The Overnight

Writer-director Patrick Brice's fragile and ephemeral 80-minute "The Overnight" walks a daring and transgressive line through the minefields of marriage, sexual attraction and the loosening of inhibitions. Exciting, full of truth, and so funny I almost choked at one point, it's sure to make my list of the year's best films.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Ben Stiller's update of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" achieves more of what it sets out to do than most of the better-pedigreed Christmas releases this year.

A.C.O.D.

That the terribly titled "A.C.O.D." (which stands for adult children of divorce) merits even the mildest recommendation is tribute to the comic genius of Catherine O'Hara and especially Richard Jenkins.

Friends with Kids

Director Jennifer Westfeldt casts herself as the lead in her new picture "Friends with Kids," about a girl and her platonic best friend (Adam Scott), who decide to forgo the boyfriend-girlfriend, marriage-divorce thing and cut straight to having a baby together. It's the sort of New York romcom where all the young people have good jobs and lots of square feet, but we never see them at work. Much of the picture is devoted to their friends' reactions to their iconoclastic lifestyle choice, with the friends played by the cast of "Bridesmaids." Kristen Wiig is massively underused in an underwritten part, but manages to get a huge laugh out of something as small as the way she pours one glass of half-drunk wine into another. The breakout star is Chris O'Dowd, the dishy cop from "Bridesmaids," who shows real comic flair, saying just enough crude-but-real guy stuff perpetually to exasperate his wife (Maya Rudolph). Scott makes an appealing, if lightweight, co-star, but Westfeldt lacks screen presence: she's vaguely sweet, a little mousy, a little whiny. The movie has more laughs than most of its ilk - at times recalling Alan Cumming's and Jennifer Jason Leigh's "The Anniversary Party" - but falls prey to the gratuitous vulgarity and verbal diarrhea that have become pandemic.