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

RECOMMENDED

“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 »

RECOMMENDED

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)

The French government restricted Werner Herzog and his 3D camera crew to narrow metal walkways installed inside the Chauvet Cave. Nonetheless, he manages to draw outside the lines as the narrator-mystifier of “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” which may be his most accessible film in a long career. Inside a cave discovered in 1994, he documents shadow-dappled paintings of horses, maneless lions, cave bears and one part-woman from 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. “One of the greatest discoveries in the history of human culture,” he rhapsodizes at the risk of self-caricature. Herzog speculates on the mindsets of the painter with a bent little finger who placed clusters of red palm prints on cave walls, like paleolithic predecessors to the red dots imprinted on movies nowadays to thwart pirates who sneak camcorders into multiplexes. A lively rendering of an inexplicably eight-legged bison makes Herzog wonder aloud if his image-capturing counterpart attempted “almost a form of proto-cinema.” Likewise. he tries to discern precursors of animated film and 3D among the artifacts. This educational film is a must-see only for art-history students and Herzog completists. Interviews with Dominique Baffier, Jean Clottes, Jean-Michel Geneste, Carole Fritz, Gilles Tosello, Michel Philippe, Julien Monney. 90m. (Bill Stamets)

“Cave of Forgotten Dreams” opens Friday at River East And Cinemark Century, Evanston.

Resist guessing this deadly cave-diving adventure is a rebreathing of “Descent.” There are no lost tribes of gilled albinos, nor leftover aliens from “Abyss,” or nasty indigenous species from “The Ruins” inhabiting “The Mother of All Caves” in Papua, New Guinea. That’s where producer-co-writer Andrew Wight, and co-writer (and dive coordinator) John Garvin set their “Sanctum.” Australian diver Wight draws on the 1988 escape of his twenty-two-member team from Pannikin Cave in Nullarbor Plain, which lead him to produce the documentary “Nullarbor Dreaming.” Shooting off the Queensland coast, Alister Grierson (“Kokoda”) directs this fictional version spiked with six deaths. The 3-D technology is the same that James Cameron deployed on “Avatar.” Wight earlier worked with Cameron, one of “Sanctum”‘s executive producers, on four underwater documentaries. Here some over-the-shoulder shots in above-ground scenes jar with extreme foregrounding. In the press notes, Garvin and Wight say they don’t want us to see them using 3-D, which seems to make it useless. On day thirty-four of an underwater speleological expedition, a big rain floods a big cave. The only way out is an underground river flowing into the Pacific Ocean, if only the survivors can find it before they run out of oxygen, suffer blood “fizz” from nitrogen narcosis, panic in tight passages, or get back-stabbed by a billionaire with stalagmites. The story is less eventful than “Touching the Void” or “The Way Out,” two other nature escape narratives. 17-year-old Josh (Rhys Wakefield) will discover his dad, master diver Frank (Richard Roxburgh), is not just “an emotionally shut-down Nazi asshole.” The old man has a life-and-death skill set to pass along. With Alice Parkinson, Dan Wyllie, Ioan Gruffudd, Christopher Baker, Nicole Downs, Allison Cratchley. 103m. (Bill Stamets)

Director Michel Gondry hardly displays the visual play that levitated his “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “The Science of Sleep.” Here he is tasked with a jokey screenplay by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who earlier co-wrote “Superbad” and “Pineapple Express.” Rich brat Britt Reid (Rogen) is the dissolute son of the late publisher of the The Daily Sentinel in Los Angeles. He plays vigilante on a lark with Kato (Jay Chou), his barista, mechanic and chauffeur. There’s a drug kingpin and a dirty D.A. Lots of cars, guns, fireballs and shattered glass. Cameron Diaz has a cameo role as a temp secretary who knows her crime news. Based on “The Green Hornet” radio series created by George W. Trendle in the thirties, this is thin action comedy that makes little of the superhero and sidekick dynamic. Sad to report, the best line may be Britt’s anticipation of Kato’s unwritten autobiography: “When they adapted it to a movie, I’d watch the shit out of that movie.” In this 3D conversion, there’s this bit of visual business to look for: the very same bad guy who wields a double-barrelled handgun gets two halves of a broken chair leg poked into his eye sockets. That’s the best industry insider joke about 3D to date. With Christoph Waltz, Edward James Olmos, David Harbour, Tom Wilkinson. 87m. (Bill Stamets)