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.

Chico & Rita

The jazzy, careering animated Oscar nominee "Chico & Rita" has a Cuban musician's soul (Bebo Valdes', to be exact) and a kaleidoscope of lush, vibrant colors to make you look past the sketchily drawn love story at its center. As the lovers sing and ivory-tickle their way from Havana to Nueva York to Paris to Vegas, you do best to lie back in your chair and luxuriate in the neon lights and the street lamp-lit stairwells, the stylings of Gillespie and Puente and Chano Pozo. The movie won't touch your heart, but it's a feast for your eyes and ears.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

The laughs are mostly unintentional in Lasse Hallstrom's "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen," a threadbare outline of a bad romcom aimed at the type of Kaballah-practicing Westside woman who found meaning and insight in "Eat Pray Love." Ewan McGregor plays a prissy ichthyologist in a loveless marriage entered into too young. Emily Blunt is typecast as the personal assistant to a Sana'a sheikh with billions to burn on the titular pipe dream. She taps McGregor to spearhead the project.

The Turin Horse

In a world of tortured auteurs making agonized films for pointy-headed cineastes, let's hear it for a crowd pleaser that aims only to entertain: Bela Tarr's lighthearted romp "The Turin Horse," about an Italian cabbie and his wisecracking daughter who get into all manner of wacky misadventures in the windswept countryside. It's as light, fizzy and disposable as ...a flute of cocktail-party champagne.

This is not a Film

The title "This is Not a Film" is less a Magritte-style meta-artistic meme than a sort of lawyerly plea on behalf of "convicted" Iranian director Jafar Panahi, whose attorney has to explain to him that the outcome of his appeal of his 20-year filmmaking ban and 6-year prison sentence has as much to do with her legal arguments as did the conviction itself; that is to say, nothing. "It's 100% political."

Being Flynn

Passionately in love with the sound of its own voice, "Being Flynn" builds a house of pseudo-literary artifice on a foundation of risible coincidence. It's every inch the torturefest a glance at the cast list would cause you to surmise.

On the Ice

Inupiat director Andrew Okpeaha MacLean has set his feature debut, "On the Ice" (not to be confused with the recent Greg Kinnear black comedy "Thin Ice"), in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost city in the United States (population: approximately 4,200), and its fascinating milieu and strong sense of place are by far its best features. The market is called Arctic Grocery. The cleaners: Arctic Cleaners. Snowmobiles seem to outnumber cars, and get more use. Alcoholism lurks everywhere. (A boy comes home to find his mother passed out drunk. "She made it three months this time," he tells his friend.) The sun doesn't set for six months at a stretch. It's remote, but not undeveloped, and it's amazing to think of its way of life as part of the American experience. Because we almost never see this landscape or these people depicted in film, it's natural to want to spend time with them and learn more about them.