Jennifer Garner glows like a rising star in 13 Going On 30, a girly version of the Tom Hanks classic Big. Jenna (Garner, Alias, Daredevil), a frustrated teenage girl, just wants to skip past all those annoying adolescent years and arrive at a glamorous adulthood--and thanks to some inexplicable wishing dust, she does.
Screenwriters rarely develop a distinctive voice that can be recognized from movie to movie, but the ornate imagination of Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) has made him a unique and much-needed cinematic presence. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a guy decides to have the memories of his ex-girlfriend erased after she's had him erased from her own memory--but midway through the procedure, he changes his mind and struggles to hang on to their experiences together.
An ingeniously campy and enormously entertaining piece of fluff, View from the Top stars the impossibly lithe Gwyneth Paltrow as Donna, a white-trash girl with dreams of escaping her dead-end life by becoming an international flight attendant. Her destiny is complicated by a sweet guy (Mark Ruffalo) who just wants to live with his family in Cleveland and by a sister stewardess (Christina Applegate) who stabs Donna in the back.
Collateral offers a change of pace for Tom Cruise as a ruthless contract killer, but that's just one of many reasons to recommend this well-crafted thriller. It's from Michael Mann, after all, and the director's stellar track record with crime thrillers (Thief, Manhunter, and especially Heat) guarantees a rich combination of intelligent plotting, well-drawn characters, and escalating tension, beginning here when icy hit-man Vincent (Cruise) recruits cab driver Max (Jamie Foxx) to drive him through a nocturnal tour of Los Angeles, during which he will execute five people in a 10-hour spree.
