Up in the Air 'Darkly Hilarious'

Charlize Theron stars in Jason Reitman, Diablo Cody film

(NEWSER) - Young Adult, from the writer/director team behind Juno, stars Charlize Theron as a selfish thirtysomething returning to her hometown with the belief that she can win over her high school boyfriend—who's now married with a kid. Critics love it, though it can be hard to take:

• The film "systematically demolishes a china shop full of shopworn sentimental touchstones about—for starters—high school, small-town life, heterosexuality, Minnesota, and the capacity of human beings to change, learn, and grow," notes AO Scott in a New York Times ' Critics' Pick review.

Is it a film for kids? Who cares! gush critics

(NEWSER) - Wes Anderson is winning raves for his stop-motion take on Roald Dahl's classic Fantastic Mr. Fox, with voices by a raft of stars including Meryl Streep and George Clooney:

• It's so good, David Edelstein forgot himself. When the flick ended, he writes in New York , he wished "the whole battery of gifted artists could come out and take a bow." The film "feels handmade, present, as if they’re all backstage and the curtain is going up before your eyes."

Clooney turns in top performance in military farce

(NEWSER) - The Men Who Stare at Goats, a farce loosely based on a non-fiction book about the US military's '80s effort to form a psychic unit, is wildly uneven but often hilarious, say critics.

• The "over-the-top, absurdist satire" will be "inevitably likened to Dr. Strangelove," Owen Gleiberman writes at Entertainment Weekly , "though a better comparison might be the fractious, madcap-incoherent film version of Catch-22."

Critics mixed on scary-kid horror film

(NEWSER) - Critics are divided over Orphan, a horror flick about an adopted child who makes scary things happen:

• “Actors have to eat like the rest of us, if evidently not as much, but you still have to wonder how the independent-film mainstays Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard ended up wading through Orphan and, for the most part, not laughing,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

No Country follow-up funny, but not the brothers' best

(NEWSER) - Burn After Reading is your standard Coen Brothers comedy: It’s black, clever, and zany, and David Ansen writes in Newsweek that he “enjoyed just about every heartlessly jolly minute of it.” The film is nominally a spy/thriller spoof, its sidewinder plot involving airhead gym employees trying to sell supposed secrets to the Russians. But really, it’s less a spoof than an “escalating farce of idiotic behavior” from a “cast of delusional dunces who are a wonder to behold.” More»