NO STRINGS ATTACHED ★★★ OUT OF FOUR STARS
Rated: R for sexual content, language and some drug material.
Ivan Reitman -- whose directing career ("Ghostbusters") is so long in the tooth that he actually has a son, Jason, directing Oscar-worthy comedies -- has his best outing in decades with "No Strings Attached," an amusing flip of the "friends with benefits" romantic comedy formula.
It's a movie benefiting from another sparkling and sexy performance by Natalie Portman, some clever turns in situations and witty banter that isn't shy about crossing over into "Hangover"-level raunchy.
Super-smart Emma met hunky-needy Adam at summer camp, way back when, and they had a momentary fling. Ten years later, they meet again and the pretty, flirty Emma (Portman) invites Adam to "this thing" she has to go to. It's her dad's funeral. But dopey-handsome Adam (Ashton Kutcher, NOT cast against type) doesn't hear the "She's cut off from her emotions" warning bells. Another chance encounter years later leads to an exchange of phone numbers.
And then, that magical night when the boy drunk-dials the girl and something begins. But don't call it a thoroughly modern romance. Emma, now an MIT-trained doctor, won't have that. She's busy. She's guarded. And she's interested in sex -- somebody "in my bed at 2 a.m." -- and nothing more.
They have their romps, but snuggling and the like -- real intimacy -- scares her off. So for Adam, the chase is on.
Portman, almost certainly an Oscar nominee if not winner for "Black Swan," carries this movie with her warmth and her wicked way with an incredibly crude come-on. Kutcher is better at bringing the funny than in carrying the emotional weight. Reitman didn't suddenly evolve into a warmer, deeper filmmaker, either.
ROGER MOORE, ORLANDO SENTINEL
nÉnette ★★★ 1/2 out of four stars • Not rated. Theater: Lagoon.
A child's voice whispers "Nénette!," and immediately we are in the patient and curious world of the French filmmaker Nicolas Philibert. Best known in the United States for "To Be and to Have" -- his captivating 2002 portrait of a rural schoolteacher -- Philibert has switched his gaze to a primate with rather less agency: a 40-year-old female orangutan in the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.
That gaze never wavers. "Nénette" is a film devoid of human faces, the camera merging with the more than half-million visitors who traipse past the orangutan's cage every year. We hear their voices, these mothers and children and couples, their words revealing the complexity of our relationship to caged wildlife. Is Nénette depressed, they wonder, or just lonely?
Quiet and watchful, the object of their fascination leans on her gnarled knuckles, straw clinging to her mat of ginger hair. She arrived from Borneo in 1972, has survived three mates and produced four offspring. Once she was lively ("the bane of the place," says an older zookeeper); now she looks passive and glum, quieted by age and arthritis. Or something else.
Beautiful in its minimalism, "Nénette" is no antizoo rant but a melancholy meditation on captivity. Nénette may be better off than her endangered kin, but as we watch her delicately pour tea into a yogurt container, that knowledge gives us small comfort.
Yet Nénette is loved, with some people stopping by every day. A keeper likens them to those visiting a relative in prison -- which, when you come to think of it, is exactly what they are doing.
JEANNETTE CATSOULIS, NEW YORK TIMES
