Last year, Julia Roberts cut a swath through Bill Crudup, James Franco, and Javier Bardem to rekindle her lust for life in Eat Pray Love, and this year, it’s only fair that she balance things out by helping Tom Hanks adjust to middle age, too. That’s the premise of Larry Crowne — the first Hanks-directed film since That Thing You Do — which casts Hanks as a recently fired goofball who goes back to college to learn a few life lessons from a burned-out professor played by Roberts. Shenanigans ensue, and even romance, but we’re less interested in the conventional rom-com beats than we are with the movie’s excellent, kinda random supporting cast, which includes Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bryan Cranston, Rami Malek, Pam Grier, and George Takei, among others. (And again, Tom Hanks proves himself incapable of taking any kind of safe trip by crashing his new scooter. Let’s hope he has some good insurance by now.) [Movies/Yahoo]
