Imagine a team of eager magazine employees investigating a classified ad seeking a companion for time jumping (mis)adventures. Aubrey Plaza, Jake M. Johnson, Karan Soni and Mark Duplass who seems to jumping from project to project this summer (you can catch him in People Like Us and in the upcoming Your Sister’s Sister) star.   

Seth MacFarlane's new movie Ted, a live action hybrid, finds him channeling just one character, an animated teddy bear brought to life by the wish of a young boy named John Bennett (Mark Wahlberg stands in as the adult body double) who longs for a best friend, a buddy to hang onto during the thunderous storms of life or toke up and watch Flash Gordon with during all of those in-between moments.  

Lola Versus starts with such promise: Lola (Greta Gerwig), on the beach, engaging in morning yoga while through voiceover informing us about life and the changes on the horizon. In particular, she alerts us to the fact that she (like most of us) is not good with change.  

It’s been about 16 months since I met my father for the first (and what looks like only) time. It would be difficult to describe his presence in my life. For 40 years, he was an absence, a void, a ghost in the machine; one that I can’t say I missed.  

 Few films were more critically lauded last year than Aki Kaurimaki’s Le Havre, a light-hearted Finnish/French political dramedy about a young African immigrant on the run who is befriended by   

I’m sure that at some point during last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, some outlet in the world referred to Tanya Wexler’s Hysteria, which humorously probes into the birth of the vibrator, as “a feel-good” story, so I will shamelessly insert my own play on this idea. I must, because the premise simply demands this kooky kind of lowball take.   

In a remote Lebanese village (hard to believe that such out-of-the-way places actually exist), Christians and Muslims live together, side by side, working and entertaining themselves as a community that is as close as family. Boys being boys joke and cross lines that are familiar to both sides, the men drink and eye women — although there is a sense of respect and honor truly from another time.   

June 12 happens to be my stepdaughter’s birthday, but this year it takes on even greater significance to our family and thousands of other couples in the United States because it marks the 45th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision making it legal in all 50 states for couples of different races to marry and live their lives without fear of harassment from law enforcement.   

Pulp — there it is again — the good cheap stuff is back and, not surprisingly, it has found its way onto the big screen. Jo Nesbø, the Norwegian bestseller trawling these murky shores, provides the basis for a solid anchoring with Headhunters.   

I have a question for Greta Gerwig, the odd naturalistic beauty who has bounded out of the Mumblecore underworld into the bright and glaring lights of mainstream attention, while still skipping back and forth across the great divide.