Weekend Movie Forecast: A Serious Man or The Invention of Lying

Comedy The Invention of Lying, starring Ricky Gervais, takes place in an alternate reality where lying—even the concept of a lie—does not exist. But when a down-on-his-luck screenwriter discovers prevarication, everything's turned upside down, ha ha. The Onion's Keith Philipps says the movie doesn't "settle for easy laughs in portraying a world of absolute truthfulness from its advertising ('Coke: It’s very famous') to its institutions, as when Gervais visits his mother at A Sad Place For Hopeless Old People. The film doesn’t traffic in drollery for its own sake. Between laughs, 'Lying' uses its skewed reality to comment on our own need to create useful fictions to wallpaper over the abyss... Matching humor with ambition, it takes on an even bigger topic when Gervais, unable to watch his dying mother suffer, tells her about the Big Man In The Sky and the happy place awaiting her while happily aghast onlookers beg him for more details on this great news."