Bandslam is better than it has any right to be. After all, its premise is strictly out of the Disney playbook: Geeky teen loner becomes the manager of a band, and finds himself torn between two girls, the band’s (gorgeous) rebellious lead singer and the (equally gorgeous) bookish outsider he’s partnered with in his human studies class.

And yet . . . I sensed something was up with Bandslam right out of the gate, when our hero Will (Gaelen Connell) wrote a letter to David Bowie. (Had his letter been to Nickelback, I would've known I was in for a long night.) Turns out, Will has been writing letters to Bowie for a while now, undeterred by the fact that Bowie never writes back.

My second clue that Bandslam had a few tricks up its sleeve was when I saw that Lisa Kudrow was cast as Will’s mother. You simply don’t hire an actress as wonderfully offbeat and vivid as Kudrow unless you’ve got a good reason. And Kudrow gets to do some fine work as the protective mother—yes, she smothers a bit, but we...

We like to think that if a spaceship filled with aliens arrived on earth, it would be a chance for enlightenment, a moment of grace.
More likely, the scenario envisioned in the ingenious District 9 would come to pass. And it ain’t pretty.

It’s 1984 in Johannesburg and a space ship has hovered over the city and stalled. On board are aliens—almost a million of them, scared and hungry—who are rounded up into a ghetto-like area (District 9), where they’re monitored by a paramilitary group, the MNU. (The MNU is particularly interested in the alien's sophisticated weaponry, which can only be fired by those with alien DNA.)

The public’s initial curiosity about the aliens, nicknamed “Prawns” because of their resemblance to the shell fish, eventually turns to suspicion, revulsion, and cries of “send the Prawns home.” Nigerian gangsters have descended upon District 9 to search for weapons and provide black market cat food (an alien favorite) and interspecies prostitution.

Now, 20 years have passed and the residents of Johannesburg want the Prawns out...

When I heard that Meryl Streep had been cast as Julia Child in Nora Ephron’s new biopic, Julie & Julia, I put my grouchy pants on. Fine-featured, delicate Streep as Amazonian, earthy Julia? Sacre bleu!

Well, score one for Meryl.

Streep is absolutely winning in this part, which chronicles Julia’s move to France in 1949 and her two greatest love affairs: with French cuisine and with her loyal, doting husband Paul (Stanley Tucci, who after The Devil Wears Prada is becoming Streep’s true partner in charm.) She gets the trilling voice right, the towering stature, and the sensual pleasure Julia took in food. What’s more, she captures the great chef’s joie de vivre. There’s a buoyancy to Streep’s performance that is completely irresistible.

That’s the Julia part of our story. The Julie part focuses on a modern-day low-level bureaucrat (Amy Adams), who is feeling unfulfilled in her life. She and her very own doting husband (Chris Messina) cook up a madcap idea: She will recreate every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art...

Adam Sandler for Best Actor? No joke, I think the guy deserves serious consideration for his complex, nuanced, and fearless work in Judd Apatow’s Funny People.

He plays George Simmons, a comedian who rose from small nightclub standup to global success by making the kind of low-brow films where he plays a Merman or a man-baby in diapers. (It’s tempting to say that George is an alternate universe version of Sandler—Sandler without the humanizing influence of his wife and kids. But that’s part of what makes Sandler's performance so fearless—people will inevitably compare him to George, who’s pretty much a dick.)

George is a self-loathing narcissist (they seem to specialize in that particular oxymoron in Hollywood), who lives alone in a giant mansion, beds a series of faceless groupies, and waits for his next script to roll in. George’s hedonistic, unexamined life gets a jolt when he is diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. He’s past the point where chemo or radiation can do him any good, so doctors start him on a radical drug treatment. Mostly,...