Jack Black, whose Kung Fu Panda opens this week, seemed to move awfully quickly from rising star to overexposed. His always-moving, rock 'n' roll persona seems to be everywhere, turning up in several movies a year, always pitched at the same high level. It's all too easy to concentrate on his most annoying performances, as lazy fast-talkers, or selfish schemers in films like Saving Silverman, Shallow Hal, Envy and The Holiday. But a closer look at his filmography shows more than a few samples of the Jack Black that we initially liked and elevated to stardom.

1. High Fidelity (2000)
This was the first time Black came onto my radar, although he had previously been in at least 30 other movies and TV shows. It's arguably the first time he tapped into the Jack Black persona for the length of an entire movie, and he was nicely fitted in the mix between cool, confused John Cusack and Todd Louiso (as the withdrawn music nerd). His was a supporting role, rather than a lead, which is the best place for a character actor of his caliber. Moreover, Black played a nerd with a wide-ranging knowledge of music, implying that he was at least using his brain for something (as opposed to many of his other films). As for his performance, he showed enough natural, unhinged exuberance (especially in his surprise rendition of "Let's Get It On") that, frankly, he deserved an Oscar nomination.

Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding did smashing business at two theaters in Manhattan, earning a per-screen average of $39,800, according to estimates compiled by Leonard Klady at Movie City News. Was it the sparkling dialog, the witty performances, the star wattage of Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jack Black? The critics were mixed: our own Ryan Stewart opined that the film was "torpedoed by its own self-indulgence." A. O. Scott of the New York Times was kinder ("frequently brilliant, finally baffling") and Lou Lumenick of the New York Post was not ("I've had root canals that were more enjoyable"). Check Metacritic for more critical coverage.

Opening in a single Manhattan theater, What Would Jesus Buy? performed quite nicely according to Box Office Mojo, making $11,600. Personally, I thought Rob VanAlkemade's documentary was timely and entertaining, although quite scatter-shot in its approach.

Opening in a single Los Angeles theater, Smiley Face earned an estimated $5,700 over the weekend, according to Mr. Klady. Distributor First Look has been criticized for changing their plans from a wider release last April; filmmaker Sujewa Ekanayake comments: "It is sad to see a film that screened at 4 incredibly well known festivals [Sundance, SXSW, Cannes, Toronto] being released in only 1 theater." Amen! Both Jette Kernion and Monika Bartyzel reacted positively to Gregg Araki's stoner comedy starring Anna Faris; the movie hits DVD in January.

Redacted ($1,760 per screen; 13 theaters) and Southland Tales ($1,780 per screen; 63 theaters) appeared to fall victim to bad buzz. Everyone kept saying that no one would want to go see Brian DePalma's Iraq War project and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Critical response was lukewarm overall, though a number championed it, according to Rotten Tomatoes. (Ryan Stewart felt it "doesn't ever truly gel.") The same site estimated that only 34% of the Southland Tales reviews were positive; its champions are fewer but no less appreciative -- but not Nick Schager, who called it "monumentally vapid."

The Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men expanded into 148 theaters and soared into the overall Top 10, scoring a scorching per-theater average of $20,540.

Writer-director Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding, his follow-up to his Oscar-nominated The Squid and the Whale, portrays the friendship -- and friction -- between sisters Margot (Nicole Kidman) and Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Pauline, mother to Ingrid (Flora Cross), is marrying her boyfriend Malcolm (Jack Black) -- and Margot comes to lend her support for the big day, bringing her son Claude (Zane Pais) along. But the sisters aren't really the best friends they claim to be, and the Pauline's coastal home soon seethes with judgments and resentments and secrets. And yet, according to Leigh, the tension on-screen wasn't on-set: "It was a pretty happy set, actually -- and also the scenes are exciting; it was exciting to have scenes with this much going on them. So you never went home bummed out; they were exciting and really good scenes, and the tension was alive. ..." Of course, Leigh also had the fairly unique experience of working with her husband as her writer-director. ... Leigh spoke with Cinematical in San Francisco about working with the people you love, what happened when the cameras were off, which of her movies she doesn't flip past when they come up as she channel-surfs and the sort of movie she considers a "crowd pleaser."

Cinematical: To start with a fairly obvious question, is it easier or harder when at the end of the day's shooting, you're going home with the director? Does that make your job as an actor easier, or more difficult?

Jennifer Jason Leigh: A lot easier -- because of our relationship, too, but it was a lot easier. Because not only can you talk about the day, but you can talk about the next days to come, and what you want from the scenes and what you're striving for -- and also you have the person you love most with you through it all, so you get to have this great creative collaboration doing something you love together and be together. For me, it made it easier. Also, if there was a scene I wanted a little extra rehearsal on, I could get it at home.

Cinematical: You had unlimited access to the writer.

JJL: Writer, director, yeah. "Could we work on that scene. Could I rehearse with you?"

Cinematical: What was it like working in these very intimate dramatic scenes with Jack Black -- who people don't automatically think of as an actor, who people think of more as a presence, or a comic actor. Did you do a lot of preparation, or did he just show up bringing his "A" game?

JJL: We did rehearse; we all rehearsed. Jack was Noah's first choice, and Jack's someone I've always wanted to work with, and I've known Jack a really long time, so I knew he could be great. I just think he's a wonderful actor, so ... he would always joke about having his "A" game on, and all that, but ... he's just so good. There was never a doubt in my mind. And I knew we'd have good chemistry, because we're friends, and I just enjoy him anyway. It's always nice to work with people you know and like, just because you already have that history - and it shows, in a way, and you can feel it on the screen a lot of the time, I think. He's a wonderful actor; everything you would hope he'd be, he is. He's warm, he's available; he's funny, he's smart as hell ... he's lovely.

It isn't uncommon for a guy to get a girl who's out of his league. It certainly happens in the movies and on television all the time. But it does happen sometimes in real life, and often the guy ends up feeling like he's never good enough. And then he sabotages the relationship somehow because of his insecurity. And then the idiot is back to dating women who aren't the woman of his dreams, always regretting screwing up that perfect thing he could have had. We've all seen it happen, right? Well, if you haven't, you can also see the scenario happen in the movies. Just recently I saw Run Fatboy Run, in which Simon Pegg plays a guy who leaves Thandie Newton (totally out of his league, right?) at the altar -- pregnant. And certainly this year's hit comedy Knocked Up was about a situation of a mis-matched couple. Oh, and the upcoming Margot at the Wedding has the same thing going on between Jack Black and Jennifer Jason Leigh. See, it happens all the time.

Now, according to Variety, there's another such movie coming (which we previously heard about and then saw on the pre-strike priority list). Titled literally She's Out of My League, this one is about a guy who finds himself dating an "extraordinarily beautiful woman" (why does it have to be about looks? certainly she could be out of his league in terms of brains or humor or other personality traits -- in Margot, Leigh is out of Black's league in multiple ways). Because he is insecure about her attraction to him, and because his friends and family are suspicious of beauty's motives, he comes close to sabotaging the relationship (unless he's about to leave her at the alter, with child, then this movie's got nothing on Fatboy). The movie will be directed by British sketch comedian Jim Field Smith and will star Jay Baruchel, best known from TV's Undeclared and, interestingly enough, Knocked Up. Originally scripted as a spec by Sean Anders and John Morris, the movie is currently in re-writes care of Tim Dowling (George Lucas in Love). It goes into production early next year, but if you can't wait to learn the secrets about how to score and keep a girl out of your league, I've got some tips: if it's good enough for Ric Ocasek, Rod Stewart and Billy Joel, it's good enough for you. And: girls love a funny guy, so if she's laughing, she probably doesn't care that you're not a hottie.

Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, a semi-autobiographical film about a Brooklyn family's experience with divorce, was the sleeper indie hit of 2005, and after its success Baumbach shot to prominence as a director to watch. His highly anticipated follow-up effort, Margot at the Wedding, returns to similar themes of family love and loathing; it stars Nicole Kidman as Margot, a high-strung writer who, along with her son Claude (Zane Pais), goes on a pilgrimage of sorts to her childhood home, where her estranged sister (Baumbach's wife Jennifer Jason Leigh) is marrying an unemployed painter (Jack Black) she just met. Baumbach -- who, it must be noted, bears an uncanny resemblance to Adrien Brody -- sat down with us in Toronto to talk about New York, family dynamics and just what's up with all those masturbation scenes.

Cinematical: After Squid and the Whale, a lot of people looked at you as a Brooklyn artist, the way they might look at someone like Jonathan Lethem. Did you have any temptation to make another movie set in Brooklyn, or did you deliberately move away from that?

Noah Baumbach: It wasn't deliberate or not deliberate -- I started writing this movie and it became what it was. It wasn't a response to anything in particular. I feel a real connection to Brooklyn, certainly, because I spent 20 years of my life there, but I don't think of myself as a Brooklyn artist any more than I think of myself as a male artist. I will say that when people would respond to Squid with a kind of Brooklyn-centric reaction I was pleased with that, because obviously Brooklyn means a lot to me.

Margot at the Wedding is a film torpedoed by its own self-indulgence. The film starts by offering us a thin premise -- a frosty, New England writer named Margot comes to town for the occasion of her quasi-bohemian sister Pauline's wedding to a slob -- and then more or less does nothing in the way of development, opting instead for ninety minutes of hints and innuendo. Nothing in this family dysfunction drama ever rises to the surface, even in the third act. Usually, you at least know what the director was going for, whether they succeeded or failed, but not here. Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh have to be given some amount of credit for doing the requisite character-building work, playing past the obvious physical dissimilarities between them and creating a workable, sisterly dynamic that can go from warm to freezing in an instant, but there's so little in the way of compelling events for them to react to that it's almost hard to maintain interest. Margot at the Wedding is a ninety minute film, with about twenty minutes worth of content.

Jack Black is the third lead as Malcolm, Pauline's soon-to-be-husband who has no job and no ambition to do anything except possibly commit infidelity. It's hard to say whether Noah Baumbach hired Black to play a thinly-disguised version of himself or whether he intended to have him do heavy lifting, acting-wise, because there's an odd mixture of both on display. There are moments when he's simply playing his part with none of his usual verbal or physical affectations, and there are other moments, such as in a late scene where he's supposed to be doing some crying, when he's unwisely allowed to lapse into a light version of Jack Black schtick. Both incarnations of his character seem to be a noticeably bad match for Jennifer Jason Leigh, by the way. Her natural gravitas doesn't mesh well with his absurdist persona, and whenever they are together on screen, there's a palpable sense of 'acting' going on that undermines Jason Leigh's seemingly honest attempts at character development. Theirs is just one of several of the film's actor pairings that don't seem very natural.

Not much to see here that wasn't covered in the trailer that we passed along a few days ago, but here is the first one-sheet for Nicole Kidman's next film, Margot at the Wedding. Directed by Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) the film focuses on a 40-something woman, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, whose (apparent) spur of the moment decision to get married prompts the arrival of her disapproving sister, Margot, played by Kidman. The advance buzz on this movie is pretty good, with a few sneak reviews saying that the trailer is covering up more serious elements to the storyline, and that Kidman's performance is what will sell the movie. Jack Black plays the almost-husband of Jason Leigh's character, so I think it's safe to say that he'll be balancing out whatever serious intentions the trailer is masking.

Kidman is currently in Australia, shooting the Baz Luhrmann epic of the same name, and is loosely attached to two future projects -- Need, in which she may co-star with Naomi Watts and Wong Kar Wai's The Lady from Shanghai, which has gone through a lot of shifts over the past couple of years. I'm not up on the latest regarding the project, but something tells me you shouldn't hold your breath for it. As for Jennifer Jason Leigh, she'll next be seen opposite Alec Baldwin in Lymelife, a family dramedy about a marriage that is falling apart. Margot at the Wedding is currently scheduled to hit theaters on October 19.

The first trailer for Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach's follow-up to The Squid and the Whale, has landed at Moviefone. While Jack Black rubs me the wrong way sometimes, I am a fan of both of the female leads -- Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh -- and from the looks of the trailer, they've got at least a couple of big scenes together in this one. The movie tells the story of Pauline (Jason Leigh) a 40-ish woman who impulsively decides to get married to a guy played by Black. The wedding brings Pauline's disapproving sister, Margot (Kidman) and the two of them go at it. Meanwhile, Jack Black's character sort of sits back and takes the brunt of the abuse. There may be a romance triangle that develops, although it's hard to tell from the trailer. John Turturro also has a role in the film, but he's barely even mentioned in the trailer, so it must be a glorified cameo, at best.

The best part of the trailer comes near the end, with Kidman's character inexplicably climbing a tree to prove that she's still young at heart or something, and getting totally stuck. There are definitely enough good moments here to make me anxious to give it a whirl. One observation, though: although Kidman is clearly going with the dressed-down, dowdy look she's used for other films like Birthday Girl, it's still a bit of a stretch to buy her as sharing DNA with Jennifer Jason Leigh, don't you agree? Anyway, Margot is being put out in limited release on October 19 by Paramount Vantage, which will also be putting out one of the films I'm most looking forward to in 2007 -- P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood. Fall is shaping up, people.