Last year, director Todd Phillips was able to make one of the funniest films of the decade, The Hangover, by constantly ratcheting up the insanity. Just when you thought things couldn’t get more out of control, someone lost a tooth, or Mike Tyson showed up, or a gangster ended up in the trunk of a stolen police car.

Phillips’s newest film, Due Date, a clear homage to the John Hughes classic, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, attempts to do the same thing—with somewhat less inspired results.

Robert Downey Jr. plays Peter Highman, a tightly wound architect who is traveling across country to witness the birth of his first child. Zach Galifianakis is Ethan Tremblay, a dope smoking, perm-sporting man-child who, as is often the case with Galifianakis characters, is just a few loose screws away from being completely unhinged.

In Planes, Trains and Automobiles it was bad weather that forced the two mismatched companions to set out on their cross country journey. In Due Date, updated as it is for the new...

Talk about the entrée not living up to the promise of the appetizer. Stone starts out with an absolutely nifty film noir premise: An uptight case worker with a few skeletons in his closet is seduced by the femme fatale wife of a manipulative inmate who’s hoping for early parole. Juicy, right? And when you consider that the sap is played by Robert De Niro, the wife is played by the sexy Milla Jovovich, and the con is played by the ever-compelling (if hammy) Edward Norton, you should be in movie heaven, right?

Well, I should’ve known that Stone had deeper, less pulpy things on its mind when director John Curran started doing artsy close-ups of buzzing bees and De Niro’s Jack and his put-upon wife (Frances Conroy) were always listening to a fire-and-brimstone-preaching radio station.

Nope, Stone isn’t really about the con—who’s double-crossing whom—but sin, God, and the possibility of redemption. So when Norton’s Stone starts buying into a Buddhism-type religion that advocates man’s perfect tonal harmony with the universe, he’s not faking it for Jack’s benefit. Or...

Red Alert! Red Alert!: The following review is chock full o spoilers. Proceed at your own risk…

The opening scenes of Never Let Me Go, based on Kazuo Ishiguro chilling novel, seem familiar—and yet ever so slightly off.

We’re at Havisham’s, a boarding school of some sort in England—and the children are well-behaved, as British school children tend to be, and dressed in tweedy gray uniforms, as British school children tend to wear. They eat in a cafeteria, play football (or soccer if you like), and the girls whisper about the boys.

But why is Mrs. Havisham (Charlotte Rampling) insistent that these children, in particular, can never smoke and must take excellent care of their bodies? Why is the school nurse’s office more like an ultra-sterile hospital ward, with several doctors and nurses milling about importantly in white coats? And why is there a rumor that leaving the school’s grounds will result in immediate death?

Because these children are different from other...

Over the years, we’ve seen many movies about sweet-tempered simpletons (Forrest Gump being a prime example) but very few about brilliant jerks. The Social Network is such a movie.

We learn almost everything we need to know about Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg, in a fearless performance) in the first scene. He’s at a bar with the girl he’s dating, and he’s rambling on about the elite social clubs he wants to pledge. In the course of their (mostly one-sided) conversation, he manages to be testy, rude, elitist, defensive, cruel, and just a wee bit desperate. The girl promptly breaks up with him.

Of course, Zuckerman isn’t the film’s hero, he’s more like its jangly nerve center. He’s, famously, the young billionaire who founded Facebook, and The Social Network tells the story of how he built up that site from a campus-only social phenomenon—a way to get girls and maybe be seen as cool—to the biggest thing to happen to global communication since the telephone.

The film is directed by David Fincher (The Fight...