Our Idiot Brother
Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel, Emily Mortimer
In any other hands, this script would be unbearably sentimental and predictable, but the expert cast, which also includes Adam Scott, Rashida Jones, and Steve Coogan, plays the material so well they distract you from those flaws (for the most part). Rudd stars as a kind of holy fool whose radical honesty and faith in others disrupts—but ultimately refocuses!—the disordered lives of his three sisters when he asks for their help after his release from prison. (He went to the slam for selling weed to a policeman. A uniformed policeman.) It’s formulaic, but the stars deliver enough winning moments to keep things afloat.—John Bolster
