I have a simple rule about the success of an onscreen romance. A good one feels like a movie is conspiring to keep the couple apart. A bad one feels like the movie is shoving them together against the movie’s will. Crazy, Stupid, Love shoves like a school lunch line on chocolate milk Friday. The marriage of Steve Carell and Julianne Moore is cemetery dead, probably in a way that didn’t play to the writers on the page. The worst marriages are those that don’t just die but drown the two people with them.

Jacob Tierney's film career launched in 1993, at the age of thirteen, when he starred—alongside Joan Allen, Martha Plimpton and a young Jake Gyllenhaal—in the adolescent road trip comedy/drama Josh and S.A.M. For the next ten years, the Quebec-born actor was cast in relatively obscure independent films featuring legendary character actors, such as Neon Bible (produced by his father, Kevin Tierney, and starring Gena Rowlands) and Rainbow (directed by and starring Bob Hoskins). In 2003, he made his directing and writing debut with Twist, an adaptation of “Oliver Twist,” and its success in Canada granted Tierney the opportunity to shoot a higher-budget film: The Trotsky, released last year to acclaim and starring geeky heartthrob Jay Baruchel of Knocked Up fame.

For Good Neighbors (which comes out today), Tierney, once again at the directing helm, cast Baruchel and Trotsky co-star Emily Hampshire, as well as Scott Speedman (most known for the TV drama Felicity) as three ill-at-ease neighbors in a dimly-lit Montreal apartment building. Adapted from Chrystine Brouillet's noirish 1982 story Chère Voisine, this black comedy concerns a serial killer on the loose, a war between an equally demented cat killer and cat enthusiast, and one of the more grotesque murder sequences of late. Screen Comment talked with Tierney about his favorite early acting experiences, his break into directing and his distaste for setting movies in our current Internet-dominated era.

You sit up abruptly, sweat streaming down the side of your face. You crave brown crab claws with peanut paste, watermelon and muscovado sugar air.

I know that feeling. But unluckily, I never got to go to Spain's El Bulli, which is owned by Ferran Adrià (he started working there as a line cook in 1984). And now it’s closing.

You know El Bulli, it's that establishment where molecular gastronomy is on offer and where the superhuman abilities of its chef beckon fans from everywhere. El Bulli will be no more by month’s end and a documentary is being released, El Bulli: Cooking in Progress. Don’t expect a Food Channel documentary—those follow helpfully along a straightforward narrative and interviews with the protagonists help thicken the plot. They’re all-in-one packages and they’re usually very successful films.

This documentary is bare-bones in comparison, but you might still derive some pleasure from watching a group of young men belaboring over some seriously exotic-looking appetizers. Cooking In Progress is more the fly-on-the-wall approach: watch the studied intensity of a group of Adrià’s cooks being trained and the negotiations that ensue to establish the upcoming season’s menu (this documentary was shot a couple of years ago); nod, salivate and wonder.

Adrià’s legacy on what gastronomy can do to food is so unavoidable, missing this documentary would be a shame. But the lack of padding or subtext (testimonies; overall context) could make it unrewarding to some. Some research before watching (on cooking trends, Adrià, molecular foods) might be in order to get the most out of it.

Errol Morris' Tabloid (released on July 15), examines what is left, spiritually and mentally, of a once-respected, now-notorious figure, ruined by the unending scrutiny of trashy media. There is, however, one crucial difference. Mr. Death's title character, a builder of more “humane” electric chairs, essentially crucified himself when he became a rallying Holocaust denier; Morris never questions Fred Leuchter's guilt. In Tabloid, all of the subjects interviewed seem a little mad, yet they all possess hints of clarity and conviction; no one's quite smart or stupid enough to believe or disavow.

Directed by Evan Glodell. Starring Evan Glodell, Jessie Wiseman, and [...]

Directed by Guy Moshe. Starring Josh Hartnett, Ron Perlman, Demi [...]

For those of us who like nice, clean categories to put people in it could be hard to get your head around Brit Marling. She’s an actor (she moved to Los Angeles after finishing her Bachelors in Economics and Studio Art at Georgetown University) and she’s a producer (she starred and co-wrote two films that were shown at the last Sundance Festival). She was most recently seen at the Los Angeles Film Festival presenting her sci-fi movie Another Earth (the film was also shown at SXSW).