: Civil War—In March it was Batman and Superman that couldn’t get along; now it’s the gang over at Marvel. The U.N. wants the Avengers to agree to regulation. Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) thinks it’s a good idea. Captain America (Chris Evans) doesn’t want anyone telling him what he should and shouldn’t do.

I’ve become a bit of a curmudgeon about the current run of superhero flicks; technically eye-popping though they are, most of them seem overlong and humorless to me. That’s true of Civil War too, but I will say I enjoyed it more than Batman v Superman. About midpoint the quarrel leads Iron Man and his pals into a brawl with Cap and his pals at an airport, and the goofy, semi-slapstick action and the trading of corny quips between adversaries really conjured up the fun of reading an old-school comic. For once, the movie didn’t feel like Wagner without the arias.

The point of contention between Iron Man and Cap is, I suppose, a fair dramatization of a central conflict in the American attitude toward the rule of law, especially international law. But whichever side with which you may sympathize ideologically, there’s little doubt of which leading man wins this Civil War from an acting standpoint—Downey is as manically vibrant as ever, while poor Evans is as pleasantly bland a leading man as you can find in American movies right now.

Also adding some liveliness is Paul Rudd, returning as Ant-Man, Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther, and Tom Holland as another new Spider-Man. Spidey gets a new Aunt May his time, too—Marisa Tomei. Yes, that’s right; since the first Spider-Man flick back in 2002 the role of Aunt May has gone from Rosemary Harris to Sally Field to Marisa freakin’ Tomei. It’s a bit of a jolt to realize that Aunt May is two years younger than I am (and looks at least ten years younger).

LITTLE MAN SYNDROME

Opening this weekend:

Ant-Man—With the Marvel movies of the past few years, maybe the more obscure the source comics—obscure to me, at least—the more interesting the film. Guardians of the Galaxy turned out to be one of the more amusing big-budget flicks from last year, and this summer’s Ant-Man is possibly even a bit more fun.

Ant-Man, whose major superpower is the ability to shrink himself to ant size, originated in 1962 as the star of a recurring feature in Marvel’s Tales to Astonish and later, as an original member of The Avengers. Initially the alter-ego of the haunted genius Hank Pym—and paired with the Wasp, his similarly diminutive lady love and fellow Avenger—the micro-superhero has gone through several changes of secret identity over the decades, but obviously never attained the mythic stature of Spider-Man or The Hulk or Iron Man.

The film takes up the story with the aging Pym (Michael Douglas) turning over the Ant-Man suit and mantle to high-tech burglar Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), in hopes that Scott will help him foil the schemes of Pym’s mad protégé Darren Cross (Corey Stoll). Cross has a suit of his own that turns him into the super-villian Yellowjacket, who can also, as Steve Martin would say, get small. Pym’s enlistment of Scott is over the objections of his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly), who would prefer to be the agent against Yellowjacket.

In outline, it’s standard superhero stuff, but the film was made, thankfully, by a bunch of goofballs. The director is Peyton Reed, who made the terrific 2000 cheerleader comedy Bring It On, the script was by Joe Cornish of the terrific Attack the Block and Edgar Wright of the terrific Shaun of the Dead, with star Rudd and Adam McKay also contributing to the writing. The dialogue keeps mischievously deflating the corny tropes of the genre, and Reed maintains a light-footed pace and serves up one imaginative gag after another, deftly shifting from Ant-Man’s epic perspective on his surroundings to a normal-sized perception of their dinkiness and back, to often hilarious effect, like a screwball, primary colored, Saturday morning cartoon version of The Incredible Shrinking Man.

Ant-Man also has the power to command actual ants of various species—winged carpenter ants he can ride, bullet ants to attack his enemies and the like. After a childhood spent repeatedly watching Them! I’ve always been a little phobic about ants, but Ant-Man succeeds in making them endearing (Parents and sensitive viewers should be warned [spoilers!]: one of Ant-Man’s loyal ant pals pays the ultimate price, and also that an adorable lamb gets disintegrated in the course of the story).

These sweet ants gave the movie a sour postscript for me—as I left the screening, I called home to ask my wife if she needed anything, and she told me, I’m not kidding, to stop at the supermarket and pick up some ant traps; our kitchen had been invaded. I did it, but I didn’t like doing it.

Lila & Eve—Lila (Viola Davis) is a single mom in Atlanta who has lost her elder son Stephon to a stray bullet in a drive-by. The police have no leads, and aren’t looking very hard for any. At a support group for grieving mothers Lila strikes up a conversation with Eve (Jennifer Lopez), who agrees to be her sponsor. But Eve’s sponsorship is a little different—she and Lila go on a killing spree, targeting the drug dealers responsible for Stephon’s death.

The result is a thriller that sweeps us past its more implausible aspects with its swift pace and the nice, unforced rapport of the two leads. It has a central plot twist that may not come as much of a surprise to audiences—I figured it out about forty-five minutes in, and I’m pretty slow with that sort of thing. It also has, at its core, a beautiful, wrenching performance, which cracks the movie’s conventional dramatics.

Not many actresses now in American film can do grief like Viola Davis. With zero showy histrionics, she gets across Lila’s soul-shattered agony, horrifyingly faced with the dull requirement to keep slogging on through life. The glimpses we get of her immediate reaction to the tragedy are so raw that they’re difficult to watch, but later, Lila even shows flickers of humor and pleasure, which seem, in the context of her loss, heroic.

It’s magnificent acting, and it throws Lila & Eve off balance—Davis gives us too much complexity in Lila, too much fatalistic awareness of the futility of her revenge, for us to fully enjoy the movie as a lurid melodrama in the Death Wish vein. Yet Davis is also, by a large margin, the best thing about Lila & Eve, and its only real claim on our emotions. Her performance wrecks the movie, and makes it worth seeing.

IVY BELEAGUER

For the large majority of us who didn’t especially want to go to an Ivy League or other prestigious school, or weren’t up to it academically, or couldn’t have afforded it if we were, Admission is a smooth and pleasant hour and a half. For those who did or were or could have, it might be painful, and compelling, too.

One of the more intriguing elements of this romantic comedy, directed by Paul Weitz, is the inside look it claims to give at the admissions process for Princeton University—the script, by Karen Croner, is based on a novel by Princeton faculty member Jean Hanff Korelitz. If your own college career was ever in the hands of a system this baroque and whimsically subjective, it might make watching this movie that much more maddening.

The heroine is Portia (Tina Fey) a veteran admissions officer who, like her colleagues, has long since become immune both to the plying and the outrage of Princeton aspirants and their families, and is ruthlessly able to stamp “DENY” on their dreams. She loves, or thinks she loves, the life she has with her nebbishy Prof boyfriend (Michael Sheen)—quiet, child-free nights in, reading poetry. She has to endure an occasional awkward visit with her disappointed Mom (Lily Tomlin), the author of an iconic feminist classic who expected more from her daughter than guarding the gate for the elite. Other than that, however, Portia’s life is comfortable.

But of course all this gets yanked away from her, and a wacky new life is dropped in its place. She meets John (Paul Rudd) the adorable head of a “progressive” school in rural New Hampshire, who introduces her to his most promising student, Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), a brilliant, sweet, slightly dizzy kid that John thinks belongs at Princeton. Then, when he gets Portia alone, John’s real agenda emerges: He tells her that Jeremiah is her biological son, given up for adoption when she was in college.

Instead of recusing herself, Portia starts trying to steer the process in Jeremiah’s favor. She also, it need hardly be said, finds herself falling for John, and bonding with his adopted Ugandan son Nelson (Travaris Spears), who likes her because, in contrast to the globe-trotting, do-gooding John, she’s “boring,” as he feels an adult ought to be.

This complicated, rather contrived story gives rise both to farcical and to poignant scenes, and the terrific cast gives them punch. Fey’s persona, with her declarative delivery and her self-conscious disinterest in sex, seems to generate a love-her-or-hate-her response in many people. I’m in the former category—she’s fine company here, and strikes some surprisingly heartfelt, touching notes.

Rudd gets to show less of his manic, squirrelly side here in this unambiguous good-guy role, but he’s appealing as always, as is Tomlin. Sheen is a riot as the sad-sack boyfriend; he looks like a melancholic teddy bear with Albert Einstein’s hair. There are good turns by Gloria Rueben, Wallace Shawn, Sonya Walger, Olek Krupa and others, but the real standout is the beguiling Wolff (son of actress Polly Draper) as the wide-eyed, fast-talking Jeremiah. Our investment in the story hinges on his likability—on him seeming, for all his intelligence, like a clueless boy.

Of course, you may find yourself hoping that Princeton doesn’t ruin him. A quiet ironic joke built into the fabric of Admission is what it says about the American sensibility in relation to prestige institutions—the tension between the belief that they’re often essentially meaningless and their unshakeable currency in the American culture of success.

On the one hand, the movie suggests that getting into Princeton is an arbitrary, even corrupt process. On the other, we’re expected to root for Jeremiah to get into the school anyway. We’re told he’d “thrive” there, and he may believe he will, but it’s mentioned several times that he’s an “autodidact,” so you may wonder how much, in purely educational terms, he needs with college at all. I suspect the real reason the grownups want him to get in is simply so that he can put the word “Princeton” on his resume for the rest of his life.

MIDDLE-AGED CRAZIES

With This is 40, Judd Apatow brings two memorable supporting characters from his 2007 hit Knocked Up to center stage: Debbie and Pete, the heroine’s bickering sister and brother-in-law. It appears that the reason they were such successful characters in the earlier film is precisely because they were supporting characters. This is 40 is well-acted, and it’s not without laughs and strong scenes. But watching these two squabble for more than two hours is, ultimately, more ordeal than pleasure.

L.A. fashion boutique owner and mother of two Debbie, played by Leslie Mann—Mrs. Apatow—is a blonde beauty and a bright-eyed, freaky obsessive. Pete, played by Paul Rudd, manages a struggling record label (he’s gambled big on a Graham Parker album). He’s emotionally recessive in the face of the intensity of his wife and daughters. He regularly retreats to the bathroom when he doesn’t need to relieve himself, just to play handheld electronic games. But he’s not safe from his wife’s intrusion even there.

Even so, for some reason Pete comes off less sympathetically than Debbie, maybe because the underlying dynamic seems to be that he’s no longer in love with his wife—he sometimes fantasizes about being a widower—yet she’s still desperately fascinated by him. In real life, of course, Pete’s trapped and overloaded feelings could awaken compassion, as could his terror at the prospect of admitting to Debbie that they’re on the brink of ruin. But in the movies, even with the always-appealing Rudd playing him, he just seems like a detached skunk who’s not trying. When we see him weeping in his car at one point, the moment falls surprisingly flat.

The movie centers, way too loosely, on the lead-up to a joint 40th and “38th” birthday party for Pete and Debbie, respectively. But it pursues a profusion of subplots, from Debbie’s troubles with her shop employees (Megan Fox and Charlyne Yi) to the growing pains and Lost fixation of her older daughter (Maude Apatow, who’s excellent) to the daddy issues that fuel Debbie and Pete’s dysfunction. Pete’s Dad (Albert Brooks) is a jolly, outrageous deadbeat—with toddlers from his more recent wife!—who shamelessly leeches off his son. Debbie’s Dad (John Lithgow) is the ultimate absentee, a hotshot spinal surgeon who can’t even confidently remember the names of his granddaughters.

I like Apatow, a lot. Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin are already classics, I think, two of the best American comedies of the past decade. But his instincts are way off here. He tries to give every little strand, down to Debbie’s efforts to quit smoking or Pete’s cupcake addiction, its own story arc and payoff, and it’s just too much. He lets scenes play too long, and overindulges what appear to be improvisations until they become unfunny.

There’s a lot that’s good about This is 40, and with some fairly merciless cutting it could probably have been made into a decent movie. Not a great one, though, I don’t think. The core situation—affluent married people find themselves facing middle age without having attained a perfectly satisfactory life—isn’t exactly unique, and it lacks the urgency of Apatow’s earlier films. After all, at least they aren’t still virgins.

Make no mistake, the athletic and acrobatic feats captured on film in Cirque du Soliel: Worlds Away are enough to make you believe in superheroes. The performers in the circus franchise’s feature film come across like some other, higher species; some Nietzschean improvement on Homo Sapiens. What they do with their bodies doesn’t seem possible, and yet there they are, clearly doing it.

Considering how jaw-dropping their abilities are, and their beauty and erotic presence, it’s hard to understand why the movie is a bit of a bore. The franchise, started in the early ‘80s by a pair of Canadian street performers, has grown into a worldwide empire, with shows on six continents. It’s a contemporary take on the circus—no animals, a New-Agey, music-driven style and unifying themes to the performances. Worlds Away, directed by Andrew Adamson of Shrek, showcases the seven Cirque du Soleil productions in Las Vegas alone.

I have friends who are serious fans and repeat customers of the live shows, but even they admit that the videos of the performances just aren’t the same. I’m inclined to believe them—I can see how witnessing this stuff live could be overwhelming. But while watching this movie, more than once my chin began to droop toward my chest.

There’s a little bit of story to Worlds Away. An extremely cute gamine (Erica Linz) goes to the circus. In the middle of the act, a hunky aerialist (Igor Zaripov) makes eye contact with her and, distracted by her extreme gamine cuteness, misses his trapeze and plummets into the ring. But instead of going splat, he plunges right through the dirt, and the gamine, rushing to his aid, falls through after him.

She finds herself in a strange alternative avant-garde circus dimension. For the rest of the movie she wanders, accompanied by a grim-looking clown (John Clarke) with a bad case of bed head, from tent to tent, in search of her hunk. Some of her encounters are visually magical—like a lovely staging of “Octopus’s Garden”—and all are eye-popping demonstrations of physical skill and prowess.

But this slender thread of plot isn’t enough to disguise what Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away really is—a commercial, first of all, but also a concert movie. And I would propose that the concert movie, with a handful of rule-proving exceptions, may be the most wearying of all film genres, blunting as it does both the immediacy and excitement of live performance and the narrative pull of cinema.

Oh yeah, it’s in 3-D. I honestly can’t remember one particularly striking effect that this added to the film.