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 »

Eleven-year-old loner plus wounded critter equals movie tears in the affecting, if formulaic “Dolphin Tale.” “Family is forever,” preaches this PG-rated kids drama based on a 2005 incident in Florida. Sawyer’s (Nathan Gamble) dad left five years ago. Now his champ swimmer cousin Kyle (Austin Stowell) heads off to war somewhere, telling Sawyer the U.S. Army will pay for his Olympic training once his tour of duty is over. Meanwhile, the withdrawn kid with low grades bonds with a beached dolphin dubbed Winter. Read the rest of this entry »

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This lovely fare for the read-to-me set teaches a life lesson: illiteracy can lead you to needless fear, yet crafty arranging of the letters of the alphabet can build a ladder to freedom for your pals in peril. Walt Disney Animation Studios preserves the interplay between screen and storybook page found in 1977′s “The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh,” where the narrator intervened at one point to wake up the title’s dozing bear, a small-brainer with an endearing oral fixation on honey. This time the narrator (John Cleese) tilts the page to slide slumbering Winnie along the edges of paragraphs. One of the toy animals belonging to the boy Christopher Robin, whose misspelled and misread note triggers the plot, will ask what happens next. “If I told you that, I’d ruin the rest of the story, wouldn’t I?” chides the storyteller. Also reprised is the gentle hand-drawn style of animation. Instead of three episodes that comprised the earlier seventy-four-minute film, this fifty-four-minute morsel bears the heading “Chapter 1, In Which Winnie-the-Pooh Has a Very Important Thing to Do,” phrased in the manner of author A.A. Milne’s original chapters in 1926. Co-directors Stephen J. Anderson and Don Hall share story credit with six others. Tender ears will detect the quaint imprecation “Oh, bother” during the winsome adventures of Tigger, Owl, Rabbit, Piglet, Kanga, Roo and Eeyore. With tunes by Zooey Deschanel and the voices of Jim Cummings, Craig Ferguson, Tom Kenny, Travis Oates, Bud Luckey. 74m. (Bill Stamets)

Director Joe Nussbaum (“Sydney White,” “Sleepover”) directs a debut script by Katie Wech for an uncommonly bland story of high school students getting ready for the prom. Oh darn, all the “Starry Night” decorations go up in flames! Only three weeks to go! The tweedy principal forces working-class, motorcycle-riding bad-boy-with-attitude Jesse (Thomas McDonell) to help Nova (Aimee Teegarden), the straight-A class president and head of the Prom Committee. He sneers that she is “winning the award for most awards.” She recalls: “You were the guy who cried when the hamster died in third grade.” As they fall for each other, various classmates pick their dates. Co-producer Justin Springer calls the spring rite of passage “a magnifier that allows teenage emotions to come out.” Although affectionate towards its well-scrubbed cast, the PG-rated “Prom” is no lens on adolescence. Acne and alcohol are absent at Brookside High School where kids take AP, not STD, tests. At Walt Disney Pictures’ press and promotional screening, ‘tweens in attendance seemed outnumbered by twentysomethings who loudly mocked afterschool cliches that hardly qualified as camp. With Danielle Campbell, Yin Chang, Kylie Bunbury, Nicholas Braun, Jared Kusnitz, Jonathan Keltz, De’Vaughn Nixon, Nolan Sotillo, Cameron Monaghan, Joe Adler, Janelle Ortiz, Raini Rodriguez. 104m. (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.

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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)

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By Ray Pride

I went into Rob Reiner’s “Flipped” fearing a coming-of-age romantic comedy that would live up to Roger Ebert’s notorious pan of the director’s “North”: “I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it.” I love being wrong when foolish expectations get stamped out, and there are moments in “Flipped” to be loved, loved, loved.

An extended piece in the Los Angeles Times in July on the movie’s marketing left me fearful. “I wanted the story to feel timeless and pure, in a time before texting and Facebook,” Reiner told a columnist. “I thought it was important to strip away the technology so we could get at the true emotions and feelings and make it as innocent as possible. I guess you could say I wanted to make it closer to my own childhood.”

In a small town in Michigan along Bonnie Meadow Lane in the six years leading up to 1963, in the season before the murder of JFK, lives a boy, Bryce Loski (Callan McAuliffe) and across the street, a girl, Juli Baker (Madeline Carroll). The values of their respective families resonate through their behavior toward each other, from Bryce’s stodgy, frustrated father (Anthony Edwards, who throws away the line, “I hate cool”) to Juli’s (Aidan Quinn), whose strength and compassion comes from unexpected places. McAuliffe is Cera-esque in the ways that people who don’t like Michael Cera describe that actor: a milquetoast for Juli to invest her substantial imagination in. You wonder what this wonderful girl sees in him: hope, potential, pretty eyes? She’s a smart child, tomboy with pigtails: Carroll has a feline cast to her eyes, a little of the young Anna Paquin to her features. Read the rest of this entry »

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Five English kids get five lessons in manners from a nanny enhanced with a magic cane. By a peculiar logic, the bulky, snaggletoothed, hairy-moled Nanny McPhee (Emma Thompson) loses one of her unsightly features each time her charges acquire a new degree of civility and character. Thompson reprises her role from “Nanny McPhee” (2005). She also writes the screenplay based on Christianna Brand’s three books originally published in 1964, 1967 and 1974. In the first film, Mr. Cedric Brown was a widower with seven unruly offspring. Now Mrs. Isabel Green (Maggie Gyllenhaal) may learn she’s a widow upon opening a telegram concerning her husband who’s away at a war with no name. (An aircraft labeled “Enemy Plane” will drop a jumbo bomb in her barley field.) Susanna White directs this welcome exception to American fare for families. 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)

“Suggested by” the segment of the same name in Walt Disney’s animated “Fantasia” from 1940, this PG-rated Walt Disney Pictures family-action-adventure is an enervating, overlong tale of a good sorcerer training a chosen one to exterminate an evil sorcerer. Then our hero wins over his childhood sweatheart for an all-night flight aboard a Chrysler Building eagle-style gargoyle to Paris for lattes and croissants. Compared to recent boy-with-powers-saves-world films, this Jerry Bruckheimer junk is far worse than “Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief” and a tad worse than “The Last Airbender.” Jon Turteltaub (both “National Treasure” films with a third one threatened) directs an uninspired screenplay by Matt Lopez and Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard set in CGI-NYC. Balthazar Blake (Nicolas Cage, “Kick-Ass,” both “National Treasure”‘s) is a 777th-degree sorcerer from 740 A.D. who searches for centuries and finds a 10-year-old New Yorker in the year 2000. The late Merlin designated a super-sorcerer to wear his magic dragon ring and stop evil sorcerers from “enslaving mankind,” although their labor needs would seem more easily met by a few waves of the wand. These evil ones are later said to aim to “destroy the world,” with no other world in mind. Sorcerers seem not so smart. The plot picks up ten years later. Now a NYU physics nerd, Dave (Jay Baruchel) is the badly cast apprentice. Cage is at his blandest. No good spell is cast by “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Except for a minute or so of sparkly confetti effects in a Chinatown dragon bout, this never enchants. With Alfred Molina, Teresa Palmer, Monica Bellucci, Toby Kebbell. 110m. (Bill Stamets)