Growing Up and Other Lies

Mr. Jacobs and Mr. Grodsky have an extraordinary ear for the rhythms and nuances of everyday speech, as voices overlap, conversations take random directions, and casual remarks carry loaded subtexts.

Intermittently amusing but rarely as funny as it wants to be.

Part of what made Edgar Wright’s "The World’s End" so refreshing was the way that it feinted at being a certain tired sort of movie before suddenly making a wild leap in another direction. Growing Up And Other Lies, is exactly the mediocre movie that The World’s End was pretending to be.

Only Adam Brody is compelling here.

The seriocomic Growing Up and Other Lies, written and directed by Jacobs and Darren Grodsky (Humboldt County), offers strained male bonding from a quartet sorely out of tune.

Although the film is supposedly about movement, Growing Up And Other Lies frequently stalls out, and whole patches of it grind on without momentum or purpose.

Struggling for the same vibe as male-bonding comedies like “Diner,” Growing Up & Other Lies instead feels like a really long beer commercial, except beer commercials usually contain at least one witty idea.