I did not have high expectations going into Juno. Sitting through the trailer a million times, I quickly tired of its self-consciously cutesy-clever dialogue, written by a debut screenwriter with the similarly self-consciously cutesy-clever moniker of Diablo Cody (real name: Brook Busey-Hunt). The fact that stripper-cum-blogger-cum-screenwriter Cody has been force-fed to the filmgoing public as the new flavor of the… read more!

Aaron Eckhart plays Nick Naylor, a smarmy lobbyist for the tobacco industry and self-described "merchant of death" whose job it is to convince Americans that cigarettes won't kill you. During the first few zippy minutes of Thank You for Smoking, Naylor is at the top of his game – smooth talking and quick thinking. Soon, though, as he tries to… read more!

The third collaboration between Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody appears to be an intensely personal one for the latter: Tully's protagonist Marlo (Charlize Theron), a 40-year-old former free spirit now relegated to housewife duties as she expects her third child, is an obvious stand-in for the stripper-cum-blogger-cum-Oscar winner (for Juno), who now has three young kids of her own. Unable… read more!

Nearly flawless comedy-drama with George Clooney as a "professional firer" who spends over 300 days a year flying around the United States in order to lay off strangers at various downsizing companies. Up in the Air may be an extraordinarily timely document of life during these bleak economic times, but that's just a framework for the human drama that is… read more!

After delivering the crowd-pleasing dramedies Juno and Up in the Air, Jason Reitman re-teams with Juno scribe Diablo Cody, blessedly eschewing the idiosyncratic slang dialogue that made her such a polarizing screenwriter, to deliver a bleak, crowd-numbing anti-comedy. Charlize Theron stars as Mavis, a bitchy former prom queen and now author of several disposable "young adult" novels (think Sweet Valley… read more!