The Bradley Cooper vehicle Limitless (Fox) was a surprise sleeper hit at the box office, and for good reason: The fantasy of a mind-expanding drug that lets users accomplish just about anything is an alluring proposition. Cast perfectly to type as the smugly handsome hero, Cooper stars as a 35-year-old failed science-fiction writer who gets the experimental drug from his shady brother-in-law and turns his life around. There’s a moral lesson to this story—something about Cooper’s newfound super-awesomeness not being the real him—but Limitless is blessedly slow to get around it…
The nostalgia comedy Take Me Home Tonight (Fox) would fit snugly into the recent spate of funny, vulgar R-rated comedies like The Hangover Part II, Horrible Bosses, and Bad Teacher, if it hadn’t been rotting on a shelf for four years before its release. Oh, and if it were funny. Sadly, it falls into the Hot Tub Time Machine trap of ’80s-pop-culture-reference-as-punchline as it chronicles one crazy Reagan-era night in the life of lovelorn dreamer Topher Grace and his all-purpose sidekick Dan Fogler…
With Potiche (IFC), prolific, versatile French director François Ozon has made a colorful bauble in the style of his 2002 musical 8 Women. And as he did in 8 Women, he cast the iconic Catherine Deneuve, who plays the upbeat trophy wife of an umbrella-factory owner who inherits (and transforms) the business after he dies. Set in 1977, Potiche gives Ozon license to evoke the era through music, fashion, décor, and a kind of sitcom breeziness that proves enormously appealing…
Harper Lee hasn’t published a book since 1960’s To Kill A Mockingbird, and stopped giving interviews 45 years ago, which leaves and understandable dearth of new information or insight about her. So the tasteful but dull documentary Hey, Boo: Harper Lee & To Kill A Mockingbird (First Run) falls back on footage of the 1962 film adaptation and celebrities offering enthusiastic boosterism. Apart from input from Lee’s 99-year-old sister, the doc plays like an earnest but sleepy Hollywood Hills book-club meeting…
The Boy In The Striped Pajamas (Miramax) looks at the Holocaust through the friendship between two 8-year-olds: a Jewish boy in a concentration camp, and the German son of the camp’s commandant. It sounds unlikely and forced, and it sometimes is, but strong performances and languid pacing keep it touching, if not always plausible.