Superbad (Sony) has a lot more on its mind than the typical horndog high-school movie, even if it's only to show how awkward teenage boys relate to only-slightly-more-together teenage girls. Michael Cera and Jonah Hill play geeks who look like real geeks: not hopelessly unfashionable, just a little clueless. And the pretty high-school girls look like real pretty high-school girls: not knockouts, just average teenagers who haven't fully matured. Far from a "shame of the nation" cautionary tale, Superbad uses awkward sex talk to reflect that part of growing up where kids learn to take the confidence they feel talking to their best friends, and apply it to interactions with strangers…
The first Pirates Of The Caribbean movie offered something unexpected and improbably winning: a cinematic theme-park-ride adaptation that brought swashbucklers into the blockbuster era. Then the sequels spoiled all the fun by creating a Star Wars-like mythology that made each one bloated and confusing to all but the enthusiastic kids who kept buying the tickets. The final entry in the trilogy, Pirates Of The Caribbean: It Won't End… er… At World's End (Buena Vista) finds a lumbering franchise that's ready for the glue factory…
It didn't seem possible that the series could get any better, but The Wire: The Complete Fourth Season (HBO) may be the best season yet—it expanding The Wire's portrait of the drug war in Baltimore to include four middle-school boys caught up in its cruel machinations. Some characters try earnestly to help them, some make promises they never keep, and still others push them into the life, but the kids are innocents through it all, left to twist helplessly in the cruel winds of fate…
Coming off their innovative, triumphant adaptation of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor, the filmmaking team of Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman mostly whiffed with The Nanny Diaries (Weinstein), a flat anthropological satire about babysitting for Manhattan's power elite. But it's worth seeing for Laura Linney's caustic yet surprisingly moving turn as an Upper East Side housewife whose gross snobbery and harsh directives cover up her deep insecurities about a marriage that's falling apart.