Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, 2011)

It would be just as easy (and lazy) to ascribe the words “whimsical” or “charming” to Woody Allen’s 41st(!) film as “well-intentioned” and “creaky.” But the truth lies somewhere in the middle—the conceit of the film is an interesting one, and though the execution of it works more often than not, the misfires occur often enough to all but ensure a disconnect between the audience and what’s happening on the screen.

Still, Owen Wilson as all-but-defeated screenwriter Gil Pender, on vacation in the city of the title with his improbably shrewish fiancée (Rachel McAdams, dutifully allowing herself to be trapped by the character’s confines) and cartoonishly dreadful in-laws, comes off as one of the better Woody Allen surrogates, either because he’s savvy enough to steer clear of Allen impersonation or he’s too “Owen Wilson” to effectively impersonate anyone. Either way, it’s a winning, slightly revelatory performance. And Allen frames and photographs Wilson’s face without cutting prematurely, allowing us to be persuaded by Gil's reactions to the fantastical events (each night at the stroke of midnight, Gil is transported back to the Paris of the 1920s populated by the likes of Hemingway, Dali, and Fitzgerald) unfolding before his eyes; rather than seeing things through Gil's eyes, we see them registered on his face.

If you’re a Paris-in-the-'20s fetishist (I’m guessing you’re probably not), there’s a lot to feast on here—the set design and photography have a much-needed and impressive transportative quality—even if some of the setup is hackneyed. Some scenes come off as near-miss variations on tighter-scripted Allen moments, where closing-scene punchlines meant to linger as the film segues into its next scene are instead only suggested by the cutting, relying on the audience's collective recall of similarly structured, more successfully mounted scenes from other Allen films rather than the precision of the punchline. And I think we can all agree that it’s more than a little tiresome to have the Woody Allen surrogate as the only character with any perspective; his fiancée is a drag, his object of affection (a thoroughly winning but elegiac Marion Cotillard) lives in a bygone era, and the impossibly glowing, agreeable and fetishized sales clerk he encounters at a flea market is way too young for him (which makes for, in the universe of Woody Allen, a perfect match).

Midnight in Paris is a clever, slight, handsome little diversion, and you might just enjoy it, as I did, as long as your tolerance for known celebrities playing historical figures is high, and you’re not looking to laugh out loud too much or be moved emotionally.

The Switch (Josh Gordon and Will Speck, 2010)

You know you’re in trouble when the ineffable charm and comic wares of Jason Bateman can’t rescue your film from coming off as an affront to mediocre romantic comedies, a sub-genre defined by its apologists (I know it’s schmaltzy, but, etc.), or the poster is by far the best thing about it.

Both are true of The Switch, a film whose contrivances are bested only by the level of boredom it manages to inspire in its audience. Apparently based on a short story, "Baster" by Jeffrey Eugenides, the film deposits us in New York seven years in the past, marked by the insane and impressive mass that is Jason Bateman's hair. Wally (Bateman) finds out best friend Kassie Larson (a blander-than-normal Jennifer Aniston) has decided to find a sperm donor and have a child. What better way to do this than have your kooky friend (Juliette Lewis) throw you a party where you artificially inseminate yourself, which, we're ensured, is what everybody's doing these days. Wally, who doesn't particularly like the donor—could it be because he's in love with Kassie?—gets really drunk and happens upon the donor's canister of semen in the bathroom. While fucking around with it, he accidentally spills it in the sink. Therefore, he must replace it with his own. Due to his state of extreme inebriation, he has no recollection of this occurrence.

Seven years later (the present day), the story picks up as Kassie, who had moved away, is moving back to New York with her fucking annoying son Sebastian (Thomas Robinson), who seems to have similar characteristics to a now more reasonably coiffed Wally. One of these similar qualities is the particular brand of hypochondria that befalls people only inasmuch as it indicates a character trait for the purpose of comparison rather than an actual condition. Someone like Sebastian exists only in the movies, coming off as an amalgam of that "special child" you've seen countless times (the character is even endowed with Jonathan Lipnicki character's penchant for using big words and spouting out weird facts in Jerry Maguire). But Sebastian's character quirks are so unlikely—he collects picture frames and keeps the generic pictures they come with and creates stories for each of them—you'll find yourself rolling your eyes when your not scratching your head.

That the characters relate to each other in ways that people don't relate to each other may be perplexing ("Hi, I'm out of town with this dude I like right now, and I really don't want to have to come back there, but I just found out my son has lice. Can you do me a favor and go pick him up and perform a rigorous regimen of rituals to see if you can get rid of them? Thanks. And when I come back, and you've taken care of my son for me, and scrubbed his head and laundered his sheets, and gone through his hair with a fine-toothed comb, I might yell at you for not being happy for me and my new boyfriend," says the heroine of the film), but the film's real downfall is the laziness inherent in Allan Loeb's screenplay. It seems defiant in its tendency to string together elements we've seen before in other movies, but without any meaning behind them. Bateman's voiceover, offering the coda to the film displays this perfectly, as he declares "Maybe the human race isn't a race at all," possibly hinting at slowing down and enjoying life? Who knows, because this sentiment is completely independent of anything that happens in the fucking movie.

Only Jeff Goldblum, who manages to wring one or two laughs from the hackneyed material, seems like he's having any fun here; on the sinking ship, where everybody's running around waving their arms and panicking, he's sitting back and getting drunk, because, Why not? We're all going to die anyway.

Thoroughly improbable, utterly unfunny, and sometimes even mean-spirited (the film seems to have something against homeless people, offering at least two shameful throwaway jokes at their expense), The Switch foolishly relies on the knowledge of its audience to make inferences from and draw comparisons to other, better movies it's already seen and apologized for, even while recommending.

Friday the 13th (Marcus Nispel, 2009)

You can be forgiven for not knowing that the depraved serial killer Jason Voorhees appeared only peripherally as a deformed young boy in the original Friday the 13th (1980). But fans of the series know that Jason's mother was responsible for the slaughter of the now-standard cabal of generic, sex-crazed teenagers in the original—the entirety of which is summed up in the first few minutes of this version—so this is more an update than it is a remake. The whole thing feels a little paint-by-numbers and designed by committee; you get the feeling that everyone here is unified in their ideology of performing a job-for-hire, strictly because there’s money to be made, the only thing at stake being performing dutifully enough to ensure future employment. But there’s one great moment of invention in Friday the 13th's screenplay when, about 20 minutes in, after Jason has dispatched with what the viewer can be forgiven for thinking is the group whose journey we will follow through to the film’s conclusion, the title is introduced, revealing the preceding sequence to be a foreword. Not only is it impressive in its concept but also in its resourcefulness: by having two groups of teenagers to kill, there’s less time needed for plot development. Which is presumably a good thing, depending on whether your tolerance is higher for watching teens get stalked and mutilated by a madman than it is for excusing flimsy plot construction.

Though screenwriters Damien Shannon and Mark Swift offer a modest improvement over their screenplay for the D.O.A. Freddy vs. Jason—I liked that there were little homages to fans of (or at least those familiar with) the original series, such as Jason wearing as he did in Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) a pillow case (or burlap sack, whatever) over his head before finding, as he did in Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982), the hockey mask that would make him (and it) an icon—none of it is scary. Part of this is because all of the sets look constructed, Jason looks and moves like a stuntman, and the score is lousy. The multi-ethnic cast (the presence of which begs the question Is it progressive to allow blacks and Asians to be brutally murdered alongside their white peers? and, strangely, I think it may be) comprises a series of "types," the white kids included. (The most ridiculous and perplexing being the guy obviously meant to look like the screen persona of Seth Rogen, though with none of his awkward charisma or self-effacing sense of humor.)

The Friday the 13th movies have always seemed oddly puritanical and conservative in their values (smoke pot and fuck, you die) given their penchant for employing inventive forms of brutality. This notion is only complicated when you find yourself siding with the killer (a surrogate for imposing these values) due to the brash, obnoxious behavior of the callous teenagers. While it may indeed be brisker (and arguably better) than any of the films of the original series, it’s still pretty thin. And at 97 minutes, it feels way too long. Fairly generic and offering a bit of restraint, given the post-Saw world we live in, it's best not to expect much here, because that’s precisely what you’ll get.

The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko, 2010)

The Kids Are All Right is certainly well acted, subtly directed, the writing is sharp and focused, and it is overall engaging. But I couldn't help but be a little put off by the story's chosen trajectory, especially in the wake of numerous critics' lamentations about how, even though the parents here are both women, in the end, it's about "family." Because that's not entirely true. It's about a family facing a crisis, which is a different thing altogether. I suppose I was (naively) expecting more Cassavetes, less sensationalism and soap-operaish plotting and gloss. True, it's by no means a product of the branch of Hollywood that produced Transformers, but in ways aside from Annette Bening's involvement it reminded me of American Beauty, with its characters participating in a scandal that betrays their essence, and kind of deflates the whole thing.

The Social Network (David Fincher 2010)

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Margot at the Wedding (2007)

Sure, like all of Noah Baumbach's efforts, there is a required level of class condescension—in this case, of, say Deliverance-sized proportions—but the frenetic in-the-action staging (and, to a lesser degree, pervasive handheld camerawork) create an immediacy and a sort of verite veneer that almost makes you believe that these types of people could exist in the real world. Overly everything, including charming.

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010)

If Darren Aronofsky is the filmmaker equivalent of Brandon Flowers of The Killers, then Black Swan is his "When You Were Young," a terrific song (amidst some really horrible ones and a few that almost get it right) where all of the operatic pretension effortlessly rises and tugs you along, away from a well-deserved reservation and hesitance to the other side of the hump where intoxication and sadness reigns. The film is is essentially the collection of seconds born of awaking in the middle of the night, grabbing a baseball bat and slowly creaking down the hallway toward sounds you understand to be consistent with those of a home invasion—only stretched to two TMJ-inducing hours.

Aronofsky is not to be confused with a first-tier contemporary director on par with, say, Paul Thomas Anderson (there's a little too much "arteest" in Aronofsky's blood for my money) but he deserves a lot of credit here for keeping the train on the track; he has certainly matured since the similarly toned Requiem for a Dream, which I found pretty intolerable. But in the end, it's primarily due to Natalie Portman's disciplined, anxiety-drenched and transformative performance that Black Swan is deeply affecting, painfully sad and thrilling, miraculously avoiding the potential for silliness—there's plenty of it—lurking around in the screenplay. Given its fantastical leanings, I can certainly see why someone would find the whole thing to be utterly fucking ridiculous. Me, I was haunted, troubled, in admiration. It's black licorice, black olives; either you like it or you don't.

The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman, 1960)

Troubling, simple story forcing you to grapple with complex issues of faith, violence, forgiveness, good, evil, intention, and innocence. Its power is crafty; though you may realize that you're watching something of substance, you'll probably find yourself shocked by the weight and intensity of its emotionally charged and despairing conclusion.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)

I resisted watching this for a long time, even though it is a favorite of my friends; I'm not a huge Altman or Warren Beatty fan, and, for the first half, I wasn't convinced that McCabe was anything other than irritating, from the characters' incessant muttering to the Leonard Cohen songs trying to either lull you to sleep or tell you how you're supposed to feel about the characters. But in the second half, it becomes overwhelmingly clear that this is one truly original, otherworldly, sad, and disquieting film. It's not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's lousy with invention and heart.

Four of the Apocalypse (Lucio Fulci, 1975)

Although there's nothing to specifically recommend this film, I rather enjoyed its bizarre melancholy. It would be a mistake to deign to finger its lack of polish amateurish; there's an element of that, to be sure, but I think its employment is intentional—as is the film's ghostly hippie-folk soundtrack and snow-heaped climax (probably in homage to the much-superior McCabe and Mrs. Miller). There's a chilly disconnect, at times, and director (and future gore aficionado) Lucio Fulci's inclusion of some pretty gruesome flesh-removal scenes seems out of place. (Unfortunately, the rape seem does not, as is the standard for most spaghetti westerns good and bad.) There's nothing to learn or take away, but I was really taken with the weight of sadness these characters carry with them, and I was surprised by the sheer volume of scenes containing grizzled men fighting—and losing—battles to keep tears from streaming down their faces.