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)

Screenwriters Joe Stillman and Nicholas Stoller contemporize “Gulliver’s Travels,” Jonathan Swift’s 1726 account of the fantastic travels of a ship’s surgeon to three islands and the land of the Yahoos. Nearly none of the political satire of England and Europe survives this abridgement. Swift’s attack on his time’s oratory turns into characters quoting rock lyrics. This “Gulliver’s Travels” bowdlerizes the bodily waste comedy in the original, but at least that Swiftian motif tracks with the casting of Jack Black. In no way stretching his branded persona, he plays Lemuel Gulliver, a ten-year employee in the mailroom of the New York Tribune with a five-year crush on travel editor Darcy Silverman (Amanda Peet). She assigns him to write about a tour to the Bermuda Triangle, where an inter-dimensional vortex transports him to the kingdom of Liliput. The locals are quite little and Lemuel is a big deal in court politics, a hero for putting out a fire with his piss. Lemuel coaches the commoner Horatio (Jason Segel) to do what he himself has yet to do, which is get up the nerve to do a “valiant” deed to get the out-of-his-league gal. “Gulliver’s Travels” is directed by Rob Letterman (“Monsters vs. Aliens”), who is totally outdone by the fourth “Ice Age” cartoon, featuring Scat and his epic acorn, that precedes this “3D family comedy.” With Emily Blunt, Chris O’Dowd, Billy Connolly, Catherine Tate. 87m. (Bill Stamets)

RECOMMENDED

That fake look of a lot of 3D fits the cyberterrain of the totalitarian realm in this sequel to “TRON.” The exceptional computer graphics do not eclipse the quantum up-bump seen in the 2D original from 1982, although its visual adventurism is upheld here, coded with traces of Russian Constructivism and Italian Futurism. Except for framing scenes shot  in overcast British Columbia, “TRON: Legacy” is set in an endless nightscape as dark as “Dark City” and “Blade Runner.” All that’s insubstantial  melts into something or nothing with 3D seamlessness. Check out the sparkly detritus marking every death. Read the rest of this entry »

Warner Bros. Pictures puts two TV cartoon characters owned by Hanna-Barbera Productions into an awful live-action 3D comedy made for very, very young children. The nothing-there-ness of “Yogi Bear,” shot in New Zealand, is signaled by its title appearing in the black absent bottom of a plundered picnic basket. Yogi (voiced by Dan Aykroyd) is a gabby bear wearing a necktie and hat who steals “pic-a-nic” baskets, as he calls them, from visitors at Jellystone Park. If he’s a yogi, he’s fixated on the stomach chakra. Eric Brevig (“Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D”) directs a screenplay by Jeffrey Ventimilia and; Joshua Sternin (“The Tooth Fairy”) and Brad Copeland (“Wild Hogs”) with the line “I’m like a genus without a phylum” and a recurring gag about an adult blocked by a childproofed car window. To balance the town budget and launch his run for governor, Mayor Brown (Andrew Daly) plans to sell the park to loggers. Ranger Smith (Tom Cavanagh) and documentary filmmaker Rachel Johnson (Anna Faris) try to thwart him by wielding the lone specimen of a resident endangered-turtle species with an elastic, elongated tongue evolved for 3D effects. The unoriginal ending has the good guys leak gotcha video of the bad guy for all the townsfolk and news media to see. Shame and handcuffs follow instantly. Justice and a kiss come next. As for life lessons, three twosomes—Yogi and his bowtie-wearing sidekick Boo Boo (voiced by Justin Timberlake); Ranger Smith and his backstabbing deputy, Ranger Jones (T.J. Miller); and Mayor Brown and his obsequious chief of staff (Nate Corddry)—are dubious role models for siblings with status issues. With narrator David Stott, Greg Johnson, Christy Quillam, Patricia Aldersley. 83m. (Bill Stamets)

Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky (“Tango & Cash,” “Runaway Train”) delivers the dimmest and least dimensional 3D film of the year. It’s Christmas in Vienna in the 1920s. Uncle Albert (Nathan Lane), a daffy relativist with an Einsteinian hairdo, entertains 9-year-old Mary (Elle Fanning) and her brother Max (Aaron Michael Drozin). In a twist of bewitching, the kids are transported to a rodent Nazified realm under the thumbs of the Rat King (John Turturro) and his mother (Frances de la Tour) where long lines of forlorn children are forced at gunpoint to toss their dolls and toys onto towering piles. Long conveyor belts feed these cherished belongings into the maws of terrifying furnaces. Towering smokestacks billow ominous smoke, while ash-white leaflets fall like snow on the streets below. Mary topples the mean totalitarians to reinstate The Nutcracker (Charlie Rowe) to his rightful throne. “The Nutcracker in 3D” is not for fans of Piotr Tchaikovsky’s score. Far from balletic, this noisy-yet-inert CGI-action fare likely bears little resemblance to the Imperial Russian Ballet’s 1892 premiere in St. Petersburg of the opera based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 children’s tale “The Nutcracker and the King of the Mice.” With Richard E. Grant, Yulia Visotskaya and the voice of Shirley Henderson. 101m. (Bill Stamets)

“The Nutcracker in 3D” opens Wednesday, November 24.

RECOMMENDED

Gorgeous imagery and restrained use of 3-D mark Zack Snyder’s hoot of a foray into children’s animation. “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls Of Ga’Hoole” is adapted from the first three of fifteen young adult novels by Kathryn Lasky, with a story that seems likely to frighten the short pants off any kids who see it: a rank of good owls versus bad owls, the good owls battling genocide and the bad ones wreaking all manner of militaristic mayhem. There’s a full nest of voice talent, drawing largely from a who’s-who of Australian actors—the film received Australian film production credits—including Geoffrey Rush, David Wenham, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Helen Mirren, Anthony LaPaglia, Joel Edgerton, Richard Roxburgh, Deborra-Lee Furness and Abbie Cornish. Snyder’s knack for painstaking production design, seen in earlier movies like “300″ and “Watchmen,” enlivens a story that eventually becomes near-impossible to follow, with feathery fiends with myth-heavy names being hard to tell apart. Talking to Snyder last week, he told me the style of filmmaking wasn’t so different, requiring about the same amount of preparation as his live action-CGI hybrid filmmaking. But, exposition of the book series’ invented backstory thunders instead of flutters. The Lisa Gerrard song that accompanies a key montage sounds weirdly like The Postal Service, but the score does all it should do in the intense action sequences. And the owls’ flight through storms at sea soar. A new Road Runner cartoon precedes; it’s awful in every possible way, dull, unimaginative, unfunny and with an unappealingly stylized Wile E. (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED

The third “Step Up” film turns up the dance technique to “dazzle” on the dial, and dumbs down the storylines of “Step Up” (2006) and “Step Up 2: The Streets” (2008) to new lows in laughable. In literal brightness, though, Ken Seng’s digital 3D cinematography beats this year’s other releases in that retooled format. After two installments set at Maryland’s School of the Arts, writers Amy Andelson and Emily Meyer relocate this one to New York CIty. “Hip-hop fairy tale,” to use the tag in the film’s publicity, especially fits. The first two were merely simple-minded stories of teens dreaming of dancing and doing it. This one stuns with its godawful simplicity. Condescension is the only option. If you didn’t look down, you’d miss it, so oblige and enjoy the show. Moose (Adam G. Sevani) says goodbye to his parents, who trust he’s said goodbye to dancing and hello to electrical engineering. But in the next step, he skips his freshman orientation at NYU and dances up mayhem in Washington Park. “Family is family” is the tautological mantra of this fantasy. Family equals dance crew. (Moose’s dad, on screen for under a minute, is the only one to appear in all three films.) Like a backstage musical, this sports dance numbers that upstage the tossed-off plot. Although the choreography and camerawork are nothing like Busby Berkeley’s, certain sequences of eclectic street styles and cheerleader athletics evoke his deco machine aesthetic. Read the rest of this entry »

An evil cat conspired to unleash a virus that would make humanity allergic to dogs in “Cats & Dogs” (2001). In “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore” another evil cat conspires to broadcast an audio file via satellite to radios, TVs and cell phones that will drive all dogs mad so mankind will put down this “man’s best friend” business. “I will enslave mankind,” cackles the hairless, pointy-fanged Kitty Galore (voiced by Bette Midler). Tactical inter-petdom detente ensues as Cold War-style secret spy organizations of cats and dogs team up—”a first in our political history”—to take down this power-crazed cat before forty-eight hours go by. For this interminable PG-rated mixed-breed of live action, puppetry and computer animation, Ron J. Friedman and Steve Bencich write laugh-free riffs on James Bond and Hannibal Lecter films, along with lines that only connoisseurs of pet-food ad copy will get. There is an abject lack of wit about four-legged friends in this sub-Saturday morning kids fare directed by Brad Peyton. With the voices of James Marsden, Nick Nolte, Christina Applegate, Katt Williams, Neil Patrick Harris; and the voices and bodies of Chris O’Donnell, Sean Hayes, Michael Clarke Duncan, Fred Armisen. Reviewed in 2D; 3D in some theaters. 100m. (Bill Stamets)