Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)

Good "Friend": Keira Knightley and Steve Carell
fall in love one last time.

“Seeking a Friend for the End of the World” is an unlikely romantic comedy wrapped up in a grim, doomsday tale of mankind having only three weeks left to survive thanks to a runaway asteroid hurtling towards Earth.

Written and directed by Lorene Scafaria, the movie opens in New York City where a soft-spoken insurance salesman named Dodge Petersen (Steve Carell) loses his wife when she abruptly abandons him after hearing the latest news about the impending apocalypse. Left all alone, Dodge wearily drags himself back to his empty apartment with only his sad memories to keep him company.

Meanwhile outside, the end of the world has seemingly splintered the harried denizens into categories ranging from suicidal (people hurling themselves out of windows), to destructive (streets become a dangerous snarl of rioters, looters and arsonists), to hedonistic (wild parties feature unlimited, guiltless sex and drugs).

Desperate to escape, Dodge leaves the Big Apple and heads for Delaware, where his onetime high school sweetheart, an enigmatic figure named Olivia, may still have feelings for him. Accompanying him is Penny (Keira Knightley), an attractive and amiably scatterbrained neighbor who hopes to travel to England to see her parents one last time.

It’s not a stretch to predict that Dodge and Penny will eventually fall in love, but what’s more interesting about their relationship is how the affection between them grows based largely on shared feelings of sadness and regret. Both are fresh from breakups (Penny just split with her boyfriend) and both feel a deep need to reconnect with parents (Dodge is still tormented by his dad leaving him as a child).

“Seeking” recovers from a messy first fifteen minutes—in which the madness and chaos of looming planetary destruction threatened to overwhelm any attempt at thoughtful introspection—and becomes a quiet contemplation of subtle themes, especially abandonment and loneliness. The romance between Dodge and Penny is like a gentle mingling of two lost, fragile souls, sweet and poignant. Even a cute, small dog that tags along with the two characters during the film has been deserted, having been left tied to Dodge’s foot when he passes out in the park at one point.

The key performances are highlights. Keira Knightley is warm and wonderful as the sometimes bubbly yet vulnerable Penny. And as the melancholy Dodge, the always impressive Steve Carell continues—along with “Dan in Real Life” and “Crazy, Stupid Love”—to establish himself as the latest likable everyman of the cinema, a Jimmy Stewart for the new millennium.

Despite being fairly fatalistic, “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World” remains a genuinely sweet love story with a surprisingly original bend. These days, maybe you have to die to get a fresh idea in the movies.

Katy Perry: Part of Me (2012)

Fun "Part": Katy Perry stars in her own pop-doc.

“How can you ever be too cartoony?” giggles Katy Perry early on in “Katy Perry: Part of Me,” a breezily entertaining pop-doc about the highly popular singer known as much for her wacky costumes and colorful sets as for her string of number one hits.

The movie, a half biopic, half concert film, features an array of footage of the amiable 28-year-old pop princess—on stage performances, backstage meet and greets, interviews and candid moments—during several stops on her exhaustive 127-show tour in 2011. Along the way, it chronicles Perry’s meteoric rise from anonymous gospel singer to international superstar.

Directed by Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz, the most notable revelation emerges in the backstory of how a young girl from Santa Barbara, Calif. somehow went from being the daughter of religious parents (her mother and father are both pastors at a Pentecostal church) to the widely beloved artist of such hits as “I Kissed a Girl,” the lyrics of which—with its hints of sexual liberation, erotic curiosity and provocative playfulness—doesn’t exactly scream god-fearing conservative.

And yet, when Perry talks about her musical inspirations—like the edgy Canadian singer Alanis Morissette, whose dark, angry work helped define the alternative rock movement of the 90s—it's clear that the pop diva’s style is less about shedding her religious roots than about being the next generation’s voice of female empowerment.

Less interesting in “Part of Me” are the moments that focus on Perry’s personal life, such as a short marriage to the British actor Russell Brand. The couple’s breakup occurs during the tour and accounts for a few maudlin scenes of Perry, now tear-stained and devastated, trying to pull her emotions together at the last minute before a show.

Still, just as the star's marriage seems to dissolve in a flurry of heartbreaking texts, supportive messages come streaming from a gaggle of followers on Twitter, in a neat juxtaposition that allows the film to say something about the way modern communication instantly links fans and celebrities alike.

Of course, there’s plenty of music to both satiate hardcore fans and impress casual viewers. Perry’s brand of engaging bubble gum pop doesn’t have the versatility or depth of Madonna (another of Perry’s idols), but it is polished and infectious.

Like a lot of artists, Perry seems to save her best for the concert setting, feeding off the audience’s affection and enthusiasm with a mix of energy, swagger and confidence that makes her shine as brightly as her big, blue eyes. Even though she performs in a childlike, carnival world of swirling pastels and cotton candy colors, the way Katy Perry owns the stage makes her act at once smart as well as sweet.

The Skeleton Twins (2014)

Uneasy Twins: Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig star in the
uneven suicide comedy "The Skeleton Twins."

The two lost and troubled souls at the center of “The Skeleton Twins”—a well-acted, sometimes funny but shaky blend of comedy and drama directed by Craig Johnson from a script by Johnson and Mark Heyman—are a brother and sister tandem who have not seen each other in ten years, drifting apart despite a seemingly happy childhood together. Things have not gone particularly well since the split.

The brother, Milo (Bill Hader), hasn’t been able to get his acting career going after moving to Los Angeles; while his sister, Maggie (Kristen Wiig), lives in New York and is married to a nice guy (a grinning, sycophantic Luke Wilson) that she constantly cheats on. Although they occupy spaces on opposite ends of the country, the twins are linked by a tragedy—the suicide death of their father—that continues to torment them; however, in a macabre twist, it also manages to bring them closer.

Shortly after the movie begins, Milo is recovering from his own suicide attempt, lying in a hospital bed with bandaged wrists. Maggie has flown in to see him, having received the phone call regarding his condition just in time before gulping a deadly handful of pills.

Later, there will be more suicide scares, ranging from understated (Milo contemplates a belly flop from the roof of a building) to lurid (Maggie ropes herself to heavy weights before plunging into the deep end of a pool), in a film that seems bizarrely eager to establish a record for most times characters attempt to kill themselves.

The initial near-death sequence sets the stage for the twins’ reunion that’s by turns cathartic and messy, as warm and sentimental memories mingle with painful and long-buried secrets. Meanwhile, the pair continues a pattern of bad choices. Maggie has several dalliances with a hunky Scuba instructor; while Milo, who is gay, looks up the sleazy, duplicitous former English teacher  he first met while still a minor.

Wiig and especially Hader do a surprisingly good job playing serious, but “The Skeleton Twins” is a mix of misery and mirth that awkwardly pinballs between suicide and comedy, infidelity and whimsy. The result is a kind of queasy comedy that’s at best disorienting and at worst disingenuous.

Still, it’s not without some highlights. The two best and funniest scenes remind the viewer of the brand of short, sketch comedy that Wiig and Hader excelled at on Saturday Night Live. In the first, Milo and Maggie have a silly exchange after inhaling a few rounds of laughing gas at her dental office; and in the second, they perform an impromptu lip-syncing to the hopelessly infectious ‘80s pop tune “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” that’s as cute as it is hilarious.

You’ll remember those moments long after forgetting about the rest in “The Skeleton Twins.”

Wild (2014)

"Wild" at Heart: Reese Witherspoon plumbs
the depths of pain along the Pacific Crest Trail.

Somewhere along her extraordinary 1,100 mile hike up the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) pauses to tend to a sore foot and ends up inadvertently knocking one of her boots over the edge, sending it tumbling hundreds of feet down the side of a steep mountain. Unable to retrieve it from the abyss below, she lets out a feral, expletive-laced scream of frustration while launching the second, now useless shoe over the cliff.

It’s a brief step in the wrong direction for the main character, but fortunately, the outstanding film about her has no such flaws. Based on Strayed’s first person memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, the movie version of “Wild”—a spellbinding and masterful biopic directed by Jean-Marc Vallee from a screenplay by Nick Hornby—finds the right note from the opening scene and never steps wrong.

Unable to cope with life and still brutally mourning the death of her mother (Laura Dern) four years earlier, Cheryl, at 26, divorces her husband and leaves home in Minnesota, setting off for Southern California with a hulking backpack of supplies. Despite not being an experienced hiker, she immerses herself in a perilous, solitary walk—Strayed would later call it a journey of self discovery—beginning in the dangerous heat of the Mojave Desert, traversing the snowy mountains of Northern California, and finishing, ninety-four days later, in the rainy wilderness of the Oregon-Washington border.

We learn more about Cheryl’s turbulent, often agonizing past through the film’s distinctive, hypnotic use of flashbacks, which often spring suddenly from images that seem to pop up and ambush Cheryl’s mind. There’s the strong bond with her struggling but wise mother ("You've got to find your best self,” she tells Cheryl at one point, “and when you do, hold on to it for dear life"); the devastating illness that quickly and cruelly claims her mother’s life at an early age; and later, Cheryl’s self destructive plunge into a dark world of cynicism, meaningless sex and heroin use.

If some of the themes in “Wild” are about coping with grief and the fragility of life, the grueling physical journey at its center becomes the ultimate visual metaphor for Cheryl's struggle to find psychological and spiritual clarity. It’s a task she accomplishes by facing her fears on the trail, but also—in a nod to the creative process—by facing her memories through journal writing.

So much of the film is just Cheryl hiking along, breathlessly making her way along the trek, alone with her thoughts. The outdoor imagery is never less than exquisite—Vallee captures the beauty and scope of the rugged landscape with lovely and lyrical wide screen compositions—but it’s the emotions and memories (often beautiful, at times inscrutable, sometimes haunting) that make “Wild” stirring and powerfully moving.

With movies like “Legally Blonde,” Reese Witherspoon has been operating beneath her capability for a long time. But here, she fully showcases her wide range of expression—perfectly and fiercely conveying shades of contempt and desperation, vulnerability and fear, sadness and rage—in a gritty, uncompromising and brilliant performance. Those who've been waiting patiently since "Election" for her to get a role to really sink her teeth into are finally rewarded with one of the finest performances by an actress in recent memory.

“She was the love of my life,” Cheryl says to someone at one point, about the woman who was taken away from her too soon. “Wild” is a love letter to the lives of people that touch us deep enough to make us want to walk a mile, or a thousand, just to keep thinking about them.