Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Is He Having A Laugh? Is He Having A Laugh? | He sure is: Ricky Gervais makes a corpulent but charming romantic lead opposite Greg Kinnear in Ghost Town.

TEETH!
Ghost Town
CAST | Ricky Gervais, Téa Leoni, Greg Kinnear, Kristen Wiig
All of The Dictator’s friends are huge Ricky Gervais fans, and yet none of them went to see the movie that contains his first lead role — scared off, one presumes, by the cheesy-looking premise (antisocial dentist dies on the operating table, and comes back to life with the power to see ghosts) and the presence of buzzkill co-stars like Téa Leoni and Greg Kinnear. Well, they missed out on seeing one of the year’s better date movies, with a final line guaranteed to make even the most hard-hearted viewer go “Awwww.”

CLEAVAGE!
The Duchess
CAST | Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, Dominic Cooper, Charlotte Rampling
The Duchess shrewdly plays it both ways: on the one hand, this biopic about the 18th-century aristocrat Georgiana, The Duchess of Devonshire pays tribute to its subject’s ahead-of-her-time role as a political operator while making feminist points about the way society excuses male sins while condemning women for the same behaviour. On the other hand, it’s a great excuse for Keira Knightley to wear a bunch of sumptuous gowns and towering wigs (and for co-star Dominic Cooper to wear very little clothing at all). 

HEADS!
Baghead
CAST | Ross Partridge, Steve Zissis, Greta Gerwig, Elise Muller
Uh-oh — there’s going to be confusion on the DVD store new-releases rack this week, so let The Dictator walk you through it. Baghead is the mumblecore movie by Jay and Mark Duplass about a bunch of out-of-work actors who go to a cabin in the woods to bang out the script for a horror movie, only to be menaced by an actual killer. Towelhead, on the other hand, is the controversial satire by American Beauty director Alan Ball about an Arab-American teenager who has her sexual awakening during the first Gulf War.