DIMINISHED CAPACITY
Running time 92 minutes
Written by Sherwood Kiraly
Directed by Terry Kinney
Starring Matthew Broderick, Alan Alda, Virginia Madsen, Dylan Baker, Bobby Cannavale, Louis C. K.

Diminished Capacity is a harmless but monotonous trifle about a baseball card. Matthew Broderick is making too many movies and giving the same performance in all of them. This time, he’s a Chicago newspaper editor named Cooper who suffers a brain concussion and gets demoted to proofreading comic strips. His neurologist says he’s got what they call “diminished capacity,” but he no longer throws up when he drives a car, so he goes home to visit his mother (the wonderful Lois Smith) and discovers that everyone in his hometown has diminished capacity, too—especially his Uncle Rollie (Alan Alda).  read more »

Diminished Capacity
Running time 92 minutes
Written by Sherwood Kiraly
Directed by Terry Kinney
Starring Matthew Broderick, Alan Alda, Virginia Madsen, Dylan Baker, Bobby Cannavale, Louis C. K.

Terry Kinney’s Diminished Capacity, from a screenplay by Sherwood Kiraly, is based on Mr. Kiraly’s gentle and yet hilariously hectic novel spoofing the insane predilections of people entangled in the mania surrounding the hunt for an obscure baseball card of a Chicago Cubs player from the early days of our national pastime. Again, as with The Wackness, for a low-budget project, Diminished Capacity is blessed with a blue-ribbon cast. Most notably, Matthew Broderick as brain-damaged Cooper, a downward-drifting Chicago journalist, and Virginia Madsen as Charlotte, a spunky, divorced mother of one and Cooper’s former flame in their hometown, LaPorte, Mo.  read more »

Finding Amanda
Running Time 100 minutes
Written and directed by Peter Tolan
Starring Matthew Broderick, Brittany Snow, Maura Tierney, Peter Facinelli

Finding Amanda is an inconsequential little low-budget throwaway with another stagnant, indifferent performance by the underwhelming but overexposed Matthew Broderick as a mediocre Hollywood TV writer named Taylor Peters. Taylor is so unreliable, indifferent and irresponsible that each episode of his sitcom is like a knee replacement. A severe case of writer’s block has reached the level of mental illness. He also suffers from a gambling addiction so serious that it has derailed his career and almost wrecked his marriage to the long-suffering wife (Maura Tierney) he has lied to for years.  read more »

Tuesday night’s TFF premiere of Finding Amanda was a feature directorial debut for Peter Tolan, a veteran film and television writer who's written for Murphy Brown, Analyze This and Rescue Me.

Finding Amanda is about a sit-com writer with a gambling addiction who tries to redeem himself after his wife leaves him, by going to Vegas—a natural setting for gambling addicts to find themselves—and rescuing his niece who is prostituting herself for drugs.  read more »

Savage Grace, AMC 19th Street, 3 p.m.

It’s a good thing the filmmakers of Savage Grace make sure to throw the “based on a true story” tag everywhere they can, because this film is bananas. Julianne Moore (who continues to surprise us with roles like this one), plays Barbara Baekeland, a beyond eccentric and certainly troubled socialite. As her husband Brooks (Stephen Dillane, a.k.a. Thomas Jefferson for all you John Adams fans) starts to become more aloof, Baekeland becomes, er, inappropriate with her son Tony (played by Eddie Redmayne, who was quite the Sundance superstar this year). We won’t give away the ending, except to say it is based on a real story, one that ends in murder, and has a scene in it that still has us feeling traumatized.  read more »

At the premiere of Helen Hunt’s directorial debut, Then She Found Me, the actor Matthew Broderick smiled recalling the first time he worked on a film with Ms. Hunt: 1987’s Project X, about the military testing radioactivity on chimpanzees.  read more »

THEN SHE FOUND ME
Running Time 100 minutes
Written and Directed by Helen Hunt  read more »