Todd Phillips re-teams with Hangover star Zach Galifianakis for the satisfyingly funny road comedy Due Date (Warner Bros), in which Galifianakis’ misfit would-be actor plagues a workaholic father-to-be (Robert Downey Jr.) trying to make it back to L.A. in time for his child’s birth. The leads’ strong work and a heartfelt tone makes up for the occasionally spotty jokes…
Released just a few months after another CGI supervillain-as-superhero adventure, Despicable Me, Megamind (Paramount) was second out of the gate, but turned out to be a better project, with a higher concept: What if a supervillain actually won his lifelong battle against a hero? What comes next? Will Farrell voices the titular alien super-genius, a heart-of-gold type who has a hard time dealing with the death of the nemesis (voiced by Brad Pitt) who gave his life meaning. It’s an energetic comedy and a solid adventure, though it comes packed with weirdly dated references…
In Get Low (Sony), Robert Duvall plays another effective variation on a cranky-old-coot role, this time as a ’30s-era backwoods-Tennessee hermit who sets about arranging a funeral service for himself while he’s still alive. The look and tone is too Hallmark Hall Of Fame, but Duvall and a fine supporting cast, led by Bill Murray as a greedy mortician, make the film a minor pleasure…
Though it stumbles whenever any semblance of a plot kicks in, especially the potboiler suspense that lurches forward in the second half, Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (Criterion) is an often vivid slice of life, chronicling the struggles of a tough teenage girl (a stunning Katie Jarvis) who lives with her little sister and her vulgar, hard-drinking mother in a ratty Essex apartment. Her relationship with her mom’s charismatic but dangerous boyfriend, played by Michael Fassbender (Hunger), is particularly affecting…
Lixin Fan’s exceptionally touching documentary Last Train Home (Zeitgeist) deals with the painful—and distressingly common—separation between Chinese laborers who work many hundreds of miles away from home, and the children who carry on in their absence. The train ride back over holidays takes two days, but the distance between family members is even more difficult to bridge.