IRA AND ABBY

Let's just quote Joe Morgenstern from the Wall St. Journal: "The nicest surprise of the week -- not just nice but amazing -- is a comedy called "Ira and Abby." The film was directed by Robert Cary from a stunningly funny script by Jennifer Westfeldt, who plays Abby to Chris Messina's Ira. (She co-wrote and played the title role in "Kissing Jessica Stein.") To do rough justice to this special treat in not much space, let me first stipulate that it evokes any number of Woody Allen films, thanks to its therapy-centric characters and its Upper West Side milieu. But it also evokes the precision and panache of Feydeau farces, and the giddiness of the classic screwball genre, thanks to Ira and Abby's roundelays of marriage and divorce in a madcap relationship marked by skittering skepticism about the wisdom of marriage, and the nature of love.