PARKING LOT RAGE: Nick (Will Ferrell) tampers with his boss's car in Everything Must Go.
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WIN WIN If life is indeed about enjoying the little things, then it's entirely appropriate that the best scenes in Win Win are the little slice-of-life ones. Coming off a great performance in Barney's Version, Paul Giamatti again works wonders with his sad-sack routine — here, he's Mike Flaherty, a struggling lawyer and high-school wrestling coach whose backhanded dealing with a dementia-afflicted client (Burt Young) eventually leads to the elderly man's grandson, a troubled runaway named Kyle (Alex Shaffer), entering his life. Mike and his wife Jackie (a terrific turn by Gone Baby Gone's Amy Ryan) reluctantly decide to help Kyle out, only to grow genuinely attached to him. But this bond gets threatened when Kyle's irresponsible mother (Melanie Lynskey) turns up, just out of rehab and ready to drag her unwilling son home. Writer-director Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent) occasionally stumbles into unlikely scenarios that generally exist only in the movies, but he makes such slip-ups easy to ignore (or excuse) because the vast majority of the picture strikes the right notes in terms of its characters and the ways in which they interact with each other. Win Win is by no means a perfect movie, but it's a lovely one that deserves its designation as one of the top-seeded films currently in theaters. ***1/2
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