Maya Rudolph

‘Sisters’ delivers plenty of huge laughs and is required viewing for fans of slob comedies

It’s not just that Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies tend to defy any one genre description; it’s that, often, it seems as if the writer-director is trying to play with many genres simultaneously. The only reason that Boogie Nights isn’t the best drama of the 1990s is that it spends a lot of time trying to be the best comedy of the 1990s instead. So Anderson’s newest, Inherent Vice, is a departure in that it mostly sticks to one style (sun-drenched film noir) and one tone (absurdist comedy). It’s also a fine film, which suffers only when measured against the insanely high standard that Anderson’s past work has set.

Even if you were not around during the 1970s, Inherent Vice comes across as a faded, nostalgic memory. Being a faithful adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel, the film recounts the dying days of the free love era, laced with the look, feel and paraphernalia of the subculture. Anderson’s comedic thriller peppers itself with restless, almost out of place laughter, while dedicating itself to the themes of the early Seventies. One is reminded of private-eye classics such as Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, with traces of Zucker-Abrahams comedies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun. For many, the homage to 1970s filmmaking will be a very real and thrilling look down memory lane. For others, it’ll be a history lesson like no other found in modern day filmmaking.

Friends with Kids Written by Jennifer Westfeldt Directed by Jennifer Westfeldt USA, 2011 There’s nothing more irritating than a pretender. Jennifer Westfeldt’s second feature as writer-director, over a decade after Kissing Jessica Stein, wants so badly to be construed as a transgressive anti-rom-com that subverts the norms of screen romance and family dynamics that it’s …

Away We Go Directed by Sam Mendes Give Sam Mendes credit – at least he’s finding new ways to make less-than-satisfying films. From the leaden, humorless graphic novel adaptation Road to Perdition, to last year’s hopelessly shrill Revolutionary Road, to this year’s comparatively light road movie Away We Go, Mendes’ troubles at least variate. Away …