Screenwriter Diablo Cody both amused us and annoyed us with her hipster teen speak in Juno. But I loved that film for its surprising tenderness. After all, woman cannot live on snark alone.

For her second film, Jennifer’s Body, Cody dials down the contrived puns (a good thing) but also seems to have lost her emotional way. Where Juno subverted our expectations at every turn—our too-cool indie hero was actually pretty square—Jennifer’s Body, which tells the story of a mean girl (Megan Fox) who becomes possessed by a demon, goes exactly where you would expect.

“She’s not just high school evil,” explains Jennifer’s best friend Needy (Amanda Seyfried). “She’s evil evil.” (Jennifer feeds on unsuspecting teenage boys—who are so horny, they don’t notice the rats and rotted wood in her den of death.)

Cody’s trying to do a Heathers for the Facebook generation, but she doesn’t come close. The evil Queen Bee story was told much better in Mean Girls. And the high-school-...

Matt Damon, sporting 30 extra pounds and an unflattering toupee and mustache, gives a bravura performance as Mark Whitacre, company man turned FBI snitch in Steve Soderbergh’s darkly comedic take on corporate crime, The Informant!

Whitacre, a real life corporate whistle blower, is a character like no other. His mind easily wanders (often at inopportune times) to banal trivialities—say, the time-saving benefits of flossing while taking a shower, the pronunciation of the word Porsche, or the failures of the metric system—but he thinks they’re deep thoughts. He has a fixation on Tom Cruise inThe Firm and sees himself as a hero in his own thrilling high-stakes drama. He’s also a liar—a fact we are alerted to pretty early on in the story, but that we (and the FBI) conveniently choose to forget.

When Whitacre, who's a VP of biochemistry at agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), tells his bosses that he’s been threatened by a corporate blackmailer, the FBI is sent to investigate. This makes Whitacre extremely nervous. His blindly...

In The September Issue, RJ Cutler’s highly entertaining documentary about the making of the famed September issue ofVogue, editor Anna Wintour proves herself to be surprisingly delightful, charming, winsome. . . Oh, who am I trying to kid? She’s an ice queen.

Indeed, the most fascinating thing about Anna Wintour is this: She’s not fascinating at all. When Meryl Streep played a thinly veiled version of her in The Devil Wears Prada, she depicted her as regal, haughty, the kind of woman who could crush you with a snide comment or withering stare. But the real Anna Wintour is mousy, somewhat bloodless, even meek at times—she’s like Andy Warhol without the wide-eyed innocence that gave him his charm.

And yet, as the film makes quite clear, she is the most influential woman in fashion. A single issue of Vogue can make or break a designer’s season—even a career. What’s more, while Vogue is populated by a bevy of talented art directors, photographers, and editorial assistants, it is...

Have you ever met one of those guys with loads of potential, but he just kind of fritters it away because maybe he’s too lazy, too bored, or possibly too stoned to get motivated? Extract is the movie equivalent of that guy.

We know that writer/director Mike Judge is a funny man. Office Space is justifiably a cult hit and I happen to think that Beavis and Butthead was a major work of cultural satire (no. . .really).

Extract is actually funny in fits and starts. But I kept staring at the screen thinking, “This is the best Mike Judge can do? This is the film he got excited about?” (It’s particularly frustrating considering the fact that Judge has now made a grand total of 3 movies in the past decade. His 2006 film Idiocracy, which I haven’t seen, was initially drubbed by critics, but is now being hailed as an underappreciated gem.)

Extract follows the misadventures of Joel (Jason Bateman), the owner of an extract flavor plant. Joel is a...