It Is Just Perfect
The Princess and the Frog marks Disney's less-than-triumphant return to the realm of 2-D animation with a film that's certain to entertain the children and simultaneously tax the patience of those parents who've become spoiled on the more accessible, multi-layered films of studios like Pixar.
The story of Tiana, a low-class worker in old timey N'Oleans, the film centers around the arrival of Prince Naveen to the city from a far-off fictional country. Tiana, whose dream of one day opening her own restaurant is more an homage to her late father's love of cooking, is closing in on the money she needs for the down payment. But just as her finances are looking up, Prince Naveen's are on the wane. Cut off by his parents and forced to search for a rich princess to marry, he sets his sights on Tiana's friend-slash-employer, the spoiled debutant, Charlotte.
Before he can seal the deal, the local voodoo "shadowman," Dr. Facilier, seduces Naveen and his manservant into a ritual that finds Naveen transformed into a frog and his servant transformed into Naveen. Thinking that a kiss from a princess will bring him back into his real form, he convinces a costumed Tiana to help him, but once the kiss is complete, Tiana herself is transformed into a frog simply because she's not a true princess.
This particular performance also bears the distinction of being perhaps the only truly entertaining number in the whole film – catchy, well-written, brilliantly performed and highlighted by the first-rate animation. The other musical numbers, however, prove less than stellar, offering a tour of Louisiana's rich musical tradition from jazz, zydeco, blues, gospel, etc. It's a noble effort, and most of the songs produced for the film entertain on at least a basic level, but aside from "Almost There," which provides a through-line for the film, the music just feels secondary. Most of the tracks aren't catchy enough, or emotional enough, to inspire a second viewing or a purchase of the soundtrack, and one wonders if the choice of setting didn't limit the filmmakers to a style of music that simply doesn't work for kids these days.
It’s a tragic but simple story, Firth’s George Falconer, a British professor of English at a Los Angeles campus, going about what he intends to be the last day of his life, with the peril of the Cuban missile crisis playing out in the background. Through flashbacks, we relive tender moments of his home life with Jim (Matthew Goode) and the awful day when George got word that his companion had died in a car wreck. As George passionately lectures students, has a close encounter of potential romance with a stranger and shares witty phone chatter over preparations for an evening with dear friend Charley (Moore), it becomes clear that he plans to kill himself at day’s end, no longer able to go on without Jim.
With modest production, “Heavenly Creatures” presented striking fantasy visuals that complemented Jackson’s dark story of two teenage women whose compulsive relationship results in murder. Now working on a grander Hollywood scale, Jackson loses the spark of Sebold’s story - a young girl’s lament over a life never lived, a family’s bottomless grief over a child and sister lost - amid his expensive pretty pictures. Like the book, the film merges first-person and omniscient narration as Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) chronicles her journey from sensitive 14-year-old schoolgirl to shattered soul stuck in a nether zone between earth and heaven.
The film is pretty much a chamber piece in which a wife (Meg Ryan) - a hard-charging professional - finds out that her seemingly passive husband (Timothy Hutton) is about to leave her for another woman. The initial mistake is that Ryan, who is normally about as likable as any actress out there, plays the wife as a repellent nut job, so that audience sympathy is entirely with the husband even before she knocks him out with a flower pot and duct-tapes him to a chair. And there we have "Serious Moonlight." A wife duct-tapes her husband to a chair and tells him that she will make him fall in love with her again. The situation is frustrating. Audiences may begin to feel as if they're duct-taped to a chair. It might take duct tape to make people sit through this thing.
Rusty is a dead ringer for a long-dead (supposedly) vampire, which his classmates - the brainy one, the stoners, Mr. Bad-in-Bed, the sexpot, the good sister and bad sister, the hustler and '70s hair - think is hilarious until the real vamp wakes up and confusion ensues. South African Musetta Vander ("Kicking & Screaming") rolls her Rs as the resident vampire hunter on campus. An Ava Gardner look-alike, she wields swords and wears her Spandex with verve. C-movie vet Jennifer Lyons flings herself at her character - the daffy, sometimes-possessed-by-a-vampire bombshell Lynne - with the abandon of someone with a lot of direct-to-DVD credits and one shot at showing she deserves better. 
The rest of "Old Dogs" can be pretty easily cribbed together from other similar recent films like "The Game Plan" and its ilk. There will be destruction of Charlie's bachelor pad, some sort of costumed play time as the adults learn how to get back to the kids level and some promises that will have to be broken and then made up for. The sad part is there's a decent film in there somewhere. The desire to stay young for as long as possible, particularly while simultaneously dealing with growing old, is potent soil for comedy but also requires care in its handling and there's none of that to be found in "Old Dogs."
Me and Orson Welles was intended in part to showcase the acting chops of teen idol Zac Efron and also to bring his considerable following into the movie theater many of whom, no doubt, have never heard of Orson Welles. But not a few people suggest that the Richard Linklater movie would have been far more enjoyable if it had focused on Welles and not the teenage character who inadvertently becomes a part of Welles's famed Mercury Theater ensemble at about the time the 22-year-old enfant terible of the theater was staging Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. As Welles in real life upstaged every other actor in his presence, so, too does Christian McKay, the virtually unknown British actor who portrays him in this movie, many of the critics suggest. 
McKay's command of the subject is so Welles-ian that when he's in a scene everyone else fades a little," she observes. In fact, some critics are suggesting that McKay might very well end up winning the best-actor award at next year's Oscars, something that always eluded the real-life Welles. Welles, writes Mary Pols in Time magazine, "is brilliantly embodied by Christian McKay in one of those, hey-who's-that? performances that tends to draw Oscar talk, even if the film itself isn't much more than an extremely pleasant lark."
Ninja Assassin follows an orphan boy (Rain), who was taken from the streets as a very young child by a thousand year old Ninja society known as the Ozunu Clan whose existence is considered a myth. He is bestowed with the name Raizo and transformed into a ruthless killer along with an army of other orphans from a variety of races. The movie frequently inter-cuts between scenes of Raizo's youth in the brutal orphanage/ninja factory and the modern day ninja war that is taking place. In Berlin, Europol agent Mika Coretti (Naomie Harris) stumbles upon a money trail linking several political murders to this ancient network of untraceable assassins. Unfortunately for her, this makes her a prime target for assassination. The Ozunu Clan sends a team of killers, led by the lethal Takeshi (Rick Yune), to silence Mika forever. Raizo, for his own honourable reasons, betrays his clan and saves Mika from her attackers, but knows that the Clan will not rest until they are both eliminated.
The final action scenes are actually enough over-the-top that there's some good fun to be had. McTeigue's cameramen seem to have gotten a bit worn out by the time they filmed these scenes as the movements of the camera are far less seizure-like. In between there are brief moments where we get to see what we have imagined it must be like for a ninja to slip in and out of the shadows. Had this been incorporated better in the action, had McTeigue rented a steadicam, had the mythology been made fun we might have a solid ninja film to return to time and time again. Instead we have a watch once and throw away, frustrating curiosity.
Sony's entry in the crowded animation field this holiday season is "Planet 51," a perky though not terribly imaginative feature aimed primarily at youngsters. The twist in this movie is that it has an alien planet terrified of - a human astronaut.
Planet 51 devotes itself to tiresomely repetitive scenes of frenzied jeopardy, accompanied by music that shifts gears every 15 seconds to underline whatever response is desired and larded with refs to famous antecedents (The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001, Star Wars, E.T., Alien, et al.) and an innocuous putative romance between Lem and neighbor Neera.
"Planet 51" is Sci-Fi Lite, running through the cliches - let's make that the memories -- of old sci-fi classics with gentle jokes and cornball battles. It doesn't measure up to what's best in current animation -- say, Coraline, Up, Fantastic Mr. Fox or A Town Called Panic, to name a few other films the Academy recently announced as eligible for this year's animation nomination. Those films demonstrate you can make animation that entertains the entire family. 
Red Cliff is the most expensive Chinese movie made to date, a two-part film depicting the famous battle at Red Cliff, when the Han Dynasty general from North China, Cao Cao, sails a massive fleet down the Yangtze River to invade the lands of Liu Bei and Sun Quan in the South.
The heart of the film is the relationship between master strategist Zhou Yu and scientific sage Zhuge Liang. Perfectly cast as man of action and crafty savant, Leung and Kaneshiro build a rich spirit of warmth and respect around these two very different men.
The title comes from categories of alien contact. The beginning of this film is strange. Actress Milla Jovovich walks out in an Alaskan forest to explain that she's going to be playing Dr. Abigail Tyler. Then for the next 10 minutes, we see purportedly real footage of the 'real' Tyler, sometimes in split screen with Milla Jovovich. While that sounds interesting, it really isn't--it's distracting and the people look nothing like who they are playing.
When it comes time for the big reveal--we never see or meet the aliens! We see a quick shadow and characters tell us what they saw. In one brief scene of Milla Jovovich being experimented on, the film blurs the image. Speaking on behalf of myself and every 14 year old boy in the world, if aliens are gonna experiment on a naked Milla Jovovich, that is NOT the time to go blurry! It doesn't help that the"REAL" footage is slightly more effective than the film itself.
A Christmas Carol is a Victorian morality tale of an old and bitter miser, Ebenezer Scrooge (Jim Carrey), who undergoes a profound experience of redemption over the course of one night. Mr. Scrooge is a financier/money-changer who has devoted his life to the accumulation of wealth. 
ilm will finally see what happened to the McManus brothers after their reunion with their father. The first film ended with Connor and Murphy McManus being reunited with their long-lost father, and continuing their vigilante streak with him by their side. The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day picks up in Ireland where the brothers have been living in hiding with their father. 
Fans of the first movie will definitely enjoy seeing this film and is a must see for any Boondock fanatic. Kudos to the cast and crew for making a film that stayed true to the original, yet realistically modernized it to reflect the years that have passed since the original release.
Gentlemen Broncos is just like it's name- a sophisticated, well-dressed animal that kicks naysayers repeatedly in several places. I wish I had the connections to be able to see it again right now. Thank you comedy Gods, for giving us Jared Hess.
It's not just the chuckle-free writing or leaden pacing. Hess sprinkles a few real actors into a cast full of non-actors who recite lines rather than giving performances. He also makes sure that every last extra is homely or funny-looking, to the point of being misshapen. His is a world of freaks, who exist to be laughed at -- except there's nothing funny about them but their looks.