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...

A lot of critics are calling Emma Stone the new Lindsay Lohan and I totally get that. Like Lohan, she’s a pretty, husky-voiced redhead with serious acting chops and a great sense of comic timing. But while Lohan always had a laid back quality to her work (and allow me to formally apologize for speaking of Lohan's acting career in the past tense—come back soon, Linds!), Stone is positively antic. She’s a motormouthed ingénue with a Borscht-Belt-like tendency to make hurried sarcastic asides—and she’s able to play both the sexy siren (as she did in Superbad and Zombieland) or the dweeby outcast (as she did in House Bunny and The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.) What’s more, she’s fearless as an actress—never afraid to look foolish (braces and acid washed jeans anyone?) or push the joke too far.  She’s her own very unique force of nature. Frankly, the Lohan comparisons are just lazy.

Easy A is the first film that allows Stone to show us all that she’s got. She plays Olive Penderghast, a good kid who gets along almost too well with her neo-hippie parents (Stanley Tucci and Patricia...

Is George Clooney lonely? Feeling disconnected? Because in his last big film, Up in the Air, he played a man who kept moving in order to avoid human connections and now, in The American, he plays Jack, a gunmaker and assassin for hire, whose very job requires that he has no friends.

Call me, George. I can help.

Of course, Up in the Air’s Ryan Bingham was a charming smoothie (Clooney was able to expose the pain beneath his cavalier veneer). But The American’s Jack is more like a ghost—a man whose very economy of gesture and speech is key to his survival. It’s a strange role for Clooney to play, although I guess he’s trying to prove that he doesn’t need to do the Cary Grant thing to be a movie star. It’s true, the taciturn paranoid Jack is mesmerizing—it’s the film that left me cold.

As The American starts, Jack is living in a remote Swedish cabin with his sweetie. She knows nothing about him, as evidenced by the fact that, when they get shot at by snipers from afar, she’s shocked to discover that...

As our romantic comedy leading ladies hit their late 30s, the emphasis seems to have moved from finding Mr. Right to finding Mr. Fertility. To wit: Tina Fey in Baby Mama, Jennifer Lopez in The Back-up Plan, and now Jennifer Anistan in The Switch.

Anistan plays Kassie. She wants a baby and she’s not getting any younger, so she decides to take the bull by the horns, so to speak, and find a sperm donor. Her best friend Wally (Jason Bateman) wonders why it’s not him.

“It would ruin the friendship,” she hems. “And besides, you’re too neurotic.”

Yes, Wally is neurotic. Almost too neurotic to be solid leading man material (a scene where he sabotages a blind date by going off on a morbid tangent rings a little too true) but Bateman is just sheepishly charming enough to pull it off.

Kassie finds the perfect sperm donor, a strapping married...