We’ve all heard that old cliché about the character actor trapped inside a leading man’s body. But that doesn’t quite apply to Brad Pitt. He’s something rarer: For most of his career, Pitt’s actually been too good-looking to even be taken seriously as a leading man.

He’s rebelled against it mightily, playing all manner of freaks and gypsies and even, in one truly ill-advised project, the embodiment of death. But he’s actually been at his best when he’s stopped worrying and embraced the hotness. In Fight Club, he was a fantasy projection—the coolest, sexiest, most bad-ass chick-magnet alive. In Ocean’s Eleven, his good looks gave his character a kind of perpetually amused insouciance. In Legends of the Fall, he was a full-on swoon-worthy romantic hero.

But Brad Pitt is 48 years old now and, while he’s still a beautiful man, he’s got some wrinkles, some bags under his eyes and, unfairly or not, it gives him a new depth. He’s so not much turning into a silver fox, a la his buddy George Clooney—instead, his current looks represent a kind of dissipated youth, a faded glory. All of which makes him perfect to play Billy Beane in the great new Moneyball—and why...

In Contagion, every doorknob, every elevator button, every handshake poses an insidious, unseen threat. Director Steven Soderbergh cannily shoots these things as though they are the artifacts of a horror film—which, of course, they are. We have seen the boogeyman and he is a cough on the bus.

 “The average person touches their face three to five times every waking minute,” says Erin Mears (Kate Winslet), a doctor from the Center for Disease Control, who has been dispatched to Chicago in an attempt to interview and quarantine those who have been in contact with a deadly, fast-moving virus. 

(Ewww!)

Within the first few minutes of the film, we see Gwyneth Paltrow, as a perfectly healthy wife and mother from Chicago, just back from a business trip to Hong Kong, get suddenly sick and die. (This isn’t a really spoiler and if it is, I’m about to spoil you further: Lots more deaths will follow.)

As he did in Traffic, Soderbergh deftly introduces us to lots of characters—doctors, patients, infectious disease experts, government officials, conspiracy theorists, innocent bystanders, et al—who are affected by the scourge. And as the disease and the inevitable mass...

I’m not really a full-on Gleek, maybe just a touch Gleek-ish. Yes, I watch the show, but I feel it has gone markedly downhill since its first stellar half-season. The episodes are seriously hit or miss. Storylines get started and dropped— Rachel’s mother? Quinn’s painful past? Sue Sylvester’s humanity?—and, as brilliant as Jane Lynch is, she can only sabotage the glee club so many times before it becomes tiresome. The proselytizing has gotten to be a bit much, too, even for someone like me, who totally embraces Glee’s message of celebrating our differences. It’s a classic case of a show reading too much of its own good press.

But at least there’s the music, which is always fun—well, as long as Mr. Schue isn’t rapping, that is—and sometimes downright magical.

So, of course, Glee: The 3D Concert Movie was going to a have a certain base level of entertainment. How could it not? These kids are just too darn talented—especially breakout star Lea Michele, who can wrap her voice around a classic Barbra Streisand song like nobody’s business (her “Don’t Rain on My Parade” is as much of a showstopper on stage as it was on the TV show).

But we get to see the New Directions gang strut...

In this so-so comedy, already nicknamed “Freaky Friday with dudes,” Jason Bateman plays Dave Lockwood, over-worked lawyer/family man and Ryan Reynolds plays his childhood pal Mitch Planko, unemployed actor/ladies man. Throw in a drunken night, a magical water fountain that our heroes pee in (ah, the charms of the modern-day fairy tale), and, presto-chango, they swap lives.

Most of the laughs here come from the Mitch-as-Dave side of the equation. In one politically incorrect scene, Mitch essentially demonstrates how not to feed a pair of twin one-year-olds (sharp knives and electric sockets are involved). It will play well to the Go the F**k to Sleep crowd.

Another scene, where Mitch thinks Dave’s hot wife (Leslie Mann, quite amusing here) is disrobing for sexytimes, when in fact, she’s about to go to the bathroom in front of him (egad!), is a clever commentary on the sometimes neutered state of the modern marriage.

But the scenes of Dave-as-Mitch embracing the single life don’t play as well, partly because the film is so intent on reassuring us that Dave’s a stand-up guy, they don’t really let him enjoy his vacation in Ryan Reynolds’ body. (And really, what...