A superbly cast comedy that for the most part successfully balances a surface crassness with the requisite eventual emotional maturation and bonding of more conventional mainstream fare, Role Models manages to locate and till fresh ground in the ascendant guys-behaving-badly sub-genre of American studio comedies.

Anson Wheeler (Seann William Scott) and Danny Donahue (Paul Rudd) are a pair of Minotaur
Energy Drink reps who make their living traveling from school to
school peddling their product as a hip, safe alternative to drugs. For
unrepentant ladies man Wheeler, this is the high life. Danny, however,
is bitter and listless. Haranguing coffee shop employees over the
language they use to sell their product, he has a sardonic,
hair-trigger temper that frustrates his live-in, long-time lawyer
girlfriend (Elizabeth Banks).

When a public outburst lands the duo community service, Danny and
Wheeler are assigned to “Sturdy Wings,” a mentorship program run by a
former addict (Jane Lynch). There, Danny is paired with Augie
(Christopher Mintz-Plasse), an introverted teenager obsessed with medieval,
live-action interactive role-play, and Wheeler is paired with the
younger Ronnie (Bobb’e J. Thompson), a fatherless kid prone to foul-mouthed
outbursts. Various mishaps ensue. Initially attempting to just bide
their time and clock the necessary hours to fulfill their
court-mandated obligation, Danny and Wheeler soon find themselves
caring, against their previous instincts.

Multi-hyphenate David Wain, who honed his skills with the comedy
collective The State, has impeccable skill at crafting self-contained
scenes, but neither does he sell out the nature of his characters in
any of these discrete bits, as in so often the case in small screen
sitcoms.

A big part of Role Models‘ success stems simply from the superb comic
timing and expertly orchestrated interactions of its cast, who are for
the most part very familiar with one another. Rudd, who receives his
first screenplay credit on Role Models, has a working history with his
co-writers dating back to 2001’s summer camp send-up Wet Hot American
Summer, which also served as Wain’s directorial debut.

But there’s also much to be said for the quality of the banter and the
specificity of the often age-inappropriate commentaries that inform
Danny and Wheeler’s attempts to relate to their young pupils (eyeing
Augie with exasperation, Danny invokes comparison to composer Marvin
Hamlisch, while Wheeler at one point imparts explicit insight about the
sexual metaphor of Kiss’ “Love Gun”). Some of the set-ups feel familiar, and the film’s energy does flag a
bit when required to highlight a moment of growth, as when Danny tells
off Augie’s parents. Still, the across-the-board strength of the
performances makes these pop-storytelling concessions easy enough to
swallow. Rudd’s seething deadpan resentment and Scott’s libidinal
recklessness make for a fun pairing. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, R, 99 minutes)

If filmmaker Kevin Smith lived in olden times, and had a family coat of
arms, it would probably have a phallus and giant lit doobie on it, and
maybe some sort of animalistic violation. Smith, of course, burst onto
the scene in 1994 with the ultra-low-budget, delightfully lewd Clerks,
and has since then, while various indie film trends have waxed and
waned, by and large hewed to the same sort of hyper-literate puerile
humor that defined his debut. Injections of more overt sentimentality
(as in Jersey Girl, for instance) have proved Smith a sometimes ham-fisted peddler of sincerity, so it’s a good thing that his new film, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, counterbalances a third-act romantic awakening with such a heaping helping of filthy fun.

Things look grim for lifelong friends and roommates Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) when an escalating mountain of debt results in their electricity and water being cut off, just in time for winter. A chance encounter at their high school reunion with the gay porn star boyfriend of a former classmate, though, sparks an idea in Zack: they can get out of debt by making their own homemade skin flick.

Recruiting a motley crew of off-screen assistance (Craig Robinson, Jeff Anderson) and on-screen “talent” (Jason Mewes, Ricky Mabe and adult film stars Traci Lords and Katie Morgan), Zack and Miri set out to shoot an adult Star Wars spoof, only to find their budgeted plans ruined at the last moment. Re-jiggering ideas on the fly, they end up shooting after-hours at the coffee shop where Zack works. The two vow that having sex won’t ruin their friendship, but when filming begins what started out as a business proposition turns into something much more.

Rogen might be somewhat overexposed, it’s true, but he’s a natural fit for schlubby misfits like this, and he and the superlative Banks — who can do both sunny and salty, with equal skill — have a nice chemistry together. Smith’s touch with hilariously raunchy dialogue, meanwhile, is still virtually unparalleled. (“Gimme two popsicle sticks and a rubberband and I’ll find a way to fuck it, like a filthy MacGyver,” rants Zack at one point, illuminating the differences between men and women’s masturbatory aides.) That’s certainly what powers the movie, and gives it its kick. In terms of structure, though, Smith also smartly dispenses with any potentially distracting sideplots by having Zack and Miri’s families already out of the picture.

At its core, Zack and Miri is about the transformative power of sex, and how special that bond can be. If Smith hasn’t quite found a way to convincingly seal the deal, narratively speaking (the jump forward in time that precedes the closing 20 minutes comes off somewhat contrived), the candor and bluntness with which Zack and Miri deal with one another — devoid of any of the typical polite gender-identified boundaries — at least mark it as a realistically blue 21st century love story. (The Weinstein Company, R, 101 minutes)

A handful of eerily staged scenes and a surfeit of passably evocative production design can’t save the otherwise muddled Passengers, in which Anne Hathaway stars as a grief counselor assigned to help survivors of a fiery plane crash. In trying to tick a wide variety of genre boxes, the movie ends up servicing none that credibly.

Assigned by her boss (Andre Braugher) to
help walk a quintet of airplane crash survivors through their shock and
grief, psychologist Claire Summers (Hathaway) encounters particular
difficulties with one of them, Eric (Patrick Wilson). While others display
behavior more consistent with massive trauma, Eric is bouncy and
charged by a newfound energy. He flirts with Claire, and asks her out
on dates, which strikes her as odd. As her other clients begin
to disappear, though, Claire finds herself swimming in paranoia,
suspecting a strange airline employee (David Morse) of having a hand in their
disappearance, possibly to cover up the real reasons for the crash.

Narratively, Passengers marks a departure from the past films of Colombian-born director Rodrigo Garcia (Nine Lives), whose recent small screen work on HBO’s In Treatment showcased a level of psychological engagement not on display here. Passengers‘ mystery never takes hold, mainly because Ronnie Christensen’s script
is a thinly sketched mood-piece of appropriated motifs and
characterizations. Almost a decade on, the huge success of M. Night
Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense is still spawning mystery-thrillers
that seem chiefly backwards-plotted, with gimmicky point-of-view pivots
that are meant to draw appreciative audience reactions out of a
re-framing of the narrative.

Given the loose, unrealistically pitched nature of some of the characters in Passengers,
though, it’s quickly apparent that the movie isn’t a straight dramatic
telling, and only a small handful of scenarios seem plausible. Rodrigo,
accordingly, is left to try to imprint and impress a unifying visual
strategy on this forestalled revelation, with only fitful success. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony/TriStar, PG-13, 93 minutes)

Film, it’s been both said and proven, time and again, is chiefly a director’s medium. Television is the area in which writers can most clearly and lastingly establish a distinct voice for themselves. Just like most of the movies he’s penned, however, Charlie Kaufman defies the restrictions of that categorization.

In fact, his filmography reads like a list of some of the most subversive, idiosyncratically trippy and dazzlingly audacious movies of the past decade (regardless of whether one thought they succeeded or not): Being John Malkovich, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Human Nature, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Thus, somewhat unusually, there’s already a distinguishable persona attached to Kaufman’s directorial debut — Synecdoche, New York, a sprawling, contemplative and imaginative work in which the literal and metaphorical collide in sardonic and sometimes surprisingly affecting fashion.

Attempting to condense the plot of Synecdoche, New York in a way that’s meaningfully representative of the whole is perhaps an exercise in folly, but here goes, broadly. Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as Caden Cotard, a New York theater director whose life starts to contract on him. His marriage to Adele (Catherine Keener), a painter of miniatures and celebrated artist in her own right, is fraying, and a mysterious physical (psychosomatic?) malady is shutting down his autonomic functions one by one. Things get worse when a flirtatious, would-be affair with box office ticket girl Hazel (Samantha Morton) runs aground before it even really catches fire, and Adele runs off to Europe with Caden’s daugther.

Honored with a MacArthur grant that gives him hope of creating a work of brutal honesty, Caden launches himself into a massive, Mike Leigh-esque undertaking, hiring hundreds of actors to craft an improvised, much-workshopped “living play” in a giant warehouse that contains an ever-growing mock-up of the city outside. He even hires actors, Sammy (Tom Noonan) and Tammy (Emily Watson), to play himself and Hazel, which helps contribute to the mental deterioration of new wife Clare (Michelle Williams), his former leading lady.

Synecdoche, New York (the title is pronounced “sih-neck-doh-kee”) is a movie that has the capacity to enthrall and frustrate in perhaps equal measure, depending on one’s capacity to accept elliptical plotting and abstract flavoring. For a while it unfolds as a more or less straightforward drama about a man caught up in his own head, albeit with a few heightened touches of absurdism. (Hazel lives in a house that is literally on fire, and for years Caden peruses his daughter’s forward-reading diary, long after she’s left.) Later, the movie becomes a series of slipstream moments, scattered marbles of life that serve as emotive triggers and placeholders as much if not more than conventional dramatic fodder.

What I can most easily and honestly say about Kaufman’s id-tickling, decades-spanning picture is that it has both enormous, insistent ambition and a soul, which are so frequently mutually exclusive in modern American movies. “Like” is a hard word to attach to it, not because it’s punishing or depressing, but just because it doesn’t coddle an audience, or pander. It’s largely about death and creative struggle, but it’s also whimsical and hopeful. There are a few bits with which to quibble, but it’s mostly an engrossing experience — funny, mildly unnerving (there’s a pinch of domestic creepiness that would make David Lynch proud) and affecting in unexpected, tangential ways… much like life itself, actually. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 124 minutes)

Recent parolee Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) has been estranged from
what remains of her family for 15 years, and has a drab wardrobe of
browns and greys to match her battered psyche. Lea (Elsa Zylberstein, below left),
her younger sister, picks up Juliette at the airport and subsequently
takes her into her Parisian home, which she shares with her husband
Luc, his mute father, and their two adopted little Vietnamese girls. As
Juliette is slowly reintegrated into society both at large and in
small, a slow thaw occurs, with unanticipated consequences for all
involved.

There’s a pinch of self-conscious Franco-genuflection to the directorial debut of novelist and literature professor Philippe Claudel, most particularly in the form of a dinner scene praising Eric Rohmer. For those who’ve sampled even a bit of French cinema, the emotional contours of this film are familiar, and in that regard the movie feels a bit like a stacked deck, daring one to rebel against its slow-developing appraisal of confinement and regret. The studied warmth and unfussy sincerity of its telling, though, wins out; I’ve Loved You So Long is a movie about familial silences and the great, tilled-earth spaces in between, both in relationships and in one’s head. The slow reveal of the full reason behind Juliette’s incarceration gives the film some extra emotional heft, but this is first and foremost an Oscar-level showcase for Thomas, as a woman who learns to purge herself of the swallowed self-loathing that has soured her soul. Think of it as a French secular rebirth drama, about self-forgiveness and learning to walk looking at least partially forward, and not always backwards. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 117 minutes)

In New York City, four cops are dead, killed in an ambush that has
the entire police department on edge. With a cop killer on the loose
and so much riding on the case, Chief of Manhattan Detectives Francis
Tierney (Jon Voight) asks his reticent son, Detective Ray Tierney (Ed
Norton), to lead the investigation. Ray takes over the case knowing the
cops who were lost had served under his brother, Francis Jr. (Noah
Emmerich), and alongside his hotheaded brother-in-law, Jimmy Egan
(Colin Farrell). On the surface, it looks like a routine drug bust gone
tragically wrong. But as Ray delves deeper into the case, he realizes
someone on the inside had to have tipped off the drug dealers that the
cops were coming. When the evidence starts to point in an unthinkable
direction, the case forces the family to choose between their loyalties
to one another and their loyalties to the department.

Directed by Gavin O’Connor (Tumbleweeds) from a script co-written with Joe Carnahan, Pride and Glory fairly capably does what it does, and to that end will be embraced by those who are predisposed to love similarly minded good cop-bad family tales like We Own the Night, no matter the muggy, musty odor of familiarity that hangs over these proceedings. Others will, to degrees, yawn. Tightly shot in heated, hand-held close-up, the movie plays as an accented slow shuffle toward inevitability, with an ending of comeuppance that would work a lot better without the bifurcated, correlative strand aimed to neatly wrap up all loose ends. Invested as always, Norton and Farrell mine a few nuggets from the material, which includes the end-credit crawl tag that “any real people or events are included solely for realism.” Well, OK then. I hadn’t necessarily noticed. But thanks for the heads up. Streets! (Warner Bros., R, 125 minutes)

Testing the maxim that happiness can’t be contrived, High School Musical 3: Senior Year sets off a joy bomb, and attempts to charm tween-leaning audiences through an explosion of primary colors, bright production design and sheer, indefatigable force of will. The first film in the Disney Channel’s huge hit TV movie series to receive a theatrical release is a relentlessly chipper toe-tapper, bluntly effective in its staged cathartic moments but powered by a puttering dramatic engine.

Against the spring backdrop of their senior year, a half dozen students at New Mexico’s Eastern High try to juggle competing interests for their time and attention, and figure out the paths for their respective futures. Fresh off winning their second state basketball championship, school hunk and big-man-on-campus Troy (Zac Efron) seems destined to follow in his father’s footsteps to the local university, by accepting a basketball scholarship alongside his best friend Chad (Corbin Bleu). Giving Troy pause, though, is the fact that his girlfriend Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) is headed out-of-state to Stanford.

As they prepare for one last school musical, eagerly anticipated by the self-involved Sharpay (Ashley Tisdale) and her more open-hearted twin brother Ryan (Lucas Grabeel), the group’s drama teacher adds a wrinkle to events by announcing that recruiters from Juilliard, the prestigious performing arts academy, will be on hand to observe the award one scholarship to a student at yet to be determined.

Returning series director Kenny Ortega creates an immaculately presented fashion showcase, and places a heavy emphasis on theatrical gesticulation that makes High School Musical 3 seem ever solicitous of its audience’s feelings, in ways perhaps contrived but no less forceful and effective. A couple musical numbers are shot in seemingly hurried fashion, with tight alternating close-ups, but for the most part there’s a nice fleshing-out consistent with the bump in production value from the previous made-for-television movies.

Somewhat unfortunately, the conflict here is of the paint-by-numbers variety, even for teen dramas. Sharpay’s conniving and antagonism is rather blithely dismissed, never carrying over to later scenes. Similarly, because it’s not evidenced by actual friction in their relationship, the emotional drift between Gabriella and Troy as they prepare for different post-high school paths never seems like more than a set-up for song. Troy, too, often seems an incidental bystander in his own unfolding future, the one exception to this being “My Own Dream,” which is the movie’s requisite Footloose-style, solo freak-out number, complete with shifting floor and ceiling dance bits to simulate angsty teen disorientation and confusion.

That said, there’s not much in the film’s look or execution to dissuade embrace by its core audience. Production design and overall packaging are slick, and the performances are sunny and engaging. (Walt Disney, G, 109 minutes)