“Good Night, and Good Luck” is elegant, gripping and, at 93 minutes, brief to the point of poetry. Directed by George Clooney and originally conceived as a live-broadcast TV special, it bears many similarities to 2000’s Clooney-produced live-broadcast “Fail Safe.” Both are black-and-white Cold War dramas with themes that remain powerful today, but where “Fail Safe” tells a fictional story about a U.S. nuclear bomber mistakenly dispatched to the Soviet Union, “Good Night, and Good Luck” retells with great, sparse precision a story that is all too true—that of legendary radio and television journalist Edward R. Murrow’s duel with Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

“Just Like Heaven” should be easy to like. After all, it stars Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo, both of whom are pretty likeable and easy on the eyes. It also co-stars John “Napoleon Dynamite” Heder as a dorky psychic and Donal Logue as a dorky psychiatrist, and they’re both pretty friendly guys, even though they’re not as attractive as the film’s stars. It should be a pleasant way to waste 90 minutes, but “Just Like Heaven” is also a romantic comedy, a genre that, as a whole, is monumentally difficult to even tolerate, much less enjoy. “Just Like Heaven” is hampered not only by its own genre, but also by an unintentional political statement buried in a lame plot twist, one that makes it hard to watch without cringing.