Stephanie Zacharek

Driver ferries Baumbauch’s super-cerebral script — Baumbach could never not be cerebral — to a place beyond thinking, where raw emotion becomes an entropic, hurricane swirl.

There are no noisy meltdowns or hyper-dramatic revelations in Brittany Runs a Marathon; even the lines that sting have some buoyancy. Brittany has a tough outer shell — you need it in New York, and you need it just being a woman. But Bell makes that shell translucent; her character’s vulnerability shimmers through it, in a gorgeous everyday way.

Mostly, with the exception of a tiresome, protracted gag involving a parental stash of sex toys, it’s more funny and charming than it is raunchy. If these boys are the men of the future, their parents have done something right.