It’s impossible to watch Like Crazy and not think about the nature of young love—or perhaps the nature of your own first love. It captures those very specific sensations—the thrill of your partner’s otherness, mingling with the thrill of finding you have so much in common. The giddiness, the possessiveness, the solipsistic charge of it all. And it captures the unique sensuality of young love—two bodies almost cocooning together, as if they could tuck away inside each other, protected from all the sorrows and troubles of the world.

More specifically, Like Crazy tells the story of college students Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones). She wants to be a journalist and is prone to writing discursive notes and filling journals with photos and poems and observations. He wants to be a furniture maker and is sweet and indie-boy shy. She boldly leaves a note on the hood of his car (“p.s.-I’m not a nutcase!”) and they spend the night in her room discussing life and music and the perfection of Paul Simon’s Graceland.

These opening scenes are so intimate, you almost feel like a voyeur. When Anna scribbles a note to Jacob and he scribbles one back, we are not privy to what the notes...

I cringed every time I passed a poster for the Footloose remake. The whole endeavor seemed so unnecessary and even slightly embarrassing for those involved. After all, when a film hits upon some sort of unlikely alchemy to become a hit—some secret combination of Kevin Bacon’s big hair and Kenny Loggins’ bigger guitar licks—shouldn’t you just leave well enough alone? Because really, what are the odds that lightning can strike twice?

But I must say that director Craig Brewer (Hustle and Flow) has proven me wrong. He obviously loved the original film, so his remake serves as much as an homage as update. And he doesn’t try to drastically change it—making our hero Ren a hip-hop dancer, say, or setting the whole thing in Cuba (I’m talkin to you, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights)—he just tweaks it. He sets it in the south, not Utah, which makes sense. And he adopts High School Musical’s cheerfully multi-culti approach to casting and music: the film casually incorporates hip-hop, metal, and classic pop into its soundtrack.

Of course, there’s no way to really sidestep the essential corniness of the film (heck, it was even corny back in 1984): The young rebel with a heart of...

I  had to drag myself to see 50/50. I mean, did I really want to see a movie where Joseph Gordon Levitt battles cancer? Especially when the film was (dubiously) dubbed a comedy?

Man, am I glad I went. It’s almost impossible to overstate how lovable a film this is. It’s endearing, clever, moving, and, yes, funny. A cancer film for the rest of us.

Part of what makes 50/50 so good, and so totally grounded in a recognizable reality, is the fact that it was written by Will Reiser, a young comedy writer who himself was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 27 (he’s now in remission). Reiser had the good fortune to be close friends with actor/writer Seth Rogen, who plays Kyle—essentially a fictionalized version of himself—in the film.

50/50 doesn’t fall into the trap of so many cancer films: Just because Gordon Levitt’s Adam has cancer, it doesn’t make him a saint, it doesn’t make him a deeper, more profound human being. He’s just a regular guy dealing with a seriously messed up situation.

So how do a couple of young, funny, hip guys deal when one of them gets cancer? They smoke a lot of weed, make a lot of gallows jokes, and, at Kyles’s urging, attempt...

Everything about I Don’t Know How She Does feels slightly off. There’s the ungainly title, which sounds like something you’d find in the self-help section of a bookstore (it’s actually based on a 2002 novel). There’s the fact that Sarah Jessica Parker’s Kate Reddy works as an investment manager. (Is America ready to embrace a movie about a finance exec?) And there’s the film’s slightly dated insistence that Kate feels  judged by society for not staying at home with her two adorable kids. (If anything, my stay-at-home friends feel the opposite—like society is raising its collective eyebrow at them. )

And frankly, who really wants to see a movie about somebody else’s stress? Kate has to juggle career, kids, husband, backstabbing co-workers, a constantly buzzing cell phone, last minute business travel arrangements, meddling in-laws, etc. Yeesh, with escape like that, who needs the movies?

Also, much as they can mess up SPJ’s hair and have one of her shirt-tails come adorably untucked, things aren’t really all that bad for Kate. Her husband, played by Greg Kinnear, is doting and almost endlessly patient. Her hot new client (Pierce Brosnan) takes one look at Kate singing a lullaby to her...