PICKS & PANS

This week's reviews: 'Tadpole,' The Vines album, more

(PEOPLE) -- This week, PEOPLE.COM looks at the film "Tadpole," The Vines album "Highly Evolved" and "Women vs. Men" on Showtime.

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Movie review: 'Tadpole'

"Tadpole"'s Bebe Neuwirth (left) gets into minor trouble with Aaron Stanford.

Oscar (Aaron Stanford), 15, is in love for the very first time with, appropriately enough, a woman named Eve. What's not appropriate is that she's his stepmom, a 40-plus medical researcher who studies the human heart. "The heart is simple," Eve (Sigourney Weaver) tells him, unaware of his crush on her. "Fixing it is complicated."

Oscar's heart will need serious mending before "Tadpole," a slight but appealing romantic farce, is over. As it follows the travails of its precocious protagonist -- who quotes Voltaire and dismisses teen girls as lacking depth -- the film captures Oscar's adolescent need to wallow in his own emotions. While Stanford (25 in real life) and Weaver perform laudably, slinky Bebe Neuwirth steals the show. Playing a fortysomething chiropractor who is Eve's best pal, she ends up trysting a night away with the virginal Oscar. Amusing though this all is, one has to ask, what if it were about a 15-year-old girl?

Bottom line: Stays afloat

Music review: 'Highly Evolved'

MORE STORIES PEOPLE COVER STORY: Meet seven lucky Americans who know what it's like to come back from the brink  More from PEOPLE.COM    RESOURCES PEOPLE.COM PROFILE: Get to know Sigourney Weaver    E-MAIL Want more from PEOPLE.COM? Sign up  for free e-mails

The Vines (Capitol)

This Australian quartet -- led by singer Craig Nicholls -- brazenly borrows from its trusty rock and role models: the Beatles, the Kinks, Cheap Trick and Nirvana. The result is an exhilarating mix of raw rock -- as noisy as it is infectious -- tempered by a smattering of dreamy, psychedelic songs that might even have impressed John Lennon. Throw in some melodic ballads, ska-influenced bop and post-modern punk, and you're left with a debut disc that easily transcends other garage-band revivalists such as the Strokes, the Hives and the White Stripes, which have emerged as the latest rage in rock.

Yes, these young bands all strive to sound like the seminal giants that came before them, but it's the Vines who still manage to distinctly reinterpret those influences, proving that for a derivative rock group, they really are highly evolved.

Bottom line: A natural selection

TV review: 'Women vs. Men'

Showtime (Sunday, August 4, 8 p.m. ET)

Joe Mantegna, Paul Reiser, Christine Lahti, Glenne Headly -- the cast is overqualified for this fundamentally routine sex comedy. But they seem to be having a fairly good time, and chances are so will you.

Lahti plays a woman who tails her husband (Mantegna) and his buddy (Reiser) to a lap-dancing establishment. She immediately reports her findings to Reiser's wife (Headly), and the rest of a long night is filled with accusations, evasions and complications. Reiser has some funny riffs in the "Mad About You" manner ("It wasn't cheating -- it was fake, it was faux, faux cheating"), and Robert Pastorelli runs enjoyably amok as a screwy friend of both couples' who decides it's his "calling" to parade in a loincloth and paw as many women as possible. Unfortunately, all the antics lead to an ostensibly serious speech by Mantegna that makes less than an ounce of sense.

Bottom line: Enough laughs to get by