Greta Gerwig is not Zooey Deschanel, and we should be thankful for that. In mumblecore movies like Hannah Takes the Stairs and Baghead, and in mainstream comedies such as No Strings Attached and Arthur, Gerwig plays quirky and adorable, awkward and charming. But those traits haven't solidified into a tiresome trademark, like Deschanel's Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She hasn't turned herself into a brand; she stays just unpredictable enough. Gerwig's fumbling and self-doubt feel natural, not coached.

And never have they shone better than in her new movie, Frances Ha. Sure, she's playing another twentysomething fumbling through life, but the film plays to her strengths so well—and allows her to dig deeper than she ever has before—that it feels like this is the character she's always had inside her fighting to get out. Which makes sense: Gerwig herself wrote Frances Ha (with Noah Baumbach, who directed her in Greenberg and later became her boyfriend).

In a recent New Yorker profile of Baumbach, writer Ian Parker briefly summarized the history of their relationship: The pair worked together on Greenberg, when Baumbach was still married to actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, but soon after that film's release, and the birth of his and Leigh's first child, Leigh and Baumbach began divorce proceedings. Baumbach and Gerwig started dating the following year. Because of the quick succession of events—and the 22-year age difference between Baumbach's partners—it made for a minor gossipy sensation in the world of indie filmmaking.

But Gerwig and Baumbach clearly make a good team, as Gerwig wrote about in last week's New York Times Magazine. Baumbach—who's best known for caustic character pieces like The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding—has made his first terribly affectionate (and still very funny) movie in Frances Ha, with Gerwig's spirit lighting it up.

Frances Ha has plenty of recognizable reference points: the black-and-white romantic New York of Manhattan, the playful freedom of the French New Wave, the disarming honesty about young people's lives you see in the recent work of indie filmmakers Andrew Bujalski and Lena Dunham. And yet it's still something new. Gerwig plays Frances, a 27-year-old living in New York who's trying to make it as a dancer in a company that likes her fine as an apprentice but doesn't necessarily see her becoming a troupe member. Sarcastic, hip, funny but also a little sad, Frances is at that age where she and her friends are all still talking about what they want to be when they grow up, full of ambitions if not a lot of clear ideas. Emblematic of the group, an aspiring-writer buddy of hers is excitedly working on some spec skits for Saturday Night Live. When he becomes disenchanted with the process and gives up, he declares that it doesn't matter. After all, he explains, the show has really gone downhill of late.

Mixing music from The 400 Blows and David Bowie's '80s dance-rock phase, shooting in black-and-white, and focusing more on character than plot, Frances Ha checks in at less than 90 minutes, which might give the impression that it's a cool sketch rather than a particularly memorable or weighty film. (Baumbach and Gerwig made it on a quick schedule with a small budget, which only amplifies that impression.) Yet while the movie is light on its feet, it feels substantial. Just about every scene ripples with insights into that anxious period in every young person's life when everything has the potential to take off—or fall to pieces.

Gerwig doesn't significantly change her approach for this movie, but her brand of self-deprecating comedy has never been this consistently radiant and touching. Frances would probably fit in just fine with the women on Girls. She's not as tart as Jessa or odd as Shoshanna or glamorous as Marnie or depressive as Hannah, but her likable self-consciousness and quick wit make her as funny and real as Dunham's creations. (Adding to the comparisons, Adam Driver has a role in the movie.) But the trick to her performance is that Gerwig constantly perches Frances on that precipice between being a kid and an adult, never comfortable in either role but also not happy being in limbo. Frances may be ironic and blasé, but you never doubt that she's also taking in everything around her, whether it's the guy she thinks she may have a crush on or the longtime friend who suddenly and casually betrays her. If your 20s are a time when every little moment seems incredibly cataclysmic, playing into the grand drama of what you think adulthood will be, then Frances Ha captures that sensation in all its messy exuberance.

But Gerwig and Baumbach aren't smug or condescending about Frances' struggles to find love and a career. To the contrary, they've struck a happy balance. A twentysomething making a movie about this period might be too close to the events to be objective, while a fortysomething might be too nostalgic to recall it clearly. Miraculously, Frances Ha is both intimate and wise, its ability to crystallize a delicate time-of-life moment endlessly amazing. As a result, this is a coming-of-age film without all the icky, feel-good baggage that usually comes with the genre. You laugh because it's clever and it's true and you remember it being exactly like that when you were in your late 20s.

One of Frances' friends comments that she looks old for her age, which isn't meant as a compliment. It's a funny scene, one of many in the movie that's intentionally awkward without slipping into full-on Curb Your Enthusiasm cringe, but it holds the key to what has been central to Gerwig's appeal all this time. She seems like an old, disheveled soul who's constantly befuddled to find herself in the skin of a young woman. In the movie, Frances never quite seems comfortable, lurching after each new thing while trying to preserve her cool, as if she's afraid of being found out. For an actress who can look quite stunning in photo shoots, she can be adorably gangly on screen, and she's especially so in Frances Ha: a swan who walks around like she's an ugly duckling.

And that's the core truth of Frances, who can see the woman she'd like to be but doesn't quite know if she can get there. The movie doesn't take her problems too seriously—even Frances realizes that being broke and young in New York City is hardly the worst fate in the world—but it does have deep compassion for her plight. In the past, Baumbach has kept his characters at arm's length, no matter how autobiographical those movies were. With Frances Ha, he embraces her. Maybe it's because he's dating his leading lady. Or maybe it's because Gerwig's just so vibrant in the role. Frances is still finding herself, but Gerwig seems to have arrived.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

The Cannes Film Festival, which kicks off on Wednesday, is the year's premier film festival, the launching pad in recent years for celebrated movies like The Tree of Life, No Country for Old Men, The Artist, Amour, Holy Motors and Inglourious Basterds. It's funny that Cannes takes place just as summer movie season is getting underway: The festival's selections share little in common with their blockbuster brethren, but they do often factor into Hollywood's other big season, the Academy Awards.

Before the festival gets rolling, I've put together a handy little guide of movies that will be premiering at Cannes that I'm especially excited to see. (I'm going for the first time this year.) Narrowing the list to 10 wasn't easy—I had to leave off Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring and Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive, among others—but that just underlines how many high-profile must-sees Cannes has on offer over the next two weeks.

All Is Lost

Writer-director J.C. Chandor's first film was Margin Call, an excellent ensemble drama about the 2008 economic collapse that showed off his skill with actors and sharp dialogue. So give him credit for going in a completely different direction with his follow-up film. All Is Lost, which stars Robert Redford as a man trying to survive at sea and is said to contain no dialogue and no other actors. Maybe it'll be nothing more than a gimmick. But after Margin Call, I'm willing to give Chandor the benefit of the doubt.

The Bastards

French filmmaker Claire Denis is no stranger to Cannes: Her first movie, 1988's Chocolat, had its premiere there. Since then, she's become one of the most distinctive and understated directors working today, whether it's the quiet character study 35 Shots of Rum or the slow-burning suspense of White Material. There aren't a lot of plot details about her new film, The Bastards, but it sounds like it involves a ship captain who decides to get revenge for his sister after her whole family is wrecked by an evil businessman. Denis has never shied away from dark dramas; this one promises to be especially jet-black.

Behind the Candelabra

It's still hard to imagine that Steven Soderbergh will retire from filmmaking, but if he's true to his word, then Behind the Candelabra will be his final effort. Telling the love story between Liberace (Michael Douglas) and his boyfriend Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), this drama will play on HBO on May 26, the final day of Cannes. It looks absolutely fabulous.

The Congress

Director Ari Folman's last film was Waltz With Bashir, the bold mixture of animation and documentary. His new movie isn't any less ambitious. The Congress, based on a novel by Solaris sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem, stars Robin Wright, who plays herself as an actress who sells the rights to her digital image with unintended consequences. Also featuring Jon Hamm, Harvey Keitel, and Paul Giamatti, The Congress will mix live-action and animation. Fingers crossed that it's a trippy, thought-provoking affair.

The Immigrant

As HitFix film critic Guy Lodge points out, American director James Gray has gotten more love from international critics and festivals than he has in his home country. In the States, he may be best known for making Two Lovers—and in that case, too many people know that film as "the one where Joaquin Phoenix promoted it by acting all weird on Letterman." (No matter: It was my favorite film of 2009.) Gray reunites with Phoenix for The Immigrant, a 1920s drama starring him as a New York pimp who lures a recently-arrived Polish immigrant (Marion Cotillard) into his stable. Gray prefers stories about hardscrabble New Yorkers, and this one definitely fits that mold.

Inside Llewyn Davis

The Coen brothers have long been Cannes's favorites. Joel Coen has won three best director trophies, and Barton Fink won the Palme d'Or, the festival's top prize. Joel and his brother Ethan return with Inside Llewyn Davis, a tribute to the 1960s folk-music scene in Greenwich Village. Davis is played by Oscar Isaac, an up-and-comer who was in Drive and Robin Hood, and the film also stars Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan. For a lot of people, none of that matters: Just so long as the Coens directed it, folks will want to see it.

Nebraska

The latest from Sideways director Alexander Payne is a drama about a father (Bruce Dern) and son (Will Forte) traveling to Nebraska. In its broad outline, this may seem reminiscent of earlier Payne movies: He's done road trips before with About Schmidt, and several of his films have taken place in Nebraska, his home state. But Nebraska is his first film he didn't co-write, and I'm curious to see how SNL/30 Rock alum Forte does in a more serious role.

Only God Forgives

One of the themes of this year's Cannes is the return of several filmmakers who have been part of the festival's official competition in previous years: Soderbergh, the Coen brothers, Roman Polanski (who has Venus in Fur). Another is Nicolas Winding Refn, whose last film, Drive, won him best director in 2011. He's back with Only God Forgives, a crime thriller set in Bangkok that stars his Drive lead Ryan Gosling. Around Drive's release, Refn talked a lot about wanting to make a Wonder Woman movie. Personally, I'm glad he's making his own versions of comic-book films instead.

The Past

One of the best reviewed films of 2011 was A Separation, the Oscar-winning drama from Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi. His new drama stars some Cannes veterans—Bérénice Bejo (The Artist) and Tahar Rahim (the excellent prison drama A Prophet)—in what's being billed as a multicultural love story set in Paris. Before A Separation, most didn't know Farhadi's name. Now, a lot of us can't wait to see what he does next.

A Touch of Sin

The terrific filmmaker Jia Zhangke has spent most of his career chronicling the rapid rise of his native China as a superpower, often focusing on those affected by the changes. (His 2004 film, The World, was about the unhappy workers in a real-life Chinese theme park that offers Disneyland-style re-creations of famous landmarks like the Eiffel Tower.) His movies tend not to be heavily plotted, but that might be less the case with A Touch of Sin, which is said to "[revolve] around four threads set in vastly different geographical and social milieus across modern-day China." (However, as that above publicity still suggests, it may be more action-oriented than is customary from him.) It would be great to see his moving, muted films find a larger audience. Could the potentially more accessible A Touch of Sin help pave the way?

Grierson & Leitch write regularly for Deadspin about movies. Follow them @griersonleitch.

Near the beginning of Stories We Tell, director Sarah Polley's documentary about her family, her sister Joanna is asked how she feels about being part of the movie. Perfectly candid, she responds, "I guess I have this sorta instinctive reaction of, like, 'Who fucking cares about our family?'"

It's one of the earliest moments of unguarded honesty in a film that's full of them, but it also speaks to a problem that a lot of "personal" projects have. A work based entirely on your own life, whether it's a memoir or a one-woman-show or a documentary, carries the twin risks of self-indulgence and self-immolation; you're exposing parts of yourself to an audience who will judge you or, perhaps worse, find you not worth judging at all. Polley, an actress in The Sweet Hereafter and the Dawn of the Dead remake who has focused more on directing in recent years, flirts with all kinds of disaster with Stories We Tell but, remarkably, she sidesteps most of the usual pitfalls. She makes you care very, very deeply.

It helps if you've seen—and liked—Polley's first two films as a director. Away From Her, based on the Alice Munro short story, starred Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent as a longtime married couple going through a major crisis once the wife develops Alzheimer's. She followed that up with Take This Waltz, which Polley wrote on her own, a romantic drama that featured Michelle Williams as a dissatisfied woman torn between her loyal, loving, dull husband Seth Rogen and a flirty, mysterious romantic interest played by Luke Kirby. Away From Her was stately and serious, while Take This Waltz was messy and emotional, but at their core they both had to do with relationships: what makes them last and what can tear them apart.

Both movies were well-observed, if a bit uneven, but they hold the key to what makes Stories We Tell so terrific. It's easy to deduce, in hindsight, that she made those fiction films first to gird herself for the real story she's been struggling with for so long.

The movie focuses on Polley's mother Diane, who died shortly after Polley's 11th birthday in 1990. Polley has gathered together her older siblings, her father, and some family friends to reminisce about this energetic spirit who, we begin to understand, was something of an enigma. A stage actress and singer, Diane is described in glowing terms, and we see home movies that suggest the radiance she brought to those around her. Polley, who was the youngest of Diane's children, asks everyone she interviews to tell her everything they remember about her mother, piecing together a snapshot of this vivacious woman.

If that was simply Stories We Tell's objective, we'd have an affectionate portrait from daughter to mother, but nothing that memorable for a general audience. But Polley's interest in Diane goes far beyond hearing old stories. For years, it was a running joke in her family that Polley's biological father wasn't the brood's dad but someone else: a man Diane had a clandestine affair with at some point in her life. (The reason this joke got started was that she doesn't look a thing like her dad.) The documentary plays as a detective story in which we follow along as Polley explains how she set about discovering if the joke had any truth to it. If you don't know the actual story, I urge you to resist finding out until you see the movie, which goes beyond simply answering that mystery and investigates precisely what impact it had on members of her family, who had their own opinions of who Polley's biological father was.

But it's not just the mystery at the heart of Stories We Tell that makes this movie juicier and more compelling than your typical "personal" project. It's the intelligence she brings to the material. Most first-person confessionals derive a lot of their effectiveness from an optimistic belief that because we're interested in the person telling the story, we'll be invested in their concerns. For the most part, Polley doesn't make that assumption in Stories We Tell, shifting the focus away from questions like, "How is this affecting Sarah?" to more universal concerns about family and the ways our own perceptions of our past can be shaped by the opinions of those around us.

Without being overly precious about it, Polley has actually constructed a rather intricate structure for her documentary, which includes having her father Michael (an actor like her mother) reading from a narration whose origin isn't clear at first. There are mysteries within mysteries in Stories We Tell, and even the title isn't exactly what it appears to be. In the wrong hands, this could all be insufferably adorable—another young person mooning over family angst in a cutesy way—but in her feature films Polley has shown an ability to create some distance between herself and her suffering characters, letting us feel their pain without wallowing in it. In a sense, Stories We Tell, which is so much about trying to create a "character" out of Diane, is treated like another fiction film. That doesn't mean it's not intensely personal for Polley—the film is quite moving in how it portrays many of her family members and friends—but she has a healthy perspective on the material that suggests not only that she's felt these things fully but that she's absorbed them and learned something from what has happened.

This is one of those documentaries that actually has spoilers in it, but even if you think you know the whole story, there are still some nice surprises in here that argue that, even when we think we know everything about those closest to us, there are still things we'll never quite understand. Joanna may not get why people would care about her family, but it's easy to grasp from the audience's perspective: We see ourselves and our own families up there on the screen.

Grierson & Leitch write regularly for Deadspin about movies. Follow them @griersonleitch.

There are many movies that could have been made from the raw materials of Pain & Gain, which is based on a series of outrageous Miami New Times articles about three dimwit Florida bodybuilders who in 1994 kidnapped a rich local businessman and stripped him of all his assets. Some filmmakers, for example, might have looked at this story as a dark commentary on the American dream or as a satire on Miami's Neverland strangeness. Michael Bay is not that filmmaker.

Bay seems to have been interested in this story mostly because it sounded, like, really funny and, y'know, insane, bro. He fills Pain & Gain with flash and energy, and he does it well enough that the movie succeeds. But at the same time, it's a missed opportunity.

As originally chronicled by journalist Pete Collins in late '99 and early 2000, Pain & Gain drops us into the world of Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), a Miami fitness buff who's a top personal trainer inspired by the characters in The Godfather, Scarface and Rocky. Wahlberg's at his best when he's playing genuine-but-clueless lugs, and Daniel is perfect for him: The character's idea of how to get ahead in America is completely wrongheaded—he doesn't understand that Rocky Balboa and Tony Montana are on very different moral planes—but he believes it so deeply that it's almost touching.

One of Daniel's clients is Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), a successful man whom Daniel has decided doesn't deserve his big house and fancy cars. (The names of the actual victims were changed in the movie to protect their identities.) Daniel, who considers Victor an affront to his own dreams, recruits two regulars at his gym to kidnap the guy and extort him for all he's worth. One is Daniel's longtime buddy Adrian Doorbal (a disappointingly one-note Anthony Mackie), who's so obsessed with steroids that he's done severe damage to his penis. (And because this is a Michael Bay movie, you can count on plenty of dick jokes.) The other is Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), a recently freed convict and born-again Christian who's in desperate need of money.

Pain & Gain is Michael Bay's first non-Transformers film in eight years, and only Bay could look at this new movie as some sort of return-to-his-roots, "artistic" outing. It's still endlessly frenetic—the only time the camera isn't whipping around is when everything's moving in super slow-motion—but Pain & Gain does seem to be Bay's attempt at making an epic crime drama like a Goodfellas or Casino. Just about every major character supplies some voiceover, each of them adding in background details or explaining their perspective on the events.

But does Bay really have any roots to go back to? From his debut with Bad Boys, he's always been about high-octane, low-nutrition action movies. The return to Miami, where the Bad Boys movies were set, has at least loosened him up a bit. Among all the other reasons the Transformers movies were terrible, Bay never seemed to be having any fun making them. They lumbered around, mechanical and joyless. Pain & Gain recalls the unapologetic guys'-guy bravado of Bay's earlier work, and he has a blast taking this unbelievable true story out for a spin, driving way too fast and seeing if anybody's going to stop him.

Unfortunately, Bay's reconnection with his Bad Boys/The Rock period doesn't mean that he's matured since then. At 48, he still comes across through his movies as the world's oldest frat guy–objectifying women, telling lame jokes, and getting incredibly uncomfortable in the presence of homosexuals. Pain & Gain's story is inherently funny, but Bay doesn't do much to sharpen the humor. He shoots everything in Awesome-O-Rama, which makes the action sequences bigger and the jokes louder. But Bay knows nothing of nuance, so the material's deeper levels simply don't interest him. He just wants to tell a story about some dumb guys who swindled this jerky guy and then had to do a bunch of messed-up stuff to get away with their crimes. Bay's ADHD filmmaking is enough to make Pain & Gain endlessly watchable, but the twisted darkness of the actual events (adapted by screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) is what gives the movie life.

The acting does, too. You tend not to dwell on performances in a Bay movie, but Pain & Gain has two standouts. One is Wahlberg's Daniel who, deep down, thinks of himself as a Rocky-like underdog required to seek vengeance against foreigners like Victor who have stolen his American dream. He thinks he's a hero, and his surety makes his actions all the more frightening. Daniel gets progressively more unhinged as the movie rolls along, but Wahlberg keeps him believable, grounding Daniel's criminal activities in a wounded sense of pride that (to his mind, anyway) justifies everything he's done.

But the real standout is Johnson. Pain & Gain's unsubtle approach ensures that Paul's struggle between being a good Christian and helping with this kidnapping will mostly be played for broad, mocking laughs. But Johnson is actually quite nuanced in his portrayal. In the past, the actor has played either kick-ass action roles or dopey comedy characters, with the occasional dramatic role thrown in for good measure. Pain & Gain brings together his different onscreen persona, and it's more proof that the guy's simply magnetic. Paul may be a conflicted fool, but Johnson makes you feel the turmoil within the character: He wants to be a good person, but his human temptations simply won't let him. It's a sign of Johnson's decency that even when Paul has to engage in some of the movie's homophobic humor—ha ha, gay sex toys sure are weird—the character is mostly live-and-let-live about the whole thing.

Even with those performances, though, Bay can't help but overdo everything in Pain & Gain. The film's later sections get aggressively dark and, at two hours, the movie feels longer than it needs to be. And, seriously, the man's attitude toward women and gays is repugnant. But let's be honest: This is the sort of movie Bay was built to make. There have been a few movies recently set in Florida, and each played to that filmmaker's strengths and interests. Magic Mike incorporated Steven Soderbergh's preoccupation with showing how people go about doing their jobs, and it was filmed in his cool, observational style. Spring Breakers was Harmony Korine finding a new way to outrage audiences and sensationalize weirdo behavior. Pain & Gain is Bay's way to celebrate supreme macho attitude, as always. There's a strange, juicy movie in there about police incompetency, unbridled ambition, America's penchant for can-do positivity, and the simmering tensions within a large multicultural city. Bay finds that movie about half the time. The other half, he seems as much of a meathead as his characters.

Grade: B-.

Grierson & Leitch write regularly for Deadspin about movies. Follow them @griersonleitch.

People go to inspirational sports movies not in spite of their predictability but because of it. Other than romantic comedies, there's no other genre so dependent on the fact that you know exactly how they're going to play out. It doesn't help that they're usually based on true stories. These movies–Remember the Titans, Hoosiers, Glory Road, The Express–want to get our juices flowing and comfort us at the same time. Actual sports (not to mention real life) have so much agony and uncertainty wrapped up in them that you can understand why people like watching movies where the underdogs always win or the racists always lose.

If you think you want to see 42, then you'll probably like it, and no review is going to make you feel otherwise. The movie tells the story of how Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color barrier in the 1940s while playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers. It sets up the pins and knocks them down. Just about everybody at the start of the movie dislikes Robinson because he's black, but by the end, everybody realizes he's great. That's the movie, which doesn't offer much insight or emotional complexity. It congratulates us for being open-minded enough to realize that bigotry is bad.

Chadwick Boseman plays Robinson, and he possesses the man's swagger and smile, not to mention a bit of his stoicism. But he's not playing a nuanced character: He's a symbol for something larger, the struggle of any minority group to be treated equally. It's an incredibly difficult task to portray bland virtue, and Boseman does his best. But although writer-director Brian Helgeland doesn't try to make Robinson a Christ-like figure who suffered for our sins, there's a martyr-ish quality to the way the character's been conceived of that keeps him at a distance from us. The real Jackie Robinson was presumably a layered, complicated man–you know, a fully-formed human being. The one in 42 mostly reacts to the racism around us without revealing much of his inner life. He's just this guy we root for because, hey, nobody deserves to be treated the way he was.

The whole movie has that same goodhearted but musty attitude. (It comes through strongest in Harrison Ford's frumpier-than-frumpy performance as Branch Rickey, the Dodgers executive who drafted Robinson and, according to the movie, spent the rest of his career chewing on cigars and offering gruff-yet-adorable inspirational speeches to his star player.) 42 wants to point out that the old days were bad, but whether it's Mark Isham's pervasive, on-the-nose score or the generally nostalgic look and feel of the film, Helgeland has crafted a story that's so damn conventional it rarely challenges its audience. Watching 42 is akin to getting a full body massage while being told, "don't worry, we can lick bigotry."

The problem is that the racism in this film doesn't possess the necessary sting that would remind us that it still exists in our world today. 42 will introduce a really horrendous character, like Alan Tudyk's rival manager, who's such a clear villain that it's easy to boo-hiss him and even easier to feel superior when he gets his comeuppance. Even Robinson's teammates who initially aren't happy about an African-American player in their locker room come around eventually, but not in any way that gets at how we confront our own biases when meeting people from other walks of life. Still, the movie is intelligently made and sometimes finds a sneaky way of making racism hit home. In one scene, an anonymous father and his young son enjoy a warm moment at the ballpark together, until the father is revealed as a vitriolic racist who shouts the N-word at Robinson over and over again. The son, confused but impressionable, starts doing the same thing. It's the film's effort at showing the extent to which ignorance is learned behavior. And Helgeland also is too smart to suggest that baseball integrated because they realized it was the right thing to do: It was because teams wanted to win, and if a black man could help them do that, so be it. Still, 42 only occasionally makes us feel like bigotry is our problem, not just theirs.

Because Robinson is such a cipher in 42, I sometimes wondered if maybe Helgeland was after something more subversive than what we see on the screen. It's possible to interpret that by making 42 somewhat generic, Helgeland wants Robinson's story to stand in for a lot of other people's stories. In its broad outline, the challenge Robinson endures in 42–keeping his cool and not playing into the hands of his detractors by lashing out–isn't that dissimilar to the strategy that Barack Obama incorporated in his run for president and later during his administration. And the ridiculous logic used by bigots during Robinson's time for shunning him ("How will it affect the locker room?") is the same kind of ridiculous logic used in our discussions of closeted professional athletes.

These are all compelling ideas, but it's likely giving 42 too much credit: I don't buy that the filmmakers specifically intended any of them. The movie's a little too soft and a little too square. That's even more surprising considering that Helgeland once made A Knight's Tale, a movie that giddily took all the conventions of the medieval-times film and turned it into a comedy filled with anachronistic rock 'n' roll songs. 42 is the opposite. Helgeland giving us a staid sports movie that never mucks with the formula. It may help young kids appreciate Robinson's courage, but for a movie based on a real person, 42 doesn't feel much like real life–and, unfortunately, that's where all the troubles this movie is trying to deal with exist.

Grade: C.

Grierson & Leitch write regularly for Deadspin about movies. Follow them @griersonleitch.

When we first meet Simon, he's not unlike a lot of twentysomething guys you knew after college. Recently graduated, cash-strapped, withdrawn and sorta lost, the lead of Simon Killer finds himself crashing in Paris at a family friend's place, wanting to escape New York and the girlfriend, Michelle, who dumped him after five years. The guy's such a heartsick lump that you feel bad for him, even when he refers to his ex as a whore. But as we'll soon realize, Simon is something of a mystery, which makes it so perfect that he's played by Brady Corbet, an actor who you've seen in a lot of different things but probably don't recognize. After Simon Killer, you'll know who he is.

This dark character study, which opens on Friday in New York and will be available on-demand next Friday, is something of a coming-out party for Corbet, who has appeared in Melancholia, Mysterious Skin,the American remake of Funny Games, and Martha Marcy May Marlene, a movie from the same filmmaking collective, called Borderline Films, that was behind Simon Killer. (If you haven't seen any of those indies, you may recognize Corbet as Derek Huxley from the fifth season of 24.) He's a handsome, boyish guy–he'll be 25 in August–but even when he's smiling there's something about his eyes that seems troubled. You can tell that he's thinking, but you're not sure what he's thinking. And maybe you don't want to know.

That specific quality of being appealing but also somewhat inscrutable is incredibly important to what Corbet brings to Simon Killer, which is all about having an audience live with a character we trust less and less as the story moves along. Directed by Antonio Campos (Afterschool), Simon Killer can be seen as a worst-case scenario of two romantic fantasies: living in Paris and leaving all your troubles behind to reinvent yourself in a new land. This film perverts all that for a subdued, intense drama in which Simon attempts to get over his ex, occasionally writing her emails that try to find the right tone–does he close with "Sincerely" or "Love"?–when he's not masturbating to online porn. Eventually, he wanders into a sex club, where he befriends a prostitute named Victoria (Mati Diop). They start to form a relationship that's based on, really, nothing: He's nice to her, and she takes care of him, sensing that he can barely take care of himself. (Long ago, Simon figured out that he can use his puppy-dog eyes to get people to feel sorry for him.) Soon after, he gets the idea that she should blackmail her clients for big money, threatening to tell their wives about their infidelity if they don't pay up.

Simon Killer has a plot, but it rambles along from sequence to sequence, driven by Simon's unpredictable whims. As we come to understand, he may act like a sad-sack, but he's also hiding darker impulses, which cause us to question everything we see him say or do. At its core, the film is a puzzle, daring us to figure out who Simon was before he arrived in Paris and which parts of his past are real or invented. Corbet is playing a variation on the unreliable narrator–the only actual voiceover narration comes from his occasional emails to Michelle or his mom–and since everything we learn about Simon is from his perspective, the actor's blank, vaguely threatening gaze gets increasingly more unsettling. (We cling to his seeming sweetness, even though we see more and more evidence that it's a sham.) A potential love interest in Simon Killer tells him that she doesn't like how he stares at her. You'll share that feeling soon enough.

Campos has made a film that's the opposite of warm and fuzzy. Besides its sexual frankness, Simon Killer features brief experimental light-and-sound interludes (meant, presumably, to echo the main character's uneven moods) and a dispassionate, downright chilly attitude toward Simon's questionable behavior. Simon Killer isn't set in the same City of Light as depicted in Midnight in Paris: It's a place of desperate loners and very little magic.The film also doesn't ask you to love Simon; at most, it wants you to fully appreciate his cruel, pathetic nature. Indeed, Simon Killer isn't the kind of film that will appeal to audiences who prefer their main characters to be "likable." Rather, it asks us to study this screwed-up enigma, who can't seem to get out of the way of his own self-destructive tendencies.

I don't know what a psychologist would make of Simon, but in the confines of a movie, he's terribly compelling precisely because his every action is justified (in his mind) as a response to Michelle's breakup. It's very possible he's a psychopath, but Corbet plays him so quietly that, if you weren't paying attention, you might think he's just fine. Sure, Simon is a liar and a schemer, but Corbet keeps him oddly sympathetic. Like Matt Damon's characters in The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Informant!, Simon is arresting because he doesn't think there's anything wrong with him. He's just misunderstood is all. And Corbet never signals to us that he knows this guy is deeply disturbed. Quite the contrary, there's this commitment to respecting Simon's point of view–whether through Corbet's performance or the movie in general–that makes Simon Killer all the more riveting.

We're used to our cinematic villains being easily recognizable, sometimes over-the-top creations, often with simple back stories that explain their motivations. Simon Killer offers no such relief: The quiet kid fretting over his broken heart turns out to be the bad guy. And the greatness of Corbet's performance is that, even at the end, I never was sure who Simon really was and how he got that way. You keep watching this movie because you're fascinated to figure it out, and because you're concerned about what he might do next. Often, a breakout performance is one in which the actor pulls out all the stops in a grandiose way. In Simon Killer, Corbet does the opposite. He reveals nothing–and that absence of emotion and clear clues into a character's mindset becomes hypnotic. I can't wait to see what he does next.

Grierson & Leitch write regularly for Deadspin about movies. Follow them @griersonleitch.

For director Danny Boyle, anything worth doing is worth overdoing. With each genre of movie he makes, you get the sense that he wants to be sure it's the most demonstrative of its kind ever. Trainspotting was the druggiest movie ever. 28 Days Later was the zombie-iest movie ever. Slumdog Millionaire was the most exotic and romantic and melodramatic movie ever. (Not really, but you know what I mean.) Kinetic and vivid, Boyle's films are a visual delight and an emotional pummeling. With Trance, he's gone ahead and made the trippiest of trippy head-game thrillers in recent memory.

Trance in some ways returns Boyle to his roots, playing like a spiffier, gaudier version of his 1994 debut, Shallow Grave. As in that film, a crime goes wrong, and no one can trust anyone else in the aftermath. Trance's ostensible hero is Simon (James McAvoy), who works for a British auction house that's robbed by Franck (Vincent Cassel) and his men in broad daylight. Soon, though, it becomes clear that Simon has teamed up with the crooks (in order to settle large gambling debts) to be their inside man to rob a priceless Goya painting. But there's one problem: During the heist, Simon got concussed by Franck and now has no memory where he hid the painting. Desperate, they send Simon to a hypnotherapist named Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson) in the hopes she can help. But she quickly realizes that he's not really there to find his missing keys as he alleges: She figures out he and Franck are part of the auction heist, and she wants a cut of the painting's worth if she succeeds in recovering his memory.

Because it's partly set in Simon's subconscious, which creates "Is this a dream?" scenarios throughout, Trance will probably be compared to Inception, although it's not nearly as brooding as that Christopher Nolan effort. The recent movie that most comes to mind is actually Steven Soderbergh's Side Effects, which happily pushed past plausibility for the sake of springing twist after twist on the audience. You got the sense that Soderbergh was flexing his muscles and having a little fun, and so it is with Trance. As is Boyle's way, Trance has an almost operatic emotional sweep to it–love and betrayal and regret and past sins all swoop by with an all-caps intensity to them. (To help restore Simon's memory, Elizabeth has to guide him past a Dark Secret that he's been repressing for some time. And it isn't helping matters that he's fallen in love with her.) But mostly, Boyle seems like he's just happy amusing himself, letting the preposterous story not bother him one lick.

When you've got somebody who's as visually assured and commanding as Boyle behind the camera, it can be awfully tempting to forgive Trance's increasingly ludicrous plotting. (The questions just keep mounting. For instance, couldn't these underworld figures find a hypnotherapist they trust rather than going to a total stranger? And if Simon's memory has a gap of just a few hours, he couldn't have gone that far during that time–the painting has to be somewhere nearby, right?) But because it's such a whirling dervish of colors and energy and music–the propulsive electronic-rock score never lets up–Trance carries you away with its confident skillfulness.

For a while, anyway. Unfortunately, the film isn't very engaging, and it only becomes less so as it moves along. By Boyle's standards, Shallow Grave was one of his less stylish films, but it worked so ingeniously because of the interplay between its three central characters, which Boyle established well enough early on that the escalation of their later backstabbing actually had some weight to it. By comparison, Trance is simply shallow, twisting and turning its characters so that we're never sure who to believe or why we should really care. Which is a shame because the performances are actually pretty good–especially Dawson's. She's both sexy and smart as a hypnotherapist who has no problems calling the shots around this group of thugs and killers. (Another difficult plot point to swallow, but Dawson sells it.)

One shouldn't take Trance too seriously–it knows it's all style and no substance–and there's something to be said for just a pure movie-movie experience that zips along with this much panache. But if you're going to go to the trouble of casting some good actors and pulling out all the technical stops, it would seem like a small thing to work up a compelling, clever story that complements those other assets. Apparently not, though. For all of his talents, Boyle for once seems hypnotized by his own pizzazz. Let's hope he snaps out of it quickly.

Grade: C+.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

Director Derek Cianfrance's last film, Blue Valentine, was a crushing study of a couple (played by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams) falling apart. It was beautifully made and well acted—I loved it—but the rawness of the emotions and the ambition of the structure (cycling between the present and the past, as we see the couple both in love and out of love) turned other people off. Cianfrance was striving for a gritty, casual authenticity that thrust you into the middle of his characters' romantic disintegration. It was bold and uncompromising, and it definitely wasn't to everyone's taste.

With his new film, Cianfrance is only getting more ambitious, and even though it's not nearly as successful as Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines suggests that no matter what pejorative you want to throw at him—pretentious, precious, self-serious—he knows how to stir up strong feelings about his characters and his movies. You'll wrestle with The Place Beyond the Pines, which on the whole can be more rewarding than simply letting a generically "good" movie simply wash over you without leaving an impression.

This character drama opens with Luke (Gosling), a rudderless motorcycle rider who performs in one of those Globes of Death as part of a traveling carnival. In one small town, he comes across Romina (Eva Mendes), an old flame who reveals that he got her pregnant. Wanting to support her and his son, he decides he needs to quit the carnival and be close to her, which is a problem since Romina doesn't really want him in her life. (She's living with another man now.) Undeterred, Luke eventually resorts to robbing banks, realizing that a few well-timed hits at small banks will provide enough of a windfall without putting him into too much danger.

That plan ends up working surprisingly well, and Cianfrance films the heists with a handheld, one-take immediacy that doesn't overdo the "realness" but does make each job gripping and visceral. (After being inundated for years with CG effects, you may be surprised how frightening it is to see a real person fly down the street on a motorcycle at high speed while being pursued.) But Luke's luck takes a turn when he encounters Avery (Bradley Cooper), a young cop who chases him down after a bungled heist. It wouldn't be fair to reveal precisely what happens when they square off, but their showdown shifts The Place Beyond the Pines into a new narrative direction, suddenly making Avery the film's main character.

At 140 minutes, Cianfrance's movie (which he wrote with Darius Marder and Ben Coccio) starts off as a study of a tormented loner trying to do the right thing by getting involved in bad things. But eventually we realize that The Place Beyond the Pines has much more on its mind than that, telling a story that moves across 15 years and is divided into thirds, each section devoted to a different central character. (The final third isn't primarily about Avery or Luke, but, in keeping with the movie's theme of how one generation's issues are passed along to the next, they're very much involved in what happens.) If Blue Valentine stared at its characters as if through a microscope, The Place Beyond the Pines adopts a wider perspective, and the movie is appropriately grand, taking on the grim tone of a folktale or an Old Testament parable. By juxtaposing Luke's situation with what we learn of Avery's—a man who seems to have been given certain advantages but has resisted them for his own reasons—Cianfrance is asking questions about how we cope with our circumstances, and how our past shapes our future.

These are thoughtful questions elevated by some strong performances. Gosling is doing a variation of his charismatic, down-on-his-luck Blue Valentine character, with a dash of his Drive antihero thrown in for good measure. As for Cooper, this is yet another recent portrayal from him that shows that he has some depth to go along with his good looks. In many ways, his character is a trickier one than Gosling's—he surprises us by some of the decisions he makes—and Cooper is largely effective, although he doesn't quite have the gravity to make Avery's unexpected transformation entirely work.

The Place Beyond the Pines does eventually start to resemble one of those misery-porn dramas in which bad things—or "ironically" bad, in a poetic-justice sort of way—keep happening to the characters, not because it's organic to the situation but because the filmmaker wants to make a thematic point. In the film's third section, especially, you can feel Cianfrance push the chess pieces around, getting everything to line up just so in order for him to elicit the maximum emotional impact. His new film is a bigger, bolder movie than Blue Valentine, but that one seemed wiser about human nature than this one does. Still, it's hard to fault a guy who's swinging for the bleacher seats. Some of his ideas are trite; some of his ideas are striking; and some of them have stayed with me more than two weeks after seeing the film. Even if The Place Beyond the Pines stumbles, Cianfrance has assembled a pretty great cast—including Ben Mendelsohn and Chronicle's Dane DeHaan—to give those ideas life. You may not always buy the movie, but you buy the people in it.

Grade: B.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

One of the saddest things about the death of a favorite filmmaker is realizing that you'll probably never see any new movie from him ever again. When popular musicians die, they always leave material lying around that their estates can spruce up and put out for the fans. (Jimi Hendrix died in 1970, and he's still releasing albums.) But when Stanley Kubrick died in March 1999, he had essentially finished his final film, Eyes Wide Shut, and his many fans knew that that there would never be another Kubrick movie ever again. You could watch his existing movies over and over again, but there would never be another chance to get enraptured and surprised by a new Kubrick work. Fourteen years after his death, I still miss the guy–and I really miss that excitement for a new Kubrick movie.

Maybe that's in part why I love Room 237 so much. Directed by Rodney Ascher, the documentary (which opens on Friday in New York and will be available on-demand) compiles some of the most popular theories about the hidden meanings within Kubrick's 1980 horror movie The Shining, based on Stephen King's book. Ascher and his interview subjects haven't uncovered a new Kubrick film, but they've done the next best thing: They've given his fans a chance to revisit a classic with fresh eyes. It's a decent consolation prize.

The people who speak in Room 237 have been sounding off about their alternate readings of The Shining for more than two decades, so Kubrick obsessives won't necessarily be surprised by the theories collected in the documentary. But by bringing these individuals together in one film–and offering little indication of which theories he personally finds more or less persuasive–Ascher has created a rich tapestry of ideas that, collectively, recalibrate your thinking about a movie that you've probably seen several times over your life. I don't necessarily buy that Kubrick intended any of these alternate readings, but the passion these people bring to their theories is such that you're at least willing to meet them halfway. In the process, the brilliance of The Shining reemerges, shaking off your familiarity with the movie.

I don't want to discuss what theories are mentioned in the movie; you should discover them yourself. (They're easy to find online, if you're curious.) But I will say that they encompass everything from mass genocide to government coverups to spatial inconsistencies within the Overlook Hotel, where most of The Shining is set. It's not as if these theorists are all kooks and weirdos: Bill Blakemore, who's been writing about his interpretation of The Shining since the '80s, has been an ABC News reporter for over 35 years. But Ascher's stroke of genius was to not show any of his subjects throughout the documentary. Instead, we get a title card that introduces each of the six people; we merely hear their voices as they explain in a calm, measured fashion why, for instance, the cans of food in the Overlook Hotel are much, much more significant than the rest of us could have possible realized.

Ascher complements his subjects' theories with scenes they're describing–or, for variety, a scene from another Kubrick movie that also ties in. So rather than looking at these people, we're looking at The Shining: sometimes slowed-down, sometimes looped, sometimes in reverse. We're looking and looking and looking at the movie. And no matter how far-fetched the theories become, the sheer conviction of the speakers matched with the arresting images start to take on their own sort of truth. (Also great is Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson's foreboding score with its through-the-looking-glass spookiness and urgency.)

Room 237 is really just the latest example of remix culture, one artist building off the work of another to create something that readjusts how we feel about the original work. In popular culture, that happens most noticeably in viral mashups–think Trent Reznor and Carly Rae Jepsen smashed together or the Toy Story 3: Inception trailer–that are clever but also sort of disposable. (You think about them for a second, and then you click on another "Harlem Shake" video.) There have, however, been larger, more ambitious film projects along these same lines, such as Rebirth of a Nation (where DJ Spooky "remixed" Birth of a Nation) and The Clock (Christian Marclay's engrossing video that consists of existing movie and TV scenes that take place chronologically over a 24-hour period). Beyond simply being clever, these projects force you to look at older work in a new light. In The Clock, for instance, you're constantly aware how time is always a factor when telling a story, and how you yourself are spending time when you watch a film. By comparison, Room 237 is something of a happy middle ground between the silly, shallow pleasures of viral mashups and the more intellectual pursuits of The Clock, which you can only see at a museum and only at certain times. Room 237 is a documentary that cuts open and examines a horror favorite, but along the way it asks lots of thoughtful questions about how we interpret movies and how a director's intention and an audience's takeaway can be very, very different.

Room 237 is also just really fun. For all its obsessive talk and odd theories, it's really about a deep love for The Shining and and its filmmaker. And in the end, that's what I respond to the most. I've seen it twice now, and both time it's made me want to watch The Shining immediately. That's weird because, really, I'd been watching it for the 100 minutes or so that the documentary was on. But Room 237 draws you in and screws with your head so much that, when it's over, you feel like you need to see the original source again to make sure that what you thought the movie was about really is accurate. (I've also seen it as a dark satire on the traditional American family.) In its own way, the documentary is as frightening as the movie it's analyzing. You get lost in Room 237, and although it can be really funny–some of the theories are just plain nuts–you start to get disoriented, with only these disembodied voices leading you through the Overlook. There will never be another Stanley Kubrick film, but Room 237 so expertly rewires your feelings about The Shining that a 33-year-old movie suddenly feels brand new.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

GIF by Jim Cooke.

If you're going to make a movie where the White House is destroyed and the fate of the American government hangs in the balance, it at least ought to be fun to watch. That may sound sacrilegious—I'm pretty sure even the Tea Party doesn't want Washington overrun by Korean terrorists—but after sitting through the ultra-glum Olympus Has Fallen, you realize that Roland Emmerich has the right idea: What's the point of blowing up lots of stuff and stirring deep-seated national paranoia if you can't have a blast doing it? Alas, Roland Emmerich didn't direct this movie.

Olympus Has Fallen is the first of two "Die Hard at the White House" movies we're getting this year. (The other, White House Down, stars Channing Tatum and is directed by Emmerich.) This one was directed by Antoine Fuqua, who's known for more standard thrillers/dramas like Training Day and Shooter. And so we get a very sincere action movie concerning Mike Banning (Gerard Butler), who used to be part of U.S. President Asher's (Aaron Eckhart) security detail before a freak car accident claimed the president's wife. (Asher dismissed Banning not because he blamed him, but because he didn't want to be reminded of the tragedy.) Now working a desk job, Banning is bored—that is, until a group of Korean extremists overwhelm the White House and take Asher hostage. Banning doesn't just need to save the free world—he needs a shot at redemption. (Funny how often they go hand-in-hand at the movies.)

It wouldn't be entirely accurate to say that Olympus Has Fallen is humorless. As Banning emerges as the one man who can infiltrate the White House and rescue Asher, he cracks wise in a warmed-over John McClane style that's supposed to be funny. And the fact that Morgan Freeman's Speaker of the House is forced into the role of acting president suggests that somebody involved in this film had a sense of humor about Freeman's past cinematic presidential experience. (Or maybe it was just flat-out lazy casting. With this movie, you just never know.) But on the whole, Olympus Has Fallen seems to have been put together with the notion "Hey, what would it really be like if the White House was taken over by terrorists?" Which makes it that much funnier when everything that occurs is executed in the most ludicrous manner possible.

I realize one has to suspend one's disbelief with movies like this, but the ease with which the terrorists pull off their attack wounds credibility from the start. (Conservatives who say Obama is weak on defense will lose their minds when they see this movie: All it takes is one plane to infiltrate Washington airspace and cause holy hell!) Olympus Has Fallen doesn't get any more plausible from there. The president's closest aides, who are being held with him in an underground bunker, are tortured until they surrender their parts of the country's closely-guarded nuclear passcodes, when, really, it would be a lot faster if the bad guys just used their super-smart tech nerds to just break the codes themselves. (Each one's, like, a series of eight letters and numbers.) Also, all the decorated military bigwigs around Freeman always give the worst advice, and nobody ever listens to Banning, even though his suggestions are always right. (Sadly, this is the only aspect where Olympus Has Fallen gets Die Hard right: Boy, did that movie have some really stupid authority figures in it.)

If the movie had a certain cockeyed irreverence to it—if it was in on the joke—we could laugh along at the sheer silliness. But, no, this is another of those movies, like last year's Red Dawn remake, that wants to remind us that there is nothing funny about the growing overseas threat to America. And so we get lots of helpful bits of dialogue about America never negotiating with terrorists and America being a symbol for freedom in the world, and so on and so forth. It's been a while since a film has used the flag as such a helpful, unironic indicator of how the movie's characters are doing. (Flags being thrown to the ground with bullet holes through it: America is in trouble. Flags being lit up by sunshine streaming through the stripes: We're back on top!) At least Emmerich had the good sense to have Bill Pullman's American president in Independence Day deliver his platitudes with the proper over-the-top zeal. Olympus Has Fallen really, really believes its shtick.

Nobody in the movie really embarrasses themselves; even Melissa Leo and Robert Forster are completely fine in an anonymous-character-actor kind of way. (And since the movie is a hard R, with lots of bloody violence, it is a kick to see Eckhart dropping some F-bombs as the POTUS.) But there's not one moment in Olympus Has Fallen that doesn't plod along with a dull, dutiful air. You're left to get your pleasures where you can. For me, I found myself enjoying Butler, who's far more compelling as a third-rate action hero than as a third-rate rom-com presence opposite Katherine Heigl. At least here he feels comfortable, growling one-liners and killing people. If nothing else, maybe Stallone will decide to cast him in The Expendables 5 someday.

Grade: C-.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

Admission is such a mess, its good ideas knotted up with its unfocused and bad ones, that even if you end up liking the damn thing, you may find yourself apologizing for its faults. Tina Fey's first movie to be released since 30 Rock ended reminds us that she can do more than Liz Lemon, and it's great to see her take on an emotionally complicated character piece. (The ads make it look like a fish-out-of-water romcom, but they're lying.) The movie takes some risks—it's not another predictable date-night flick. But I keep wishing it was just a little better than it was.

The film stars Fey (who didn't write the screenplay or the Jean Hanff Korelitz book it's based on) as Portia, a respected and dedicated longtime Princeton admissions officer. Portia is in the running to become the new dean of admissions, and she's also in a comfortable-as-an-old-shoe relationship with a Princeton professor (Michael Sheen). Her life is so perfectly put together that you know it won't be long before she experiences a complete meltdown and some late-night soul searching.

That crisis comes in the form of John (Paul Rudd), a former classmate she doesn't remember who runs a progressive, rural East Coast high school that encourages independent thinking and an unconventional curriculum, including lessons on how to milk cows. Portia visits John's school, where he introduces her to Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), a senior with terrible grades but an incredible intellect and a passion for reading. John hopes that if Portia meets Jeremiah, she'll consider accepting the rudderless kid into Princeton. Portia isn't sure about Jeremiah's academic potential, but then John springs a surprise on her: Jeremiah is her long-lost son that she gave up for adoption after getting pregnant in college, hoping no one would ever find out.

In its broad strokes, Admission is a romantic comedy-drama that chronicles how uptight Portia and free-spirit John fall for each other, but the movie is more unpredictable and nuanced in its trajectory. We've come to expect that from director Paul Weitz, who started out working with his brother Chris on American Pie and About a Boy before going on to make movies on his own like In Good Company and Being Flynn. (Regrettably, he's also the guy responsible for Little Fockers.) Judging from his films, Weitz is somebody who likes operating in the terrain located between broad laughs and lump-in-the-throat melodrama, trying to find the small character moments that speak volumes about the regrets and disappointments most people carry around with them on a daily basis.

Admission is Weitz at his most James L. Brooks-esque, giving us a bunch of sweet, flawed characters floundering around with their problems. More specifically, Admission is like Brooks' most recent movie, How Do You Know, which also starred Rudd. If you liked that film, tolerating its tonal inconsistencies and so-so plotting to appreciate its deep affection for its characters and the warmth of its performances, then you might be open to the bighearted Admission. (Considering what a bomb How Do You Know was, Admission's backers will probably be thrilled by the comparison.) This is a film with awkward comic sequences and too many meandering digressions, and yet the sheer sincerity of what it's trying to say and Weitz's desire to populate his story with so many three-dimensional characters ultimately win out.

A lot of the credit for holding the whole thing together goes to Fey, who with Liz Lemon created such a fun, self-mocking modern variation on The Woman Who Wants It All. In her film work, she's played aspects of Liz—the smart professional in Baby Mama, the acerbic mom of Date Night—but Portia is more of a performance than a riff, and Fey does a pretty decent job of making us almost forget about the iconic TV character she's been playing for the last seven years. Portia's arc is pretty familiar—she realizes her neat little life is a shambles—but Fey makes each moment better than it probably would be otherwise. Afraid to reveal herself to Jeremiah but also scared to admit her past to her Princeton colleagues, Portia ought to be a conniving, unlikeable woman, but Fey just won't let us hate her. Even at the beginning, Portia is adorable enough that we're always on her side. It's the same technique she brought to Liz: That character was so self-aware of her many, many failings that her pettiness almost seemed charming.

Because Admission isn't a conventional romance—the love story (and John as a character) really is secondary—it has room to explore a lot of other areas. (For one thing, the film's title has a double meaning, underlying the story's somewhat-obvious point that, really, so much of life is about the anxiety of being accepted, whether it's by a college admissions board, your family, a worthy romantic partner, or your peers.) Weitz charts Portia's belated coming-of-age in several ways, including her strained interactions with her hippy-dippy single mother Lily Tomlin and her slow warming to the idea that Jeremiah's emergence could be her second chance at the life she gave up. This movie wanders around and it's only sporadically funny, but as Admission rolled along, I found myself not minding, simply enjoying, these characters and sympathizing with their dilemmas. After all, it's not just Portia who's struggling: John's seemingly selfless do-gooding spirit has its downsides, while Jeremiah is a nice, sweet kid whose whole life is stretching out in front of him—if only he doesn't throw it away because of a lack of drive. (The strong performances help: Rudd is at his most charming and vulnerable, while Wolff is just right as the articulate, uncertain young Jeremiah.)

Granted, this is a film that's easy to pick apart on a story level. (For instance, there are plenty of good colleges in the U.S., so why is it so important to John that Jeremiah get into Princeton?) But it's also impossible to predict where it's going to go from moment to moment, which has its rewards. Like Portia at long last, Admission lets its heart be its guide. Sure, that's corny—but this movie turns that into a strength.

Grade: B-.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

It's common for film sites to do some kind of "career advice" column where they analyze a Hollywood star's trajectory and try to figure out what kinds of roles the actor should or shouldn't be doing. Will and I used to do this for The Projector, so I understand the impulse: You see a career that maybe isn't going as well as it should, and you want to offer some tips. It comes from a good place, but, really, it's a completely misguided endeavor. When we write these columns, we're assuming so many things: that we know better than the star; that the things we think they should be doing is what they actually want to be doing; that Hollywood is a place where anybody can be in any movie they want. (We just assume that actors can pick through roles with the ease that you and I can walk through a grocery store, deciding what kind of bread we want to get.) It's easy for a film writer to say, "Hey, Gwyneth Paltrow ought to loosen up and do some comedies—she should do a Bridesmaids." It's a lot harder in the actual film industry where there are schedule conflicts, ego clashes, competing actors, and a thousand other complicated realities.

I thought about this all over again while watching Colin Farrell in Dead Man Down. It's an unsuccessfully gritty revenge-drama-cum-love-story that's nonetheless offbeat enough that you keep watching it in the hopes that it'll get better. It never really does, but it's always watchable, and a lot of that has to do with Farrell. This is a guy who's the perfect subject for a career-advice column. He's a good actor who never quite became the sort of breakout superstar that everyone expected 10 years ago. But as a viewer, I don't think I would have preferred a more traditional career for him. You would never tell any aspiring actor to follow Farrell's path, but it sure hasn't been boring.

In Dead Man Down, Farrell plays Victor, a Hungarian expat who works for a smooth-talking gangster named Alphonse (Terrence Howard). Someone is sending Alphonse cryptic messages that include portions of a ripped-up photograph and dire warnings about vengeance. What he doesn't know is that they're coming from Victor, whose wife and son were accidentally killed by the gangster's men two years ago. Assuming a new identity and infiltrating Alphonse's group, Victor is waiting for the perfect time to kill everyone involved in his family's murder.

This is nicely grimy pulp terrain, and it's directed by Niels Arden Oplev, the Dansh filmmaker who made the original Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Like that movie, Dead Man Down is utterly consumed with darkness and revenge. Victor doesn't just mourn his family; he obsessively watches a home movie of them projected on his wall in the way that only grieving movie characters do. (He also, naturally, has a room in his apartment where he has meticulously constructed the cliched "photo chart of the complete hierarchy of the bad guy's organization," complete with thumbtacks, string and Post-it notes.)

Victor's not the only grieving person, though. In the apartment directly across the street from him—they can see into each other's living room—there's a beautiful woman named Beatrice (Noomi Rapace from the Swedish Dragon Tattoo), whose face was scarred in a car accident. (She's kept the broken watch from the accident, running her fingers across its cracked face and exuding dramatic import.) Beatrice and Victor share meaningful glances from their separate apartments, but soon she enters his life—and not for the reason he expects. She has filmed him killing a man during his time in Alphonse's gang, and wants to blackmail him into killing the driver who left her disfigured.

If all of this sounds convoluted and cumbersome, your instincts are correct. As befitting its title, Dead Man Down is overrun with seriousness but also a bit generic: It's like every other lowlife crime film about the pointlessness of revenge, only with some extra thematic baggage about scarred souls and such.

And yet Farrell almost makes it worth seeing. In the past few years, Farrell has given some of his best performances in movies like Cassandra's Dream, In Bruges, Crazy Heart, The Way Back, and Seven Psychopaths, drawing on an ability to seem instantly empathetic and believable, whether he's in a comedy or a drama. (And even if the movie turned out not to be that good, like Total Recall or Horrible Bosses, he at least gave his all to the project.) That same sort of commitment goes a long way to helping Dead Man Down: His Victor may be a collection of "haunted antihero" tics, but Farrell's natural authenticity makes you look at the character before the conventionality. As in many of his recent roles, Farrell in Dead Man Down broods sublimely. Some of the cockiness of his early career has slipped away, and he's reached an age where he can convincingly play beaten-down men whose lives haven't worked out. It's not the only thing he could or should be doing, but he does it well.

Unfortunately for Farrell and his handlers, Dead Man Down isn't going to do that well commercially or critically. Its basic premise is too farfetched, and the movie doesn't have much going for it beyond a dark atmosphere and genuinely bizarre digressions. (There's a whole big thing about Tupperware.) And the supporting cast is a bunch of scene-chewers: Isabelle Huppert plays Beatrice's kooky, near-deaf mom; F. Murray Abraham digs into a Hungarian accent as Victor's one true friend; and Dominic Cooper does his usual bug-eyed intensity as another Alphonse minion. Dead Man Down seems to be at war with itself, trying to liven up smotheringly serious material with goofy asides and overacting.

Farrell doesn't embarrass himself. Maybe he knows that there isn't anything that fresh in here, but he gives himself completely to Victor's walking-wounded demeanor. I didn't like Dead Man Down, but I walked out appreciating Farrell's willingness to treat the role with repect. There are a hundred different pieces of career advice you could give the guy, but watching this movie I was reminded that, sometimes, actors make their choices based on reasons the rest of us will never understand. It's not our job: We should instead be focused on what they bring to the roles they do take, even when the movies aren't worthy of them.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

For Seth MacFarlane's critics, Sunday night was supposed to be the moment we finally got to see the guy get his comeuppance. A "billion" viewers around the world, one of the most prestigious gigs in all of entertainment: As Oscar host, this was his chance to justify his swiftly, perhaps inexplicably, rising star. Or, if we were lucky, he'd embarrass himself, his petty, juvenile humor crashing and burning in front of the world, leaving nothing but some hair and two dimples and the wreckage of bad Jews-in-Hollywood jokes smoldering on the stage of the Dolby Theatre. We'd all have a good laugh about it later: Remember when Seth MacFarlane totally ate it at the Oscars? God, that was great.

When Will and I discussed back in October all the reasons we weren't happy with his selection as host, I ended by saying, partly as a joke but partly not, "Just think how funny this will all seem in five months when it turns out MacFarlane was the best Oscar host in 30 years." And when last night's show started, there was a part of me that wondered if maybe I was more right than I had realized. Maybe not the best host in 30 years, but definitely a step up from Billy Crystal or the truly dreadful co-hosting gig from James Franco and Anne Hathaway from a couple years ago. He wasn't good, sure, but at least he did the job in a way that breathed some life into a production that's been in repertory for years.

I've long hated Family Guy, but it does have a certain irritating, button-pushing vigor to it that occasionally overcomes the show's nihilism. Last night's Oscars were a lot like an episode of Family Guy. Around the time that Captain Kirk showed up to warn MacFarlane about how badly the show would be received, the host seemed to be in his element. The bit had all his usual tics: It was a riff on pop culture, wrapped in a critic-proofing self-awareness that too often MacFarlane mistakes for a license to be stupid. And yet it worked. He did an irony half-gainer with a meta twist and still stuck the landing. I laughed at the "We Saw Your Boobs" song, though your mileage will vary. It deflated the night's most high-minded pretensions and reminded us in a giddy, old-show-biz way that movies are still, at bottom, about stroking the lower impulses of the audience. This is tacky and so is Hollywood, MacFarlane seemed to be saying. Don't forget it.

But, as per norm, MacFarlane couldn't help himself. In general, he seems wholly incapable of doing anything at less than 100 percent smarminess. He started off with self-deprecation, but as the night wore on, the jokes curdled into meanness. It's not impossible to make a dig at Quentin Tarantino's fervent wish to seem black. And any host would have made a crack about Emmanuelle Riva's age and Quvenzhané Wallis's youth. But when MacFarlane did it, it was with an air of remote snideness, the peanut gallery finally getting a clean shot, rather than a playful member of the tribe mocking the chieftains. You just sat there going, "Who is this TV guy making jokes about people who have actually made good movies?" If the Oscar producers wanted us to rally around the power of film by getting everyone to turn on the host, then in that way, they succeeded. (Though I do have to commend him for his admittedly creaky Mel Gibson joke, where he nicely responded to the audience's groans by saying, "Oh, so you're on his side?" It might have been his best line—and it punctured the sanctimony in the room.)

The result, in ways both good and bad, was an Oscars that felt energetic and disjointed and sorta loose and weirdly under-rehearsed. The downsides were immediately apparent. Usually, the Academy Awards throw together two very different presenters and then watch as they exude zero charisma on stage. This year was unique in that they brought together casts of popular movies—Chicago and The Avengers—and then watched the actors behave as if they had never been in the same room together. Flubbed presentations abounded. (Seriously, it was as if Paul Rudd and Melissa McCarthy had never done comedy before.) This might have been one of the most unpolished Oscars in recent years.

But it wasn't boring—it wasn't Crystal mugging his way through everything, so eager to be loved by everyone in the room, and slowly putting you to sleep in the process. The shows it most reminded me of were two that I think remain underrated: Chris Rock's and David Letterman's. Like theirs, MacFarlane's Oscars were antagonistic. You got the sense that the hosts didn't really care about the pageantry of the evening, nor did they much like the people in front of them. And in all three cases, that's exactly why the host was chosen. But Rock and Letterman are seasoned live performers who know how to work a room. MacFarlane isn't anything like that, and you could see him struggle. (And maybe that had its charms, too. It felt as if the audience were generally sympathetic to him, as opposed to, say, previous host Ellen DeGeneres, who seemed to shrink as the night went on, the ineffectiveness of her tame bits evaporating in the dead air.)

Of course, MacFarlane was helped by the fact that last night was one of the most unpredictable recent Oscars in terms of the winners. Starting with the first award of the evening, which Christoph Waltz won for Best Supporting Actor, surprises were a theme. Some of them were minor—Lincoln's production design win—but others kept the night on edge. Ang Lee beat out Steven Spielberg for Best Director. There was a tie for Best Sound Editing, only the sixth tie in Oscar history and the first in almost 20 years.

Some surprises were built into the show. Michelle Obama appeared live from the White House to announce Best Picture. And the producers, Neil Meron and Craig Zadan (executive producers on Chicago and the TV show Smash) tried to tap into the spontaneous energy you expect from the Grammys or the Tonys with lots of musical numbers. Too bad, at least on TV, the sound mix was often iffy. (Adele managed to kill in her "Skyfall" performance, and Shirley Bassey was great doing "Goldfinger.")

And there was also a cheeky irreverence throughout, most noticeable in the decision to use the Jaws theme as the play-'em-off-the-stage music. No doubt the producers hoped that it would add a bit of levity to those always-uncomfortable moments when winners have gotten down to thanking their wealth managers. Instead, it had the opposite effect: It made you feel bad for them—never more so than when the Visual Effects winners from Life of Pi spoke up for Rhythm & Hues, a long-running effects company facing bankruptcy, and were cut off during one of the few heartfelt speeches of the night. At that point I longed for Jon Stewart, who rescued a similar moment in 2008 when Best Song winner Markéta Irglová was cut off initially but then brought back on to finish her thanks. No such luck this time around, alas. Forget "We Saw Your Boobs"—that was the tackiest moment of the night.

In the Oscars' aftermath, people rushed to declare MacFarlane a terrible host. But was he really so bad? At the very least, these Academy Awards tried something different—a little lefthanded humor, for once, with weird non-sequitur jokes (the Sound of Music gag, for instance) and an overall roast-like tone (that awful closing song with Kristin Chenoweth). It didn't all work—a lot of it didn't work—but at least the show wasn't lazy or safe. People who love Ricky Gervais on the Golden Globes have wondered how he might do on the Oscars. He and MacFarlane get their laughs from opposite directions, but last night gave us some idea of what a Gervais-hosted Academy Awards might look like. Learn from MacFarlane's example, Academy producers. There were some good ideas there: more energy, more music, more off-kilter humor. Now, you just need to find a better host to implement them.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

Snitch isn't great, but if you're like me and have enjoyed Dwayne Johnson more than his movies, his latest helps justify our faith in the guy. This is a B-movie thriller built around a real incident that's meant to show us the lunacy of our government's drug policy—and yet the movie's not preachy or sanctimonious. Unlike a lot of gritty action movies, it's got a brain and some real feelings to boot. And even as Snitch gets progressively more ludicrous, Johnson is so empathetic that you basically accept the nonsense around him because he makes you want to root for this movie to be good. After suffering through so many duds with Johnson, it's nice to see him in something respectable.

The movie stars Johnson as John Matthews, a regular guy who owns his own construction company. He's doing pretty well for himself and his new wife and daughter, but he gets a call from his ex-wife that their son Jason (Rafi Gavron) has been arrested by the Feds for accepting a delivery from one of his buddies that contained ecstasy. Because of the U.S.'s mandatory-minimum laws, Jason will automatically receive a 10-year jail sentence, even though the kid isn't involved with drugs or dealing. Hoping to get leniency for his son, John visits a U.S. Attorney (Susan Sarandon), who will grant Jason a lighter sentence if John can help the government bust other drug dealers.

If you've seen the fine war on drugs documentary The House I Live In from last year, Snitch's premise won't seem implausible. The movie underlines the madness of a policy that levies huge penalties against anyone involved in drugs (even if they're only tangentially connected) in the hopes that they'll be desperate enough to assist the feds in rounding up other dealers. Of course, director and co-writer Ric Roman Waugh, a former stuntman, takes that premise and goes his own way with it, but nonetheless there remains in the film a compassionate and angry sense of how deeply unfair American society is—whether we're talking its drug policy or class system.

John's plan is to go undercover, tricking an ex-druggie employee, Daniel (The Walking Dead's Jon Bernthal), into introducing him to some dealers. It will be no surprise that the plan doesn't go smoothly at all, bringing John face-to-face with some particularly nasty hombres, in the form of Michael K. Williams and Benjamin Bratt. But although Snitch's story is both predictable and farfetched in terms of the escalating nightmare it puts John through, Waugh balances it with a genuine sense of concern about his characters. John isn't just some guy with big biceps who wants to save his son: He's a businessman who still feels guilt about his newfound success that's given his current wife and daughter a life of luxury that his working-class ex and son aren't enjoying. (Part of John's agony over his son's incarceration is that he knows he wasn't a good dad to the kid.)

Likewise, Daniel is more than some former felon: He's a guy who legitimately wants to turn his life around to support his own family, although with Daniel's criminal past, it's just about impossible for him to find a decent job. Without ever piling on the pathos, Bernthal makes you worry for Daniel, who doesn't realize that John is happily sacrificing his employee's future—a third strike would be life in prison—just so he can get his own son out early. It's a really strong performance in a movie that features a bunch of names—Susan Sarandon, Barry Pepper, Benjamin Bratt—who could have easily just phoned it in for their paychecks. Impressively, nobody does. The dialogue tends toward tough-guy speak, but there's a stripped-down simplicity to the whole film that elevates everything a notch or two above what it normally is for a movie like this.

Eventually, Snitch becomes the action flick you assumed it would be, full of car chases and shootouts. But even then, Waugh stays mindful of the human element, reminding us of all the real lives ruined either by drugs or by a U.S. policy that overreacts to the problem. Really, it all comes back to Johnson, who's quietly persuasive and compelling from the first moment. He's always going to look like a wrestler, and you'll never throw around Italian phrases to describe his performances. But bravura isn't what's required—he simply moves the film forward from scene to scene, putting a sympathetic face on a message movie that's smart enough to know it's not really a message movie. Snitch takes on the demeanor of its star: It's earnest, genuine, likeable, a bit of an underdog. This is the sort of threadbare thriller that doesn't have the wherewithal to be amazing but, happily, that didn't stop everybody involved from actually going to the trouble to try to make it good.

Grade: B-.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

Come Sunday night, you may embark on that annual ritual: Filling out the bottom of your Oscar pool entry, pretending you know the difference between Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing. Will and I will both offer our picks for the eight major categories tomorrow, but today I'm going to offer my predictions on the smaller prizes. These are the races that are less understood and lower-profile. But they tend to make or break your pool sheet. I can't pretend I know better than anyone else when it comes to these categories, so, yeah, I'm guessing. But I guess with gusto!

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

Your nominees: Brave, Frankenweenie, ParaNorman, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, Wreck-It Ralph

The pick: Wreck-It Ralph. Most years, the Pixar film's easy money. But this isn't most years. Inertia might earn a win for Brave, but the general lack of excitement about that film opens the door for another possibility: Wreck-It Ralph's a little hip for the academy, but it has a heartwarming story and a positive message about being true to yourself that's better than the same one in Brave. Plus, it won the Producers Guild award and the Annie for the year's best animated film.

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

Your nominees: Amour, Kon-Tiki, No, A Royal Affair, War Witch

The pick: Amour. In a normal Oscar year, I'd go with the smart, crowd-pleasing No, which is based on the inspirational true story of how Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was thrown out of office as the result of a referendum Yes/No vote in which both sides got to run daily ads backing their cause. (It's like Argo meets Mad Men.) But this is the one category that Best Picture-nominee Amour seems assured of winning, so the Academy will probably make sure that happens.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Your nominees: 5 Broken Cameras, The Gatekeepers, How to Survive a Plague, The Invisible War, Searching for Sugar Man

The pick: Searching for Sugar Man. I'm really tempted to pick How to Survive a Plague, which features two crucial components for Oscar voters in this category: an important subject (the history of ACT UP) and an inspirational tone. But my gut tells me that a majority of voters will love Sugar Man, which helped bring forgotten singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez out of the shadows. A victory for this movie feels akin to the one for Man on Wire a few years ago and its equally intriguing subject, Philippe Petit.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Your nominees: Anna Karenina, Django Unchained, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Skyfall

The pick: Life of Pi. Is Roger Deakins ever going to win? The longtime cinematographer for the Coen brothers has been nominated 10 times. This time it's for Skyfall. There could be a groundswell of voters who feel that the man should have won by now and decide to award his work on the James Bond film. (It could also be a way of celebrating the movie, which received five Oscar nominations, although the Academy may do that by awarding "Skyfall" for Best Original Song.) Still, I'm going with Claudio Miranda for Life of Pi. In the past few years, the Oscar has gone to movies at the forefront of digital/3D filmmaking: Avatar and Hugo. Life of Pi fits that bill this year.

BEST FILM EDITING

Your nominees: Argo, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, Zero Dark Thirty

The pick: Argo. William Goldenberg's biggest competition may be himself. He's the editor of Argo, and he's one of two editors on Zero Dark Thirty, with Dylan Tichenor. In the last 10 years, this category has matched up with the Best Picture winner six times, and when it hasn't it's tended to go to a film that's really dazzlingly propulsive or fast-paced, like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or The Social Network or The Bourne Ultimatum. Zero Dark Thirty could sneak in for that reason, especially because of its final act, but the buildup of tension in Argo will probably be more than enough to win the prize. (Also, I think Argo is gonna win Best Picture.)

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

Your nominees: Anna Karenina, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Les Misérables, Life of Pi, Lincoln

The pick: Anna Karenina. This prize, which used to be known as Best Art Direction, might as well be called Movie With the Most Stuff in It. Hugo, Alice in Wonderland, Avatar, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Sweeney Todd... these past winners sure had a lot of stuff in them. With that in mind, Anna Karenina and Les Misérables are the most lavish and eye-popping in their overall design. This is a tough call, but I'm going with Anna Karenina, simply because that movie's complicated stage-bound look was its big selling point. My worry, though: Did enough voters see it?

BEST MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING

Your nominees: Hitchcock, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Les Misérables

The pick: Les Misérables. Another category whose name has been changed—it used to be just Best Makeup. I don't think Hitchcock was big enough to be remembered, so it's down to hobbits and poor wretches. The Lord of the Rings won this category twice, but those films were a little more beloved in the Academy than The Hobbit was. With Les Misérables getting a lot more Oscar nominations than The Hobbit, I have a feeling that could help here.

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Your nominees: The Avengers, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Life of Pi, Prometheus, Snow White and the Huntsman

The pick: Life of Pi. The Lord of the Rings went 3-for-3 in this category. But considering how despised The Hobbit's 48 FPS was—and how praised Life of Pi's visuals were—I don't see it happening again. (And for those wondering why The Avengers won't win, the Academy tends not to give the prize to movies they view as simply popcorn flicks.)

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

Your nominees: Anna Karenina, Les Misérables, Lincoln, Mirror Mirror, Snow White and the Huntsman

The pick: Anna Karenina. Eiko Ishioka, who designed the costumes for Mirror Mirror, died about a year ago, a fact that may inspire some Academy members to vote for her to honor her legacy. (She won an Oscar for Bram Stoker's Dracula.) But I see this as a contest between Anna Karenina and Les Misérables. Period costumes tend to be big winners in this category, and the more gowns the better. I'm going with Anna Karenina by a hair.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

Your nominees: Anna Karenina, Argo, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Skyfall

The pick: Life of Pi. This shapes up to be a battle between the Middle Eastern accents of Argo and the Indian themes of Life of Pi. I'm giving the slight nod to Life of Pi only because its score is slightly more integral to the film than Argo's is. One thing in Argo's favor, though: Composer Alexandre Desplat has been nominated five times now and never won. (This is the first nomination for Life of Pi's Mychael Danna.)

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

Your nominees: "Before My Time" from Chasing Ice, "Suddenly" from Les Misérables, "Pi's Lullaby" from Life of Pi, "Skyfall" from Skyfall, "Everybody Needs a Best Friend" from Ted

The pick: "Skyfall" from Skyfall. It's the one song of the five nominees that most Academy members probably know without having to think about it.

BEST SOUND EDITING

Your nominees: Argo, Django Unchained, Life of Pi, Skyfall, Zero Dark Thirty

The pick: Skyfall. I can make a decent case for each of these winning except for Django Unchained. So why go with Skyfall? Because it's the big-budget event movie that the Academy seemed to actually like. (I do wonder if Life of Pi's phenomenal disaster sequence will help give it the win here, though.)

BEST SOUND MIXING

Your nominees: Argo, Les Misérables, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Skyfall

The pick: Les Misérables. Whether you loved or hated Les Misérables, all anybody heard about the movie was that everyone sang their vocals live. The degree-of-difficulty factor will probably be enough to convince voters that the movie deserves this particular Oscar.

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT

Your nominees: Inocente, Kings Point, Mondays at Racine, Open Heart, Redemption

The pick: Open Heart. In the past, I've reviewed all the short films—documentary, animated, live-action—which made it a little easier to guess what wasn't going to win. This year, I'm flying a bit blind, so I'm going based almost entirely on plot descriptions and trailers. Critical rigor! In this category, my hunch is Open Heart, about a Sudanese center that will perform surgery on eight impoverished Rwandan children suffering from rheumatic heart disease. Seems like an Oscar winner.

BEST ANIMATED SHORT

Your nominees: Adam and Dog, Fresh Guacamole, Head Over Heels, Maggie Simpson in The Longest Daycare, Paperman

The pick: Paperman. It's got a sweet story, lovely music, and a happy ending.

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT

Your nominees: Asad, Buzkashi Boys, Curfew, Death of a Shadow, Henry

The pick: Curfew. Death of a Shadow looks amazing, but the consensus seems to be that Curfew is your winner. Look at this trailer and you can understand why: It has the sort of tart, ultimately uplifting tone that Oscar voters respond to.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

Everybody is happy for Melissa McCarthy. After years on TV shows (Gilmore Girls, Mike & Molly) and small parts in movies (she's great in John August's The Nines), she broke through with Bridesmaids, getting an Oscar nomination in the process. She's a really funny lady who's ridiculously effervescent, and it's high time her profile got raised. The only problem with McCarthy's breakthrough is that in Bridesmaids she was the shrill, obnoxious character—amusing but also really broad. In her first big role since that film, she's essentially playing another version of that character, to much less winning effect. Identity Thief is so bad that I hope it doesn't prematurely squash people's enthusiasm for her.

In the movie, Jason Bateman plays the usual Jason Bateman character, Sandy Patterson, a responsible, buttoned-down Denver businessman who doesn't get much respect from his boss (Jon Favreau) but is still hoping for a promotion to support his growing family. But when Sandy leaves the company for a better gig, his cushy new V.P. title is threatened because local police think he's another Sandy Patterson (McCarthy), a loud, brash woman (real name Diana) living in Florida who has racked up tons of credit-card debt and stolen his identity. Given a week to clear his name—this seems nonstandard—Sandy travels to Florida to confront this woman and convince her to go back to Colorado with him to explain the whole situation.

Identity Thief is the latest odd-couple-go-on-the-road-together comedy, and it will test your patience for two very likable performers made constantly unlikable by this film. Bateman does put-upon as well as anyone, so obviously he's put in endless situations where McCarthy is utterly jerky and rude. That's meant to set off comic sparks—watch out for those sparks!—but director Seth Gordon (King of Kong, Horrible Bosses) confuses screaming with comedy, which is even more annoying because of how obvious this movie's strategy is. You see, because Sandy is clearly such a good guy and Diana is clearly such a tacky, white-trash shopaholic, we're eventually going to learn that, really, Diana isn't such a bad person: She's just misunderstood. Which would be fine if she'd been a funny horrible person beforehand.

The movie isn't even clever enough to make its central conceit interesting. How is Diana so good at being an identity thief? Apparently, she calls people, pretends to be their credit card companies, and gets their social security numbers. That's about it. (For people who found the setup of Compliance ludicrous, good luck with this movie.) Identity Thief goes out of its way to suggest that she's a sociopath, but we don't really see it: She's mostly just Megan from Bridesmaids with worse makeup. And then when the film decides to try showing some heart and make Diana a little more human—which, I swear to god, involves a high-end fashion makeover—it doesn't make sense that Sandy would begin to sympathize with her because, again, she's supposedly a sociopath. The movie wants us to see her as a total nutjob until it decides, no wait, she's really very nice.

Identity Thief doesn't make much sense on any level. Sandy's new boss (who knows him really well) won't hire him back unless he meets Diana in person? We have to have not one but two different groups of gun-toting bad guys chasing after Diana? The movie even tries to work in some lame 99-percenter populism once Sandy begins to see the wisdom in screwing over certain kinds of people and stealing their identities. Everything feels thrown together with a desperate hope that, maybe just maybe, the more frantic and busy everything seems, the funnier it'll be.

While watching Identity Thief, I was thinking about just how hard it is to make a road movie in a time when most people fly everywhere. (Like with modern-day horror movies, which need to keep establishing that their characters are out of cellphone range, road movies often have to invent reasons why the characters must drive.) And with its dumb mixture of action, comedy and occasional sentimentality, Identity Thief made me think back to Due Date, another film with almost exactly the same setup. I suddenly realized that McCarthy is basically playing the Zach Galifianakis role: the overbearing dolt we're meant to find adorable deep down. Galifianakis was another comic who deserved his eventual mainstream breakthrough. But then he just kept playing variations of off-putting weirdos until it became his shtick. I don't want that to happen to McCarthy. (The trailer for her next film, The Heat, doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.) There are about 10 minutes in this movie where you get to see McCarthy's natural charisma and sweetness shine, and paired with Bateman's it's pretty enjoyable. But it disappears too quickly. What's the point of discovering new stars if Hollywood is going to stick them in the same old crap?

Grade: C-.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

Spending a week at the Sundance Film Festival, you can see a little bit of everything: horror movies, activist documentaries, experimental low-budget indies, even mainstream comedies starring the leads from Parks & Recreation. It's impossible to catch everything—scheduling issues kept me from buzzy titles like The Spectacular Now, Fruitvale, Escape From Tomorrow, and After Tiller—but of the 25 films I did see, here are five that I think we'll be talking about this year at the movies. And since festivals always give out a flurry of prizes, I'll give each of my picks its own special award.

Most Interesting Use of Your Famous Friends in a Movie: Don Jon's Addiction

Joseph Gordon-Levitt made his feature directorial debut with Don Jon's Addiction, a romantic comedy he also wrote and stars in. It's about a club-hopping, one-night-stand-loving porn addict who decides to be a better man after he falls for Scarlett Johansson's Newww Joy-seeee girl. (Remember Johansson's "Marble Column" sketch from Saturday Night Live? That's basically her character in this movie.) Meant to be a frank, raunchy comedy about men's obsession with unreal representations of sex and women, Don Jon's Addiction isn't so good, but it does feature the sort of stellar cast that you can only pull together if you're a well-connected guy like Gordon-Levitt. Beyond Johansson, there's also Julianne Moore as a woman who teaches this porn addict a thing or two—and several high-profile cameos that are funnier if you don't see them coming.

Biggest Sleeper: C.O.G.

This U.S. Dramatic Competition entry went home empty-handed, but writer-director Kyle Patrick Alvarez's comedy-drama has lingered in my memory, in part because I fell so deeply love these characters. An adaptation of the David Sedaris essay included in Naked, C.O.G. concerns a gay young preppy named David (Jonathan Groff) who travels from the East Coast to Oregon so he can do "real work": picking apples at an orchard. Of course, he soon learns that he's not really cut out for manual labor, and the film follows him as he moves from job to job meeting a collection of interesting "regular" people, most notably a Gulf War vet (Denis O'Hare) who won't stop talking about how Jesus changed his life. Kind to all its characters, no matter how flawed, C.O.G. is the sort of bright little gem that festivals like Sundance are designed to champion, creating a portrait of small-town life so beautiful and nuanced that it deserves comparison to Junebug, which also launched at the festival.

Best Terrence Malick Impression: Ain't Them Bodies Saints

Malick's latest, the underrated To the Wonder, will be coming to theaters in April, but it's not the only Malick-like film we'll be seeing in 2013. Ain't Them Bodies Saints is a loving (and, admittedly, a bit slavish) homage to the filmmaker's poetic style. Set in Texas in what appears to be the 1970s, the movie stars Casey Affleck as a small-time crook who gets sent away for life, leaving behind his young bride (Rooney Mara) and child. But once Affleck escapes from prison, the local sheriff (Ben Foster) gets involved, although he's just as interested in the woman as he is in finding his man. Fans of Malick's Badlands and Days of Heaven will feel as if they've stepped into a stunning re-creation, but writer-director David Lowery shows real skill at conjuring up a dreamlike world in which the problems of three little people amount to a lot more than a hill of beans, becoming almost mythic tragic figures in the process.

Best Example of Living Up to the Hype: Upstream Color

When you go almost 10 years between films—and your last one is the mind-bending Primer—it's easy for expectations to build up. Thankfully, writer-director Shane Carruth's sophomore effort, Upstream Color, survived all the buzz precisely because it's not Primer. Rather than being another time-traveling riddle, this sci-fi/thriller/sorta-horror movie/romantic drama is an exciting attempt to say something incredibly personal about the need for connection through an elaborate, complicated structure that eventually starts to make sense once we reach the end. It's almost better not to explain what the film's about, but I will say that it concerns a young woman (Amy Seimetz) who becomes a guinea pig for a bizarre con, only later falling in love with a man (Carruth) who helps her unravel exactly what had happened. The movie is heavily symbolic—in a post-screening Q&A, Carruth explained that different colors represent different themes in the story—but I was more struck by how deeply emotional Upstream Color was. Of all the expectations I had walking in to the movie, that was one I didn't imagine.

Best Film: Before Midnight

After directing his first two films, Slacker and Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater recruited rising stars Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke for a movie about strangers who meet on a train in Europe and spontaneously decide to spend a day in Vienna together. Nobody would have imagined that that film, 1995's Before Sunrise, would end up becoming part of Linklater's greatest achievement. Eighteen years later, the third movie in the series, Before Midnight, brings us to the present to show what has happened to Celine (Delpy) and Jesse (Hawke) since 2004's Before Sunset. This new film is perhaps the least conventionally romantic of the three—there are more arguments and hard conversations than in the previous two films—but in showing how a relationship morphs from the sticky-sweet, puppy-love phase to something deeper, richer, and far more interesting, Before Midnight is incredibly insightful and moving. I can't wait to see where these two characters are in 2022.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

When Mark Wahlberg is at his best, it doesn't look as if he's acting. In fact, it hardly seems as if he's even thinking. Watch him in The Departed or I Heart Huckabees and he comes across as a flawed regular guy who just wants to do the right thing, even though his characters aren't always the brightest. He plays lugs you can't help but love. But that's when he's in a good movie. Put him in something as generic as Broken City and it's as if someone painted eyebrows on a sedimentary rock and threw it up on screen. His winsome commonness becomes a liability. He just stands there, inanimate.

In Broken City, Wahlberg plays Billy, a former cop who left the force after he shot a suspect to death. (Billy claimed it was self-defense, and the courts agreed.) Now he's a low-rent private eye, taking pictures of wives cheating on their husbands, when his old buddy Mayor Hostetler (Russell Crowe) calls on him. The mayor is convinced that his wife Cathleen (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is screwing somebody else, so he hires Billy to find out fast: He's in a tough fight for reelection, and the voters go to the polls in a few days. Billy discovers that Cathleen is indeed sneaking around with another man, but, as you might imagine, everything is actually far more complicated and crooked than it first appears.

This is one of those films that think it's big news that there's corruption in big-city politics. Unfortunately, director Allen Hughes (one-half of the Hughes brothers who long ago made Menace II Society) doesn't have much of a feel for his movie's New York City milieu. Just about every second that you watch Broken City, you're wondering what Spike Lee could have done with it. Granted, the script (by first-timer Brian Tucker) isn't all that interesting, but at least Lee would have provided the film with color, style, attitude, life. As it is now, the film is mostly tough New Yawkuhs swearing at each other when they're not double-crossing one another.

Wahlberg does what he can playing The Cop Who Is Haunted By His Past (Version 10.7.5), and there is one intriguing wrinkle to the familiar formula: His girlfriend (Natalie Martinez) is the sister of the raped and murdered victim whose assailant Billy shot. (They started dating after the shooting, their relationship in part forged out of their shared pain.) But when you recall that Wahlberg parodied this exact type of disgraced character in The Other Guys—"You shot Derek Jeter!"—it's even more of a reminder of how by-the-numbers Broken City is.

Even the movie's series of "unexpected" twists start to get numbingly predictable. A good rule of thumb while watching Broken City is to figure that if one character is assumed to be doing something, he or she actually isn't—instead, it's another character. (Broken City also thinks the audience will be blown away by the revelation that not everybody in the film is heterosexual.) Twisty thrillers aren't easy to pull off—they have to constantly keep the viewer confused without losing him in the process—but this one is just so stacked with red herrings and obvious "surprises" that I frankly stopped caring and began daydreaming about what an Inside Man 2 might have looked like.

As for Crowe, while watching him I thought about how in some ways his appeal isn't that much different than Wahlberg's, albeit pitched at a higher level. At his best, Crowe projects a rugged masculinity that feels honorable and heroic and modest at the same time. From the get-go in Broken City, we know that Hostetler can't be trusted, and maybe Crowe signed up because it gave him a chance not to play the good guy for once. (One of his best roles is still Ben Wade in 3:10 to Yuma.) But like with Wahlberg, Crowe seems to disappear inside his macho shell for Broken City, becoming a hulking man from which no emotion or feeling can emanate. It's bad enough that Broken City isn't very good, but what makes it really depressing is how dull its performances are. Big-city corruption is a fact of life, unfortunately, but so is uninspired filmmaking.

Grade: C-

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

Every year, the Sundance Film Festival shows about 200 features, documentaries and shorts. Last year, the festival was the launching pad for Oscar-nominated films Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Sessions, and Searching for Sugar Man, not to mention that it premiered modest indie hits like Sleepwalk With Me, Safety Not Guaranteed, and Arbitrage. This year's festival kicks off Thursday night, and while there's no way of knowing exactly what may be the breakout sensations, here are 10 films I'm particularly excited to see:

Before Midnight

When last we saw them in Paris, Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) were hanging out at her apartment, Celine dancing seductively and Jesse deciding if he really wanted to catch the flight that would take him home to his wife and child. That was 2004's Before Sunset, and now director Richard Linklater and his stars have reunited for Before Midnight, which finds Celine and Jesse meeting up in Greece. Because Before Sunset was just about perfect—a sequel to Before Sunrise but even more poignant and romantic—it's tempting to wish that they'd leave well enough alone. But for anyone who loved the first two movies and those characters, how can you not want to know how they're doing now?

Breathe In

One of the more contentious U.S. Dramatic Competition winners of recent years was Like Crazy, a romantic drama about passionate young lovers (Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin) who can't decide if they'd be better off without each other. Some appreciated the movie's nonjudgmental tone toward its irrational, moody characters, while others just found the two of them insufferable. Director Drake Doremus is back with his follow-up film, which features Jones, Guy Pearce, and Amy Ryan. It again sounds like a hot-blooded affair, as a foreign-exchange student's arrival into a family causes all kinds of unexpected consequences.

Computer Chess

The NEXT section of the festival spotlights challenging, quirky, or odd low-budget fare. (It's a weird section that last year found room for both the very dark Compliance and the very light Sleepwalk With Me.) One of the potential highlights of this year's NEXT is Computer Chess, the latest from don't-call-it-mumblecore filmmaker Andrew Bujalski (Mutual Appreciation, Beeswax, Funny Ha Ha). Computer Chess seems to be his most ambitious effort, looking at a group of tech nerds in 1980 who are working on a program that will allow a computer to beat a human at chess. Bujalski's films tend to be smart, dialogue-driven character pieces, but none of them has had much of a commercial hook. Could his new film help him find a wider audience?

Don Jon's Addiction

It's hard to think of an indie darling more beloved at the moment than Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He stars in cool Sundance films like (500) Days of Summer while at the same time appearing in higher-profile flicks by respected auteur filmmakers like Rian Johnson (Brick, Looper) and Christopher Nolan (Inception, The Dark Knight Rises). And now he's made his feature directorial debut. Don Jon's Addiction stars him as a womanizing cad who wants to find more meaning in life. He's assembled a cast that includes Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore, and Tony Danza, and even if the film isn't well-liked, he'll still be a major presence at the festival's closing awards ceremony. (He's hosting the event.)

jOBS

This movie would have been interesting enough because of its topical premise: a behind-the-scenes look at the rise of a young Steve Jobs. But what elevates jOBS into the "Huh, OK ..." category is the casting of Ashton Kutcher as Jobs. Kutcher has tried showing his serious side before—he was at the festival in 2009 with the poorly received Spread, about a gigolo—and the combination of fascinating subject and unconventional casting makes the movie undeniably intriguing. If all goes right, we'll see Kutcher in a new light. (Remember: Before the Sundance hit Precious, no one thought Mo'Nique had such chops.) If it doesn't, jOBS may be remembered as the movie with the wEIRD tITLE.

The Look of Love

Prolific filmmaker Michael Winterbottom has worked with Steve Coogan several times before (24 Hour Party People, the underrated The Trip). Their latest collaboration tells the true-life story of Paul Raymond, a British entrepreneur who, starting in the 1950s, made his fortune through adult magazines and erotic clubs. Raymond's story has the makings of a traditional rags-to-riches biopic with a side order of The People Vs. Larry Flynt-style commentary about sexual freedom, but Winterbottom almost never tells a story in a traditional way. And, interestingly, this isn't the only Sundance entry this year concerning the lives of those in the porn industry ...

Lovelace

At one point, there were going to be dueling biopics about porn star Linda Lovelace. One of them, which initially cast Lindsay Lohan before firing her and switching to Malin Akerman, seems to have lost momentum. The other is arriving at Sundance and stars Amanda Seyfried. Lovelace is directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, who previously collaborated on the offbeat Sundance entry Howl, a sorta biopic that starred James Franco as Allen Ginsberg. For years, Seyfried has been poised to become a breakout star, but it's never quite happened. This movie would appear to be her big swing for the fences to be taken seriously as a dramatic, award-worthy actress.

Touchy Feely

Writer-director Lynn Shelton has been on a hot streak. 2009's Sundance entry Humpday took a provocative premise (two longtime straight male friends dare each other to star in a porno together) and turned into a thoughtful, realistic comedy-drama about friendship and marriage. Then last year's Your Sister's Sister examined sibling bonds and platonic male-female relationships with great performances and clever, improvised dialogue. Shelton is back with Touchy Feely, which features her Your Sister's Sister co-star Rosemarie DeWitt alongside Scoot McNairy, Alison Janney, and Ellen Page. It's again a story about family, but this time the story revolves around a massage therapist who mysteriously develops an aversion to touching other people, which throws her entire life into chaos.

Upstream Color

Writer-director Shane Carruth has made only one film, but it was Primer, the twisty, low-budget time-travel film that won the U.S. Dramatic Competition in 2004. Nine years later, he's back in the Dramatic Competition with Upstream Color. Here's the plot line: "A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the life cycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives." Yes, that doesn't make a lot of sense, but if Primer was any indication, Carruth enjoys confounding the audience with his coldly elegant riddles. (Years later, people are still trying to unlock all of Primer's mysteries.) His fans have long waited for this follow-up film. In less than a week, we'll know if he delivered.

Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington

Journalist Sebastian Junger (right) collaborated with combat photographer Tim Hetherington on the superb 2010 documentary Restrepo, which chronicled the lives of U.S. soldiers stationed in the dangerous Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. Shortly after the film lost at the Academy Awards for Best Documentary, Hetherington was killed while covering the Libyan civil war. Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? is Junger's ode to his fallen friend, who made his name by putting himself into the most deadly places on Earth. Restrepo premiered at Sundance; it seems fitting that Which Way be unveiled in Park City as well.

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.