What Happens in Vegas

Iron Man

Son of Rambow

Baby Mama

The Life Before Her Eyes

The Visitor

Sex and Death 101

The Grand

Shine A Light

21

Drillbit Taylor

Married Life

Single businesswoman Kate Holbrook (Tina Fey) attends Lamaze class with her surrogate, Angie Ostrowiski (Amy Poehler).

Tina Fey takes a break from playing a highly successful but personally unhappy corporate executive on 30 Rock to play a highly successful but personally unhappy corporate executive in Baby Mama. The look, the tight voice, the glasses, they're all pretty identical to how you see Fey on her great TV series; the only real difference is that Fey's Kate Holbrook, in her late 30s, is obsessed with being unable to conceive the baby she wants so badly. So, she hires a fertile surrogate: Angie, a slack-jawed, trash-talking, wild-living, junk food-guzzling white trash honey played by Amy Poehler, Fey's Saturday Night Live sidekick. Baby Mama plays out like a kind of female Odd Couple, only with obligatory cracks about aging and gays, and though it isn't much of a victory, it's Poehler's show all the way. She goes at it hammer and tongs, pepping things up with a much-needed comic zing, mania, a sense of danger and hellaciously great improv skills. She's scary-funny, like some hopped-up, new millennium Lucille Ball.

Kate gets romantic with a juice bar owner (Greg Kinnear).

Written and directed by SNL alumna Michael McCullers, the movie mostly ambles along punctuated by some big laughs and equipping Kate with an obligatory potential new boyfriend (a nicely laid-back Greg Kinnear), a passive-aggressive, ridiculously fertile head of a fertility clinic (Sigourney Weaver), a relentlessly egocentric New Age-spouting boss (Steve Martin) and a straight-talking doorman (Romany Malco). The thing's not painful to watch, but it only really crackles when Poehler is on the scene, aided by Dax Shepard as her dimwitted, skirt-chasing, unemployed common-law husband. Poehler may not yet be a real actress -- her accent comes and goes and she can't disguise writing that makes her character inconsistent from scene to scene -- but as a comic talent, she's already stratospheric.

by Stephen Rebello

Photos: K.C. Bailey/©2008 Universal Studios. All rights reserved