Stranger Than Fiction

This movie is neat, and much more low-key than I'd expected, given the premise (Will Ferrell discovers that he's actually a character in a book being written by a famous novelist who is slated to die and then attempts to find said author to convince her not to kill him). Ferrell's damn good (a la Carrey in The Truman Show and, of course, Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love), Emma Thompson as the scruffy, overwrought, death-fixated writer is simply brilliant (particularly given that I last saw her in Brideshead, a completely different role), Dustin Hoffman plays a literature professor who's like a straighter version of his character in Huckabees with characteristic understated aplomb, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is as much of a charmer as ever in hitting the nail on the head with her depiction of an independent-minded harvard drop out cookie baker; the film bubbles along but it's both morally and emotionally serious, and finely crafted too. A minor gem.