The Back-up Plan
Jennifer Lopez -- making her long-overdue return to comedy after years of morose movie dramas, music videos and careful cultivation of her celebrityhood -- plays Zoe, a 30-something pet-store owner who has decided to go it alone when it comes to having a baby. Alex O'Loughlin ( Whiteout) co-stars as Stan, the pushy-charming cheese merchant she keeps bumping into. Director Alan Poul, a TV vet ( Big Love, Swingtown), commendably makes the most of what he has to work with. That would be Lopez -- who is gorgeous, a little overdressed for a Manhattan pet-store owner and properly comically nonplussed -- and some of her supporting players plus the film's occasional can't-miss funny scene. But for all the profanity (quite a bit) and sexual sass, The Back-up Plan plays like a TV movie, and there isn't much chemistry between the leads. In wide release.
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
One of this year's nominees for the Best Documentary Oscar, The Most Dangerous Man in America doesn't strive for the complexity of Errol Morris' The Fog of War (2003), a film that brilliantly used an interview with former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as the springboard for an analysis of a century's worth of American foreign policy. Still, directors Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith nonetheless serve up a stimulating history lesson about Ellsberg, a former McNamara protégé, who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers to Congress and to dozens of newspapers -- and brought to light America's secret history of involvement with Vietnam. At the Magnolia in Dallas.
