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Jeff Daniels is interviewed in the current issue of Esquire, where he made an important point about the difference between the way a character actor and a star approach a role.

Stars like to be likable. The Squid and the Whale is a perfect example. You get to the end scene, and that's the point where the star turns to Noah Baumbach, the director, and says, "You know what'd be good? If I had a speech, heart-to-heart, a lot of tears. I've actually written something you might like." It happens all the time. Noah and I -- never. Not a word. If the guy's got flaws, wear them on your sleeve. And stars don't like to do that. And they're paying you $20 million to do that thing you did that America loves, now just do it for them. It's true.

Dana Stevens liked "Year One" more than I did and she nailed the Black-Cera chemistry with this beautifully written assessment:

[Michael Cera] has a way of stepping on the very end of Black's lines with quickly blurted put-downs that gets me every time; it's the comedy of passive-aggression, a tart counterpoint to Black's oleaginous self-assurance. Cera's critics complain that he always plays the same role, but I've said it before and I'll say it again: We need Michael Cera to keep being Michael Cera. Nobody else knows how.

Will Smith's latest got only a few positive reviews, 29% according to Rotten Tomatoes. One was from USA Today, where Claudia Puig said, "Concerned with how people overcome trauma and tragedy, the film focuses on universal themes of loss, forgiveness and redemption. While it doesn't break any new ground or provide any revelations, Seven Pounds is unabashedly emotional and cautiously hopeful. It's the feel-good movie for these feel-bad times."

But it most critics placed it somewhere between "feel bad" and "feel furious" and the frustration of writing about what they did not like without giving away the ending had some of them just about foaming at the mouth. SPOILER ALERT -- DO NOT READ IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW THE ENDING It is clear from the very beginning of the film that Smith's character will at least attempt to commit suicide and that he is preparing to make a great sacrifice to benefit seven people he considers deserving, including a character with a congenital heart defect played by Rosario Dawson. It turns out that he carelessly caused a traffic accident (don't text and drive, my friends) that killed seven people, including his wife. At the end of the film, after giving up a lung, a part of his liver, his bone marrow (with no anesthetic), and his beach house, Smith's character kills himself so that he can give up his heart and corneas. This is Puig's idea of a feel-good movie?

I would not go as far as the New York Times' A.O. Scott, who called it "among the most transcendently, eye-poppingly, call-your-friend-ranting-in-the-middle-of-the-night-just-to-go-over-it-one-more-time crazily awful motion pictures ever made." But I see his point. Scott Foundas of The Village Voice called it "a morbid morality play that rivals The Reader for the bottom spot in this season's celluloid martyrdom derby" and "dispiritingly obvious and phony from top to bottom." It is not the obviousness and phoniness and manipulation that bothers me as much as the clueless and even condescending immorality of it. No one thinks that suicide, even to benefit others, is a legitimately redemptive act and it is contemptible and irresponsible of the movie to suggest otherwise.

"Slumdog Millionaire" is a Dickensian story of orphans in India. The movie is not for everyone. It combines the most harrowing abuse, betrayal, and tragedy with a piercingly romantic fairy tale. It is the story of a young man who is accused of cheating when he wins "Who Wants to Be a Millionare?" because he has no education and lives in the slums. In flashbacks that reveal his whole life to that point we learn how he knew the answer to each question. The movie has one of the most transcendently romantic moments of the year and concludes with a rousing dance number under the closing credits.

Mark Jenkins has an illuminating interview with director Danny Boyle ("Trainspotting," "28 Days Later," "Millions"), putting this film in the context of favored Boyle themes like sudden riches and the guerrilla filming style in the streets of Mumbai (Bombay).

Jenkins: How difficult was it to shoot in Bombay's slums?

Boyle: The slums are great! You have to contact the right people to go in there, but once we were there and got to know the people, they're extraordinary. They're so resourceful, considering how little they're given by the state. There's no toilets, there's no running water, no electricity. It looks filthy and disgusting, and it is around the edges, but you go in the homes and they're absolutely spotless.

I think the energy of the film is a tribute to the slums. Everybody imagines people just hanging around, sleeping in the sun and not working. They're incredibly industrious! Working in these cottage industries, and trading. That's why they don't want to move out of these places. Because the land is so valuable now, the municipal councils want to move them out to these tower blocks they built in New Mumbai. But they don't want to go there. They do forcibly move them, but the people come back. They want to live amongst their own kind. Because what they get from their own kind more than compensates for the bricks and mortar that's on offer out there. To be in the hub of the city, the maximum city, is priceless.

And Chris Orr's superb review of the film appears in "The New Republic."

Working from a script by Simon Beaufoy ("The Full Monty"), Boyle stages every scene with verve and brio, confidently flashing forward and back from Jamal's boyhood to his quiz-show appearance to his mid-game interrogation by a police inspector (Irrfan Khan) who suspects him of cheating. Throughout it all, cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle's camera bounces giddily through the tin-roofed shanties of Mumbai, while Indian superstar A.R. Rahman's soundtrack throbs seductively. Not since Fernando Mireille's "City of God" has a film about poverty and violence been told with such extraordinary panache.

A beautiful tribute to book, television, and movie critic John Leonard in Salon has this lovely quote from him about the books he loved:

My whole life I have been waving the names of writers. From these writers, for almost 50 years, I have received narrative, witness, companionship, sanctuary, shock, and steely strangeness; good advice, bad news, deep chords, hurtful discrepancy, and amazing grace...The books we love, love us back. In gratitude, we should promise not to cheat on them -- not to pretend we're better than they are; not to use them as target practice, agitprop, trampolines, photo ops or stalking horses; not to sell out scruple to that scratch-and-sniff infotainment racket in which we posture in front of experience instead of engaging it, and fidget in our cynical opportunism for an angle, a spin, or a take, instead of consulting compass points of principle, and strike attitudes like matches, to admire our wiseguy profiles in the mirrors of the slicks. We are reading for our lives, not performing like seals for some fresh fish.

"When I first started acting, I thought it was about the best liar. I thought the best liar was the best actor. But it's the best truth-teller. To find the truth on those pages of black and white and to...

Movie review from Dana Stevens of Slate: Neither satire nor biopic, the film is a kind of secular pageant, enacting with dogged literality the well-known stations of the cross of Bush's life: the 40th-birthday hangover-turned-religious-conversion! The near-asphyxiation by pretzel! Mission...

Dana Stevens of Slate gets a little meta on "Body of Lies:" Certain moments are contractually required to happen in a movie like this: Camels will plod across the horizon as a woman's voice wails in Arabic on the soundtrack....

I love New York Times critic A.O. Scott's review of this movie, my favorite romantic comedy of the year so far by far. Scott beautifully captures the charm of this lovely film. As thin as an iPod Nano, as full...

One of the most thoughtful and knowledgeable movie critics I know, Desson Thomson, appeared on NPR's "Weekend Edition" this week to talk to Scott Simon about what ties "Dark Knight" and the new documentary "American Teen" together -- the way...

I often say that when movies are good, critics are very, very good, but when movies are bad, they're better. It is a challenge sometimes to write an interesting, meaningful review of a dumb comedy like Step Brothers. One of...

The Dark Knight has inspired some very thoughtful reviews. Anonymous DC critic "J.J." wrote that the film moved him to tears: Perhaps it's because the film has characters I grew to care about, scenes that soaked my heart in adrenaline...

I love to read other critics' reviews. When movies are good, they're very, very good, but when movies are bad, they're better. Paris Hilton's new movie, The Hottie & the Nottie at least inspired two of my favorite critics and...