As the end credits roll on Dan in Real Life, I imagine most people will have roughly the same reaction -- a smile and a shrug. You won't be angry at yourself for watching it, but you'll be hard pressed to remember the thing in two weeks. It's a relentlessly average movie, packed full of "nice" moments but lacking a single great one.

Steve Carell stars as Dan, a widowed advice columnist trying to be a good father to his three daughters, well played by Alison Pill, Marlene Lawston, and a very funny Brittany Robertson. A widowed man raising his three daughters is also the premise of the old sitcom Full House, and the comparison isn't far off. These daughters are fleshed out a bit more than the Olsen twins, but the relationship beats feel the same -- forced, cutesy, a little tired.

Dan and the girls go to visit their extended family in a lakeside Rhode Island cottage. Dan takes a trip to the local bookstore, and in a very Woody Allen-esque scene, he meets and develops a crush on a woman named Marie (Juliette Binoche). There's a "falling-for-each-other" montage that doesn't really convince, Dan gets her number, and heads home to brag about his new "hottie" and meet the girlfriend of his brother (Dane Cook). Surprise surprise -- his hottie and the girlfriend are one and the same -- Marie. Cue the laugh track.

Before production even began on Dan in Real Life -- the funny, heartfelt and sometimes heartbreaking tale of a lonely widower named Dan (Steve Carell) who falls in love with his brother's girlfriend Marie (Juliette Binoche) -- writer-director Peter Hedges set an ambitious goal: to have Dan's soundtrack do for the film what Cat Stevens' music did for Harold and Maude and Simon & Garfunkel's classic tuneage did for The Graduate. In other words, Hedges wanted to find one artist to lend a unique musical voice to Dan; he wanted the songs to be unforgettable and inextricably linked to the heartbeat of the film; AND he wanted the soundtrack to be mentioned in the same breath as some of the most revered soundtracks of all time. Sounds like a job for a seasoned, world-wise-yet-hopeful music legend -- perhaps a Springsteen or a Bono ... or a 25-year-old Norwegian singer-songwriter named Sondre Lerche. Though Lerche's brand of whimsical, romantic indie-rock has been quietly dazzling music diehards for years, he has yet to hit the mainstream -- but that could all change with this film. We talked with Lerche about playing guitar with Steve Carell, soothing Hedges on the film's set and making his big Hollywood debut.

Cinematical: How did you get involved with Dan in Real Life?

Sondre Lerche: Well, Peter [Hedges] had heard a couple of my songs and thought that my music had the right kind of sound and feel for the movie, and so he came to my apartment in New York and we talked about what he was trying to do. He wanted one musician to do all the music, and he wanted it to have a unique feel, like Harold and Maude. Then I played him a song that I had written a couple days before, and he loved it. So I read the script that Peter was in the process of rewriting and started attending auditions and rehearsals for the movie so I could get the mood right.

Cinematical: You were also on the set of the movie during filming. How was that? Care to share any anecdotes?

SL: Oh yeah, I was there as much as I could be -- whenever I was in town. I was there for the scene where the whole family puts on a talent show, and Steve Carell plays the guitar and sings 'Let My Love Open the Door.' I gave him some tips, showed him the best way to hold the guitar and stuff. That was very cool. And Peter also wanted me on the set in case things started going badly so that I could play some songs and calm him down [laughs].

Cinematical: Ha. And did you write the songs as the different scenes were being filmed, or did you wait until the end so you could see a finished product?

SL: I started working on them immediately. I actually wrote the first song a couple of days after I met with Peter. That was about a year and a half ago now.

Having just come off the Tribeca film festival, I should be perfectly attuned to an experimental short film anthology like Paris Je T'Aime, (Paris, I Love You) and some segments of it are definitely enjoyable, but the overall hit-miss ratio is too low to ignore. This, despite a juggernaut talent bench that includes the Coen brothers, Wes Craven, Natalie Portman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Alfonso Cuaron, Nick Nolte, Miranda Richardson, Bob Hoskins, Elijah Wood, Steve Buscemi, Gus Van Sant and Juliette Binoche. In fact, these are only a few of the notable performers and directors who contribute to the 18 shorts, only a few of which actually intersect with the others. My favorite of the lot is the one that the Times' Stephen Holden declared to be the worst: a snappy little love note to Parisian vampires titled Quartier de la Madeleine. Starring Olga Kurylenko as a classic vampire with opaque, milky eyes who is interrupted in the midst of her work by Elijah Wood, it's a beautifully photographed little love story with lots of blood that seems made of melted pink plastic.

Strangely enough, that's not the short directed by Craven (even though he makes a cameo in it -- how could he not?) Craven's entry is Pere-Lachaise, focusing on a visit to that famous cemetery -- where Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust and Jim Morrison are buried -- by a squabbling couple played by Rufus Sewell and Emily Mortimer. Just when Sewell's character has run out of things to say, the ghost of Wilde actually shows up to give him some advice. Like many of the films, however, it feels like a 30-minute short that was cut down to about one-third of that time in order to squeeze it into this crowded phone-booth of a feature format. If you don't pay careful attention, you might actually miss Wilde's appearance and wonder what happened to wrap up the segment. Still, the acting drags it over the finish line. The same can be said for Quartier des Enfants Rouges, starring Gyllenhaal as an American actress shooting a costume drama in Paris and possibly falling for her Parisian dope dealer.

He may not be a great director -- perhaps not even worthy of his Oscar -- but Ron Howard is good enough at making the kind of movies he makes. His films are sufficient in quality for the masses who might not see a film by Michael Haneke, for instance. Therefore, Howard should be the one of the most suitable directors to strike a compromise between the demands of Hollywood and international cinema by successfully remaking a foreign film. Unfortunately, he's tried this before and failed miserably, with EdTV, which was a redo of Louis 19, Le Roi des Ondes (Louis the 19th, King of the Airwaves).

Now Variety is reporting that he may attempt to redeem himself by doing another remake, this time of Haneke's Caché. The original film stars Daniel Auteil and Juliette Binoche as a married couple who are terrorized by a series of mysterious videotapes, the first of which appears to be a surveillance tape of their home. It is a fairly slow, open-ended film that lacks the conventions that many Americans expect from a thriller, and obviously Universal, the studio releasing the remake, will want to amp up the suspense and consequences. This would be a silly approach, though, since Haneke's version is more suspenseful because it has few consequences.

As long as Haneke is going to be doing remakes of his own work, I have no reason to complain about other people redoing his films. And if those people who can't be bothered with the original Caché are interested in seeing a Hollywood translation, they are better off with Howard directing than most. They may even get to see it with Binoche reprising her role -- if producer Brian Grazer is smart, he'll ask for her. Now, if only Auteil could finally be recognized by the majority of Americans. Of course, he'll probably be replaced by either Russell Crowe or Tom Hanks. There is no timetable set up for the Caché remake, and if Howard is definitely interested, he'll have to sort out his future projects, which so far include Frost/Nixon, Angels & Demons, The Look of Real and East of Eden.

This film is instantly recognizable as an Anthony Minghella film in one respect -- it centers on characters who are pathologically determined to sweep something under the carpet, even if they have to stomp up and down on that 'something' to keep it under there. Like his brilliant Hitchcock-opera, The Talented Mr. Ripley, which never used the word 'gay,' no matter how many bodies stacked up like cordwood at the expense of Ripley's psychotic self-denial, Breaking and Entering centers on an up-market London couple -- the wife is so up-market she's 'half-Swedish' -- who also suffer greatly for having no 'word' that sheds light on their dilemma. Robin Wright Penn and Jude Law play the possibly un-proud parents of a high-functioning autistic child who is aggressively weird, excels at a flip-heavy style of gymnastics and knows that she will never, under any circumstances, be disciplined by her happening liberal parents, even when she throws things. They are resigned to just sit and age at an accelerated rate while she backflips across the kitchen table.

The impossible situation at home leads Jude Law's character to grab at a hobby when one is dangled in front of him. As a city planner, he has boldly moved his family to King's Cross, an urban location that passes for 'inner city' in London. He plans to sweep it into the 21st century with an expensive-looking urban renewal plan. Soon, his office becomes the repeated target of a gang of professional burglars who take everything not nailed down, right down to his little toy-soldier men on special order from Japan, that he uses as stand-ins for people in his scale model of the future, burglar-free King's Cross. Unable to accept the irony, Jude begins an amateur stakeout routine, waiting around outside his office at night in an SUV for the thieves to materialize, so he can accost them. It's somewhere around this point that the screenplay begins to drag the characters into directions they would never go, and towards people they would never interact with, so they can ultimately make decisions they would never make.

Anthony Minghella's first film since 2003's disappointing Cold Mountain is a back-to-basics drama with none of the towering vistas and enormous set-pieces you remember from the early epics like The English Patient or The Talented Mr. Ripley. Breaking and Entering is a simple love story, starring Minghella veterans Jude Law and Juliette Binoche as an upscale, London-based city planner and a Bosnian immigrant seamstress who embark on an unlikely relationship. Robin Wright Penn also stars, as Law's half-American, half-Swedish, always unhappy wife. The Departed's Vera Farmiga also has a small, but memorable role as a Romanian prostitute who doubles as an amateur philosopher. Because of Minghella's natural abilities with a camera, the film has none of the boxed-in feel of some other small character pieces, like Proof, but it's still a noticeable stylistic downshift for the director. Originally scheduled to drop in theaters last October, the film had a rocky ride through the distribution process and eventually landed on a late-January release date.

All the principals, except Jude Law, who is busy filming Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth, were on hand for last week's quick and painless press conference for the film. Instead of facing the firing squad one at a time, the gang of four entered the small ballroom together, took turns batting press questions back and forth for a scant forty minutes, then quickly exited again as a group. It was a pretty low-energy affair, but a few interesting questions snuck through. Here's a sampling:

Anthony Minghella

Cinematical: Talk a little bit about how you came to be aware of Vera, and why you wanted to work with her. "I told a story today. It's an absolutely true story. When I was writing, I go away to write, because it's very hard in my life right now to find a space where I can just think and work, and I went away to work in a cottage. I tend to write through the day and the night. I have a very sort of odd rhythm. And at about 4:00 a.m. one morning, I was making a cup of tea before I went back to write again, and I put the TV on and there was an American cop show, and I was just going to drink my tea and then go back, but I found myself getting more and more glued to this show, and when it finished, I went online to find out who Vera Farmiga was, who was in this cop show. That's how filmmakers are. They are all film fans. I remember vividly the first time I saw Robin working as an actress and the first time I saw Juliette, and how it's like the greediness of filmmakers. They go...I need that thing. I need Robin Wright Penn-ness. It's quite parasitical on some level. It's a desire to get people who thrill you as a watcher into the things you're making. And it's great when actors dignify the work you do in such an extraordinary way."