If you count the five prior movies that feed into the “mythologies” of “Marvel’s The Avengers,” it must be the most expensive, if not the most accomplished, feature film of all time. (At least until James Cameron surfaces a couple more “Avatar”s in the next decade.) To take ten or eleven hours to build up to writer-director Joss Whedon’s new movie follows the pattern of quality television series since the past decade or so, that the two-to-two-and-a-half-hour theatrical feature format can’t fit all the chewy goodness of the amazing and beautiful and literary and emotional imagination at hand. That, of course, refers to “Breaking Bad,” “The Wire,” “Mad Men” and “The Sopranos” and should not in any way be attached to “Marvel’s The Avengers,” which is more like a plastic pumpkin at the front door filled with bite-sized, slightly mooshed and maybe a little melted candies that children would never eat unless there were a big plastic pumpkin filled with them at the front door. It will make a mint—it will buy the mint, tear the mint down, and fill it up all over again—which will help pay down Disney’s $4 billion-plus acquisition of Marvel, but which will only encourage them to make more meshuggah mayhem with an ever-attenuated attention span. Read the rest of this entry »

Peter Lord

By Ray Pride

Beaming fifteen-inch figures stand at rubbery attention in front of a roaring fake fire in a cleared-out hotel bar. Peter Lord, director of “The Pirates! Band Of Misfits” and co-owner of Aardman films, is not impressed.

“It’s a rubbish fire,” he says, “Rubbish,” as we sit before the audience of the Pirate Captain, various cohorts and a squishy little Dodo, the most agreeable of the lot from “The Pirates! Band of Misfits,” the animated eighteenth-century-set seafaring send-up from Aardman. During the 3D stop-motion action, which was produced on actual scale sets, I wondered if there would be a squeezable bath toy based on this little fellow. Now I make the mistake of reaching for the Dodo, and neither of us can get it back on its extinct feet. Read the rest of this entry »

Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s animated motion-capture 3D “The Adventures Of Tintin” (known on its October release in Europe as “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn”), from several of Hergé’s graphic novels, may perplex the unacquainted and confound the devout. (It did not go over as a treat in Blighty.) It made me thirstier than a Haddock. I feel winded even reaching toward my notes. While the intention may have been to explore what’s possible in live action, in a new vocabulary of unattractive animation at the kind of headlong pace that would match today what “Raiders of the Lost Ark” accomplished in 1982, the end result is more winded than winding, a dispirited ragbag of faux-naiveté and unlikeable, weird-looking, strange-moving characters. Read the rest of this entry »

Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz

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“Hugo” is Martin Scorsese’s most personal film, a pop-up picture book of a metaphor for his own childhood. He, as a boy, small, asthmatic, watched from a Little Italy window the goings-on on the street below, captivated by the narrative that he could construct in his mind but never fully participate in, swept away by the power of movies that his father took him to. Here, his protagonist Hugo Cabret is an orphan who tends the clocks of a vast train station in 1931 Paris, peering through window and frame and trapdoor and crevasse down onto the teeming to-and-fro of passengers and merchants, a human comedy he can only witness with wide eyes. Read the rest of this entry »

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First unfurled in March 1941 by Timely Comics, Captain America goes from that ten-cent comic to the big screen in a summer action adventure built for ten-year-old boys. In 1943, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) lies five times to recruiters before Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci), an Austrian scientist in exile in Brooklyn, reclassifies the asthmatic “4F” runt as “IA,” and recruits him into the Strategic Scientific Reserve for a “super-soldier” experiment. Steve is the sort of Brooklynite who gets beat up for chastising a jerk in a movie theater who heckles a patriotic newsreel. A massive injection of blue serum, followed by a blinding zap of Vita-Ray that taps half of Brooklyn’s electricity, “amplifies” Steve’s muscles, stature and righteousness. His homefront handlers brand him Captain America and put him on the road with show girls to hype war bonds. Read the rest of this entry »

All Michael Bay’s “Transformers” in 3D is missing is a 40. (Take a 40, please.) Robustly cynical, “Transformers: Dark Of The Moon,” credited to screenwriter Ehren Kruger (“Scream 3,” “The Ring Two,” “Transformers 2″), serves up generous lashings of counterfactual pulp, including an Autobot-Decepticons-NASA-JFK-Nixon conspiracy with a soupcon of Chernobyl for spice. It’s like a Bizarro World Warren Report reduced to postage-stamp size. (The briefly seen JFK stand-in resembles someone who took second place in a Donald Trump look-alike contest.) “TDOTM” premiered at the Moscow Film Festival, and some of the most jazzed-up (yet largely incomprehensible) passages resemble the winningly cheesy special effects of local mogul Timur Bekmambetov’s “Night Watch” and “Day Watch,” but with less rude charm. Hope for keenly choreographed mayhem quickly fades. If not on the level of Michael Kidd and Vincente Minnelli’s work on “The Band Wagon,” say at least a few bars of “Collateral Damage,” the musical? When you’re working with Decepticons, a sentient race of mechanical beings that preceded film executives, you can hope to be the biggest and the best, but at best, you could only ever be ne plus Ultraman. (Or “Cars 3,” with eager-school-leaver Shia LaBeouf in the role of “Mater.”) Read the rest of this entry »

Cherish your friends and do not try to change them, no matter how much they embarrass you. That’s the message of this animated G-rated adventure about automobiles with eyeballs in their windshields and teeth in their grilles. Jets, boats and buses all share those anthropomorphic features in this sequel to “Cars” (2006). Unlike “Toy Story” and “Transformers,” there are no humans in this Pixar 3D tale. This time the main character is Mater, a buck-toothed hick-town tow truck (voiced by Larry the Cable Guy) from Radiator Springs. On his first trip to Tokyo, he thinks wasabi is pistachio ice cream. That gaffe and other eye-rollers turn off celebrity race car Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson). The first film’s interstate race is upgraded here to an international one designed to hype a new “renewable” fuel. There is a corporate evildoer, a James Bond-like spy and uplift bits for “lemons” with low-esteem. Overdone action sequences unfold in London and on the Italian Riviera, but none match the kick-ass kinetics of the opener on an oil rig in the ocean. Writer-director John Lasseter and co-director Brad Lewis do not win a victory lap for this lesser model. The kids at the press screening did not squeal with delight. If your line at the concession stand is slow-moving, for the first twenty minutes you miss only overlong Pixar trailers and shorts. With Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, Bonnie Hunt, Tony Shalhoub, Cheech Marin, Jason Isaacs, Joe Mantegna, Peter Jacobson, Brent Musburger. 112m. (Bill Stamets)