No Strings Attached

Review:
The prospect was iffy at best: a romantic comedy, from a Hollywood studio, with a premise that smacked of "Last Tango in Paris," the scandalous classic in which Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider have a sexual liaison with no strings—or names—attached. Yet the outcome is delightful. Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman are the lovers in "No Strings Attached," which Ivan Reitman directed, with great verve and unflagging finesse, from a terrifically funny script by Elizabeth Meriwether. These lovers do have names: Adam and Emma. They're longtime friends who decide to become FWBs—friends with benefits, i.e. sex friends—because they don't think they can handle the demands of a committed relationship without wrecking their cherished friendship. In fact, it's more complicated than that, and much more interesting, but their earnest entry into a no-strings pact is enough to put them on a bumpy, raunchy—sometimes very raunchy—and pot-holed road to true love.

Adam is an aspiring writer on a cheerfully silly TV show about high schoolers "who sing, dance and blog." Emma is a doctor, which is why she tells him at one point, "You give me premature ventricular contractions—my heart skips a beat." The movie doesn't miss a beat, be it comical, farcical, emotional or even lyrical. (Well, maybe one—a change of heart, announced by Emma in the courtyard of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, that seems to have happened off camera.) This success is due in huge part to the beautifully tuned work of its co-stars, to the lilt of their verbal—and, yes, physical—duets. Both of the actors, like their characters, seem to be enjoying themselves with a graceful sense of self-irony that inoculates them against narcissism. Mr. Kutcher's Adam is an intelligent, good-hearted hunk who's genuinely lovable. Ms. Portman's Emma has a gift for floating and darting while staying grounded.

Still, actors can't do what these two do without gifted people around them. The director, Mr. Reitman (that's Reitman père, of "Ghost Busters," not Reitman fils, of "Up in the Air"), sustains precise and often delicate comic rhythms, yet he also allows for enjoyable looseness in scenes that can use it. (Some of my favorites involve a special musical mix that Adam burns for Emma, a congratulatory balloon that he brings for her, and an interlude on a miniature golf course.)

The writer, Ms. Meriwether (no grounds for confusion here; it's her feature-film debut), keeps the zingers coming with remarkable regularity and almost eerie accuracy. More than that, though, she has created a heroine with substantial, if unstressed, depth. Far from a flirty beauty who wants to keep her options open, Emma keeps her distance from open feelings because she hasn't learned how to do otherwise. "I'm not an affectionate person," she says in a girlhood prologue. That's before she blossoms forth as Natalie Portman, but even then Emma knows herself all too well.

In keeping with the quality at the top of the bill, the supporting cast is chockablock with comic chops: Kevin Kline as Adam's father, Alvin, a fatuously lascivious actor who's famous mainly for saying "Great Scott!"; Greta Gerwig as Emma's quick-witted friend Patrice; Lake Bell's Lucy, a major-league neurotic producing minor-league TV; Chris "Ludacris" Bridges as Adam's cheerfully profane and dependably obtuse friend Wallace. "No Strings Attached" doesn't have the overexposed, washed-out look of a studio comedy—the cinematographer was Rogier Stoffers—and doesn't for a moment feel like one. It's a smart, sexy romcom that turns the neat trick of staying sweetly human.

Peter Weir's latest film (he directed "Master and Commander," "The Truman Show" and "Gallipoli," among many others) takes us—on foot—from a Siberian gulag in 1940 to India by way of Siberian wastes to the south, then much more Siberia east of Lake Baikal, Mongolia and finally the Himalayas and Tibet. The journey's length is reflected in its visual sweep and, unfortunately, in its pace and its 133-minute running time.

"The Way Back" was inspired by the Slavomir Rawicz novel "The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom." How much the book's truth was embellished by fiction continues to be a subject of debate. Yet there's cumulative power in the tale, part prison break and part survival epic, of a group of political prisoners, led by a young Polish cavalry officer, Janusz (Jim Sturgess), who escape from their Soviet captors only to suffer dreadful hardships in a year-long quest for freedom.

Most of those hardships are familiar to movie lovers; that's a reductionist view of a serious and ambitious production, but it is, after all, a movie on a screen. (And a movie with a dreadfully clumsy ending.) How many new ways can you dramatize icy gales, parched deserts, agonizing thirst, shimmering mirages? And how do you step up the pace of a story that's about people walking? It helps when some Mongolian horsemen come galloping out of nowhere. It also helps to think that real people may have achieved this, but that nagging question is how real they were.

The movie's most interesting element is the civilizing effect of a young woman, Irena (Saoirse Ronan), who joins the group partway through their journey or, if you will, their pilgrimage. Irena is the one who incites her male companions to kindness, and who elicits touching stories that help them learn about one another. (She's an equally useful device for the director and Keith Clarke. They wrote the screenplay, which is generally sparse on characterization, as opposed to behavioral characteristics.) Russell Boyd did the spectacular cinematography. The admirable cast includes Ed Harris and Colin Farrell, who sports flamboyant side-by-side tattoos of Lenin and Stalin on his chest.

The official Japanese entry for an animated-feature Oscar, "Summer Wars" enlivens second- or third-rate storytelling with patches of first-rate animation. The dubbed English dialogue is awful—the acting and writing, not the accents—while the plot is an unmanageable mélange of domestic drama plus cyber attack, impending apocalypse, flashy avatars, immersive video games and artificial intelligence running amok. The teenage hero, Kenji, is both a math genius and a generic nerd who lives for, and mostly in, an online community called Oz. (Imagine "Dungeons & Dragons" crossed with "Invasion of the Body Snatchers.") He's invited by a pretty girl, just like that, to spend a few days at her ancestral home, impersonating her fiancé for the benefit of her dying grandmother. Then, just like that, Kenji is called upon to save the world when a rogue program called Love Machine acquires an orbiting nuclear weapon.

Japan's abiding fear of nuclear weapons continues to inform its popular culture, so it's not surprising to find that element surfacing yet again in this storyline. Still, I found "Summer Wars" scary on very different grounds—as an unwitting example of the mindset it's depicting. The script takes a mildly satiric stance toward a new world order in which the disjointed abstractions of online life have pretty much replaced the traditions of social interaction. What's scary is how disjointed the movie itself proves to be. It's as if the people who made it were determined to confirm our fears of what computers are doing to kids' minds. The filmmakers can't keep the strands of their clumsy plot straight, but they create brilliant images and manipulate them with blithe abandon. Oz is a vastness of white space that teems with toylike objects, teraflopping monsters and gladiatorial avatars that owe more to Aztec esthetics than to the glum denizens of "Tron." A vision like this could make you want to stop making sense.