Smart, Patchy, Sweet 'Crazy, Stupid, Love' Cooper times two adds exponentially to Iraq-set 'Devil's Double'; 'Cowboys' is the bad and the dreary By JOE MORGENSTERN Watch a clip of "Crazy, Stupid, Love" starring Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Julianne Moore. A romantic comedy of intertwined lives, overlapping dialogue and multiple themes—no wonder the filmmakers had their well-publicized problems finding a title—"Crazy, Stupid, Love" has more naked contrivances than naked bodies. (It's actually quite innocent, despite a facade of edgy sophistication.) For all its implausible twists and turns, though, the film, which was directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, fills its scenes with bright surprises while making an appealing new case for the old-fashioned notion of soul mates. The precipitating event is an unmating. After two decades of ostensibly happy marriage, Cal Weaver (Steve Carell), an earnest suburbanite for whom stylish leisure wear means New Balance sneakers, discovers that his wife, Emily (Julianne Moore), has been unfaithful and wants a divorce. That promises fidelity to a formulaic plot, and to Mr. Carell's familiar wistfulness. But Dan Fogelman's script takes an abrupt turn to a trendy club where a younger and supremely self- assured womanizer named Jacob (Ryan Gosling) takes pity on the verbosely morose Cal, enlists him as his wingman, sets out to make him over into a stud and instructs him in the not-so- niceties of the dating game. Why would Jacob do this? Don't ask. If he didn't there'd be no movie, and no pretext for him pursuing one of the movie's main themes: "I'm going to help you rediscover your manhood," he announces to Cal. Warner Bros. Pictures Kevin Bacon, John Carroll Lynch, Ryan Gosling and Steve Carell in 'Crazy, Stupid, Love.' You'd expect Mr. Carell to be funny in the pick-up attempts that ensue, and he certainly is. The revelation is Mr. Gosling's comic chops, which come with a gift for tossing off smart lines at impressively high speed. Better still, he finds his perfect counterpart in Emma Stone, who was sensational as the self-ironic star of "Easy A" and is equally so this time in a smaller role that she transforms into a very big deal. She plays Hannah, a young woman seemingly set to become one more of Jacob's conquests until they repair to his elegant home. Then they share their huge pleasure with each other in an extended sequence that feeds on the logic of love and grows into the film's scintillating centerpiece. Apart from that sequence, with its slow build and lovely development, "Crazy, Stupid, Love" feeds on the logic of a patchwork quilt—exuberant set pieces, punchy vignettes, life lessons (seize the initiative, be true to yourself, fight for what you want) and secret loves that reveal themselves in a climax crazed by design and chaotic beyond measure. Yet the movie also fights for what it wants—to touch us in the course of entertaining us —and it succeeds, with its zinger-studded script that transcends clumsy mechanics and a spirited cast that includes Marisa Tomei as a nymphomaniacal middle-school teacher, and Jonah Bobo as a lovesick eighth-grader. I checked to see if Master Bobo is really as young as his character, and indeed he is, but you'd never know it from his performance, which is eerily witty and scarily wise. 'The Devil's Double' Watch a clip of "Devil's Double" about the man who was forced to become the double of Saddam Hussein's son. A special pleasure of the movie medium is watching actors play double or multiple roles: Lee Marvin in "Cat Ballou," Jeremy Irons in "Dead Ringers," Peter Sellers doing three characters in "Dr. Strangelove," Alec Guinness doing eight in "Kind Hearts and Coronets"—the list is long and goes back to the movies' earliest days. In this latest example, Dominic Cooper is both Uday Hussein, the notorious (and happily dead) son of the Iraqi dictator, and Uday's former classmate, Latif Yahia, a peaceable Iraqi army lieutenant forced into soul-smothering servitude as Uday's "fiday," or body double. The dual aspect of Mr. Cooper's performance is immensely enjoyable, and the film, directed by Lee Tamahori—from Michael Thomas's adaptation of an autobiographical book by Mr. Yahia—leaves no doubt about Uday's vileness. Its star creates a new pinup for the gallery of human perversion, a coke-snorting psychopath with a piping voice who fairly vibrates with delight at the depth of his own depravity. Lionsgate Entertainment Dominic Cooper in 'The Devil's Double.' That's the constant in Uday's psyche, even though his mood may change from one second to the next. Instead of evil's banality, Mr. Cooper gives us the elation generated by Uday's unmoored id as he plucks innocent schoolgirls off a Baghdad street, defiles a bride on her wedding day or slaughters his father's whoremaster in a delirium of displaced rage. Those who admired Mr. Cooper's work as Peter Sarsgaard's dashing friend and business partner in "An Education"—I called it "a supporting performance with star quality"—could not have imagined his achievement here. His remarkable range includes the subtlety of his scenes as Latif as well as Uday's malign flamboyance. (Saddam Hussein appears occasionally, making oracular pronouncements, then vanishes.) "You are asking me to extinguish myself," Latif tells Uday at the outset. That's true enough, though Latif tries to function as the conscience of the unconscionable man he has the bad luck to resemble. But far from extinguishment, Latif also starts to feel—from the first moment he bursts out of a hotel room in Uday's character—the liberation that amorality can bring. The movie isn't deep, or particularly intricate; it doesn't play all that much with the potential for mistaken identities, and the cruelty it depicts becomes repetitive or, worse still, desensitizing. But "The Devil's Double" does give us indelible images of Uday's decadence—the filmmakers say they're understated—and a double dip of dazzling acting. 'Cowboys & Aliens' Watch a clip of Universal Pictures' "Cowboys and Aliens". For the first half-hour, this misbegotten mash-up of movie genres sticks to its six-shooters. A stranger comes to town in the Wild West of the late 19th century, a mysterious and imposing stranger played by Daniel Craig. He must have a name but he can't remember it, or anything else; his mind has been mysteriously wiped clean. Speaking barely above a whisper, he evokes Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name. But he's a man with no charm in a movie with no verve, whether it's poking along in joyless homage to classic Westerns, or losing its way amid digital swarms of generic extraterrestrials who've made a home base on the range while they plunder our planet's gold. (Jon Favreau, who mined rich veins of humor in the first "Iron Man," directed from a script that five writers adapted from a comic book.) Cowboys versus aliens is a concept that may make you smile in anticipation, but wipe that smile off your face before buying your ticket, because the film takes its subject seriously—deadly seriously in the case of Harrison Ford, who plays a nasty rancher with the snarls and scowls that have become his trademarks, as if in penance for being so charming in the past. One interesting twist has a posse of cowboys teaming up with the Apaches they fear in order to vanquish the aliens, but the storytelling, punctuated by incoherent flashbacks, is often inscrutable: I'm still trying to figure out which side of the cosmos gave birth to the woman played by Olivia Wilde. You'll be glad to know that the good guys win, though you may be offended, as I was, by the misplaced homage of the aliens' rocket, which blows up during a hasty departure. Its jagged trail precisely mimics the smoke plume from space shuttle Challenger's doomed flight. 'Point Blank' Watch a clip from "Point Blank" a French chase movie set in the subways and streets of Paris. If you lop off the closing credits of Fred Cavayé's preposterously exciting—and pleasingly preposterous—French-language thriller, the running time is a mere 80 minutes. Not since "Run Lola Run" has the term been used more aptly. Throughout "Point Blank," which starts with men running, men plus at least one female cop run around and beneath the streets of Paris at a frantic pace. One of the two main runners is Samuel (Gilles Lellouche), a hospital nurse's aide studying for his nursing certificate. Thanks to his not-so-random act of kindness—saving a patient's life— Samuel's pregnant wife is kidnapped and he must find her before she's killed. His companion, a criminal named Sartet, is played by Roschdy Zem, a powerful actor I first admired in Rachid Bouchareb's "Days of Glory." What links them is too intricate to explain here, and why, in any case, wouldn't you want to find out on your own? Suffice it to say that the two men need one another—think "The Defiant Ones" without chains—and the climactic chase is complicated by a city-wide crime wave that turns into a crime tsunami. Watch a clip from "Life in a Day" a documentary compiled from footage shot all around the world depicting life on July 24, 2010. 'Life in a Day' Kevin Macdonald's documentary imposes a semblance of unity on a planet of unfathomable diversity.