Jeff Garlin

Keira Knightley continues to open up as an actress with this sparky comedy. As in Begin Again and The Imitation Game, she taps into her own lively personality to create a punchy character who's loose, likeable and prickly. And while the film has a warm, engaging tone that's often both honest and funny, it also feels somewhat contrived as it pushes Knightley's character into corner after corner. As with films like Humpday and Your Sister's Sister, director Lynn Shelton takes a spirited idea and ends up playing it oddly safe.

It's set in Seattle, where Megan (Knightley) is in her late-20s, horrified to see her close circle of friends settling down into predictable lives involving marriage and children. So when her longtime boyfriend Anthony (Mark Webber) proposes, just as she discovers that her dad (Jeff Garlin) has cheated on her mom, Megan makes a run for it. At a convenience shop, a group of teens asks her to buy some alcohol, and suddenly she has a new best friend in Annika (Chloe Grace Moretz). As they bond, Annika invites Megan to stay at her house. So Megan invents a story about attending a self-help conference and lays low, hanging out with her new teen gang like it's the good old days. But Annika's single dad Craig (Sam Rockwell) begins to challenge Megan to realise that perhaps there are benefits to growing up.

Yes, it's obvious from the moment Megan and Craig start bickering where this is headed. And these predictable plot turns feed into the standard rom-com structure of the screenplay, right up to climactic scenes at both an airport and the prom. There isn't a single surprise along the way, but Knightley's breezy performance is more than enough to carry the audience with her on this odyssey. Effortlessly charming even when she's being a jerk, she develops a wonderful improv-like chemistry with both Moretz and Rockwell, while the bit players add plenty of texture to each episodic sequence.

Continue reading: Say When [Laggies] Review

With a low budget but a lot of imagination and talent, director Trevorrow and writer Connolly create a deceptively simple comedy that's one of the most entertaining films of the year. It's so cleverly written that every moment of the film is hugely engaging, and it's so perfectly played by its cast that we can't help but fall for the likeable, flawed characters.

Set in Washington state, the story centres on Darius (Plaza), a sardonic Seattle magazine intern whose life derailed when she was 14, after her mother's death. So her interest is piqued when she hears about a classified ad asking for an assistant on a time travel mission ("Bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed"). She accompanies arrogant journalist Jeff (Johnson) and fellow intern Arnau (Soni) to a seaside town to write up the story for the magazine, but once they track down the ad's author Kenneth (Duplass), nothing goes as expected.

Each of these three magazine reporters has a full-bodied story, expertly set within the larger investigation of whether Kenneth is nuts or not. All of these characters are caught between their past and the present, exploring who they once were, who they are and who they want to be, which makes them easy to identify with even as they do some amusingly silly things. And the filmmakers cleverly refuse to play into our expectations, keeping us guessing about where the movie is heading. So each scene bristles with possibility, and each twist and turn of the plot and side-plots is both thrilling and hilarious. 

Continue reading: Safety Not Guaranteed Review

It's set in the sleepy town of Blithe Hollow, a tourist village cashing in on its grisly history of 18th century witch trials. This is where Norman (Smit-McPhee) lives, which is a bit annoying since he can speak to the ghosts which are lurking everywhere. His parents (Mann and Garlin) dismiss this as a childhood fantasy, while his boy-obsessed teen sister (Kendrick) just ignores him. At school, the class bully (Mintz-Plasse) makes his life miserable, and just when Norman thinks things can't get worse, his vagabond uncle (Goodman) tells him that he's the next in line to make sure the town's legendary witch doesn't enact her curse on the 300th anniversary of her death.

Continue reading: ParaNorman Review

Nicole (Aniston) is a New York journalist who's so busy with a breaking story that she neglects to turn up for a court date and ends up on the bail-jumper list of bounty hunter Milo (Butler), her ex-husband. Their stormy marriage didn't last long, and Milo is happy for the chance to get some revenge. But he's being chased by the goons (Coster and Garland) of an Atlantic City loan shark (Moriarty). Meanwhile, Nicole also has a lovelorn colleague (Sudeikis) and a vicious henchman (Greene) after her.

Continue reading: The Bounty Hunter Review

Right around the time Pixar Animation Studios released its fifth feature, Finding Nemo, conversation shifted from "Is it any good?" to "Just how amazing is it?" Quality was assumed, and rightfully so. The studio's creative directors helped redefine the animation genre with the Toy Story franchise, A Bug's Life and Monsters, Inc. Subsequent Pixar stories were measured against their predecessors and ranked accordingly.

Continue reading: WALL-E Review

There's a delightful surprise before the opening credits of "Daddy Day Care" -- a very funny CGI-animated short about tadpoles and peer pressure called "Late Bloomers."

The movie itself doesn't demonstrate half the creativity crammed into that four-minute cartoon. But it's not bad either.

Eddie Murphy stars as a workaholic ad exec sacked from his job (for promoting a kids' cereal called Veggie-Os) and saddled with taking care of his 4-year-old son (cute, uncommonly sad-eyed wisecracker Khamani Griffin) while his wife (Regina Hall) becomes the breadwinner, going back to work as a lawyer. But apparently she's a woefully underpaid lawyer because to make ends meet, Murphy turns their home into a day care center and enlists a couple laid-off buddies (pratfalling heavyweight Jeff Garlin and scatty sci-fi geek Steve Zahn) to help.

Continue reading: Daddy Day Care Review