(500) Days of Summer — Let us now praise Zooey Deschanel, if not necessarily her agent. Most of us got our first glimpse of Deschanel in two small but scene-stealing roles: as the wise older sister of precocious rock journalist William Miller (Patrick Fugit) in Almost Famous and as Jennifer Aniston’s wacky co-worker in The Good Girl. A wide-eyed beauty with an appealing, off-kilter comic delivery, Deschanel seemed destined for a better fate than the string of mostly mediocre romantic comedies that fill her IMDb page. Typecast as the manic pixie dream girl in uninspired big-screen sitcoms like Failure to Launch and Yes Man, Deschanel has made some otherwise dreary movies momentarily watchable, but fans of her early work have been hoping for more than that.

At first glance, (500) Days of Summer looks like more of the same; even the parentheses in the title scream “self-consciously quirky!”  Learning that “Summer” is actually the name of Deschanel’s character doesn’t do much to alter that snap judgment, but fortunately there’s more to director Marc Webb’s feature debut than meets the eye. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Mysterious Skin) stars as Tom, a nice-guy romantic who falls for Deschanel’s Summer and spends a total of, yes, 500 days loving and losing her. Webb employs a fractured timeline a la Pulp Fiction (the break-up comes early in the film, so no spoiler there), and the script by Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber upends the conventions of the rom-com genre in a satisfyingly offbeat manner.



Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince — The eleventy-gazillionth installment in the Potter series finds our young wizard hero discovering an exciting new use for his wand. Okay, maybe it’s not quite that graphic, but Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) does find time for romantic intrigue amidst the increasingly dark developments at Hogwarts.



Homecoming — College football star Mike (Matt Long) returns for homecoming weekend, but he’s somehow neglected to inform high-school sweetheart Shelby (Mischa Barton) that he’s got a new girlfriend, Elizabeth (Jessica Stroup). Shelby does what any heartsick small-town girl would do: she takes Elizabeth hostage in an effort to win Mike back. Works every time!

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