IDENTITY THIEF

Near the very start of the Jason Bateman/Melissa McCarthy comedy Identity Thief, Bateman's character, the mild-mannered businessman Sandy Patterson, is enjoying a birthday party thrown by his wife (Amanda Peet) and two adorable daughters. After blowing out his birthday candles, Sandy scoops his younger daughter in the air - she looks about four or five - and, in what seems like a totally improvised gesture, turns her upside down, playfully plopping her face-first into the cake. The whole family laughs, but no one laughs harder than that cake-smeared little girl, who takes a second to wipe frosting from her eyes and mouth before exclaiming, to our utter delight, "Oh my God!"

Just thought I'd share that in case you were curious about the movie's funny moments, because for me, that was the only one.

EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE

The protagonist of director Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - based on Jonathan Safran Foer's famed 9/11/01-themed novel and adapted by screenwriter Eric Roth - is Oskar Schell, an 11-year-old Manhattanite who tells a new acquaintance that he was once tested for Asperger's syndrome, but that "the results weren't definitive." My first thought upon hearing that admission was that Oskar's folks really should've sought a second opinion, because with young actor Thomas Horn tearing through breathless reams of stream-of-consciousness dialogue, his condition seemed definitive as all-get-out. My second thought, which I only fully composed during the end credits, and which I apologize for in advance, was that watching Extremely Loud was like watching a movie while an 11-year-old with Asperger's yammers in your ear for 130 minutes.

A young man sits in his living room, in a large, inviting house that, as we'll learn, is located in the small town of Perry, Iowa. He practices a quiet melody on his guitar, occasionally glancing at his handwritten sheet music for a song titled "Last Looks." It's a sunny day in late afternoon, and both the man and his surroundings exude an air of utter, unalterable calm, a feeling only briefly disrupted by the sound of a plane passing overhead. Well, that and the faraway screaming.

THE INFORMANT!

The film's madcap trailers -- to say nothing of the exclamation point in the title -- don't accurately capture the tone of Steven Soderbergh's The Informant! But I'll be damned if I know what kind of trailers would suggest the feel of this altogether remarkable corporate comedy, which starts off amusingly arch, becomes more funny and fascinating as it progresses, and winds up flat-out hysterical, with your laughter tempered by righteous anger, unanticipated pity, and stunned disbelief.