War has been said to be 99% tedium interspersed with 1% pure terror. And so it is with pregnancy, childbirth and baby rearing, only thankfully (else who would do it?), in these pursuits there are also intervals of intense joy. Perhaps appropriately then, something akin to this ratio of tedium to pain and pleasure obtains in the new romantic comedy What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

With a title based on the famously alarmist, best-selling series of pregnancy advice books, one might expect this film to be a cautionary tale of the innumerable ways the process of pregnancy can go wrong, but not to worry. This is a Hollywood product; like a anesthesiologist with an epidural syringe, it does its best to deliver easy laughs and a feel-good ending.

Following the stories of five interrelated couples, the plot is as crammed as a uterus in the ninth month (yes, the pregnancy metaphors must continue). Little wonder few of them make emotional or comic impact, or that several wear out their welcome. Although she’s as impressively long-stemmed and perky-bodied as humanly possible, the appeal of Cameron Diaz has always been inexplicable, and here again she left me wondering.

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Director Lasse Hallstrom (best known for My Life as a Dog and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape) is a man unafraid of heartwarming, and his latest, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, is shameless. The big fish tale of a romantic, mystical Yemeni sheikh (the gorgeous and charismatic Egyptian actor Amr Waked, last seen as Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law in the HBO bio-pic) with seemingly limitless riches and a cockamanie vision of building salmon fishing grounds in his native desert, Salmon Fishing neatly wraps together all the makings of an arthouse wet dream: exotic locales (the Yemen of the title and a Scottish estate that makes Balmoral look like a split level), a star-crossed yet inevitable love story between bumbling, uptight scientist, Dr. Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor, looking good in tweeds) and crisp, proper career gal Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt), plus the necessary danger element in the vague shape of possible Jihadi assassins, or at least jealous locals.

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Jeff is a jobless 30-year-old slacker man-child who does indeed live in the basement of his mother’s house. He is an expert at marijuana smoke rings, daytime television and pickup basketball but whines and protests when asked to perform a simple household errand for his mother (a wonderful Susan Sarandon). Lost and paralyzed, he casts desperately about for clues on what to do with his life, as per a favorite movie, 2002′s Signs, M. Night Shamalayan’s ridiculously self-serious examination of the eerie and paranormal.

So far the title character sounds like a cliché of the zeitgeist, but as played by the shambolically charming Jason Segel, and in the witty, expertly paced hands of the Duplass brothers, this movie is joyful entertainment from start to finish. Jeff is earnest and open-hearted. When the universe sends a sign, he follows. Never mind that every step ends in folly and humiliation. It is enough for him that there is a path.

That path merges him directly into the way of his distant, scornful brother, Pat (Ed Helms, channeling a lower-runged, far angrier version of his uptight corporate drone in The Office). Pat is an underling who has to spend his days in a hideous paint company shirt and tie, lives in a low-end apartment complex with his sweet and pretty wife (Judy Greer) and is suffering an early midlife crisis manifested by the purchase of a Porsche he can’t even begin to pay off, but hey, at least he has a job.

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Friends with Kids is one of those high concept romantic comedies that posits a Big Life Question—in this case: can a couple have a baby together and keep the romance?—and then spends the next 90 minutes trying to answer it. Think of it as the No Strings Attached—can friends sleep together without emotional complications?—of the ticking biological clock set.

Julie (Jennifer Westfeldt, best known for 2002’s Kissing Jessica Stein) and Jason (Adam Scott) are good college friends who live on different floors of the same apartment building on Riverside Drive. They watch in alarm as their coupled friends Leslie and Alex (Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd) and Missy and Ben (Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm, Westerfeldt’s real-life partner) conceive and bear children, and proceed to ruin their lives and relationships. At every point the parents are haggard, distraught and argumentative. Fathers are irresponsible and immature. Mothers depressed and resentful. Their looks are sunk. So are their libidos and marriages.

Julie and Jason vow the same will not happen to them, whenever they should each happen to find the mate of their dreams. Problem is: Julie’s not getting younger. There’s no man in sight and she wants a baby. So Jason, a commitment-phobe who’s known for never sleeping with the same woman for longer than a week, hatches a plan, the kind of conceit they come up with in movies and then build the next two acts on, even though it wouldn’t fly for five seconds in real life: he and Julie will have a baby together, totally without ties. Just as parenting partners. Call it Parents Without Benefits.

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The much-deserving winner of the 2012 Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture (in a precedent-making move, it was also nominated for Best Screenplay, the first time a foreign film has won a nomination outside the foreign category), A Separation is as far as can be from those facile Hollywood flicks in which not a single character behaves from any recognizable impulse or motivation. Although set in an Iranian culture that is in many ways truly foreign (for one thing, the judiciary system, in which much of this story is set, operates completely differently from anything I have seen; this is no Law & Order), the complex intent and heart of each character is absolutely clear, if at times mysterious.

The story is set around a marital rift—the Separation of the title—but it is in many ways the larger tale of an Iran separated by religion, class and privilege. An upper-middle class couple seek to separate because Simin (the beautiful Leila Hatami), the wife, wishes to leave Iran for better opportunities for their teenaged daughter Termeh (played with moving intelligence by Sarina Farhadi, writer/director Asghar Farhadi’s daughter). Her husband Nader (Peyman Moaadi) insists on staying in Tehran to care for his aged father, who suffers multiple health problems, including dementia.

Both characters and their motivations are fully sympathetic and diametrically opposed. Stuck at this impasse, Simin goes to live at her parents’ apartment. The family is split, and Termeh chooses to stay with her father and grandfather.

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This extraordinary documentary Pina by German filmmaker Wim Wenders (justly nominated for an Academy Award) on the choreographer Pina Bausch, his countryman, near-contemporary and fellow visionary, was a long time in coming. An artistic collaboration had been planned for some time but in an instance of epic bad timing, Bausch died just two days before filming was to have begun, having been diagnosed with cancer only five days previously.

The movie is thus haunted by the specter of death and of aging, compounded by the fact that many company members had been with Bausch for twenty-plus years. This theme is stated in the opening piece (returned to periodically in the duration of the movie), in which a long line of dancers chants Fruhling…Sommer…Herbst…Winter as they snake along a train platform, behind and onto a stage and later, on a wind-blown hilltop.

The Tanztheater German expressionist influence is clear in their affects, which ride the line between ecstasy and despair. Are they smiling in the face of death, or ruefully acknowledging that life and death march on regardless?

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Like a successful spy, the quiet and grippingly brilliant Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy sits unobtrusively amidst the flashier year-end Oscar contenders—alternately heartwarming (We Bought a Zoo), Artistic with a capital “A” (Hugo, The Artist), tragic (War Horse, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close), scene-devouring and envelope-pushing (Shame), glossily true to life (Iron Lady, My Week with Marilyn) or purpose-built to sweep awards (The Descendants, Carnage).

Based on the classic spy novel, this film adaptation necessarily abridges Le Carré’s densely plotted story far more than did the famous 1979 six-episode BBC miniseries starring Alec Guinness (who, for generations of fans, is the quintessential George Smiley). And yet it feels in no way over-simplified or dumbed down. Quite the opposite.

A raft of the world’s finest actors (nearly all male—this is a man’s world)—Colin Firth, John Hurt, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ciarán Hinds, Toby Jones and Gary Oldman as protagonist George Smiley—play high-level operatives in the British Intelligence at the height of the Cold War. When a mole is detected, it’s up to Smiley to ferret out which of his colleagues is the double agent.

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Great balls of tinsel, this third installment in the Harold & Kumar franchise starts off with a bang. The primary objective seems to be justifying its 3D incarnation, which it gets down to immediately, mostly by floating billows of marijuana cumulus and cirrus into the audience, as well as candy canes, Christmas ornaments, feces and other effluvia.

This being Harold & Kumar, the racial and religious slurs and gross-out humor come just as thick and fast. It’s enough to offend nearly every affinity group on the planet, and disgust anyone who’s left. If you thought that scene in A Christmas Story with the tongue stuck on the pole was horrible, this movie has got a frozen treat for you.

Seven years have elapsed since Harold and Kumar’s misadventures in Guantanamo Bay, during which the two once-BFFs have gone their separate ways. Harold has returned to his former rule-following, high-achieving ways, while Kumar has been expelled from his medical studies for failing a drug test and descended into a slovenly life of perpetual stonerdom.

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Spoiler Alert: I know how she does it. And I’m about to tell you.

The “she” of the title is Kate Reddy (played by Sarah Jessica Parker), and, for starters, she has a full-time nanny. The nanny apparently also cleans, really well, or else there is some unseen housekeeper, because the house is always in a perfect state of cleanliness, beds pristinely made and kitchen counters bare and shining.

Someone also does laundry, because there is not a single basket of dirty, clean-but-not-folded or folded-but-not-put-away laundry anywhere in sight. That same person, or perhaps someone else, must also do Kate’s personal shopping, because she has a killer wardrobe, as do the children, and what mother working a demanding 60+ hour-a-week schedule has time for shopping?

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Based on the cast (Steve Carell and Julianne Moore as a married couple Cal and Emily—how perfect) and a promising trailer, I went into Crazy, Stupid, Love fully expecting to love it. I didn’t, but I did leave loving the young couple (a surprisingly funny Ryan Gosling as Jacob and Emma Stone as Hannah). They had everything going for them—charm, chemistry and perfect timing. Emma Stone is darling and hilarious and deserves every bit of the praise and buzz she’s receiving.

They’re no mere insanely pretty faces, either. Both Gosling and Stone have smarts and personality that shine through, despite the screenplay’s sometimes ridiculous shortcomings. Yes, the screenplay. Who the heck greenlit this thing? With all the money they must’ve had, they couldn’t have hired someone to perk this thing up?

The clichés, oh the clichés. This is one of those movies where the crowd acts as one simple-minded, one-minded body. You know what I’m talking about. Everyone in the office pokes their heads above their cubicles at once and claps. Everyone stands outside and with the exact same judgmental expression watches the hero’s meltdown in the school parking lot. Stuff a normal group of individuals would never do. It’s the equivalent of a laugh track in a dumb sit-com. But that’s not all.

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If The New York Times were to break the story that the NEA has been generously funding an ongoing study of manhood and brotherhood among everyday schmoes in contemporary culture, that sure would explain a lot. Surely few phenomena have been as comprehensively documented of late as the dilemma of nondescript modern men (usually lifelong buddies) forced by extreme circumstances beyond their control (roofies, bad bosses) into the type of reckless behavior (murder, breaking-and-entering, walking into a bar in the bad part of town) they would never normally contemplate.

Almost always the upshot involves:

• •  illegal drug usage (usually unintentional)
• •  first-ever encounters with law enforcement (cue bickering recrimination scene in the back seat of a squad car)
• •  uneasy encounters with The Other (usually hip, powerful, sometimes grotesque black men against whom the protagonists’ manhoods are implicitly contrasted and found vastly wanting. In the case of Hangover The Other is represented by both Mike Tyson and Ken Jeong as an Asian Mafioso. Here, it’s a very funny Jamie Foxx.)
• •  flashes of homosexual anxiety
• •  all countered by elaborate vulgarity, gross-out humor and scatological references, as well as
• •  forced interaction with that other Other: frighteningly gorgeous and overtly sexual women who positively demand to be serviced.

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If Ferris Bueller’s Day Off got really drunk and fell into bed with Less Than Zero, their fetal-alcohol-syndrome-afflicted offspring might be Take Me Home Tonight, a movie that aims to be to the 80s what Dazed and Confused was to the 70s. And after all, it’s high time: Michael Douglas has already revisited Wall Street.

Take Me Home Tonight takes place in LA and Beverly Hills and hits all the era’s tags—RayBans, pastel popped-collar polos, pushed-up jacket sleeves, Preppie bow ties vs. New Wave skinny ties, frizzbomb perms for girls and spiked mullets or Gordon Gecko mousse-backs for guys, video stores, red sports cars, cocaine, wild house parties, evil bankers, and, of course, a sinister and sexually perverted fat German businessman in shoulder-padded black leather. Wouldn’t be an 80s movie without one of those.

The story, one of those “guy grows up in the course of one wild and crazy night” deals, hits all the plot buttons too. Our too-straight hero manages to finally bust loose and somehow to fulfill both his parents’ expectations and the anarchic instincts of the loser sociopathic guy who’s inexplicably his best friend. It goes without saying that he gets the girl too.

There are fibs and other deceptions, grand theft auto, cocaine abuse, dance-offs, police encounters, light sadomasochism, youthful irresponsibility and more. It’s all pretty silly and not to be taken seriously. There are absolutely no consequences for stealing the expensive sports car, bankers are prima facie arrogant and evil, and the moment of  moral triumph comes when Tori decides to quit her banking job, because, of course, she hates it. Believe me, I’m no fan of the banking industry (see last paragraphs), but most of these ideas are simply juvenile.

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