**/****
starring Julie Delpy, Chris Rock, Albert Delpy, Alexia Landeau
screenplay by Julie Delpy & Alexia Landeau & Alexandre Nahon
directed by Julie Delpy

by Angelo Muredda A leaner 2 Days in New York might have worked as a pilot for a Showtime series with a game Julie Delpy at the helm, but as a movie it's a bust, a high-calorie trifle that goes down lumpy. Delpy, who serves as director, co-screenwriter (with onscreen co-stars Alexia Landeau and Alexandre Nahon), and star, envisions the film as a roundabout sequel to 2007's 2 Days in Paris, but the first instalment got much of its low-key charm from Delpy's chemistry with fellow neurotic Adam Goldberg as Jack, an audience surrogate displaced in his girlfriend Marion's anything-goes European milieu. With Jack out of the picture, the follow-up brings Marion's family to the flat she shares with current partner Mingus (Chris Rock) in New York–a proposition that's supposed to be inherently funny, even though Mingus is easygoing and her widowed father Jeannot (real-life Delpy paterfamilias, Albert) isn't all that grotesque. That disjunct gives the film an identity crisis from which it never recovers. What's worse, it just isn't very funny as a concept.

**/****
starring Rashida Jones, Andy Samberg, Chris Messina, Elijah Wood
screenplay by Rashida Jones & Will McCormack
directed by Lee Toland Krieger

by Angelo Muredda A long-overdue showcase for "Parks and Recreation" star Rashida Jones, Celeste and Jesse Forever never makes it out of the generic romcom woods it wants so badly to escape, and the strain leaves everyone involved looking exhausted. That's especially disappointing, because Jones is a comic talent, burdened by a script–her own, co-written with fellow TV vet Will McCormack–that insists on lifting beyond its weight class to subvert the story it's telling. Bridesmaids seems to be the model here (and not just because the star is her own screenwriter), although director Lee Toland Krieger has little of Paul Feig's ease in modulating tone. You could think of Judd Apatow's protagonists as one man with many faces and varying accessories, and while Apatow is AWOL here, his presence is felt in the way that Jones's Celeste, a professional trend-watcher for a PR startup, suggests a more financially secure version of Kristen Wiig's pastry chef in Bridesmaids. From the start, we get the impression that she's happily married to unemployed graphic designer Jesse (Andy Samberg, in his second marriage-themed movie this summer), with whom she shares an easy rapport too-obviously signalled by their obnoxious habit of making restaurant orders in the voice of Dieter from "Sprockets." It turns out they're separated, though still best friends–at least until romantic complications wedge them farther and farther apart for the remaining 90 minutes or so.