Audio commentary

Debra Messing (TV's Will & Grace) shines in this hilarious romantic comedy about the surprising road to finding true love. Kat Ellis (Messing) is determined to attend her younger sister's wedding with a date. Rather than face the ridicule of her family and in order to show up her ex-fiance, she resorts to the Yellow Pages to find a last-minute escort, Nick (Dermot Mulroney, My Best Friend's Wedding). His dashing good looks and quick-witted charm may win over her family. But will they win over Kat?

Hacker/arcade owner Kevin Flynn is digitally broken down into a data stream by a villainous software pirate known as Master Control and reconstituted into the internal, 3-D graphical world of computers. It is there, in the ultimate blazingly colorful, geometrically intense landscapes of cyberspace, that Flynn joins forces with Tron to outmaneuver the Master Control Program that holds them captive in the equivalent of a gigantic, infinitely challenging computer game.

Everyone loves musical smackdowns--and Pitch Perfect is full of great ones. Pitch Perfect is like Bring It On crossed with the Step Up movies, flavored with a heavy dose of TV's Glee and the Straight No Chaser boys. All of this is set appealingly on a college campus, with charming actors and a very funny script that will entertain fans, truly, from 10 to 90. The plot in Pitch Perfect follows the character of college freshman Beca (a delightful Anna Kendrick) as she decides to join her school's a cappella women's singing group.

Are all relationships based on lies? Jake Bianski runs a fish market in north Boston, surrounded by Italians. For years, he's carried a torch for Isabella, an ex-girlfriend now married with three children and no interest in Jake. Yet, he tells everyone she's his girlfriend, including Marisa, a veterinarian his employees set him up with at the Italian singles club. She's interested in him until he tells her about his girlfriend, then he's persistent in asking her to be his friend.

The "cell phone thriller" is becoming a genre unto itself, and Eagle Eye should be considered a key example of the form. Frankly preposterous but compulsively watchable, this movie puts Shia LaBeouf in a mess of trouble instigated by a mysterious telephone voice. If he doesn't follow orders, dire things will happen--although when he does follow orders, the consequences are pretty dire, anyway. Also being blackmailed is a single mom (Michelle Monaghan) receiving similar phone calls.

Director Paul Greengrass has made a career out of not holding back, with a series of films (including United 93 and The Bourne Supremacy/Ultimatum) that forcibly propel the audience out of bystander mode and into a visceral duck-and-cover reaction. (If he were a history teacher, his students would constantly be picking old gum out of their hair.) Captain Phillips, Greengrass's collaboration with a rarely better Tom Hanks, shows the filmmaker further refining his style, telling a true-life story of heroism with an immediacy that puts most movies based on fact out to staid pasture.

The dazzling Bollywood superstar Tannishtha Chatterjee shines in the British film Brick Lane, based on the best-selling novel by Monica Ali. The film is true to the delicately nuanced novel, which tells the story of a young Bangladeshi girl's being married off to a young man living in England--sight unseen. The heroine, Nazneen, as played by Chatterjee, is humble and obedient, and if mildly unhappy in her new life, she's loath to be vocal about it.

The buzz around The Green Hornet comes from the collision of weird talents involved: Seth Rogen plays the crime-fighting hero and writes the movie with his Superbad bud Evan Goldberg; pop star Jay Chou plays Kato; and the whimsy-headed Michel Gondry directs. Toss in Inglourious Basterds Oscar winner Christoph Waltz as a super-villain highly self-conscious about his brand, and you've got a blockbuster that definitely isn't going for the normal.

It's delightful to see Meryl Streep come into her own as a romantic comedian in her later career years--after all the accolades, the Oscars, the serious-as-marble dramatic roles. Streep is in fact a true cutup, as she has demonstrated in films like Mamma Mia and Julie & Julia--and she gets the guy. So if Nancy Meyers's It's Complicated is perhaps a bit facile in the plot department, it's saved by a splendid romp of a performance by Streep (as Jane), along with her two leading men, Alec Baldwin (Jane's ex-husband, Jake) and Steve Martin (her supposed boyfriend, Adam).

In 2005, the only thing hurting Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez more than his face from a recent bike accident was his pressing need for story ideas. That is when he discovers Nathaniel Ayers, a mentally ill, homeless street musician who possesses extraordinary talent, even through his half-broken instruments. Inspired by his story, Lopez writes an acclaimed series of articles about Ayers and attempts to do more to help both him and the rest of the underclass of LA have a better life.