Men, Women & Children

Jason Reitman's "Men, Women & Children" aims to elucidate the dissonance between the copacetic personae we craft online and our true, emotionally damaged selves - the same terrain farmed in last year's "Disconnect."

Touchy Feely

I can't tell you how disappointed I am in Lynn Shelton's "Touchy Feely."

The Best Films of 2012: #4

Director Lynn Shelton allowed the cast of "Your Sister's Sister" to improvise much of their dialogue. The result was an unexpected treasure that delighted me with its emotional acuity and pitch-perfect humor.

Promised Land

"Promised Land" - not to be confused with the 1988 Jason Gedrick-Tracy Pollan film of the same name - stars Matt Damon as Steve Butler, a glib, highly successful salesman with the sinister-sounding Global Cross Power corporation, whose job entails spending a few days and nights in each of a series of blurred-together rural towns, buttering up the locals and getting them to enter land leases that allow Global to extract natural gas - via fracking - from underneath their ranches and farms. We meet Steve as he pulls into a small burg in Pennsylvania with his sometime partner Sue Thomason (Frances McDormand). She complains that the town, just a couple hours outside Pittsburgh, looks like Kentucky. "You get two hours outside any city and it looks like Kentucky," Iowa-born Steve replies.

Your Sister's Sister

Lynn Shelton’s “Your Sister’s Sister” is the best American feature film so far this year, an unexpected small treasure that delights you with its quietly perceptive emotional acuity and pitch-perfect humor.