Ricky Gervais’s The Invention of Lying is sneakily subversive. It starts out as a very clever science fiction comedy: We’re in an alternate universe where lying doesn’t exist. As such, there is no fiction, and total truth in advertising.

“A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People,” reads the sign on the entranceway to an old age  home.

“When There’s No Coke,” reads a billboard for Pepsi. (Heh.)

People, too, feel compelled to blurt out the truth: “I’m embarrassed to work  here,” says a waiter as he approaches a table where our hero Mark (Gervais) is on a date with beautiful Anna (Jennifer Garner.) “I’m out of your league,” she tells mark matter-of-factly.

When Mark gets fired from his job as a “screenwriter” (films are essentially historical readings) he finds himself in danger of being evicted. He goes to the bank to withdraw his final $300 and, in an epiphany, discovers that he can lie about the amount he has in his account. (He’s a nice guy. He says he has $800.) He has, as the title says, invented the lie....

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...