Capsule reviews of films playing the week of Aug. 12 

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(500) DAYS OF SUMMER The beauty of this utterly winning picture is that it doesn't live in a generational vacuum: Like the best films of its kind, its tale of young love (and all the accompanying trials and tribulations) will speak to all ages. Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Tom Hansen, a sweet kid who works for a greeting card company. Into the workplace walks new employee Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel), and Tom is immediately smitten. Summer, however, isn't on the same page: More cynical in nature, she doesn't particularly subscribe to the notion of true love and sees Tom as a "friend with benefits." Tom does his best to keep their union afloat, but he obviously has his work cut out for him. Rather than spill the story in chronological order, this jumps back and forth to various points in the relationship, showing the pair happy one minute and gloomy the next. In the wrong hands, such a decision might have turned out unwieldly or awkward, but here the scenes flow smoothly, making sense not only narratively (on-screen markers always alert us to the day being shown) but also emotionally, allowing us to fully understand and appreciate how earlier incidents might affect the characters' mindsets during later ones. Ultimately, none of this would work without the proper actors, and Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel are adorable talents whose open faces and inviting eyes seem to allow audiences access to their very psyches. Because of them, we find ourselves completely invested in Tom and Summer, and their love story becomes our love story, warts and all. Don't miss the brilliant cameo of sorts by a Star Wars character, the result being the funniest moment in any film released thus far in 2009. ***1/2

FOOD, INC. The documentary Food, Inc. is the perfect bookend movie, adaptable to many double-feature bills. When paired with Super-Size Me, it serves as the "before" shot, showing how those hamburgers came into being (so to speak), and how they're made so tasty – and unhealthy. When paired with The Corporation (still the scariest movie I have ever seen), it functions as a particular case study of the evils detailed in that earlier picture, which was all about how these United States of America have been reconfigured to operate as nothing more than the personal (and profitable) playgrounds of a few select conglomerates and their insidious overlords. Heck, it can even be paired with Howard Hawks' classic Red River, in which Wild West cowboy Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) delivers an impassioned speech about the personal satisfaction of herding cattle and feeding the populace ("... Good beef for hungry people. Beef to make them strong; make them grow ..."). Poor Thomas would (pardon the pun) have a cow if he could see the mechanical means by which animals are slaughtered today. Yet while Food, Inc. contains its share of queasy sequences (the peek inside the chicken house is especially unsettling), its focus is primarily on the manner in which the corporations have long taken over the entire food industry, in essence deciding what we eat and calculating how best to maximize their own profits (there's a reason sugary snacks and Happy Meals cost less than broccoli and asparagus). The result is that animals are brutalized, honest farmers are ruined, and clueless consumers become ever more obese. This documentary will doubtless rank as the year's most depressing movie, as it often feels like our fates have already been sealed. Food, Inc. offers plenty of food for thought, but, as expected, there isn't much here to nourish the mind or soul. ***

FUNNY PEOPLE What distinguished writer-director Judd Apatow's previous films (Knocked Up and especially The 40-Year-Old Virgin) from most of the doltish fanboy comedies hitting theaters these days (The Hangover, for instance) is that he made sure to include genuine characters rather than stock types in his stories and made us care enough about them to allow the movies to resonate beyond their nyuk content. Funny People is even more ambitious – it wants to make us laugh and cry and ruminate and perhaps even start Oscar buzz – but it never properly merges all of its disparate elements into an organic whole, resulting in viewer whiplash as it repeatedly starts and sputters. Adam Sandler is cast as George Simmons, a Hollywood star who's just been diagnosed with a potentially fatal strain of leukemia. After the obligatory bouts of self-pity, he tries to move ahead, first by hiring rising comic Ira Wright (Seth Rogen) to write material for him and then by trying to rekindle a romance with Laura (Leslie Mann, Apatow's real-life wife), an ex-fiancee now married to an Australian businessman (Eric Bana, stealing the show). Criminally overlong, this is so overstuffed with incidental material – Ira's thorny relationship with his two more successful roommates (Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman), his tentative wooing of a deadpan neighbor (Aubrey Plaza), George's schmoozing with countless celebrities playing themselves (Sarah Silverman, Paul Reiser, Eminem, etc.), an endless stream of dick jokes – that the George-Laura storyline doesn't even materialize until the film's second hour. Apatow clearly meant to further his reputation with this ambitious effort, but the end result, sad to say, is no laughing matter. **