To Rome With Love is no Midnight in Paris, but then, Woody Allen set the bar so high last summer that it may...

During the CD sales boom of the '90s, labels didn't need much of an excuse to release a tribute album, and although most of the decade's compilations were cheap cash-ins, a handful are true treasures. 1994's If I Were a Carpenter, which I found buried in a dollar bin in a Florida record store last month, remains a cherished relic from the era. It was an oddity from the start, assembling a slew of ...

Smart People is about what can happen when the mind is divorced from the heart and spirit. It is also a droll peek into the dreary environs of academia, where the pursuit of knowledge has stumbled onto the treadmill of careerism. It stars Dennis Quaid as Lawrence Wetherhold, an English professor trudging grimly across Carnegie Mellon, face twisted and frozen into an expression of contempt for his colleagues and students. His colleagues, exactly the sort of twits infesting many universities, are probably even poorer souls than Lawrence.