THE PROMOTION (2008), R, 85 Mins.

Seann William Scott and John C. Reilly play Doug and Richard, a couple of regular guys eagerly seeking the same grocery store management job in The Promotion, which is a much more subtle comedy than you might expect from them. I’m glad to see a comedy come along that doesn’t rely on toilet humor and doesn’t star a lot of cardboard characters but real people, even though both of the main stars may be best known for playing cardboard caricatures.

Both have real families and real problems, real needs to get the job managing a new supermarket and, best of all, they like each other. It’s two guys in a healthy competition with each other, there are no bad guys. Both are trying to get ahead in the cut-throat business world, but neither feels comfortable with the back-stabbing and betrayal that such progress so often requires. This takes a bit away from a winner-take-all conclusion but for a better story like this, that seems like a worthwhile sacrifice.

MARRIED LIFE (2007), Crime/Drama/Romance, PG-13, 90 mins.

A 1940’s-set drama about a man with a truly twisted sense of moral logic. Rather than put his wife through the humiliation of a divorce because of his own adultery, he instead plots to kill her. Harry and Pat have what their friends call a “good marriage,” but he has fallen out of love with her and into love with a younger woman. Richard, played by Pierce Brosnan, is Harry’s best friend, and manages to fall for the same woman, leaving him with the difficult choice of marrying the first woman he has ever considered tying the knot with (he compares marriage to getting the flu) and betraying his best friend, or letting her go and allowing Harry to go through with his dark plan.

Harry’s stark determination is more than a little disturbing, not the least reason for which is because he tests out his murderous scheme in advance by trying it out on the dog. The destruction of innocence around him tells us a lot about Harry, and it reveals the movie as more of a character-driven drama than a film noir or thriller. It’s an interesting exploration of a major part of our modern social culture and poses the important question of how much you really know the person who sleeps next to you. If nothing else, be suspicious of mysterious pet deaths!

THEN SHE FOUND ME (2008), Comedy/Drama/Romance, R, 100 mins.

Then She Found Me has a plot that makes me think of a screenwriter with a lot of ideas trying to squeeze as many of them into the same movie as possible. A New York schoolteacher’s life is turned upside down as, in quick succession, her husband leaves her, her adoptive mother dies, and her biological mother shows up in her life and tries to begin a relationship with her, at the same time as she is beginning a romantic relationship with the father of one of her students.

But despite having a thick and seemingly interesting plot, the movie was a bit of a critical failure, so beware. Helen Hunt stars and directs, and the movie also boasts a surprisingly long list of good actors, including Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler and Colin Firth. It’s a tearjerker to say the least, and the plot thickening seems endless. Bette Midler plays the biological mother, who chooses this difficult time to reintroduce herself into April’s (Hunt) life, and an intense session of “goodbye sex” with her husband on his way out the door results in an unplanned pregnancy which introduces all manner of new problems into her quickly transforming life.

REPRISE (2008), Drama, R, 105 mins.

Joachim Trier’s Reprise is an engaging exploration of the transition between the hopeful and dream-filled time of youth and the crash into reality as adulthood begins with shocking speed. The movie starts off with 20-year-olds Phillip and Erik mailing off their debut novels and dreaming of exciting careers as cult authors, and deals with the issues that they encounter when one becomes somewhat successful but suffers a nervous breakdown, while the other has a harder time selling his novel and has to balance his determination and drive to succeed with the fact that his role model is deteriorating before his eyes.

This is writer/director Trier’s third film, and it won several national awards in his native Norway.