As one passes by the cubes of the All Movie staff, it is not uncommon to hear overlapping conversations with subjects ranging from Altman to The Office to the newest blockbusters at the theaters or even The Muppets. Some chats are friendly and some are heated, but one thing is for sure — this is a staff with a great range of varied tastes that somehow find common ground with each other, if only because we all love the filmed and televised mediums so much. So as the weekend looms, here’s a quick list of the stuff some of us have been ingesting over the past week. Enjoy.

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The black clouds had blotted out the sun nearly fifteen minutes ago, giving what was previously a bright summer afternoon an eerie air of impending menace. I was racing down the freeway intent on keeping my date with a seducer of worlds as the rain and hail began to bounce noisily off my windshield, reducing my visibility to virtually zero. Just then, my cell phone began to ring. It was one of Yivo’s human wranglers. The elements were bearing down on her as well, so that both she and the oversexed alien’s harem of intergalactic space babes were forced to seek temporary shelter until the storm could blow over. She warned me that Yivo was feeling a bit deflated this particular afternoon, but I figured human that would only give this humble human a distinct edge over the tentacled menace.

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A G-rated synthesis of AI, Idiocracy, 2001, and Chaplin’s Modern Times, Wall-E tells the tale of a robot left behind to clean up Earth while the human race bides its time in space, waiting for machines to fix the mess they’ve left behind. But this being Pixar, the deeper issues are handled just as expertly as the conventional storyline, which in this case is a simple love story between two robots.

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The documentary Super High Me follows comedian Doug Benson as he spends one month indulging in neither marijuana nor alcohol. Then the camera stayed with him for a second month while he smoked and drank all day every day. Along the way, viewers get a look at the history of medical marijuana in California, and a taste of how the political battles surrounding the issue continue. To mark the film’s DVD release, director Michael Blieden sat down with AllMovie’s Perry Seibert to answer questions about the film, and to discuss some of his more obscure gigs, his other films, his plans for the future, and the advantages of being part of the L.A. comedy scene.

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Fans of vocalist Norah Jones who feel curious to glimpse the star’s capacity for feature drama may walk away from screens with more questions than they had going in, after checking out this English-language directorial debut by famed Chinese director Wong Kar-Wai, which hits U.S. video store shelves on July 1st.

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This big screen version of Get Smart succeeds because, unlike the main character, newly minted field spy Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell), every person who worked on the movie performed their job competently. This is not minor praise. Director Peter Segal makes both the comedy and the action pop with energy. He knows when to cut to a joke, and when to trust his actors to get the point home with their interactions. He’s as comfortable staging a humorous ballroom dance competition as he is constructing a kinetic beat down administered by agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) to a couple of bad guys. The action scenes, particularly the hand-to-hand fight scenes, aren’t treated as comedy, but as tense and exciting set pieces. Dean Semler’s cinematography balances the brightness required for comedy and the darkness needed to add tension with unobtrusive professionalism. Quite simply this is the most enjoyable American action comedy since Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

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Most Bollywood movies resist easy description and defy genre classification; Ram Gopal Varma’s Sarkar Raj (2008), on the other hand, represents an attempt to synch up Bollywood stylistic tropes with the conventions of a Godfather-influenced Hollywood crime thriller. On it own terms, it works splendidly.

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“I used to be Irish Catholic, now I’m an American. You know, you grow.”

Those were the first words spoken on George Carlin’s album Class Clown. While the man may have lost faith, he will forever be a deity for comedy fans - even after his passing Sunday in Los Angeles at the age of 71. When they build the Mount Rushmore of stand-up comedy, his face will most assuredly stare down at us – ideally with the look of disgust he would save for anyone who believed in any kind of god whatsoever. Luckily we won’t need a giant carving of his face to remember him, because he left behind the most impressive, voluminous, and influential body of work any stand-up comic has ever produced. Albums like FM & AM, Class Clown, A Place for My Stuff, and Life Is Worth Losing, and every one of his HBO specials will forever stand as documents of their time, but will also remain fresh because his observations on our linguistic and social foibles will always be on point. Carlin understood the folly of being human, the insignificance of it, and railed at the ways we built obsessions for ourselves in order to avoid the pain. He pointed out the empty soul at the heart of show business in routines like The Divorce Game and his impression of a DJ working on air at wonderful WINO radio. He deconstructed our fetishistic consumerism in A Place for My Stuff. And he never shied away from pointing out whenever language was used to obfuscate, rather than reveal, truth. This November, the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor will be bestowed on Carlin, a fact announced before his death. There could be no more appropriate comparison because Carlin, like Twain, was able to tell us all what we were doing wrong, and make us laugh while he told us.