To be released tomorrow on DVD

Greenberg is about embracing the life you never planned on — albeit awkwardly and with a flurry of caveats and complaints. It may not appeal to those seeking escape or non-stop action. But for those looking for realistic, complex characters coping with believable emotional hurdles, this is an unexpected gem.

Director Noah Baumbach wrote a perceptive slice-of-life script from a story he conceived with his wife, actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. As with his sharply observed The Squid and the Whale in 2005, Baumbach finds humor and pathos in a smart, neurotic and self-involved character. Ben Stiller is superb as the curmudgeonly Roger Greenberg, a character who is light-years away from most of Stiller’s comic foils.

Roger is 40ish and riding out an especially virulent midlife crisis. He leaves his New York existence to house-sit at the Hollywood Hills home of his brother Philip (Chris Messina), who is on an extended vacation with his wife and two children. Roger brings his New York state of mind to Los Angeles. Though raised in Southern California, he refuses to drive and mistrusts most people. He stays primarily inside his brother’s sprawling house, keeping an eye on the family’s German shepherd, Mahler, and venturing out sporadically to build a doghouse or pick up groceries.

Florence (a pitch-perfect Greta Gerwig) works for Philip and has promised to look in on the dog. She’s 25, an aspiring singer and as open-hearted and accepting as Roger is cantankerous and edgy. But both are supremely ill at ease. When Florence and Roger connect romantically, it’s in clumsy fits and starts. Stiller and Gerwig are terrific together.

Disarmingly honest, Florence has an inherent goodness about her. Roger, on the other hand, is mercurial and given to bouts of both cruelty and sweetness. When he’s not lackadaisically building Mahler’s doghouse, he’s firing off angry letters to everyone from American Airlines to Starbucks, railing against ineptitude and general corporate policies.

Rhys Ifans is also excellent as Ivan, Roger’s passive but slightly more mature best friend. Their friendship is focused on shared history, so when they finally delve below the surface, moving observations bubble up.

Baumbach has an undeniable feel for the natural rhythms of speech and telling details of behavior, which makes this rambling story powerfully honest, insightful and poignant. Grade: A-minus

Other recent movies to be released on DVD tomorrow:

Terribly Happy (2010) When Copenhagen cop Robert (Jakob Cedergren) winds up in the isolated town of Skarrild, he plans to bide his time recovering from his disreputable past so he can return to the city. This must surely be the greatest Danish Western ever made. Director Henrik Ruben Genz builds a world so soggy with muck it practically drips (he accentuates this feeling with a lot of squishy sounds). He also populates his film with actors who perfectly portray the dead-end life of small-town Anywhere, with its secrets and lies, disappointments and betrayals. Genz, who co-wrote the screenplay (based on the novel by Erling Jepsen), makes the getting there enjoyable, and throws in a few surprises as well. What seems to be a white hat-black hat showdown becomes something much more twisted — much more. At times it’s vaguely reminiscent of Blood Simple, but Terribly Happy is very much its own movie. Cedergren is outstanding, bringing empathy to the big-city cop who thinks his stint in South Jutland will be a dull-but-straightforward form of penance, but quickly learns otherwise. Grade: B-plus

Chloe (2010) Suspecting her husband, David (Liam Neeson), of infidelity, doctor Catherine (Julianne Moore) hires sexy escort Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) to seduce him and test his faithfulness. Few filmmakers have the gift of Atom Egoyan, the Canadian director of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, of establishing a mood so supercharged that your internals combust. If my brief synopsis sounds vaguely French, you’re right. Chloe is an English-language remake of Nathalie..., Anne Fontaine’s 2003 marriage a la mode starring Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Beart and Gerard Depardieu. The story is more plausible in French, the language of Claude Chabrol and carnality that flows like wine, than in English, which to the native speaker is less suggestive of things that go on below the neck. In Egoyan’s telling, the characters’ motives are opaque and their surroundings transparent. From Catherine’s modernist house to her atrium office to the greenhouse where Chloe hooks up with David, the characters are on public view. Their vitrine-like enclosures suggest another saying, the one about those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. All the glass walls, windows and ceilings create a pervasive suggestion that the situation could shatter at any moment. And so it does. Moore, Seyfried and Neeson each boast sufficient sexuality to power a single movie on his or her own. Collectively, they are the erotic dream team. Moore’s tightly wound coiffure and tension suggest a human loaded gun. Seyfried’s flowing blond curls and dangerous curves are the definition of a man trap (or woman trap). Neeson’s supreme physical confidence and seductive charm (for his character, even the act of ordering wine is a flirtation) heat up the scenes he’s in. There are two questions to ask about a film such as this: Is it erotic? Yes. Is it good? Yes, until it devolves into third-act pretentiousness and preposterousness. But sometimes I rent movies not for the story but for the erotic promise. On the latter, Chloe delivers. Grade: B-minus.

Formosa Betrayed (2010) When FBI agent Jake Kelly’s (James Van Der Beek) investigation into the murder of a Taiwanese American professor takes him to Taiwan to pursue the killers, he soon finds himself at odds with everyone - including his own government. The movie has dual agendas that collide more readily than they mesh. It is partly a tutorial on the tense relations among Taiwan (the island of Formosa), the Chinese mainland and the United States, and partly a clumsy cloak-and-dagger political thriller. The naïve Jake, who apparently has not been briefed on the history of the region, lunges headlong into danger, upsetting diplomatic apple carts in the blind pursuit of “the truth.” Van Der Beek, manlier than in his Dawson Creek days, gives an able performance in a movie whose Asian actors tend to overplay the intrigue in an exaggerated 1940s style, exchanging sinister meaningful looks and, in general, hamming it up. Wendy Crewson’s portrayal of Susan Kane, a duplicitous United States diplomatic attaché keeping a sharp eye on Jake, gives the film’s strongest performance. When he blithely ignores her instructions on how to behave and acts, in her scolding words, “like a cowboy,” you feel how difficult, wearisome and ultimately infuriating it must be to try to manage an ignorant brat, who thinks he knows it all, on a self-righteous rampage. You also understand how easily politics can turn diplomats into cynics. Grade: C-plus

8: The Mormon Proposition (2010) Filmmaker and ex-Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints member Reed Cowan examines that church’s nationwide efforts to prevent the legalization of gay marriage — including California’s Proposition 8, which was passed by voters in 2008. There is no requirement that a documentary be objective; if we’ve learned nothing else from Michael Moore, it’s that. Thus, 8: The Mormon Proposition, loses no points for having a clear agenda: Directors Cowan and Steven Greenstreet mean to expose the gargantuan fundraising role the Mormon Church played in the 2008 passage of California’s Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that defined marriage as existing solely between man and woman (thus nullifying the same-sex marriages that had been legalized months before), and they do so. Not in an especially gripping way; the filmmakers’ passion is unquestioned, they lay out the facts, certainly, but in rather pedestrian, straightforward ways. The film is all over the place, taking off in a segment toward the end on a tangent about the alarming suicide rate among young gay Mormons and the claims of terrifying efforts to “change” them — which is more compelling than the story of the fundraising efforts against gay marriage. It’s as if Cowan and Greenstreet slipped a second short film in at the end, only tangentially related to the first. It doesn’t undercut their argument that the church violated the separation of church and state, exactly, but it does make it somewhat less interesting in comparison. The interviews throughout are the best part of the movie — the least heavy-handed, yet most effective, element. There is a message here of the necessity for tolerance, but 8: The Mormon Proposition would have been better had its makers presented it in a more consistent, artful fashion. Grade: C

The Greatest (2010) Allen (Pierce Brosnan) and Grace (Susan Sarandon) Brewer are still mourning the accidental death of their teenage son, Bennett (Aaron Johnson), when the boy’s troubled girlfriend Rose (Carey Mulligan) reveals that she is carrying his baby. The veterans do their best to avoid being buried by the cliches, with Brosnan emerging fairly unscathed. The movie’s most affecting image is his ashen, searching expression during one unbroken take as the family leaves the funeral. Sarandon’s natural fearlessness is misused in scenes where a sleepwalking Grace babbles about her “missing baby,” or is thrown by Allen into the ocean to alleviate her anger. Michael Shannon, though, is a welcome splash of cold water in his single scene as the man responsible for Bennett’s death. Mulligan — Oscar-nominated for her terrific breakthrough in An Education, which was made after this — must hit too many notes: scared, life-affirming, down on her luck, ethereal. That’s a lot to put on her thin shoulders. It is, however, consistent with the smothering style of The Greatest, which takes its title from Rose’s assurance to the insecure Bennett that he was her greatest lover. So much for subtle suffering. Grade: C-minus

Our Family Wedding (2010) Forest Whitaker and Carlos Mencia butt heads as two domineering dads forced to set aside their culture-clash differences and team up to plan their children’s wedding, with only two weeks until the big day arrives. This is a broad and formulaic culture-clash comedy built on fill-in-the-blank wedding comedy clichés. This meek little comedy doesn’t have the wit to take things into uncomfortable territory and doesn’t have the cast to make the thin set-ups — an inter-family softball game, inter-family cake fights, “tradition” bashing and bonding — sing. The leading man is bland, the older generation of Mexican and African-Americans are played as Tyler Perry buffoons and Rick The Wood Famuyiwa’s film sags in the middle as the writers run out of jokes. The film is like a wedding for an iffy marriage: It begins with a little promise and attains a hint of edge before the air goes out and we’re all turning off the TV before they shove cake in each other’s faces. Violently. And a goat and spilled Viagra tablets aren’t enough to save it. Grade: D-plus

The Back-Up Plan (2010) When Zoe (Jennifer Lopez) tires of looking for Mr. Right, she decides to have a baby on her own. But on the day she’s artificially inseminated, she meets Stan (Alex O’Loughlin), who seems to be just who’s she’s been searching for all her life. This is the most generic of romantic comedies. With its animated opening credits, outtakes playing during the closing credits and a hackneyed relationship storyline in between, you’ve seen it all many times before. To get into any of this, one has to first accept that a woman who looks like the glamorous Lopez, and whose maternal clock isn’t exactly winding down yet, would have such a desperate need to be inseminated right away because she can’t find a man. Once you get past that, you still have to believe her character’s angst at telling this news to a man — whom she had gone out with on only one date — as if she was telling a fiancé that she has a terminal illness. The Back-Up Plan is clearly the type of movie Lopez can handle in her sleep. She’s good in it. Too bad the material isn’t good to her. With movies like this, Lopez might want to start leaving low-end romantic comedies alone and look at her movie career’s backup plan. Grade: D-plus

Saint John of Las Vegas (2010) Insurance investigator and reformed gambler John (Steve Buscemi) faces some old demons on a business trip to Las Vegas, where he and his hotshot colleague (Romany Malco) must investigate a wheelchair-bound stripper (Emmanuelle Chriqui) trying to collect on a big claim for lost wages. This was a bad script that somehow got made into a bad movie with good people in it. It marks the feature debut of writer-director Hue Rhodes, who tries something in this film that he probably needed to try — and needed to see — in order to find out that it doesn’t work. It’s an experiment in a style of comedy grounded in absurdity, not an existential Ionesco-ish or Jim Jarmusch-type absurdity, but a pedestrian absurdity in which everyone is just a little bit stupid for no reason. It isn’t absurd enough to be risky, just silly enough to undercut itself. Making all human exchange meaningless and making every character stupid is, in the end, just a way of evading the task of creating interesting situations and characters worth watching. Rhodes may have wanted to make a movie that’s as ridiculous as real life, but instead he’s created something divorced from life — and devoid of life — a mere series of empty gestures. Grade: D

The Bounty Hunter (2010) Milo Boyd (Gerard Butler) is a bounty hunter who finds out that the bail-skipper he must chase down is his own ex-wife, Nicole (Jennifer Aniston), who has no intention of getting nabbed without a fight. At the beginning of the film, the Milo and Nicole characters are divorced. It is obvious enough that this condition will reverse itself by the end, but it would have been better for everybody concerned, the viewers most of all, if they had just stayed split. On the bumpy road to reconciliation the once and future spouses fight, squabble and slap handcuffs on each other, and also scamper across New Jersey on the run from several different groups of murderous thugs. What they do not do is give the slightest indication that they belong together, except by virtue of having signed contracts to appear in this movie. These characters, whose feelings are supposed to be at stake, are blunted, dumbed-down caricatures of notional human beings, rather than sharply etched epitomes of human behavior. Milo and Nicole broke up because she was too attached to her career, but while Aniston is able to give a reasonable impression of a person doing a job, Butler seems fundamentally incapable of giving any impression beyond that of a self-absorbed boor just awakened from a nap. Neither Milo nor Nicole succeeds in being very interesting, and while Aniston can fall back on her easy, nicely worn charm, Butler has only the opposite of charm to work with. His charisma is aggressively negative: a petulant, sneering, bullying disregard for other people (and for his own hygiene) that is meant, I guess, to represent a kind of rough-hewn, politically incorrect masculine honesty. I suspect, though, that his character in this movie, directed by Andy Tennant (Hitch, Fool’s Gold) from a script by Sarah Thorp, is meant to offer comfort to the panicky men watching it, who can be reassured that it’s O.K. to act like a jerk, and that in any case this guy is a bigger jerk than any of the rest of us could ever hope to be. Grade: D