Rating:
Director: Peter Sollett
Starring: Michael Cera, Kat Dennings, Ari Graynor

Enter a hip, indie world where high-school students stay out all night drinking, listening to great music and running around the dirty/sexy streets of New York. Everyone is skinny, funny and cool. Doesn’t sound at all like your high school experience? Join the nerdy club!

Innocent doormat Nick, played by Michael Cera (of Juno and Superbad fame), is lured out of his lovesick daze for the evening by his well-meaning bandmates. After playing a gig in the city (to which Nick’s snarky ex, played by Alexis Dziena, shows up) everyone separates to hunt for the clandestine show of their favorite band, Where’s Fluffy? Nick winds up in his beat-up Yugo, joined by Norah, the slightly bored Kat Dennings (The 40-Year-Old Virgin), who plays a poor little rich girl who is just aching for someone to “get” her. They flirt. They fight. They listen to music. Following clues to the Where’s Fluffy? venue, Nick and Norah instead find what they’ve really been looking for: love. Or at least really, really like.

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Director: Spike Lee
Starring: Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso, Omar Benson Miller, Valentina Cervi

Spike Lee movies vary in quality to a degree rarely seen among filmmakers. You can always count on a Scorcese movie to be pretty damned good, at minimum, and you can always trust Michael Bay to deliver something between a steaming turd and a turd. Spike Lee, however, will comfortably crank out something as unbearably awful as 2004’s She Hate Me, and yet it’s no surprise when he can come up with something as engaging as his latest, The Miracle at St. Anna.

Rating:
Director: David Koepp
Starring: Ricky Gervais, Greg Kinnear, Téa Leoni

So Ghost Town has a silly premise to launch a fairly familiar journey for a mean, lonely man who needs to let his love light shine. It has some good moments, largely provided by Ricky Gervais’ infallible comic delivery, and his terrific chemistry with costars Greg Kinnear and Téa Leoni, but it’s not the sum of the parts that make this movie worth seeing, it’s the sum of what’s not there.

At no point in this film do large globs of semen hang from Leoni’s earlobes. There are no small pets using human toilets or biting people in the crotch or being fatally abused. There is a naked guy played for comedy, but we never get the full monte for a cheap laugh. Racist stereotypes are not the comic crutch. Absolutely no pies were sexually violated in the making of this movie.

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Director: Ethan & Joel Coen
Starring: George Clooney, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt

Following the intense drama No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers return to their sweet spot—deadpan black comedies about losers. With Burn After Reading they take on the spy genre in an age when political thrillers are particularly imbued with sociological commentary. Here, their commentary seems to be that there are losers everywhere you go, and our hyped-up age of espionage and the technological eradication of privacy is stocked with the same old human venality.

The result, with a top-grade cast cutting loose in the Coens’ weird universe, is a fun and unpredictable romp that delivers their trademark combination of laughably bland screwups and unexpected violence.

Rating:
Director: Jeffrey Nachmanoff
Starring: Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Said Taghmaoui, Jeff Daniels

Don Cheadle is a hell of an actor, and it’s always a good thing when he gets something of substance, like a Hotel Rwanda, that’s worthy of his talent. In Traitor, he makes a strong performance from potentially difficult material, and is the key reason this introspective thriller about Islamic terrorism is worth your ten dollars.