After several slow weeks, today is a (relatively) big day for openings. You can find my takes on Oliver Stone's W. here (short version: a shallow mess, though Brolin is terrific) and on Rachel Getting Married here (Hathaway is as good as they say, but movie-sister Rosemarie DeWitt is even better).
Also opening today:
What Just Happened? Director Barry Levinson's Hollywood satire is amusing but ephemeral; I probably had a dozen good laughs at the screening, but I'd forgotten nearly all of them by the time the lights came up. Robert DeNiro stars as a movie producer pinballing off human complications: a still-adored ex-wife (Robin Wright Penn) and her adulterous new lover (Stanley Tucci), an asshole movie star (Bruce Willis as himself) and his craven agent (John Turturro), a Brit director with anti-commerical impulses (Michael Wincott) and a studio exec (Catherine Keener) with decidedly pro-commercial ones. The supporting performances are a gas, but the center doesn't hold, with DeNiro's ambivalent antihero never quite registering.
Sex Drive This slightly above-average teen sex farce rolls in the well-worn tracks of The Sure Thing and Road Trip: an automotive odyssey with a hoped-for carnal culmination. In typical form, the leads (Josh Zuckerman, Amanda Crew) are fine but forgettable. James Marsden earns a few laughs as the bullying older brother whose 1969 GTO is borrowed for the trip, and Clark Duke (of the "Clark and Michael" web series) is arguably the best nerd sex god since Mike Myers stopped being funny a decade ago. But Seth Green unsurprisingly steals every scene he's in as cinema's most ironic Amishman.
--Christopher Orr