At the movies: Ant-Man.

Paul Rudd is Ant-Man. Peyton Reed does a good job, but we're all a little disappointed that we couldn't see the full-on Edgar Wright vision.

At the movies: I Love You, Man.

As an L.A. realtor Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) gets closer to his upcoming wedding, he realizes he has no male friends, an imbalance which he seeks to remedy when he meets Sydney (Jason Segel). As the two develop a friendship, Peter discovers a whole new world, especially when it comes to dealing with his wife-to-be's reaction.

Rudd and Segel were comic gold in last year's Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and both have been A-list material in the recent wave of big-ticket R-rated comedies, so pairing the two in this film is a given. Add in the fact that director/co-writer John Hamburg (who made the masterpiece Safe Men) and you have a recipe for greatness, though one that feels a little compromised in tone, hinting at perhaps a stranger, less audience-friendly incarnation in an earlier cut/draft.

The only weak note in the film is Andy Samberg, playing the kind of homewrecking stereotype that gives gay men a bad name. He is fortunately counterbalanced by a exceptional Thomas Lennon, who brings some dignity to what could have been demeaningly stereotyped.

If I Love You, Man doesn't quite hit the heights of Forgetting Sarah Marshall or explore the weird tangents of Role Models, it's still a delightful film, and it's anchored by an exceptional Rudd performance, easily one of the finest of the year. And what Role Models did for Kiss, this film doesn for Rush. Proceed accordingly.

At the movies: Role Models.

Director/co-writer David Wain, responsible for Wet Hot American Summer, The Ten, and a founding member of sketch comedy godhead The State, has exactly the right approach for the material. The story outline of the film sounds like something we as the audience feel that we’ve already seen at some point, so he and the cast make a point of changing things up; going for character-based comedy rather than pratfalls and visual puns.

Paul Rudd has been the go-to guy for supporting greatness in comedies for several years now, and he steps up to the lead with a hard-won sense of timing. He could have vaulted up into superstardom after 1995’s Clueless, where he actually served as a funny romantic lead, but instead worked his way up through riff-y supporting roles over the intervening years in Wain’s previous two films and much of comedy multihyphenate Judd Apatow’s recent work. So he brings to the film an absolute absence of vanity and a willingness to shun traditional likability, and it pays up immensely. It’s rare that we get this kind of emotional complexity in a comic lead. Seann William Scott’s Wheeler could have easily been Stifler Part II, but instead we’re given a libidinous partyboy who has achieved an almost Zenlike state of being. All that jock/fratboy energy that poisoned his American Pie character here becomes liberatingly sleazy, and he rebounds from Southland Tales into something a bit different for him. I would never have said that KISS embodied a philosophy before, but now, after viewing this film, I’m not sure I can be so certain.

The two kids that Danny and Wheeler find themselves mentoring get huge laughs just through course of action. Augie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse a/k/a McLovin from Superbad) is a Live Action Role-Playing enthusiast who rejects much of the awkwardness in which he finds himself, and Ronnie (Bobb’e Johnson, finding new ground to explore in the ‘foul-mouthed child’ archetype) has abandonment issues and delights in burning through assigned mentors. The always-great Jane Lynch pops up periodically as the chief administrator of Sturdy Wings program, and most of the time she’s brilliant, though occasionally she’ll hammer away at a line for longer than necessary. Who would have thought that 2008 was going to be the year that Elizabeth Banks became gloriously inescapable? With this, she gives her third great performance of the year (complementing both Zack and Miri Make a Porno and her well-drawn Laura Bush in W.), taking a small character and making it feel like more.

Role Models is an exceptionally satisfying comedy, but one that does so in unexpected ways. Brazenly filthy but also disarmingly sweet, we have here the first date movie/dude movie hybrid of the season.