Further reflections on Americana: The American Woman is polite--according to Cathy Horyn, most guests "did their best to heed Anna Wintour’s e-mail messages to be on time"--but she is also fun-loving. Winfrey told the AP that she looked forward to "having a few shots of tequila."

SLIDESHOW: See how Jessica Alba, Vera Farmiga, M.I.A., and others looked in Gap >

According to Women's Wear Daily, Jessica Alba and Vera Farmiga will wear Sophie Theallet for Gap; Kerry washington and Riley Keough will wear Thakoon for Gap; M.I.A. and Zoe Kravitz will be in Alexander Wang for Gap; and Kirsten Dunst and Jamie Bochert will be in Rodarte for Gap. That last one is perhaps the hardest to imagine.

Up in the Air

What's the story: Whether you think he's another example of Hollywood nepotism, a slick and heartless huckster, a budding talent on the level of Billy Wilder or, a combination of all three, one thing is certain: Jason Reitman is a force to be reckoned with. Just two years after Juno became a cultural phenomenon and scored him a Best Director nomination, Mr. Reitman returns with Up in the Air, which has already been tapped as an Oscar front-runner. The National Board of Review named it the best film of the year, something both Slumdog Millionaire and No Country for Old Men—the last two Best Picture winners—can lay claim to winning as well. Based on the novel by Walter Kirn, Up in the Air stars George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a corporate grim reaper who spends his life traveling around the country firing those less fortunate, until a newbie (New Moon's Anna Kendrick) threatens to make his job obsolete. Timeliness alert! The notices on Mr. Clooney have been effusive (what else is new?), but don't sleep on Ms. Kendrick or Vera Farmiga (as the woman he falls for along the way), both of whom could find themselves as Supporting Actress nominees. This is probably one you shouldn't miss.

Who should see it: Ivan Reitman.

Brothers

What's the story: Speaking of timeliness, say hello to Brothers! Jim Sheridan's remake of Susanne Bier's 2004 Danish film focuses on the war in Afghanistan and its impact on our troops. When Captain Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) is presumed dead, his ne'er-do-well ex-con brother, Tommy (Maguire doppelgänger Jake Gyllenhaal), becomes the man of the house, watching over Sam's wife (Natalie Portman) and two children. But when Sam turns up alive, you better believe differences occur. The ad campaign for Brothers paints it like a straight-up thriller, but don't believe everything you see on television. According to the middling reviews, Brothers is a lot more introverted than Lionsgate would have you believe.

Who should see it: Barack Obama.

Everybody's Fine

What's the story: The "dysfunctional family holiday film" subgenre gets another member with the release of Everybody's Fine, a remake of Guiseppe Tornatore's Stanno tutti Bene. Robert De Niro stars as a recent widower who visits his estranged children (Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale), hoping to reconnect. The reviews have been tepid at best and eviscerating at worst, so we'd advise you to tread lightly. Kudos, though, to whoever thought to cast Mr. Rockwell as Mr. De Niro's son. Seriously, that's genius.

Who should see it: Al Pacino.

Also opening this weekend: Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer add to their Oscar bona fides in The Last Station; Cheryl Hines directs Serious Moonlight, written by the late Adrienne Shelly; Matt Dillon and a host of B-listers plot an armored car heist in Armored; and something called Translymania comes out, too.

George Clooney’s performances are always variations on the same themes: tongue-in-cheek frat-house humor; a rampant ego that makes love to the camera when no girl is around; and the suave wit and good looks of a personality that is droll and self-assured enough to get him over the hurdles when range is required or intelligent dialogue poses a challenge. But in Up in the Air, a delightful new romantic comedy that never suffers from attention deficit disorder, his acting chops are as sharp as his designer suits. There’s less juvenile canoodling, more solid concentration and a welcome indication that for once he might even be taking himself more seriously than just another Hollywood matinee idol.

Guided with precision by Jason Reitman, the Oscar-nominated director of Juno, from an elegant screenplay by Mr. Reitman and Sheldon Turner, based on the satiric novel about corporate America by Walter Kirn, Mr. Clooney gives the most mature performance of his career, in a role as snugly tailored to his caustic charm as cashmere socks. He’s so ingratiating that he regains some of the dignity he lost in the horrible O Brother, Where Art Thou? and a lot of the savvy he trashed in the moronic The Men Who Stare at Goats. In the smart and topical Up in the Air, he plays a man named Ryan Bingham who takes advantage of America’s unhappiest period—the current economic collapse—by traveling all over the map firing people, downsizing companies, draining corporations of their best talent and destroying people’s hopes and futures. Headquartered in Omaha, Ryan is what polite circles refer to as a “career transition counselor” (and what his victims call a “road warrior”), rewarded with expense accounts, and a regular in Hilton hotel bars, rental car agencies and Admirals Club lounges from coast to coast. He spends 322 days on the road and 43 miserable days at home, in a job that comes with a boarding pass; he’s ready to pounce whenever the automobile, housing, health insurance and banking markets fail. His rules: no sympathy, no personal life, no committed relationships. His goal: to reach the elitist level of travelers who amass 10 million frequent-flyer miles. It’s a life no sane human would envy, but things change with sparks like the midnight sun when his job is challenged by a cost-effective new girl trainee in his company, and he meets his equal in a beautiful fellow frequent flyer named Alex (the extraordinary, versatile and alluring Vera Farmiga), who shakes up his marble coolness when she says: “Just think of me as yourself—only with a vagina.”

(Spoiler alert!) The movie shifts into high gear when Ryan inadvertently falls in love, makes somebody else a top priority and discovers with a poignancy that shatters his veneer that he is not one of hers. In movies, it’s always the woman who gets dumped. This time, it’s the man who makes a compromise and pays an enormous emotional price. The woman is totally focused in a double life that provides the film with its biggest surprise. He’s had a taste of the alternative, and going back to his old venal ways will wear off like a bee sting. It’s a film that gives Mr. Clooney the chance to work his special brand of cynicism, and effortlessly play what he does best—the aggressive, sarcastic, self-centered center of everyone else’s emotions, a real man who eats quiche. But he also shows some rare vulnerability for a change, and you like him for it. The movie works as both a short-wired romance between two sophisticated people torn between love and their careers, and as a sober indictment of the kind of people responsible for corporate layoffs and America’s shrinking economy. Jason Reitman is a terrific director who gets better with each film, and he gets a mammoth performance out of George Clooney that will most likely please critics and crowds alike. In Up in the Air, his feet never touch the ground. Another performance this solid, and I might become a fan myself.

rreed@observer.com

In the film, Mr. Clooney’s Ryan Bingham works for a company that “lends me out to cowards that don’t have the courage to sack their own employees.” He’s on the road 322 days of the year, flies 350,000 miles (the moon, he points out, is a mere 250,000 miles away) and enjoys a happy existence of isolation, proselytizing the merits of traveling light, literally and figuratively. Enter Alex, a woman who shares his sentiments when it comes to mile-high living and freedom from attachments. She is his match, and not since 1998’s Out of Sight has Mr. Clooney sparked and sparkled so successfully onscreen with a co-star.

In person, Ms. Farmiga is startlingly lovely, with intensely blue eyes and long and angular facial features reminiscent of a Modigliani. Yet she tends to look different in nearly every role: a grieving mother with an adopted child from hell in Orphan; a high-ranking Nazi officer’s wife in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas; the object of affection caught between Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed; a prostitute in Breaking and Entering; a mom with an intense cocaine addiction in Down to the Bone (for which she won accolades at Sundance and from critics). Early this year, she gave birth to her son, Fynn (with husband Renn Hawkey); had her first costume fitting for Up in the Air two weeks later; and started to film a month and a half after that.

“I had these giant porn boobs,” she said. “These big boobs with purpose! It was difficult, the lack of sleep, the weariness … just getting to know this brand-new body. Normally it would have been easier to click into Alex’s confidence and sexuality, but I was so tired. But at the same time being a new mother and experiencing that gift and empowerment of birth, of actually producing a human, it’s a feeling of power that is evident when I watch my performance.” She paused. “Of course you can’t help but notice you are 10 to 12 pounds heavier, and you know the scenes when the milk had been coming through and you’re just finding interesting positions to hide the wet spots. That’s the stuff I’m looking at.”

Mr. Reitman wrote the part of Alex with Ms. Farmiga in mind. But he was understandably worried when she showed up to their first meeting five months pregnant. “I was skeptical,” the 32-year-old director said via phone. “I was the one telling her, ‘I don’t know if you can do this.’ And she kept being like, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I can.’ She was so overwhelmingly confident … and the closer we got, she just kept reiterating how confident she was. She’s a gamer. And we got to set and she of course killed it.”

For a movie ostensibly about one man (and written and directed by one), it is quite preoccupied with women. “Here’s a guy having an existential crisis, who thinks he knows what the rules are, and everyone in life that sort of takes him by the collar is a female,” said Ms. Farmiga. “His siblings, his co-worker, to the romance that clobbers him, they’re all women.”

One of the other strong female influences in the film is the young co-worker assigned to tag along with Ryan, a 23-year-old named Natalie, played by Anna Kendrick. While the early buzz on the film is that it’s assured a slot come Oscar time, those who tend to speculate about such things have wondered if Ms. Farmiga will end up competing with her young co-star in the Best Supporting Actress category. “It’s weird when this comes up,” Ms. Farmiga said. “Because the truth of it is, I think Anna deserves it! It’s refreshing—you look at her generation and who their role models are, and she’s such an intelligent, self-possessed woman. … I’m just so pleased that she’s getting the attention she deserves.” The fingertips drummed more intently. “I … I … look,” she said, eyes somehow becoming even more blue. “I’m pretty established, I feel blessed in my career and steadily I’m meandering through it. I want the world for Anna, I really do.”

Said Mr. Reitman, “All this talk about the Oscars … this is months away. The good news is that the conversation means they did a good job. When it comes down to it, there’ll be a part of them that wants to win, and part of them that’s just honored to be sitting at that table if it happens.” He laughed. “Having been a nominee knowing I had no chance of winning”—Mr. Reitman and Juno were both in contention with the directors and films of No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood and Michael Clayton—“I knew exactly why I was there and I was thrilled. It is a joy to lose an Oscar, let me tell you.”  

There’s room and then some for strong female roles, Ms. Farmiga said. “There are a lot of talented actresses and there need to be more. I think the temperature of the climate, what’s happening in the economy and how it is affecting our business—so much money is spent on these multimillion dollar explosive CGI fiascoes where there is very little story line. There’s just no money for that sort of thing anymore. I think we’re getting down to the basics of storytelling and asking questions and hopefully that will affect roles for women and what kind of stories are being told and truth-telling and using this forum of filmmaking as a more proactive, more socially conscious way … that we can start making sense of this mess of a world we’re living in.”

Ms Farmiga sighed. She seemed ready to ditch her tailored suit, makeup and heels and return to the upstate New York farm she lives on with her husband and son and goats. Because of the Toronto Film Festival and most recent hectic schedule, they are behind on the goats’ shearing. “The Angora ones, they matt, and it becomes painful,” she said. FYI: She not only carves, cleans and spins the wool herself, she also knits from it—she said that she usually produces one sweater for her husband per season. Perhaps she and Mr. Clooney can collaborate on a second film: The Woman Who Stares at Goats?

svilkomerson@observer.com

Perhaps that’s because it’s pizza that’s his poison? The younger Mr. Reitman (Juno) told the Transom he recently flew from L.A. to Chicago on a whim to buy a deep-dish at Giordano’s, just to maintain his high frequent-flier status. “You can’t eat the whole thing,” he said, displaying a picture of the pie on his iPhone. “It’s like a wheel of cheese, that’s impossible.”

O.K.! On to the movie: Exploring solitude and transience, Up in the Air stars George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a professional job terminator who flies around the country 340 days a year firing corporate employees in major U.S. cities.

Playing opposite Mr. Clooney as a new-media–oriented young company upstart is primly pantsuited Anna Kendrick, a 24-year-old Maine native who, during a post-screening party at Tomate Rouge hosted (appropriately) by Travel and Leisure, sipped a cocktail and declared that she “flew all the way to New York just to drink … just kidding!”

Ms. Kendrick pronounced herself appalled at the recent ruling against gay marriage in her home state.

“It’s really depressing, I was upset,” she said. “It’s not easy to feel ashamed of where you’re from.”

Co-star Vera Farmiga, who plays Mr. Clooney’s oft-traveling love interest, was wearing black Ferragamo pumps—“one part athletic shoe,” she joked—and a fetching Dolce and Gabbana cocktail dress. She said she savors the travel time required by her job. “It’s so rare to be still. It’s very meditative, I really cherish it.”

With a whopping six movies hitting theaters today, the fourth weekend of July feels like an ad for the local general store: In the mood for horror, romance, or even talking guinea pigs? Then have we got a movie for you! As we do every Friday, here’s a handy guide to the new releases.

G-Force

What’s the story: The cast of G-Force is wildly impressive—including Zack Galifianakis, Will Arnett, Bill Nighy and the voices of Nicolas Cage, Jon Favreau, Penelope Cruz and Tracy Morgan—but all you need to know about this live action/animation hybrid comes from the tag line on the movie poster: “Gadgets. Gizmos. Guinea Pigs. In 3-D.” And they say there’s no truth in advertising!

Who should see it: The dogs from Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

The Ugly Truth

What’s the story: Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler star as a pair of mismatched mates (a television news producer and her boorish host, respectively) who meet-hate and gradually come to realize that they’re made for each other. Along the way, expect to see Ms. Heigl scowl, frown and wear a pair of vibrating underwear to a fancy restaurant. Yep, it’s that kind of movie. The reviews for The Ugly Truth are pitched just above scathing, but, sadly, we actually think this thing looks moderately entertaining. Talk about an ugly truth! It must be that Flo Rida music cue in the trailer.

Who should see it: Denny Duquette.

Orphan

What’s the story: Go ahead and file Orphan under the list of movies we’ll never see. Everything about this film, from the poster to that ubiquitous trailer, has made us want to burst into tears. (It’s just too scary!) For braver souls than us: Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard play parents who adopt a little girl from an orphanage, only to have buyers remorse once she starts killing people and haunting their dreams. Think The Good Son, but with a daughter.

Who should see it: Macaulay Culkin.

And! For some indie-fun, check out: In the Loop (with James Gandolfini), Shrink (staring Kevin Spacey) or The Answer Man (with Jeff Daniels and Lauren Graham).

Carlos Brooks’s Quid Pro Quo, from his own screenplay, transports us into a strange world of guilt-ridden fetishism by which the legitimately physically handicapped incite envy in a small group of able-bodied eccentrics. The film begins with Nick Stahl’s Issac Knott, a New York City Public Radio reporter, who begins to tell his own personal story, and the mystery that surrounds it, over the airwaves. Isaac has been confined to a wheelchair since surviving an automobile accident that killed both of his parents when he was 8 years old.

The crash itself is never shown over the course of the film, but the scenic approach to the accident is repeated many times, with stunning images of symmetrically arranged plants serving as counterpoint to the shady setting in which the handicapped-wannabes choose to congregate.

Issac is not lacking in his own fetish objects for recovery, most notably a pair of magical shoes that send tremors of feelings up his legs so that he can finally stand on his own power, and with a pair of canes that liberate him from his wheelchair. Another of his fetishes is a Milwaukee brace that also aids his recovery.

For the group that Issac is investigating in his broadcast, his wheelchair is itself a magical means of transforming the non-handicapped into the handicapped. At first I thought that the whole film was becoming an extended sick joke ridiculing all the agitation about supplying access to the handicapped.

But then arrives Vera Farmiga’s Fiona, a beautiful and accomplished woman with a morbid desire to enter what she considers Isaac’s privileged realm of incapacitation. Hence, she is so disappointed when Isaac begins to regain the use of his legs that she steals his shoes for a short time to hinder his recovery. But when she does finally return them, it is with a feeling of terminal resignation, and she disappears shortly thereafter. Isaac tries in vain to find her, but we already know the “secret” of Isaac’s accident, and it plays out like a detective story, with the complete solution to the mystery locked in the detective’s psyche.

The ambitious indirection of the film’s visual style is reflected in the director’s own comment on the direction of his cast: “I told the actors in rehearsal to think of the story as unfolding entirely within that moment that transpires between deep sleep and wakefulness. So from the earliest rehearsals and creative discussions and final sound design, we approached the film within that framework—that the film itself should be experienced as a kind of dream. Even to the extent that we avoided the usual overtly ‘dreamy’ filmmaking and editing tricks—in favor of a straightforward style that would, like an actual dream, invite you to perceive it as real.”

Quid Pro Quo thereby seems to be the latest attempt to awaken us all from more than a century of dreamlike voyeurism at the temples of the cinema so that we can look more closely at the mechanics of our addiction. The effort is as cerebral as all get-out, and it is moderately interesting to think about afterward. Still, there is a limit to how far we will go to forgo the pleasures of the ancient illusionists of the medium. This is to say that Quid Pro Quo is a respectable feature-film debut for Mr. Brooks, and it remains reasonably thought-provoking without ever becoming emotionally absorbing.

asarris@observer.com

Look high and low, but you won’t find a weirder movie than Quid Pro Quo. In 1989, a high-speed car crash kills the parents of a boy named Isaac Knott, leaving him an orphaned paraplegic. Eighteen years later, confined to a wheelchair, he’s a 26-year-old investigative reporter who tells odd stories of life in New York City on public radio. (Same job Jodie Foster had in The Brave One, which should have been a warning. Must be a dangerous career choice, because this one also leads to trouble.) Tracking down a story about a man who pays a doctor to cut off his perfectly good leg, Isaac (played by the gifted Nick Stahl, from In the Bedroom) discovers a sordid underworld of fetish freaks who get off on amputations.

What a story. “Wannabes” who want to be paraplegics just like himself! But Isaac isn’t your typical invalid. He swims. He works out. He stays strong. He can have sex. He gets a mysterious e-mail tip signed “Ancient Chinese Girl.” But when he meets her, she’s a vibrant blonde named Fiona (played by the feral and fascinating Vera Farmiga, who made a lasting impression as the prostitute opposite Jude Law in Anthony Minghella’s doomed Breaking and Entering). Fiona leads Isaac to a pathetic subculture of perverts divided into three groups: the “devotees” who live in wheelchairs but are merely phonies; the “pretenders” who wear their braces but don’t belong to the “cause” in any authentic way; and the “wannabes” who crave disabilities and amputations. “I’m already paralyzed,” says Fiona. “I’m just trapped in a walking person’s body.” To Isaac’s horror, she likes to strut around her apartment in her lingerie with her shapely legs strapped into torturous, medieval “Milwaukee braces.” According to this film, there are thousands of these wackos, wearing prosthetic devices in secret and dreaming of being paralyzed. It’s described as a strange new American dream—a way to improve yourself, one dead limb at a time. Up to this point, Quid Pro Quo reminded me of Crash, the nauseating 1997 David Cronenberg horror show about lunatics addicted to broken bones acquired in deliberately planned collisions, wrecks and highway fatalities (not to be confused with the overrated 2005 Oscar winner with the same title by Paul Haggis). But just when you think you can’t bear another minute of this dismal self-indulgence, the film hangs an abrupt left turn and heads in another direction, as the suspense builds like a racing car with both doors open.

Seduced into a sexually charged affair with Fiona, Isaac suddenly experiences a miraculous “cure” when he dons an odd pair of “spectator shoes” that give him the power to walk. While his healing is a cause for joy, her downward spiral into deformity is just beginning. Unfortunately, when he throws away his crutches, it coincides with her withdrawal from normalcy and her decision to live in her own wheelchair 24/7. He feels normal when he walks. She can’t feel like a complete person unless she’s paralyzed, too. So she steals his magic shoes and threatens to cut them to shreds unless he finds a way to cripple her permanently. Research reveals several ways—including puncturing the vertebrae with a four-inch spinal drill, a fate from which we are fortunately spared. She settles on a drug called “Ginger Jake,” which is supposedly used to soften plastic. (Listen, I don’t make this stuff up; I just sit there in the dark, taking notes.) Just when the film looks like it can’t get any more squirrelly, it takes another right turn in the direction of coherence. No spoilers, please—but when you find out why Isaac is crippled, and why Fiona wants to be, you’ll be floored. Solving the mystery, Isaac gets the best story of his radio career—himself!

Inspired, no doubt, by the alarming art of Hieronymus Bosch and the kinky writing of everyone from Tennessee Williams (One Arm) to Chuck Palahniuk (Snuff), this freshman feature by writer-director Carlos Brooks shows both style and imagination. Viewed as a long dream sequence, but without any self-consciously arty tricks to detour it into hokey surrealism, it creates a Technicolor chiaroscuro that jolts you from cold darkness into bright sunlight without missing a beat. Erotic and complex, it is aided enormously by the actors. Since his astonishing debut at the age of 12 opposite Mel Gibson in The Man Without a Face, Mr. Stahl has grown, stretched and developed into a formidable actor. Ms. Farmiga’s range and diversity never cease to astonish. Their work is notable in Quid Pro Quo, both as intriguing and offbeat as the film itself. It certainly won’t be everyone’s cup of breakfast bitters, but you can’t dismiss it nonchalantly.

rreed@observer.com