REEL CRITICS:

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler may be responsible for the best comedy skits of the current incarnation of “Saturday Night Live.” They bring some of their sharp wit and penchant for pointed social satire to “Baby Mama.” This film explores the funnier aspects of the serious business of surrogate motherhood.

Fey is an unmarried corporate executive who is too busy and too infertile to have kids. Poehler plays the white trailer trash woman hired to become the surrogate mom of the story. Steve Martin and Sigourney Weaver have lightweight cameos in the competent screenplay. Greg Kinnear is the love interest who takes on the White Knight role when the plot turns predictable.

Along the way to a conventional ending, there are some worthwhile sarcastic comments on relationships and modern life in general. There are also lots of good laughs. But eventually the usual formula elements of Hollywood’s romantic comedies sneak in to steal the show.

“Found” and lost

April Epner is a late-30s schoolteacher desperate to have a baby; but as it turns out, she already has one in the shape of her husband. Within a short span of time, he leaves her, April’s adoptive mother dies, her birth mother finds her, she meets a great new man, and learns she’s pregnant.

Whew. That’s just the exhausting start of “Then She Found Me,” which marks star Helen Hunt’s promising directorial debut in this modest, offbeat dramedy that packs enough anxiety and emotion for two films.

Looking tired and defeated by life, Hunt is wonderful in her best role since her Oscar-winning turn in “As Good As It Gets.” She also gets great performances from Matthew Broderick as the hapless husband, Bette Midler as a TV host/drama queen, and Colin Firth as a potential knight-in-slightly-tarnished armor. Even famed author Salman Rushdie gets in the act as April’s doctor.

Midler is never more irresistible than when recalling how April was conceived in a one-night stand with none other than the legendary Steve McQueen.

The characters are quirky and well-realized but the screenplay less so, and the film starts to weaken during the last third. The secrets and lies and human foibles revealed are sometimes too much of a jumbled mess, but I guess real life can be, too.

JOHN DEPKO is a Costa Mesa resident and a senior investigator for the Orange County public defender’s office. SUSANNE PEREZ lives in Costa Mesa and is an executive assistant for a financial services company.