Let It Go: THE HUNTSMAN: WINTER'S WAR

The 2012 summer spectacle Snow White and the Huntsman took a fairy tale and turned it into a fantasy adventure with striking visuals, a muddy Dragonslayer look, welcome weight to matters of life and death, and a feminist snap in letting its heroine fight her own battles. If we absolutely must have fairy tales run through a Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones tone, then that movie was the way to do it right. Alas, now it has also been done wrong in The Hunstman: Winter’s War, a combination prequel and sequel that doodles all around its predecessor with extra intrigue, loud noises, and hectic action, but never arrives at a reason to exist. It’s an afterthought looking for box office. Last time the title characters (Kristen Stewart and Chris Hemsworth) teamed up to defeat the Evil Queen (Charlize Theron). This time there’s new threats and old threats and new plot that suddenly wraps around the old as if the one we’re given now is the real story that’ll bring it all together. As if.

The story starts with the old cheap ah-but-the-dead-villain-had-a-sibling trick. It introduces us to another evil queen, the original’s sister (Emily Blunt), a nice enough young woman who goes full Ice Queen when her lover turns on her. She retreats way up north into the mountains where she makes herself an Elsa-style frozen fortress, then kidnaps local kids to make an army of child soldiers. One of the kids grows up to be Chris Hemsworth, in love with a fellow soldier (Jessica Chastain) despite attachment being forbidden by their icy master. This comes to a tragic end, of course, so this is an explanation as to why he was a loner and such a good fighter in the last movie. Skipping over the events of that story with a tidy “Seven Years Later,” we pick up the thread as the Ice Queen decides she wants her dead sister’s mirror. I suppose I’ve seen worse attempts to find new conflict where it was previously well resolved the last time, but they aren’t coming to mind.

The shiny gold mirror (of “mirror, mirror on the wall” fame) was left behind when the Evil Queen died. Being a tool of evil, it sits in the castle leaking malevolence – killing wildlife, browning grass, that sort of thing. We hear from a messenger (Sam Claflin in a cameo) that it has poisoned Snow White, leaving her incapacitated for the duration of the runtime. (This is screenwriters Evan Spiliotopoulos and Craig Mazin’s best effort at writing out Stewart, who doesn’t return. It stinks of a movie hobbled by contracts, schedules, and other disputes as it bends over backwards pretending that this is a story worth telling.) Snow sent the mirror to be destroyed, but it disappeared. So it is up to the heroic Huntsman and some warrior dwarves (Nick Frost and Rob Brydon, digitally shrunk) to track it down and stop the Ice Queen from swooping in and destroying everything they accomplished.

The idea of dealing with power vacuums and loose weapons of mass destruction in a fantasy context is interesting, but the movie is too thin and empty to do anything with it. There’s nothing here new, surprising, or interesting. It’s a reworking of the first film’s plot – bad queen must be stopped by band of misfits, the leader of which has a tragic history with her – mixed with action beats – fighting goblins, swirling gobs of magic – we’ve seen in every other fantasy film for decades. Helmed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, a visual effects artist making his directorial debut, the thing looks fine and has some fleeting moments of visual interest. I liked a gold-plated Theron, tricky ice walls, tendrils of tar, and a porcelain spy owl, but that’s not much to hang two hours on. This isn’t a particularly rich or novel fantasy world, and it is certainly not enriched by this new experience.

There’s a tremendous cast involved, but they have nothing to work with. Blunt and Theron sell a sniping sisterly chemistry, but of course they have the big goofy camp-adjacent parts decked out in resplendent shimmering gowns and arching eyebrows. The rest of the performers merely fit the tailored leatherwear and look competent swinging old weaponry as the predictable plotting accumulates around them. A passable diversion at best, and thudding boredom at worst, Winter’s War plays like a movie that had to be made before the public forgot about the earlier hit and consequently never figured out what story it wanted to tell or why anyone should care. The irony is that its bland action, routine story beats, and trite love-conquers-all theme is precisely what its predecessor could have been but for the spark of imagination that kept it distinctive. This is the sort of sequel that misses the point of its inspiration entirely.

Outside the Box: THE BOXTROLLS

The Boxtrolls is a marvelous stop-motion family film with all the twisted macabre charms of a Roald Dahl book or an Edward Gorey drawing. It conjures a wondrously imagined storybook Edwardian village of crooked cobblestone streets and leaning buildings clustered up one side of a skinny seaside hill and down the other. Deep below the town’s sewers live squat grey-green trolls clad in cardboard boxes. They’re harmless, kind-hearted beings who only come out at night, scavenging for bits and bobs they cobble together into steampunk creations that form their cavernous lair. But the humans fear them, leading to a storyline about the boxtrolls’ persecution. So, yes, this is a movie about learning to accept yourself and understand others. That’s like any number of family films. But this one has dastardly shifty villains, adults who cruelly marginalize children, and a society that willfully and mindlessly oppresses. You know, for kids!

Like the best kids’ films, it’s smart and involving on a level that can be appreciated by any audience. This one is tremendously imagined, creepy and cute in equal measure. The sophisticated, funny, and deeply felt script by Irena Brignull and Adam Pava, from a book by Alan Snow, moves briskly, cleverly deploying its moralizing in a parade of grotesqueries. The villain is an ugly, greedy man with spindly legs and a pendulous belly. His name is Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley), and he leads the town’s crusade to eradicate the boxtrolls. He spreads propaganda accusing the trolls of eating children and leads his team of exterminators (Nick Frost, Richard Ayoade, and Tracy Morgan) out every night to capture the creatures. It’s all in hopes of being promoted into the town’s elite White Hat club.

It is not all twisted. Our hero is a boy (Isaac Hempstead Wright), apparently orphaned before the film starts, and raised by the boxtrolls as one of their own. He alone understands their adorable guttural babble, but he’s picked up human English as well. He thinks he’s a troll, but soon learns he’s a bridge between the town’s worlds. The boxtrolls fear the humans, who are controlled by leaders obsessed with hats and cheeses. They’re more than happy to delegate troll suppression to a creepy striver like Snatcher, the better to give them more time to devote to cheese. The mayor (Jared Harris) barely acknowledges his daughter (Elle Fanning), allowing her to sneak off and explore the world of the trolls. Both locales, above and below, are filled up with charming details and throwaway gags. You get the sense man and boxtroll would get along fine if only they could get over fears and prejudices.

A charmingly cracked story, the film features bouncy slapstick, clattering gadgetry, and a compassionately lumpy design. Painstakingly detailed in the way only stop-motion animation can be, the characters move like gangly puppets and interact with the world in a tangible way. Directors Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi oversee enveloping 3D environments that enliven terrifically staged dollhouse sets. It feels both real and not in the same instant, in the way all stories do when you’re young. There’s childlike wonder in these frames. Movements carry a weight and presence, even as the events zip off confidently down whimsical alleys.

It's beautifully ugly, eccentric in every detail. This is a movie that features a man monstrously allergic to cheese who gobbles it down anyway, his face and limbs swelling with flabby pustules as it breaks out in bulging hives. (He’s cured by being covered in a writhing mass of leeches.) Henchmen have discussions about whether they’re “the good guys.” A little girl has a sense of morbid curiosity her father finds distasteful. The town is enamored of a secretive French warbler coming to town, one Madame Frou Frou. And then there are the trolls, who tinker, dance, and waddle around, then fold back into their boxes every night, stacking themselves gently into one big family cube. They mean well, and we want to see them coexist peacefully.

This is the third film from Laika, an Oregon-based stop-motion production company. The Boxtrolls fits in nicely with Coraline and ParaNorman in style and tone, forming a lovely set of richly imagined and fantastically clever movies to delight and thrill children of all ages. I think we can safely say they’ve become as dependable and singular an animation studio as Ghibli or Pixar. We know what to expect from them visually and emotionally – something skillfully dark and sweet. These are films with personality and feeling. When so much of Hollywood’s animated product is programmatic and conventional CGI homogeny, there’s definitely room for creative people willing to make earnest stories with sharp statements and distinctive imagery. How wonderful to have Laika. We can trust their heart and intelligence and retain the capacity to be surprised and charmed by their generously overflowing delights.

All's Well That Ends Well: THE WORLD'S END

With each film, from Shaun of the Dead to Hot Fuzz to Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the increasingly brilliant director Edgar Wright has pushed his zippy, energetic pop art precision further. His overt genre exercises gain their momentum and their hilarity from the way he points his camera, frames the action, and edits away, often getting big laughs with nothing more than a perfectly timed cut or a sight gag of staging. His newest film is The World’s End and it may be his best film yet, as unexpectedly moving as it is an endlessly entertaining blast of fun.

It’s immediately obvious that we’re watching a Wright film. The unchecked personality in the breakneck pace, visual flourishes, and crisply energetic montage reveal that right away. But unlike his zombie and buddy cop satires and his graphic novel adaptation, this is a film that sets out to play it straight – for a while, at least. The World’s End is an often hilarious dramedy about aging, growing into maturity, and the arrested development of hanging onto the memory of old times to the detriment of making new ones, centering on a group of teenage friends who drifted apart and are brought back together in the midst of middle age in an attempt to recapture some youthful fun.

The man who brings them together again used to be the king of their group, the guy with the fun ideas, the outsized personality that everyone followed around. When they were 18, he led them on an attempted pub-crawl through their small hometown – 12 pubs in all. Needless to say, they didn’t finish, but sure had fun anyway. Now it’s over twenty years later, and he’s starting to realize that what he thought at the time was the best night of his life actually ended up being the best night of his life. Why’d he have to peak so early? Now he’s consumed by the need to relive the night and finish the crawl, a pint at every pub, right down to the twelfth and final stop that alluded them all those years ago: The World’s End.

In the briskly expositional and very funny opening sequences of the film, this down-on-his-luck guy (Simon Pegg) whirls his way back into the lives of his buddies, now businessmen (Eddie Marsan, Paddy Considine), realtors (Martin Freeman), and lawyers (Nick Frost). They don’t quite know what to make of their friend, still driving his old clunker, listening to his high school-era mix tapes, and eager to return to their hometown. “It’s so boring there,” one of them says. His response is quick on his tongue: “Yeah, because we’re not there!” Once there they find that the sleepy little town is exactly the same except very different. The film is built around the simple observation that returning to your hometown after some time away is an odd experience.

It’s not just the samey corporatized restaurant scene – “Stop Starbucksing us!” one character shouts – that seems odd. Sure, the old conspiracy theorist (David Bradley) is nursing his drink at his favorite pub and their old English teacher (Pierce Brosnan) is still hanging around. But the place seems smaller and less welcoming. Why, it’s as if no one even remembers this group of guys. They felt like they ran the place then, but not so anymore. Time moved on and moves on. Beginning their pub-crawl, the guys fall back into old patterns of patter at times, bristling at others. They’re stuck somewhere between reminiscing and forging new bonds after being apart for so long. Do they revert to the boys they were or get to know each other as the men they now are? The terrific ensemble maintains terrific chemistry, sparkling through each scene with a genuine sense of a mix of youthful camaraderie and middle-aged resignation. Pegg’s excellent performance – so squirrely and wounded – pulls them in a boyish direction. Most of the others aren’t so definitive, warm but professional, straining to put up with the man they used to call “friend.” The marvelously witty script (co-written by Wright and Pegg) bounces their personalities off the scenarios and each other in pleasing and telling patter.

These guys, as well as a welcome Rosamund Pike as an old friend who meets up with them, form a richly sympathetic and massively likable core around which just about anything could happen. Funny thing is, that’s precisely what happens. The World’s End so buoyantly and confidently skips off the tracks of its apparent genre and lands in another without missing a beat. I can’t wait to see it again, not just to get caught up in how hugely entertaining the whole thing is, but to marvel at how smoothly and seemingly effortlessly it makes its transitions. The setup is golden, and could easily have sustained a feature on its own, although it’d have been a significantly less overtly dazzling one. Where it goes from there is as wholly satisfying as it is unexpected. To that end, avoid the advertising for the film, which I was sad to discover gives up the whole premise. Not since The Truman Show has an ad campaign so thoroughly defanged a movie’s central potent surprises. If you go in knowing only that it’s a very funny character-based Edgar Wright film, you might get the mouth-agape goofy-grin reaction that I had. Better yet, you might be like the guy a few rows back from me who shouted “What!?” during one pivotal development.

What Wright and company have in store involves taking the film’s powerful subtext and exploding it outwards as stirring, exciting, wonderfully silly metaphor, as if John Carpenter directed The Big Chill as rewritten by Douglas Adams. But that’s not exactly true, is it? This is pure Wright all the way. It’s a film that descends into the kind of action-packed genre silliness so hugely entertaining and expertly choreographed that you wish more big crowd-pleasing films were so dedicated to genuine surprises, a sense of discovery, and twists that are at once unexpected and wild while still making sense in the context of richly developed characters. That sounds like an Edgar Wright film to me.

In a summer where so many movies seemed to drift towards an inevitable autopilot conclusion, it’s a relief to find a film that grows only more unpredictable and satisfying as it goes along. There’s a real sense of the joy of the movies in every frame. It’s a freewheeling film of banter and slapstick – equally giddy and skillful in execution – that never loses track of its generous and genuine heart. It’s an inventive, tricky movie, the biggest trick of which is how straightforward it all is when you think about it. The World’s End ends with an entirely unanticipated series of moments thrilling, gentle, and a little goofy, too. There’s a sense that, although these characters are no longer juvenile, it’s hardly the end of the world. 

Unevolved: ICE AGE: CONTINENTAL DRIFT

Scrat is a bushy-tailed prehistoric squirrel who desperately desires an acorn that’s forever out of his reach. He’s a wordless, frustrated figure of bumbling slapstick with a Looney Tunes style of elegance to the purity and consistency of his motivations and adventures. Like Wile E. Coyote, Scrat’s his own worst enemy. It’s his insatiable desire for the unattainable that drives his worst impulses past self-preservation, his every inconvenience made all the more frustrating since, unlike the Road Runner, an acorn can’t even knowingly outwit him. But as much as I love Scrat, he’s simply not a good enough excuse for Blue Sky, the animation studio owned by 20th Century Fox, to keep churning out the Ice Age movies which contain within them his antics, presenting them as half-connected scenes that run parallel to the main story.

Once again we’re back with Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo), Manny the mammoth (Ray Ramano), and Diego the saber-toothed tiger (Denis Leary), who first became an unlikely herd all the way back in 2002 in the good-enough film that started this whole thing. This time around, as ever, the trio finds that the world is experiencing a rapidly changing climate. Ice Age was about the coming Ice Age. Its sequel, 2006’s The Meltdown, was about a big thaw. In 2009, the third sequel left all real geologic history in its dust with Dawn of the Dinosaurs. At least in this new one, Ice Age: Continental Drift, Sid lets us know how ridiculous that was, saying, “It didn’t make any sense, but it sure was exciting!” And it was, I guess, at first, although by the time the dinosaurs were gnashing their teeth and chasing the characters to and fro I had already gotten tired of it all. I was tired of the series sometime after my second or third viewing of Ice Age, or maybe it was during my first and only time through the waterlogged Ice Age 2. The series sure has a way of making massive climate change seem like no big deal. Then again, that shouldn’t be too much of a surprise as the oil companies have been doing just that for years.

So maybe I’m not the ideal audience for Continental Drift, but then again, maybe it will mean all the more when I say that it’s adequate. It, like Dinosaurs before it, comes the closest to capturing the very low charms of the first picture. I sat there while the sound and color danced around the screen and though I wasn’t exactly involved in the antics, I didn’t hate it either. Though I thought for sure the movie was ending at it was only the halfway point, I still ended up getting a modest jolt of entertainment during the actual hectic climax. So there’s that. The animators, under the direction of Steve Martino and Mike Thurmeier, are certainly talented and they have this particular cartoon universe down pat. I like the color and personality of it all, with exaggerated movements and nonplussed anachronisms. (And need I reiterate just how much I enjoy our fleeting moments with the strong, wordless frustration of Scrat?) I just wish that someone involved (maybe Michael Berg and Jason Fuchs, the credited writers?) could have thought up something more than halfway diverting to happen with it all.

In this installment, the continents are rapidly shifting and Manny is separated from his wife (Queen Latifah) and teenage daughter (Keke Palmer). Adrift on a chunk of ice with Diego, Sid, and Sid’s cranky, senile granny (Wanda Sykes), the group is accosted by furry pirates – a monkey captain (Peter Dinklage) and a crew containing a saber-toothed tiger (Jennifer Lopez), a rabbit (Aziz Ansari), a seal (Nick Frost), and a kangaroo (Rebel Wilson) – who are a big danger despite and because of their knowledge of the way back home. Speaking of back home, Manny’s wife and daughter are leading to safer ground a group that includes a hedgehog (Jake Gad) who has a crush on the younger mammoth (how’s that work?) and a group of cool teen mammoths (where are their parents?) with the voices of Drake and Nicki Minaj.

This is all pretty standard family film plotting with little to these new characters’ personalities beyond sight gags and standard-issue villainy and little added to the old characters beyond the new situations. There are typical father-daughter disagreement-healing, self-esteem-crisis-solving, stereotype-refuting, family-togetherness-affirming plot threads running every which way through the movie in ways that hit every point on the moral checklist in uncomplicated family film fashion. There’s no imagination here, no chance to let the story build or develop in any interesting way whatsoever. It just clunks from plot point to plot point, hitting all of its rote emotional beats while that nutty squirrel blasts through every once in a while to keep things entertaining, even if only for a minute or two at a time. Otherwise, it all feels so lifeless, written and performed (with the exception of Sykes and Dinklage who are new to the series and so aren’t bored with it all yet) as if an enormous machine had spit out what it guessed humans like best about these kind of movies.

Playing right now at a theater near you, there are good to great movie choices for nearly every demographic. But say you’ve already seen all of those, or maybe your power went out and you need a cool place to sit for a couple of hours. You could certainly do worse than Ice Age: Continental Drift, an adequate movie that gets exactly where you think it’s going without anything too especially surprising or enjoyable (other than Scrat) along the way, but there’s nothing to out-and-out dislike either. It’s blandly harmless. Somehow, I don’t think I’ll get quoted in an ad with that.

Fairy Tale, Fractured: SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN

Only the latest iteration of the fairy-tale-into-big-budget-spectacle trend that’s sweeping Hollywood, Snow White and the Huntsman hacks out an identity all its own. Unlike Mirror Mirror, a candy-colored family-friendly confection that Tarsem whipped up for release earlier this year, Huntsman is a darker, grimmer thing, drawing less inspiration from the safe, colorful comedy of children’s fantasy and more from the kind of dour, sweeping fantasy spectacle of the likes of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy or HBO’s Game of Thrones. The script by Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini takes apart the old story of the evil queen and her fairest-of-them-all stepdaughter until all that’s left and recognizable is aspects of the tale’s iconography: the mirror, the poison apple, the dwarves. What the film does with them is sometimes surprising and ultimately satisfying. This is a handsome and effective spectacle.

The film starts with Ravenna (Charlize Theron), an evil witch, tricking a king into marrying her. On their honeymoon, she straddles him and plunges a dagger into his chest. She flips back on the bed, basking in her triumph as her army storms past unsuspecting guards to take over the castle. Her stepdaughter, Snow White, is promptly locked away, so as not to interfere with her rule. Years later, now grown, Snow (Kristen Stewart) gets a chance to escape and flees into the dark forest. The queen, her good looks and terrible magic ever reliant on sucking the youthful souls out of beautiful young women, has learned that the only way she can make her dark powers permanent is to eat Snow White’s heart. So she sends her right-hand man, who happens to be her creepy brother (Sam Spruell), and a strapping, alcoholic huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) to chase down the escaped girl.

When they find her, the huntsman takes sympathy on Snow White and, instead of helping the queen’s brother, decides to help her. Together they fight off the queen’s henchmen and flee through the woods, where they will meet all manner of creatures, both frightening and enchanting, on their way towards safety. But it’s not safety Snow wants. She wants her kingdom. On their journey, they meet many potential allies amongst the people living in fear of the evil queen, including a band of dwarves (great British actors Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone, Nick Frost, Eddie Marsan, and Toby Jones shrunk down through movie magic) and a young man (Sam Claflin) who knew Snow in the years before her father’s death and who is now a talented archer. But even as they make their way through the wilderness, Ravenna glides through the castle, plotting her ultimate victory and flexing her supernatural muscles, transforming into a flock of inky ravens and commanding a phantom army made up of black shards.

This all sounds like the Snow White tale has been turned into just another epic-quest fantasy film with swooping shots of a band of allies trudging through picturesque landscapes. In some ways that’s exactly what it is, but what saves the film from becoming just an imitation is the intensity and earnestness with which commercial director Rupert Sanders, making an impressive feature film debut, stages the action. Like one of those grungy fantasies of the 1980s (I was thinking of Matthew Robbins’s Dragonslayer, but it at times put me in mind of Ron Howard’s Willow as well), Sanders makes his fantasy world muddy and convincingly worn-down. There’s a certain kind of realism to the striking visuals here that’s hugely rewarding. Dark magic has done a number on this ruined landscape and as our characters make their way through it, there’s a feeling of real melancholy. The effects – many are clearly elaborate, but convincing, CGI – are given space to breathe and consequentially often, especially in a mid-film respite in a mossy woodland oasis crawling with cute critters and a casual dusting of magical beings that reminded me of similar moments in Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, have some real awe behind them. The pace of the picture stretches out, allowing time for Greig Fraser’s beautiful cinematography (he’s also done gorgeous work for Jane Campion and Matt Reeves) to truly soak in the sights and for the subtle work of the ensemble to provide real human emotion to the stakes of it all.

Less subtle is Theron’s villainous turn as the evil queen Ravenna. She’s icy and coldly sensual, submerging herself in a tub of milk in an effort to maintain her smooth skin between injections of young souls. She’s rotten to the core, given to howling out awful demands. But she, too, is fleshed out to the point where she’s also a bit of a tragic figure. Similarly, Stewart’s Snow White is no mere placid figure of beauty. She’s rough around the edges, with a steely determination in her eyes and a real fighting spirit within her. None of this is overwrought or heavily underlined, though, even as the plot’s ending is more or less predetermined. But the complicating of the female roles and the patriarchal assumptions of the original tale happens matter-of-factly. This is just the way the story unfolds this time. (I appreciated how it all ends, too. Without giving anything away, it ends without any kind of wedding-bells romantic conclusion, instead ending on a note of weary relief.) I would never have guessed that such a serious, dark, unsmiling yet heartfelt interpretation of Snow White would have been so gripping and involving. It’s quite lovely in the way it’s underplayed.

This is a big, thunderous fantasy epic that’s filled with excitement, incident and action, embellished with expensive effects, and yet it feels so downbeat, so patiently paced and unafraid of stillness and silence. It’s genuinely creepy, tense, and moving. And yet it’s never insistent or pressing; the cast is treating this material with utter seriousness and, though that can certainly backfire, here it helps that the material is so earnest and sensitively tuned. (It could be a bit more complicated, perhaps, but let’s not press our luck.) There’s a real respect to matters of life and death here. When a character is in danger or dies, there’s a real mournfulness in the way that’s presented. That is something all too rare in this age of easy computerized carnage and quick-cut climaxes wherein digital cannon fodder and background collateral damage is just a backdrop for superheroics. Rupert Sanders handles this big movie with such a striking eye for visuals and such surprising facility with tone and emotion that I suspect he has a big career ahead of him. The idea to take a well-worn tale and retell it with modern tools from a modern sensibility seems rather uninspired, but Sanders has made a film of real, satisfying imagination.

Good Old-Fashioned Derring-do: THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN

With The Adventures of Tintin, Steven Spielberg, one of our greatest and most popular filmmakers working today, is experimenting with the most modern of filmmaking tools. Consequentially the film has the creak of an accomplished professional trying to adapt his style to a new format. Luckily for us the results are a film that is not an uninteresting exercise but a playful and fluid adventure film that’s as charming and low-key as it is fun and visually stimulating. Working with performance-capture techniques for computer animation, Spielberg can send his camera any which way he wants it to go and send his characters into any dangerous situation he wants. Luckily, he has some solid material to guide his way.

Intrepid boy reporter Tintin first appeared in the comics of Hergé in 1929 and has endured in some areas of the world, mostly Europe and parts of Asia, as a recognizable and beloved figure. Spielberg’s film has a script from three of the best and cleverest screenwriters working today, Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright, and Joe Cornish, that sticks close to the original conception of the character as a blank goody-two-shoes who happens to be clever and resourceful in getting out of the scrapes that his curiosity gets him into. The film starts with Tintin (Jamie Bell) and his faithful dog Snowy buying a model ship from a street vendor, a simple act that soon grows in consequence. He doesn’t know it at first. He’s simply perplexed as to why his little impulse buy is met with such urgency from such mysterious sources.

It turns out that the ship is not a model of just any ship. No, it’s the Unicorn, a ship that legendarily sunk with hundreds of pounds of treasure in the cargo hold. It turns out that a wealthy man, the evil Sakharine (Daniel Craig), will spare no expense to get his hands on the model for hidden within it lies a clue that will lead to the real thing. There, at the bottom of the ocean, lie vast piles of treasure. So, it’s a deadly intercontinental race, then. But first, Tintin is kidnapped and placed aboard a ship mid-mutiny where he’s forced to help Sakharine find the treasure. He’d rather not, so he flees with the ship’s embattled drunkard captain, Haddock (Andy Serkis), to beat them to it.

The set up here is terrific. There’s a nice mystery to solve and a fun MacGuffin for these characters to fight over. The plot, though I’ve made it sound so simple, also involves a murdered American, a centuries-old conflict between warring pirates and their descendants, a pickpocket, two bumbling bobbies (Nick Frost and Simon Pegg), an opera diva touring a Middle Eastern country, and circuitous action sequences involving boats, planes, and automobiles that comes to a head in one great rip-roaring chase of death-defying destruction through a crumbling and flooding sea-side town. (There’s more movie after that chase, but it is unquestionable the high point of the spectacle). It’s the stuff B-movie matinees are made of.

The movie’s essentially a case of this happens and then this happens and then this happens, a galloping plot that sweeps across several serialized episodes of adventure and thrills with characters stumbling into cliffhangers and then solving them with ease. Spielberg digs back into the same place within himself where he stores the kind of uncomplicated B-movie energy of something like Raiders of the Lost Ark, but that film’s warm, propulsive and tactile (not to mention quite possibly the best action film ever made) while Tintin is cool, level, and smooth (and not the best action film ever made). It’s a film with visual play and skillful slapstick choreography animating its computerized soul but it never feels like real human stakes are in play. The cliffhanger method of storytelling works like gangbusters but leaves things up in the air. It doesn’t come to a satisfying conclusion any more than these new renderings of 2D comics characters ever really feel like fully fleshed movie characters. Still, though, the film’s comfortable wit, bright colors, and energetic staging make it more than acceptable entertainment.

Spielberg has made his first animated movie with the verve of an old master doodling around just for the fun of it. He concocts sequences, especially that aforementioned chase, that would be logistical nightmares to direct in live action. His imagery has a range of movement that is at once freeing and problematic. In some ways, it leaves him rudderless, too tied to the technology to fully exercise his control over the technique. At times it feels less a Spielberg film than a Spielberg product. It lacks the power and humanity of his best efforts.

But then again, I’m really only trying to put my finger on what it was that kept me ever so slightly from fully embracing a film that’s so lovely, well-crafted, and entertaining. The fact of the matter is that this is a fun movie. It’s pleasant and funny and every so often takes giddy leaps into exciting action. Just as its plot engine of constant forward movement, always pushing into the next complication and smashing into the next cliffhanger, creates a series of fun sequences that lack a satisfying resolution, the film's very distinctiveness – so old fashioned, so relaxed, so European, and yet so cutting-edge Hollywood with its CGI and 3D – is both its greatest flaw and greatest asset.

Aliens in the Hood: ATTACK THE BLOCK

This year’s movie monsters have been sadly lacking. J. J. Abrams’s Super 8 is a good monster movie but, ironically enough, its most disappointing element is the monster. The humans are the entire source of interest. By the time the monster shows up in all his slimy, bug-eyed glory, it’s underwhelming. The titular beasts in Cowboys and Aliens were similarly afflicted with a ho-hum derivativeness that totally sunk what little there is to commend about that movie. These things are all arms and slime with inky black eyes and watery slithers, nothing more than the basic component elements of H.R. Giger’s Alien designs mixed and matched into something familiar-but-different.

So imagine my amazement that the slick and scrappy British creature feature Attack the Block shows off monsters that I’ve never seen before. In the dark, these are barely visible aliens, every inch covered with pitch-black fur. Only their eerie glowing maws reveal their presence in swift, chomping movements. I was delighted and surprised by these creepy creatures, which have a sense of weight and reality that is all too missing from those modern CG beasts. Even more impressive is the fact that the film that houses them is not only one of the most flat-out entertaining pictures of the year, but also the perfect kind of resourceful genre flick that has a point of view and something to say.

The events of the film take place in and around a towering building of low-income housing that dominates a city block in south London. The protagonists are a multi-ethnic group of young, aimless, posturing, unsupervised teens. They’re a tight-knit group of friends, joking, laughing, and bragging amongst themselves. A tall, older-looking-than-his-years boy clearly runs the group (John Boyega), but his buddies (which include Franz Drameh, Alex Esmail, Simon Howard, and Leeon Jones) aren’t underlings; they’re close friends. Their relationships are sharply drawn and convincing. They’re as warm and unconsciously self-conscious as any group of teen boys. We can see that they’re good kids – they genuinely care about their friends and their neighborhood – but the film doesn’t let them off easy. Their relationship to the audience is complicated. As the film opens, we are introduced to them menacing a white twenty-something woman (Jodie Whittaker), trying to steal her purse. While they bother the poor lady, a small falling object crushes a car parked nearby.

Investigating this crash landing, the kids are attacked by a gross, startling little alien. In a fit of fright, and posturing, they bludgeon the creature to death. Thus, the film starts off like a sick joke version of E.T. Instead of a white suburban kid befriending a nice little extra-terrestrial, here a group of inner-city kids kill a mean old alien and parade the body back to their block. They take it to their local weed dealer (Nick Frost) who decides to let them keep it in his weed room until the kids can contact the proper scientific authorities. After all, they just discovered a new life form, at least that’s what one of the buyers in the room (Luke Treadaway), a stoned nature doc fan, informs them.

This is all well and good, rapid-fire world building, but when things start to get hairy, the film explodes in a rush of excitement that builds increasingly tense and giddy as we race towards the climax. It turns out that the alien was just the first to land, so when the furry, pitch-black, essentially invisible, glowing-toothed aliens start stalking around the block, trying desperately to get into the towering building, looking like they’re sniffing around for revenge, the kids are the only ones prepared to recognize the threat. There’s a bit of Joe Dante (he of Gremlins) in the exuberance with which the film approaches the danger. The kids grab what they can find – anything blunt and wieldable – while they mount their bikes and get ready to protect their block from a localized alien invasion. The action that follows makes incredible use of their apartment building, with the characters and creatures scampering up, down, and all around the inner-city architecture in exciting, comprehensible ways with crisp editing from Jonathan Amos while cinematographer Thomas Townend gets a gritty beauty out of the thick nighttime atmosphere.

The film finds great vibrancy in the mostly inexperienced young actors, who bring a youthful vitality and braggadocio to their roles. They’re posturing at first, playing at the idea of toughness, but as events unfold they drop the charade and slowly turn into heroic toughs despite being scared out of their minds. One suggests they text for help. The reply: “This is too much madness to fit into one text!” The characters come from a rough part of town, but that doesn’t make them bad, unlikable, or disposable. The film asserts their humanity and strength under pressure, allows them to goof around and fight back with equal agency. They aren’t the white upper crust with the stiff upper lip of Merchant Ivory films and the Royal Family, but that doesn’t make them any less British. When they run into their victim from the film’s opening and discover that she lives in the same building they do, they’re apologetic. “We wouldn’t have robbed you if we’d known.”

This is a film energized by a deep sense of social justice and cross-cultural understanding without feeling burdened by weighty themes. It’s fleet, fast, and funny with an irrepressible wit and heart that shows through even the squishier moments of creature-related mayhem. Here, violence has consequences. Early on, the police turn up in response to the disturbance and make things worse by assuming that these kids are on a violent rampage and locking down the block. No one gets in; no one gets out. The kids have to deal with this dangerous situation without any outside help. It’s a move that amps up the plot’s tension considerably – nowhere to run, nowhere to find reinforcements – but also serves the larger satiric point beautifully. The larger society has turned a blind eye, misinterpreting the problems and enforcing solutions that only make matters worse. Those in power have effectively abandoned these kids.

Writer-director Joe Cornish, a veteran of British TV, makes his feature debut with Attack the Block, which is, in the end, not only one of the best movies of the year but one of the best debuts in several years. It’s a deceptively complex movie that mixes serious intent with a great pop tone, deeply aware of both youth culture and sociological concerns. Frightfully exciting set pieces make increasingly inventive use of a limited number of locations. The film builds characters that feel real. They’re funny and engaging and never sink to spouting monster movie clichés. They’re as distinct and memorable as the monsters they have to fight and the place in which they live. If you never thought a movie about “big alien gorilla-wolf [expletives]” could be not only one of the most entertaining movies of the year, but one of the most moving and thoughtful as well (and all in only 88 minutes!) I have just one word for you: Believe.

Unidentified Friendly Object: PAUL

Greg Mottola’s Paul may not have the emotional resonance of his two previous efforts (the excellent coming-of-age films Adventureland and Superbad), but it’s still decent entertainment. It’s a warm geeky embrace of a movie, a sci-fi action comedy, jam-packed with winking references. If you’re like me, the kind of person who can appreciate a collage of homage derived from nearly every notable piece of 70’s and 80’s sci-fi (from E.T., Star Wars, and Back to the Future to Aliens, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Repo Man), you’re in for a treat. But even if every single reference flies over your head, I can’t imagine having the fun entirely pass you buy. Here’s a comedy that really knows how to utilize its talented cast as it builds a satisfying collection of set-ups and pay-offs. It’s an efficient sugary treat.

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who also wrote the screenplay, star as two British nerds on an American road trip that starts at Comic-Con and winds its way through famous southwestern UFO hotspots like Area 51. While on a lonely stretch of road, they happen upon a car accident that introduces them to Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen), an escaped alien in desperate need of a ride. It turns out that this little green dude is on the run from the feds (a straight-laced Jason Bateman and two goofball underlings Bill Hader and Joe Lo Truglio) and he wants the nerds to help him flee to a remote patch of wilderness where he will meet his fellow aliens for a ride back to his home planet. Along the way, the trio picks up, under strange duress, a fundamentalist Christian woman (Kristen Wiig) who has a hard time believing in science, specifically that aliens are possible. What do you expect? Her T-shirt reads “Evolve This!” which accompanies a drawing of Jesus shooting Darwin in the face.

This is all so much broad shtick, that’s for sure. The characters are silly caricatures and the plot is just a mash of influences grafted onto a road movie. It’s a little disappointing see so much talent go towards something that, however much fun it provides moment to moment, comes up feeling awfully minor. But Mottola’s coming off of two great films and so are Frost and Pegg who together wrote and starred in director Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, terrific, sneakily moving, satires of zombie and cop films respectively. There’s a sense that, however minor, a lot of earnest energy went into Paul. Perhaps there’s a feeling that this is simply talented people expending great amounts of effort on goofing off. It embodies a geeky love of the minor details of sci-fi lore. The cast gamely throws itself into the ridiculousness and Mottola, with cinematographer Lawrence Sher, has a nice eye for slick widescreen southwestern spaces in which to arrange his silly, splashy, sometimes explosive, gags.

Its sense of slightness and its sense of humor ultimately balance each other out and Paul evens out at a reasonably enjoyable level of fun. Despite a few too many gay panic jokes, it’s theme of acceptance and open-mindedness is ultimately welcome. The comedy is a self-reflexive and self-aggrandizing look at fandom that posits that neat sci-fi spectacles can draw people together. That may not be exactly true, sci-fi fanboys can be awfully vicious, but if the world at large were as giddily geeky as these characters, people just might have a few more reasons to get along, bonding over the cool little moments found in cult classics.