Ruby Sparks

Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Ruby Sparks follows author Calvin Weir-Fields (Paul Dano) as his latest story, about a quirky, off-kilter girl named Ruby Sparks (Zoe Kazan), becomes more than just a work of art after said girl suddenly...

"Ruby Sparks" slyly, smartly pokes holes in the romanticism of the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl, specifically. But it also toys with the larger notion of idealizing people you don't really know just because you've fallen for them and want all that warm...

Ruby Sparks is the story of Calvin (Dano), a frustrated writer who had a monumental success with his first novel, published when he was only 19. As the movie begins, Calvin is unable to create anymore.

Ruby Sparks succeeds as a satirical fantasy about writerly self-involvement (and the many things, good and bad, the quirk can unexpectedly manifest), but it's worth celebrating as a testament to self-made greatness, particularly in regard to the...

Male fantasies have, for centuries, complicated women’s real lives through imposed and self-imposed expectations. Dealing with “the Pygmalion myth” hardly seems like the stuff of a date-night romantic comedy, but Ruby Sparks isn’t interested in...

“Weird Science” meets “Stranger Than Fiction” in “Ruby Sparks,” a romantic fable that begins as a genial slapstick comedy but finds its way to darker dramatic territory. Written by Zoe Kazan, who also takes the title role alongside Paul Dano, it’s the...

Written by star Zoe Kazan and directed by the Little Miss Sunshine team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Ruby Sparks stars Paul Dano as literary wonderboy Calvin Weir-Fields. Ten years after his sensational debut, Calvin is mired in an...

After watching Ruby Sparks, I asked myself a question: Did I enjoy it as much as I did because it brings such a breezy perspective to a tired genre or because it offers a unique point-of-view of creativity and the writing process? I'm not sure...

‘You haven’t written a person — you’ve written a character,’’ someone tells Calvin, the depressed novelist hero of “Ruby Sparks,’’ a twee, mildly amusing rom-com from the directors of “Little Miss Sunshine.’’

Screenwriter Zoe Kazan takes a whimsically fantastical idea and sees it through to its inevitably bitter end. Ruby Sparks starts in earnest with a flight of fancy: A writer not only manages to create life just from the effort of his imagination and...

Not unlike the blockbuster reboot craze crowding movie theaters lately, Indiewood's Ruby Sparks goes for that deja vu do-over too. In this case, with a modernized take on Greek mythology's enduring Victorian stage to eventual musical and screen...

"Ruby Sparks" is the kind of movie where you come away from it with the sense that the film as a whole has been conceived as a sort of support system for the one key sequence that presumably inspired the whole enterprise. I do not object to this in theory

The new American movie Ruby Sparks tells us a love story, and is most definitely in the business of wish fulfillment.

Fiction becomes fact in the surprisingly thought-provoking romantic comedy ‘Ruby Sparks’, which is essentially a 21st-century version of the Pygmalion myth. About as meta as meta gets, it is the story of a young novelist Calvin (Paul Dano) who...

The romantic comedy/fantasy Ruby Sparks takes a playful jab at writers who claim that their characters speak through them. They’re simply recording the dialogue they hear, say the powerless writers, swearing that they’re akin to psychic mediums...

It was in an essay about Cameron Crowe’s “Elizabethtown” that film critic Nathan Rabin coined the term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” to describe a type of “bubbly, shallow” female character who exists “to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life...

Ruby is played by Zoe Kazan, an unconventional beauty who cleverly wrote this character for herself, handing it over to the Little Miss Sunshine directing team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris.

Plenty of fictional creations have sprung from imagination to reality in the minds of movie characters. Look at the computer-generated woman in “Weird Science.” Or, last month, the living teddy bear in “Ted.”

It only took the husband-and-wife team behind Little Miss Sunshine six years to follow up that hit film with this, a project starring and produced by another off-screen couple about a writer similarly tasked with following up his own hit novel several...

A best-selling author at 19, Calvin Weir-Fields is a man whose body language apologizes with every shrug and baleful hesitation. Walking his dog in the hills of Los Feliz, Calif., near Hollywood, the novelist seems at odds with just about everything.

High-concept movies, by their very nature, ask that the audience accept a situation that is extremely implausible if not completely impossible. That contract is established before the film even begins; the "high concept" of the film is what's brought...

After six years, the directors of Little Miss Sunshine are back with another offbeat comedy-drama that challenges preconceptions. It's an intriguing exploration of the writing process, indulging in some magical realism as it grapples with the nature...