'The Meddler' features Susan Sarandon's best performance in years, and the movie is the undiscovered gem of the summer.

The Meddler is the undiscovered gem of the summer movie season, in which Susan Sarandon plays Marnie Minervini, a New York export living in Los Angeles, recently widowed, with too much time on her hands and more money than she knows what to do with. She’s come to L.A. to be near her daughter, Lori, a TV writer who’s played by Rose Byrne. But Lori feels stifled by Marnie’s nagging. The film opens with what seems like an introductory voiceover, with Marnie talking all about her new life in Los Angeles, which she describes as “like living on Main Street in DisneyLand.” Then we realize that Marnie is actually leaving her daughter the world’s longest voicemail. Marnie is the Queen of Nagging, and Lori, who’s just suffered a painful breakup, wants nothing more than to be left alone in her bed to cry.

At first, The Meddler seems like a cartoonish bit of fluff, a one-note kind of movie about an aging woman who’s become obsolete now that her family no longer needs her. (And the title is really unfortunate: it sounds like the name of a bad Batman villain.) But The Meddler is so much more than fluff. The film quickly becomes a thoughtful, moving, and funny portrait of a woman who must reinvent herself. Like the recently divorced Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman, or, like Blythe Danner’s character in last year’s delightful I’ll See You in My Dreams, The Meddler is a celebratory poem to women who’ve been suddenly discarded by the youth-centric, male-centric culture that has aged them out of importance. But this is not an act of cinematic pity for dowdy, aloof older women. It’s a challenge to reconsider the possibilities in life. 

Marnie is quite pathetic in the first third of the movie as she clings to Lori for some semblance of a social life, and more importantly, a source of need. But then Marnie starts getting out. Granted, the budding social life she creates for herself doesn’t feel totally healthy. She offers to fund a wedding reception for one of Lori’s girlfriends, then scouts out the location, the decorations, and the catering herself. She strikes up a friendship with a young man at the Apple store, convinces him to go to night school, and winds up driving him to his classes three times a week. She volunteers at the hospital, spending time with an elderly woman who appears to have suffered a stroke. She forces herself to be busy. But Marnie’s busyness seems like a cover-up. We sense early on that she’s never really gotten over the death of her husband Joe. But she can’t talk about her grief, and she can’t bring herself to date. (When two men get close to her, Marnie freezes up, then panics, and in one particularly funny and surprising moment, clocks a likable would-be suitor (played by Michael McKean) right in the crotch and runs away.)

When Marnie barges in on Lori’s therapist, fishing for info about her daughter, Marnie's obviously nosy questions reveal more and more about her own dependent personality. The therapist wonders: Why do you spend all this money on people you barely know? What is Marnie getting out of these acts of charity? But as crazy as Marnie’s actions seem to us—she’s like a post-ghost, Jewish Ebenezer Scrooge—there’s something completely endearing about Marnie’s new project of self-sacrifice. “I think Joe would want me to do some good with all this money,” she tells the therapist. And sure, Marnie’s motivation for acting like a menopausal Robin Hood may be wrapped up in all kinds of unhealthy emotional hangups, but the more she gives, the more those hangups diffuse.

Susan Sarandon has always had a terrific command of the screen. She’s at her best playing tough women, as in Thelma and Louise or Dead Man Walking, but she has a soft side too, and The Meddler manages to bring out both of these elements in Sarandon’s performance. Sarandon can play dotty, but she gives Marnie an undercurrent of intelligence that becomes increasingly stronger with time, as though Marnie is slowly finding herself again, and with this new discovery comes a revitalization of her senses. (And no one rocks a red dress like Sarandon does in the wedding scene.) 

Writer-director Lorene Scafaria is clearly fascinated, head-over-heels even, with the character of Marnie, which is why Scafaria doesn’t allow her to be pathetic for long. The film suggests that mothers become “meddlers” because they’re so used to being needed, that when their kids grow up, they don’t know what to do with themselves, and float around in a fog. Marnie has been floating for too long, and become totally addle-brained. At times I was worried the movie would diagnose her with early stages of Dementia. (In one scene, she crashes into another car because she’s distracted by a sign.) Thankfully, Scafaria doesn’t resort to cheap sentimental ploys.

The relationship between Marnie and her daughter Lori is equally as complex as Marnie herself. Lori is in some ways the typical adult whose mother drives her crazy. After practically screaming at her mother and slamming the door in Marnie’s face, Lori whispers meekly through the door, “I still need a ride to the airport tomorrow.” Marnie loves her daughter unconditionally, and it’s when she begins to create a fuller life for herself that their relationship regenerates into a friendship of two grown-ups. 

Movies are often terrified of older women, and they’ve always loved to show them losing their grip on reality (Sunset Boulevard, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, Fatal Attraction, etc.) The Meddler is about a woman finding her grip, and it showcases probably the best Sarandon performance in the last decade. That’s why we should celebrate movies like I’ll See You in My Dreams and The Meddler: they give rich, well-drawn characters to delightful actresses who’ve only gotten better with age. Marnie Minervini may be a little nuts, but she’s also funny, romantic, kind-hearted, and sexy. And everywhere she goes, she brings bagels. 

With J.K. Simmons (in one of his most enjoyable performances as a retired cop who becomes a love interest for Marnie), Lucy Punch (as one of Lori’s very L.A. girlfriends), Jason Ritter, Casey Wilson, Jerrod Carmichael, and Cecily Strong. 

28 Weeks Later

Warning: Spoilers abound in the opening paragraph of this review.

I don’t know why I watch zombie movies. They always kill off characters I love. Or in the case of 28 Weeks Later (the 2007 sequel to Danny Boyle’s fiercely scary 28 Days Later), it’s not just the characters but the actors who play them. You basically know that the people played by Rose Byrne and Jeremy Renner—an army doctor and sniper, respectively—are toast, well before they actually get run through the cinematic toaster oven. Whenever an actor I love dies on screen, part of me turns cold on the movie. “Well, who cares what happens now?” I think/exclaim/moan.

As sequels go, 28 Weeks Later is pretty strong. There are the expected irksome plot inconsistencies, but it’s a compelling hour-and-a-half, rife with infected-zombie-carnage and steeped in the apocalyptic mania that possessed the popular culture (not for the first time) during the previous decade. The film opens in the English countryside, where a handful of people are barricaded inside a farmhouse, hiding from the infected humans, who have turned into raging viral cannonballs. One drop of their blood in your mouth, one scratch of their fingernails on your skin, and you become one of them, changing over in mere seconds. And they run—how they run—like the dickens. The thing about uber-strong, hyper-active, running zombies is, there’s virtually nothing you can do. They take what already amounts to nihilistic bleakness and turn it up a notch.

Shortly after the film’s intense prologue, the U.S. military has contained the virus and is now in the process of restoring London. Survivors are being returned to their fair city to a specially contained district, where they’re under constant military supervision. Naturally, the zombie virus reinserts itself into the scenario and all hell breaks loose, forcing another band of survivors, including the sniper and the doctor, to run for cover. But this time, two of the group—a brother and sister—may possess the key to permanent extinction of the virus, in their potentially immune bloodstream.

What follows is a generally satisfying blend of the predictable and the terrifying. The U.S. military presence (the dubious saviors of the first film) goes from heroic to monstrous in moments, and it’s easy to read a lot of geo-political commentary here. 2007 was, of course, in the midst of the war in Iraq. Jeremy Renner was two years away from his career-making performance in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. He was made for these kinds of parts. Renner has a natural toughness that suits him when he plays a cop or a sniper or what-have-you, but he also possesses a deeply humanizing levity and tenderness, which he can apply to any scene with apparent ease. He’s a marvelous actor (the most likable performer in 2013’s American Hustle). And Rose Byrne is always fascinating to watch on screen. She’s made a name for herself as a comic actress of late (giving gem-performances in Spy, Neighbors, and Bridesmaids), and it’s more proof that actresses can be the best comedians when you see how versatile she is, capable of carrying out the lunacy of Spy or the ferocity of this little number, a perhaps forgettable but ultimately very disturbing movie that deepens the terror of its predecessor.

I do have to mention the shaky camera effect. Danny Boyle’s original also employed this irritating technique, and it had me rather perturbed here too. What exactly are we supposed to get out of not being able to interpret the action of a sequence? Is the shaky camera simply a way around doing good camera-work? My suspicion is that it’s also a cheap way to create a sense of chaos, putting the screws on the audience as much as possible. But to that I say, go back and watch some of the masters and see if they employ the damn shaky camera technique.

Nevertheless, the director, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, does mostly good work here. 28 Weeks Later is no embarrassment. It’s entertaining for those of us who like a good zombie flick, and it’s likely to freak you out if you’re at all concerned about this kind of thing happening for real. If it does, I think I’d follow Jeremy Renner and Rose Byrne. They react well in a crisis situation. 

Spy

Four years ago, Melissa McCarthy hit the stratosphere playing the unexpectedly wise misfit Megan in Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids. But the resulting McCarthy vehicles have been largely disappointing until now. The Heat was funny, but totally misshapen, like putting the camera in front of a drunk person at a bar. Letting McCarthy lose it for ten minutes can indeed deliver laughs, but they’re cheap laughs that reduce her to a very limiting kind of crazy-lady “performance.” And the result of this direction has been pretty dismal. (See Identity Thief and Tammy.) Now Paul Feig has returned as director and given us Spy, which is structurally the strongest Melissa McCarthy vehicle thus far. Spy is clever and inventive in ways that her previous films were not, and, happily, this movie lets its star be competent and self-aware. It was so hard to give a damn about Tammy when she was such a heartless moron (quite a needless, even cruel combination for any character). It’s much easier and much more fun to rally for McCarthy’s character in Spy: Susan Cooper, the CIA desk jockey who secretly pines for a more exciting career.  

Cooper plays the virtual wingman to Jude Law’s character, an agent who gets to do all the fun stuff, like infiltrate nuclear arms transactions in Bulgaria. Jude Law feels like perfect casting here: he has a corrupted charmingness about him; you always expect him to be angling for himself even when he’s mostly a good guy. Even as she sits at a computer screen watching Jude Law’s back (“there’s a guy coming down the stairs; there’s three of them coming toward you down the hallway”), Susan Cooper is in command and good at what she does. In terms of characterization, this movie has done a complete 180, because now almost everyone but McCarthy is totally inept. The CIA office is infested with rats, and we keep seeing the little rodents scurrying around the cubicles and climbing up on employees’ shoulders. While Susan repeatedly saves her agent from actual gunshots and bomb explosions, her colleagues sare shooting the shit around the water cooler three feet away from her desk.

But let’s skip ahead, to where McCarthy is unexpectedly pulled into some exciting field work in Paris. She finally gets to be a legit spy, and that’s where the movie gets interesting. Feig’s script actually bothers to surprise us, which is itself a refreshing delight in a world where comedies are too content with mediocrity. Feig stops short of making this Naked Gun 44¼, but he clearly has an affection both for spy movies and spoofs of spy movies. (The opening titles could actually be mistaken for a Bond film; and Spy isn’t afraid to let someone fall flat on his ass for a joke.) I was also surprised by how many people actually get killed in Spy, which is something many comedies are afraid to do, instead taking the Looney Toons “extreme-violence-will-only-temporarily-hurt-you” tack most of the time. But the characters in Spy get beat up and bruised and make fools of themselves and occasionally die.

McCarthy, however, takes everything on her chin, and as her character gets deeper into the film’s loosey-goosey espionage plot, she gets tougher and more comically aggressive. Feig has finally mastered the balancing act of controlling McCarthy while allowing her to pop off just enough to leave us in fits of hysterics. And she’s surrounded by a wonderful ensemble cast, all of whom have been given full characters to play. Jason Statham is particularly appealing as the comically badass agent who’s not nearly as skilled as he thinks he is. Miranda Hart, who may be unfamiliar to American viewers but who has made a name for herself in British television, is a delight as Susan’s co-worker and best friend. When the movie slows and down gives us little bursts of conversation between these two performers, it feels like a gift. McCarthy finally has a full, rich (ish) character to play, and Hart and McCarthy bring out the best in each other. (I did wish that there could have been a little more shaping to their friendship; it doesn’t get quite as deep as it could. But it’s a start.)

And then there’s Rose Byrne. What can I say about Rose Byrne? I am so happy that she is making movies. Byrne is beautiful and glamorous and smart and funny, and it’s always a pleasure when Hollywood actresses get to be all of those things at once. Here she plays the villain, a spoiled, rich Bulgarian woman named Rayna Boyanov who alone knows the location of some nuclear weapon. (It’s the kind of unimportant spy-movie-nonsense that you have to have in these movies.) It’s not evident in the film’s theatrical trailer, but Byrne and McCarthy spend much of the film playing off each other, and their chemistry pops when McCarthy turns up the volume on her aggressiveness, matching Byrne's terrific mean-girl-with-nukes bitchiness.

The best thing about Spy is its shaping. Feig has written an actual story with actual jokes and characters that feel full of life. These qualities allow the humor to grow organically out of the story; it doesn’t feel like someone is just pointing the camera at insanity and hoping for the best. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. I’m always grateful when filmmakers take the time to create funny situations and then let their actors breathe life into them. Spy has vitality and spark to it. You have fun with these people who seem like they’re having fun too.

With Allison Janney, Bobby Cannavale, Peter Serafinowicz, and 50 Cent.  

Sunshine

Sunshine (2007). Danny Boyle’s ode to Alien and any number of other science fiction films is an effective and grim enterprise. It’s set in the near-future, when the sun is dying and life on earth hangs in jeopardy. Several years before the movie takes place, a spacecraft, the Icarus, was sent to blast a payload of nukes into the sun to try and revitalize it. That craft and her crew have not been heard from since, and now a new team must repeat the journey aboard the Icarus II. Only this time, there can be no mistakes. The payload aboard the Icarus II is the last of its kind, apparently due to the earth’s depleting resources. The crew should have known better than to name either one of their space ships after the boy who flew too close to the sun and then died. But Boyle of course cannot resist such an allusion, and we are filled with grim expectation as the movie pounds away, and bad situation after bad situation confronts the characters. We are filled with the stark realization that no good is going to come of this. As grim as Alien’s plot is, I always have a good time watching it, perhaps because I know that the entire survival of the planet isn’t at stake. But Sunshine, like too many films of late, must experience conflict on only the grandest of scales. In the last third of the movie, Boyle introduces a particularly strange (and none too well explained) plot element involving a possibly supernatural presence on board the ship, and at that point I stopped caring entirely. The performances, however, are convincing. The cast includes Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne, Michelle Yeoh, Troy Garity, Cliff Curtis, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Benedict Wong.

This Is Where I Leave You

Although there are moments when This Is Where I Leave You is charming, funny, interesting, even poignant, it’s generally a mess. In fact the movie is such a mess that it's tempting to think that the makers confused narrative drama with dramatic structure, and therefore found it perfectly natural to let the structure be as loose as everything else in the movie. There are insane things that happen in this movie, and they seem to be happening for the sheer insanity of it. It’s about four adult siblings who come together after the death of their father. The matriarch—played by Jane Fonda—gathers them together in her large New England home for Shiva, the seven-day period in the Jewish faith during which family members officially mourn the passing of a loved one.

The film has an attractive cast: Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Adam Driver, Rose Byrne, Corey Stoll, Connie Britton, Timothy Olyphant, Dax Shepard, Ben Schwartz, and of course the great Jane Fonda. But in order to have so many big names and big stars, you need a lot of big parts. And that’s probably where This Is Where I Leave You loses its way. It has too many characters, all of whom are required to have multiple scenes of inner-crises spilling out into the open.

For instance, Jason Bateman’s character, Judd, who walks in on his wife and his boss during a vigorous round of love-making in his own bed. (The wife later finds out she’s pregnant, but that it’s Judd’s baby, not the boss’s.) Wendy (Fey) is the bossy big sister who possesses a sometimes charming, sometimes grating, know-it-all quality. She too has problems: namely a husband who’s too busy with work to pay attention to his wife and children. Paul (Stoll) is the responsible eldest sibling. He and his wife Anne (Kathryn Hahn) are having trouble conceiving. And then there’s Philip (Driver), the baby sibling who never grew up. The actors are adept enough to make it work at least half the time, but these are pretty tried-and-true character types torn right out of the pages of a sitcom script.

That’s another problem. This is a sitcom comedy-drama movie, and it represents an increasingly distinct genre of films that typically have mixed results. They do give traditionally comedic actors a chance to cry on screen and look puffy and unattractive. And, like any well-behaved sitcom, the serious moments are always punctuated with something funny. It’s not wrong to do that, but it also seems sort of cheap to stifle every dramatic moment with an easy laugh (frequently derived from Jane Fonda’s enormous breast implants, which trigger intense anxiety in all of her children, especially as she presses their faces against her plastic bosoms while consoling them, as she is wont to do). Then again, these dramatic moments aren’t so important or revealing or original that they can’t be improved with a little comedy.

Actually, the saving grace in this film is the dippy character played by Rose Byrne. She’s a girl from Judd’s past, and their relationship is rekindled in the usual ways you expect from this kind of thing: boy meets girl, boy remembers girl from adolescent years, boy and girl have good memories of each other, boy shows up at girl’s work—a skating rink—where they skate and talk while Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” spills over them from the speakers above. It’s not a particularly original romance, but it’s sort of enchanting to see Jason Bateman and Rose Byrne just hanging out, especially when the rest of the movie feels like a competition to see how many problems can be crammed into two hours of film.

This Is Where I Leave You isn’t really offensive in its quest to be the latest dramedy (or a light-hearted version of August Osage County), but it is disappointing. The director, Shawn Levy, and the screenwriter, Jonathan Tropper (who adapted his own novel), seem to be clutching at fragments of two different genres and then cramming them onto the same canvas. It helps if you’re a fan of Jason Bateman and Tina Fey, although it may not help to see them wasted in middling material. But Bateman carries the film well, and Fey is capable of real pathos. It’s perhaps most depressing to see Jane Fonda turning such tricks in a movie theater. She’s funny, but she hardly gets to do anything that isn’t surface-level, lowest common denominator humor.

Adam Driver has probably the most appealing part, but then that makes sense: he’s the stereotypical fun-loving youngest sibling, the one who’s also a perpetual screw-up. And of course, he’s vested with lots of unintentional bits of wisdom, all of them obliviously aimed at teaching the other siblings that their lives are just as messy as his. But if the film weren’t so careful in its adherence to certain character types, it might be funnier, more inventive. As it is, it’s a predictable, sometimes even boring, family drama that’s bolstered by the appeal of its considerable talent.

Neighbors

Neighbors calls into question the legitimacy of being a grown-up by showing us two grown-ups who aren't all that mature. They fancy themselves to be hip adults. Despite the fact that they've just had a baby, they're marijuana-friendly and have tried hard to keep in touch with their own identities, pre-parenthood, pre-marriage. Seth Rogen, King of the Man-Children, plays Mac, and Rose Byrne, an Australian pixie who's layered with a touch of insanity and a disarmingly sweet personality, plays Kelly. Their happy suburban-hipster-sitcom life is turned upside down by the arrival of a rowdy fraternity next door, which is headed by Zac Efron and James Franco's brother (Dave Franco).

Mac and Kelly make a concerted effort to win over the frat boys by going over to their house and introducing themselves and offering them a blunt. This fails to keep the frats from throwing a loud party into the wee hours of the night, and when, out of desperation, Mac and Kelly phone the police, Efron and his band of testosterony, party-animal frat brothers, embark on a campaign of sorts, to get their revenge. And that's about all there is to it.

Neighbors has a few things going for it. It has a playful spirit that lifts the movie out of its somewhat contrived, studio-raunch-comedy trappings. The script (credited to Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O'Brien) doesn't take its characters too seriously. This is a huge help to the movie, given the fact that it has such an anemic storyline. These are just adults who don't want to admit that their time to be irresponsible is over. So they engage in a cartoonishly violent sparring match that never ends. (And there are some very funny moments that involve Seth Rogen being physically injured in a myriad of ways.)

Another point in the movie's favor: Zac Efron. His acting talent surprised me. I didn't expect bad acting, but I sure as hell wasn't expecting this either. He has the comic chops of a ham and the power of a much bolder, stronger performer wells up from inside him on frequent occasions. I was shocked. He also plays off the charmingly goofy Dave Franco very well. They have a good buddy-movie charisma, and theirs is the only friendship that the film explores (other than that of the married couple) with any depth or success. There are a number of other characters who are barely introduced, and who sometimes take on bigger roles than their characters have been prepared to handle.

As is to be expected, the level of raunchy humor is pretty high here. Lots of vulgarity, lots of profanity, a disturbing obsession with sex that may make you want to not invite your parents to see this movie. (Although it's likely they won't want to see it anyway, if they've viewed the trailer.) There's also not that big of a discrepancy between the college students and our two put-upon heroes. Mac and Kelly are rather immature themselves, and ultimately, Neighbors pokes fun at this. These people are hiply square. Or squarely hip. However you want to size it up. And in the final few minutes, they embrace the beauty of the mundane that is normal life. Neighbors is really just a long episode of Workaholics (albeit not as smart as that show) mixed with The King of Queens. (Incidentally, the guys from Workaholics have a fun cameo appearance.)

Directed by Nicholas Stoller. With Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Carla Gallo, Lisa Kudrow (who's funny as an unsympathetic dean of students), Craig Roberts, and Ike Barinholtz.

X-Men: First Class

A friend of mine accused me of being out of sync with popular culture because I expressed a lack of desire to see Thor. I had an equally strong feeling of malaise when it came to the new X-Men movie, particularly because I remember seeing X2 a number of years ago and being bored out of my mind. X-Men: First Class was better than I expected, but not by much. The characters were fairly interesting, but the movie suppressed any of the humorous aspects of its plot. Every time it let loose for a moment to be light and let you laugh at the weirdness of its characters, it seemed like the director was pulling on the reins, reminding everyone that this is a serious freaking superhero movie, people.

The dialogue was rather mechanical. But most of the audience seemed conditioned to it, so hardly anyone laughed at how ludicrous some of it was. More ludicrous still was the movie's attempt to engage with recent political history, inserting X-Men into the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. (Who knew it was mutants that averted World War III?)

Meanwhile, the coming attractions were ominous and depressing: nothing but wretched apocalyptic superhero movies all summer, as though turning off your brain is the only option at the movies between May and September. It's so unfortunate that the good movies are shoved into one tiny part of the calendar. There are always surprises, but they are the exceptions. X-Men: First Class was okay for what it was, but after a while it's all the same, and you keep wondering why people are still paying to see this stuff over and over again? The 2009 Star Trek was much better.

Popular culture includes, but is not limited to, mindless superhero fodder. Unfortunately, it seems like the only thing studios are willing to risk any money on during the summer. We're at the mercy of people who care about money much more than they care about the movies. It's like we're supposed to feel lucky X-Men was mediocre. But should we be content to settle for mediocrity and elevate it to a status of greatness simply because it's not quite as bad as the rest of the drivel out there?

Starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Rose Byrne, Kevin Bacon, Jennifer Lawrence, January Jones, Nicholas Hoult, Lucas Till, Caleb Jones. Directed by Matthew Vaughn.

Bridesmaids

As I was sitting in the theater howling at the insanely funny Kristen Wiig in the new comic tour de force Bridesmaids, I started thinking about movies where the main character is an underdog who can do no right, and how movies with such characters tend to milk our sympathy--even subconsciously invoking our self-pity as though pulling the strings of our emotions without our consent. I thought of that poor schmuck in Meet the Parents, and how, by the end of the movie, I wanted him to leave those people behind and never speak to them again. I felt the same way for Kristen Wiig's character, for a while, but the beauty of Bridesmaids is that it doesn't let you completely lapse into a pity party for her character. It's not like the horrendously unfunny You Again, which was pure lazy indulgence. In Bridesmaids we are not just feeling the gut punches to Wiig's character, we're also receiving the pride-diminishing life lesson that, eventually, you have to stop playing the victim and take control of your own life.

Bridesmaids' plot operates in a mostly standard fashion: chronic failure Annie (Wiig) must compete with elegant, snotty, rich Helen (Rose Byrne) as she takes on the duty of being the maid of honor for her best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph). We identify with Annie right away, even though Helen isn't a complete bitch. She's close, but the movie isn't going to let us hate her with impunity.

In fact, the complexity of these women and their relationships is what gives Bridesmaids such personality. Besides that, director Paul Feig doesn't rush the humor. He knows how talented the cast is, and he lets them take time building the jokes to a crescendo. You laugh so much you'll miss half the gags, but what's going on visually is just as funny as what's being said, so you eventually become exhausted because you're laughing so much of the time. Bridesmaids is like a really good mixed drink and a really crude joke combined. The crudeness goes down easier because of the buzz you're feeling--as well as the sweetness, which isn't saccharine but genuine sugar.

I enjoyed the predictable relationship developing between Annie and a likable Irish cop, played by Chris O'Dowd. And Melissa McCarthy stole every scene she was in as the bride's sister-in-law to-be, a plump, plucky, and socially awkward self-made woman whose eccentric personality seems to render her oblivious to the drama that's unfolding between the other women. Wendi McLendon-Covey and Ellie Kemper round out the group of bridesmiads (the first one is a discontented housewife and mother of three, and the second a dreamy-eyed newlywed who's obsessed with Disney World and domestic life).

Wiig's comic timing is impeccable. She reminds me of Tina Fey, but with a dose of Goldie Hawn. She's utterly likable even when she's being stubborn, and her humor is genuine. There's something so natural and unforced about her performance. She seems to be having a wonderful time with Rudolph, who projects her own comic radiance while playing the straight gal. Byrne is wonderful too as the spoiled rich thing with a heart of platinum. With Jon Hamm as Annie's insignificant other and the late Jill Clayburgh as her mom. Written by Annie Mumolo and Kristin Wiig.

Adam

At the risk of summoning the adjective police, Adam is a poignant, vibrant and evocative movie. It's the story of a man named Adam (Hugh Dancy) who has Asperger Syndrome and lives a quiet, highly structured life in Manhattan. Not long after his father dies, Adam meets Beth (Rose Byrne), an elementary school teacher/children's book writer, and a truly unique relationship forms. One of the more refreshing movies of late, particularly because its characters aren't caricatures or stereotypes. They have a little more mystery to them and a lot more honesty. Of course I was thrilled to see Amy Irving in the film, even if the part--as Beth's mother--was fairly small.

The entire movie is beautiful--beautifully shot and featuring gorgeous locations of New York (and California, briefly). Likewise, the soundtrack is terrific (both the instrumental score and the lovely folk-pop songs that intermingle with it--I thought I heard Leigh Nash singing in the end credits but it turned out to be someone else). Do check out this little film. It didn't seem to make much noise (although it got some recognition at the Sundance Film Festival), but amidst a lot of noisier, flashier films, this one is worth listening to and looking at.

Directed by Max Mayer. With Hugh Dancy, Rose Byrne, Frankie Faison, Amy Irving, Peter Gallagher. 99 min. ★★★