It's a shame that the trailer for Year of the Dog spins the film as a lowbrow comedy that may or may not be about bestiality. ("Guilty," Peter Sarsgaard chuckles when asked if he sleeps with his dogs.) While writer/director Mike White is the mind behind straightforward fare like Nacho Libre and School of Rock, remember that he also penned Chuck & Buck, 2000's hilariously black comedy about obsession and childhood sexual trauma. His directorial debut is an affecting, left-field mix of laughs and pathos that's light years beyond puerile "doggy-style" puns.

Molly Shannon's certainly come a long way from sniffing her armpits on Saturday Night Live. She can, for instance, actually act, playing Peggy, a spinster-in-training whose canine companion dies after an accidental poisoning. When she mourns Pencil's death, only a hard-hearted bastard would want to laugh, and the loss of her furry spooning companion means she's forced out into the unpredictable world of human relationships,

Without cramming too much in, White spends equal time poking fun at uptight married couples, the thirty-something dating scene, and the stifling atmosphere of corporate America. Laura Dern plays Bret, Peggy's germ-phobic sister-in-law (it's the exact role typically reserved for Jane Adams, but Dern is excellent as the overbearing mom striving to protect her kids from life itself). Regina King is wonderfully manic as a Xanax-popping coworker hell-bent on marrying her boyfriend, and "the boss" (Josh Pais) ditches cardboard stereotypes, appearing instead as a soft-spoken sad sack who's perpetually on the edge of tears. Al (John C. Reilly) is Peggy's neighbor, a hunting-crazed everyman whose collection of knives and mounted animal heads fails to pull Peggy's heart strings. Peter Sarsgaard completes the ensemble as a weirdly asexual Nice Guy whose childhood in an abusive cult makes it easier for him to deal with dogs than people.

The film's latter half turns unexpectedly into what might be called The Dissolution of Molly Shannon, or Women on the Verge of an Ideological Breakdown. This is not a light comedy about the silly ways lonely people get overly attached to their pets. By the time Peggy quits eating meat, submerges fur coats in the bath tub, and starts sending donations to a sanctuary for rescued farm animals, White's spun a spot-on, morally ambiguous reflection on the difficult desire to change the world for the better. Amazingly, and quite unexpectedly, this is a mainstream film that's both a satire of and a paean to the animal-rights movement — and that's a whole lot more interesting than dog-fucking. — Scott Indrisek

What happens when Generation X grows up? Douglas Coupland, whose 1991 novel Generation X popularized the term, tackles that question in Everything's Gone Green, his first foray into screenwriting. The PR materials call Green a mix between Garden State and Office Space, a comparison both cringe-inducing and accurate, and while it isn't as angst-ridden as the first, or as hilariously quotable (though it tries) as the last, it is a surprisingly enjoyable breath of cinematic fresh air.

The film begins with ringlet-blessed Ryan (Paulo Costanzo) getting dumped and kicked out of his apartment, then fired for leaving I-hate-my-job poetry on the company's server. Ryan lucks his way into working at a lottery magazine. As this is a Coupland opus, we get plenty of meditations on the aimless middle class. Every character is trying to find a way to cheat the system; Ryan stumbles into a racket where he can launder money for the Asian mob through his lotto job. His corrupting angel Bryce (JR Bourne, who could play a microdermabrasioned Ben Folds in a Lifetime movie) is also the boyfriend of Ryan's love interest, sexy set designer Ming (Steph Song).

Subtle wackiness ensues. His parents build a grow-lab in the basement; a SlutCam enters the picture; director Paul Fox creates what must be the first-ever montage featuring strangely creepy laughing over lunchtime sushi. We wonder: will Ryan will lose his soul in search of the almighty greenback? Actually, we're supposed to, but I never did. Sweet, incorruptible earnestness oozes out of Ryan's eyeballs. We love him, even if he did buy a canary-yellow Mustang and a leather jacket with his dirty money. (It doesn't hurt that Paulo Costanzo is one hot, scrubbed-clean bundle of poodle-haired love.)

As in so many coming-of-modern-age flicks, the plot meanders and is soon lost in the wild Vancouverian ethers. The lack of momentum comes across as a storytelling weakness rather than a commentary on the characters' meandering lives. But the easy likeability of the leads, Coupland's love of wordplay and the gorgeous visuals that make the setting as much of a character as the rest of the cast, result in an rambling pleasure of a film. — Nicole Ankowski

If the release of Lonely Hearts is shrewdly programmed alongside co-star James Gandolfini's return to HBO screens this week, the film also suffers from its proximity to David Fincher's Zodiac, which reinvented and perhaps exhausted the hunt-for-a-serial-killer drama just a few weeks back. The plots are similar: a man (here John Travolta as Detective Elmer Robinson), investigating the titular serial killer(s), slowly loses his family (and perhaps his sanity) while caught in the throes of obsession. But where Fincher's film lived and breathed its protagonist's obsession, following the dirty details down every dead end, Lonely Hearts has little sense of mania. It's an overdesigned, overacted, tone-deaf jumble.

The notorious Lonely Hearts killers of the 1940s — who tracked down war widows through personal ads, then fleeced 'em for cash and left 'em for dead — have already been depicted onscreen (most notably in 1970's pulpy The Honeymoon Killers), and their stand-ins here (Jared Leto and Salma Hayek) are clearly straining for effect. It's hard to tell whether the responsibility for Lonely Hearts' laughable performances lies with the casting director or the actors themselves. Travolta should never be called upon for mournful gravitas, and Gandolfini, who plays Det. Robinson's partner, is nobody's first choice as a voice-over narrator. Leto looks and acts like a cheap (but nevertheless scary) Halloween costume, and Hayek, trying hard, convinces us of her insanity but not her emotions. In the film's confusing back-and-forth chronology, their murders feel too arbitrary to qualify as either premeditated or maniacal.

Writer/director Todd Robinson is the grandson of Travolta's character, which makes his remove from the material all the stranger. Robinson is normally a television director, and his film plays like an overlong CSI episode thrown into a noir blender, with plenty of window dressing. It's Zodiac without a pulse. — Akiva Gottlieb

Frylock, Shake and Meatwad, the protagonists of Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters, first appeared in an unproduced Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast episode entitled "Baffler Meal"; baffling they are sure to be, to anyone who wanders unprepared into their full-length film, one of the strangest cinematic projects to ever reach mainstream release. As a casual fan of the show, I'm kind of amazed it exists, and honestly admire the audacity of its creators. But I'm not sure I can recommend it.

Loosely, the TV show on which the film is based follows three anthropomorphic food items, who hypothetically solve mysteries and battle villains in their native New Jersey. In actuality, the Aqua Teens, neither teenaged nor aquatic, rarely do anything heroic, instead focusing on annoying their hapless neighbor Carl and being annoyed by various extraterrestrials (like Ignignokt the Mooninite, whose untimely appearance on a bridge in Boston significantly delayed my mother's commute some months back.) If this summary is hard to understand, consider that the film's press notes don't even try to explain — they're copied straight out of Wikipedia.

The show airs on the Cartoon Network, late at night, in ten-minute segments; this is the best possible time and format for a near-dadaist cartoon. At its best (and here I am referring to the legendary Danzig episode) ATHF hilariously upends decades of genre trash. It can be genuinely, exhilaratingly weird, in short bursts. But ninety minutes is a long time for a parade of non-sequiturs; the format is uncomfortable scaled to that length, and the film (the plot of which I will not even attempt to gloss, for obvious reasons) is less like watching one big episode than like watching nine episodes in a row. By the end, even diehards may find themselves longing for something with a bit more humanity, like, say, Space Ghost. All that said, Movie Film for Theaters will probably be hysterical when it shows up late at night on your television, where it can be properly consumed with quantities of Red Bull, Pop Tarts and hashish that most good theaters tend to disallow. — Peter Smith