Win Win (Thomas McCarthy, 2011)

With his gentile, if drably ironic, style and textured, nuanced characters, Thomas McCarthy's Win Win respects and subverts two formulaic, rigid genres: the sports film and the marketably "indie" movie. Set in New Providence, a borough in New Jersey's densely populated Union County, Win Win nevertheless feels isolated and lonely, populated by a scattered collection of reject teenagers both literal and metaphoric who wile away the time in a chilly, winter-barren suburb with nothing but a lot of broken or preemptively denied dreams to stir them. It's the sort of place made for an underdog story, but this is not a film of big victories; though he finds the expressive and emotional value of sports in some people's lives, McCarthy does not suggest that sports holds much relevance in a world beset with political and simple human issues. It is, at best, a salve to alleviate deep wounds that require stronger medicine.

Emphasizing the sense of faded glory and economically dessicated comfort from the start, McCarthy opens the film by tracking forward with Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti), a local attorney, jogging in a park as two younger runners in sleek, form-fitting black barrel past his stocky, yellow-sweatshirted frame. Mike jogs not to stay in shape but because his doctor recommended it to control panic attacks brought on by financial worries. Effectively, he ties nagging terror over his economic straits to his physical deterioration as an out-of-shape, middle-aged man, which seems a recipe for a worse outcome rather than an improvement. Faced with his failing practice collapsing, the otherwise good Mike makes a mercenary decision that soon meets with complications he could not have anticipated and cannot hope to control if some people learn the truth. Amazingly, this ticking time-bomb manages to get tied into high-school wrestling.

Paul

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's screenplay for Paul reads like the sort of film their characters from Spaced would write. But then, apart from fictional flourishes to make the characters work in a sitcom, Tim Bisley and Mike Watt have always essentially been Pegg and Frost themselves. Some might point to this as a weakness of range, but it takes courage not only to play oneself on-screen but to put a friendship up for critique before the eyes of millions.

And if Paul accomplishes nothing else, it proves that Pegg and Frost share the finest chemistry in contemporary comedy. Married couples do not have the same energy and believability on-screen as these two dorky Englishmen; even when delivering the most obviously set-up punchline, their interplay makes every exchange fresh, natural and, nine times out of 10, hilarious.