An alien visits a small town

 

    Sporting gray hair and looking disoriented, Ben Kingsley stars in Jules, a quirk-filled story about Milton, a 78-year-old small-town resident whose life is upended when a flying saucer lands in his backyard. 

    A regular attendee at city council meetings, Milton seems both obsessive and forgetful.  He can make eyes roll by repeatedly insisting that the town's motto is misleading: "A great place to call home."  His suggestion: "A great place to refer to as home."

    Truth be told, Milton's hometown doesn't look like a great place to do much of anything.

    But about that flying saucer ...

    The craft not only smashes into Milton's backyard, it brings an alien visitor into Milton's life. 

   At first, it seems as if director Marc Turtletaub, working from a screenplay by Gavin Steckler, might be charting Milton's descent in the uncharted space of dementia. His daughter (Zoe Winters) suspects that Dad might be slipping.

  But the flying saucer is no hallucination, and Milton slowly develops a relationship with its sole occupant, the Jules of the title. 

   Clad in a suit that makes her look like a cartoon version of an alien, Jade Quon plays Jules, a visitor who never speaks but develops a rapport with Milton and with two local women (Harriet Sansom Harris and Jane Curtin). The women become Milton's co-conspirators as he tries to protect the alien from the town's residents and from threatening government agents.

    Turtletaub adds odd touches, one of them a macabre suggestion that the spacecraft needs dead cats to refuel and continue its journey. Don't ask.

     Jules didn't strike me as Kingsley's kind of movie and I wasn't sure what Turtletaub was after. A mild assurance that older folks needn't be imprisoned by loneliness and habit? A reminder that connections still can be made?

     Whatever Turtletaub had in mind, Jules struck me as a bit of a drag. Or, to be more precise, a mildly eccentric drag.

Strong kickoff for another Marvel character

 

    Marvel's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings leaps into Asian-American mythos in much in the way that Black Panther brought Afrocentric freshness to the indestructible Marvel universe.

    I don’t know if Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings will have the same impact as Black Panther — either commercially or culturally. But this latest Marvel movie has enough positive elements (action, humor and a story with deep family roots) to constitute an entertaining addition to Marvel’s apparently endless stream of movies.

     Shang-Chi gets off to a lively start. Sean (Simu Liu) -- later to become Shang-Chi -- works as a valet in San Francisco along with pal Katy (Awkwafina). It doesn't take long for the two to take a dizzying ride in a borrowed car.

     Sean and Katy also encounter a group of thugs on a bus, a sequence in which clever martial-arts maneuvers are augmented by the excitement of watching a large vehicle careen through the streets of San Francisco.

    Sean, we learn, has a secret. He was raised in China by a father (Tony Leung) who schooled him in martial arts. Leung's Wenwu was no pipe-and-slippers dad. Centuries ago, he acquired the fabled 10 rings which gave him superhero powers and eternal life. He expected his son to take his place as head of a powerful secret force of warriors.

    Shang-Chi had other ideas. He fled China when he was 14. 

    Upon his return to Macau 10 years later, Shang reunites with his younger sister Xialing (Meng'er Zhang). She's still upset that Shang left her with a father who didn't treat his daughter the way he treated his son.

   The plot eventually takes Shang and Katy to the mythic land of Ta-Lo where they meet Shang's aunt Ying Nan (Michelle Yeoh), a wise woman who makes positive use of her martial arts-skills.

    Like most Marvel movies, Shang-Chi gobbles up comic-book mythology as if were popcorn. Wuwen, who gave up his powers when he married Shang's mother (Fala Chen), believes that he can reunite with his late wife if he penetrates a seal that separates an evil soul-sucking dragon from humanity. 

    The meeting of Wuwen and Chen's Jiang Li produces some of the movie's more intriguing and well-choreographed action. Li's the only person who's able to subdue Wuwen's fighting spirit. 

     It makes more sense to see all this in a theater than to write about it in a review. Besides, the mythic elements of the story are supported by recognizable emotions: a husband's inability to accept his wife's death, a son's struggle to accept his true identity, and a sister who can't totally abandon her sibling resentments.

    The Ta-Lo sequences include an element of cuteness in the form of a furry faceless, winged creature that struck me as more Disney than Marvel, a little too precious perhaps. 

    But Shang-Chi never skimps on action. A fight that takes place on scaffolding attached to a high rise offers vertiginous fun.

    I've read that Liu wanted to model his fighting style on Jackie Chan. The fight sequences contain elements of Chan-like humor but, in my view, don’t rise to the level of Chan’s best work, which admittedly makes for a high bar.

   Director Destin Daniel Cretton and his team were smart to give Shang-Chi a sidekick and the movie suffers a bit when Awkwafina is off-screen. Liu masters the physical aspects of the role but sometimes  comes up short on personality. Oh well, that's probably a marginal criticism considering that Shang-Chi is an emerging character.

   The supporting cast -- particularly Yeoh, Leung, and Zhang -- offer more than window dressing. They really supports the movie, as does Benedict Wong, whose role is smaller but still strong. Ben Kingsley adds humor as Trevor Slattery, a fading TV actor whose presence is played for laughs. 

   The movie's ending -- involving dragons (good and evil), a father/son battle, and lots of fiery combat -- can't entirely avoid the bloat that seems obligatory in these efforts.

    Overall, though, Shang-Chi succeeds in introducing a new Marvel character to the screen and proves an invigorating addition to the Marvel universe. 

    Equally important in a world in which sequels seem mandatory, the movie leaves you wanting to see more of Shang-Chi and Katy, a comic-book duo with promising  potential.

Disney scores with another 'Jungle Book'

CGI animals and a strong voice cast help director Jon Favreau sell a familiar tale.

Adaptations of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book don't exactly make for fresh news. So when I first saw the title on a list of 2016 releases, I found it difficult to get excited about another jungle journey, even one equipped with a CGI menagerie.

As it turns out, Disney's Jungle Book, directed by Jon Favreau, is bright (even in 3D), appealing and in at least one inspired sequence, engagingly loopy.

The story focuses on Mowgli (Neel Sethi), a boy who was raised by wolves and suddenly finds himself targeted by a tiger named Shere Kahn (voiced by Idris Elba).

The story is narrated by Bagheera (Ben Kingsley), the sagacious panther who first brought young Mowgli to Raksha (Lupita Nyong'o), the wolf who becomes his surrogate mother and who tries to instill him with the lore of the pack.

Elba gives voice to a convincing villain, a somewhat battered tiger who's motivated by a desire to keep fire out of the jungle. Shere Khan thinks it's not enough to exile Mowgli from the jungle by returning him to his human tribe. He wants to kill the boy.

In the early going, I half wondered whether Mowgli's flight through the jungle hadn't given Disney an excuse to produce a kiddie version of The Revenant, another wilderness survival epic. But Favreau balances the movie's convincingly dangerous situations with enough comic moments to keep fright in check.

To insure the success of its effort, Disney has surrounded first-timer Sethi with a strong voice cast. In addition to Kinglsey and Elba, you'll recognize Bill Murray as the voice of the conniving but good-spirited Baloo, a bear with a honey jones.

The movie even breaks into song with a Murray-voiced rendition of The Bare Necessities, which was used in Disney's 1967 animated version of The Jungle Book. The song seems awkwardly inserted because this version of Jungle Book isn't really a musical, but once you get past its slightly jarring arrival, the song is sort of fun.

Even though we never see him, Christopher Walken does scene-stealing work as the voice of King Louie, a giant orangutan with evil on his mind.

Louie wants Mowglie -- referred to by the animals as a "man cub" -- to return to his own kind, capture fire and deliver it to the power-hungry king who lives in an impressively created temple that has been overrun by all manner of monkeys.

Walken, too, is given a musical number, I Wanna Be Like You.

Animal purists may find this entirely anthropomorphic endeavor to be a little prone to cuteness. Despite Favreau's amazingly skillful use of CGI, the movie's spirit often follows a cartoon template with creatures (wolf cubs, for example) that are petting-zoo cuddly.

Although the movie expresses deep reverence for elephants -- all creatures bow before them -- it also makes sure to find a way to put a baby elephant into danger, an incident that provides the movie with an opportunity to showcase the human ingenuity that Mowgli possesses.

But there are also strangely alluring creatures that aren't quite as kid friendly: Ka, a giant snake voiced by Scarlett Johansson, tries to tempt Mowgli with her hypnotically seductive voice.

Favreau paces the movie at a speed that tends to help push criticism aside. Panthers with British accents? Why is it that some of the animals talk and some don't? And, most importantly, concerns about whether some of the realistically presented animal fights are too vivid for the youngest viewers to handle. The movie has been rated PG.

Overall, though, The Jungle Book proves entertaining and likable without delivering too heavy-handed a message about the way humans, the masters of fire, tend to destroy jungle habitats.

Stay put for the end credits, which are entertaining in their own right.

A movie that walks 'The Walk'

Director Robert Zemeckis recreates Philippe Petit's 1974 wire walk between the towers of The World Trade Center.

The finale of The Walk qualifies as a true astonishment, a stunning recreation of Philippe Petit's 1974 wire walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

Director Robert Zemeckis employs 3D, IMAX, CGI and heaven knows what else to make us feel what it was like for Petit to step onto a wire 110 stories above the bustle of lower Manhattan.

Now, I can't say that this was a feeling that I ever wanted to have. As a person who's squeamish about heights, I can tell you that I found the last act of Zemeckis's movie as terrifying as any experience I've had at a movie.

Those scenes, however, remind us that movies are capable of immersing us in experiences that are entirely sensory -- in this case, making us feel as if we, too, are stepping onto a wire suspended between two monolithic skyscrapers.

The movie doesn't always soar in other areas, so whether you see The Walk depends on whether Petit's wire-walking escapade proves involving enough. It was for me.

Was Petit's famous wire walk a work of art, a dangerously illegal expression of massive irresponsibility or an act of daring so exceptional that it transcended all categories?

I honestly don't know, but like most moviegoers I'm familiar with the details of Petit's story because of James Marsh's 2008 Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire, a movie that told the story of Petit's obsession.

Marsh recreated the various ruses Petit employed to gain entry into the World Trade Center so that he could string his wire. He used still photos to show Petit's walk.

I happened to live in New York City at the time Petit made his famous walk. Contrary to what Zemeckis's movie contends, Petit did not soften my view of The World Trade Center. I always thought the towers were cold, imposing and lacking in architectural elegance and invention.

So, the movie ...

Early on, Zemeckis operates in exaggerated fanciful mode, introducing us to Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as he stands on the torch of the Statue Liberty, the perch from which he'll provide the tale with its intermittent narration. He talks directly to the camera.

I can only surmise that in the wake of Sept. 11, Zemeckis places Petit atop the Statue of Liberty to show that the ideals of freedom have survived, even though the towers have not -- not that Zemeckis makes any other references to the ultimate fate of the towers. He knows we know, and leaves it at that.

Speaking with a variable French accent, Gordon-Levitt displays an unbridled exuberance that mirrors the movie's buoyant tone. Aside from an occasional angry outburst and one moment of sweaty panic, he's pretty much stuck in over-drive.

During the early '70s, we see Petit working as a street performer in Paris. He juggles atop a unicycle, walks a wire strung between trees and offers constant explanations for why he's speaking English. He's preparing to visit America, he tells anyone who asks.

Petit decided his destiny involved making this particular walk the minute he saw a picture of the then-proposed towers in a magazine in a dentist's office.

The performances surrounding Levitt, notably that of Charlotte Le Bon as his girlfriend Annie Alix, truly can be deemed "supporting;" other characters exist as props either to bolster Petit emotionally or to help him plan and execute his walk.

Zemeckis treats the latter part of The Walk as a caper film. To augment the illicit feeing that accompanied Petit's efforts, he refers to his helpers as "accomplices."

The mid-sections of the film introduce us to Papa Rudy, a circus wire walker played by Ben Kingsley. Papa Rudy tries to instill Petit with the ethos of a wire walker, as Kingsley struggles to transcend the stereotype of a gruff but caring mentor.

Because Marsh's documentary didn't try to make us feel as if we were on the wire with Petit, it did a better job of taking us inside Petit's mind, exposing us to what he regarded as a mixture of art and performance -- or, to put it another way, a magical piece of performance art.

The Walk isn't a great movie, although it boasts a truly great recreation of an event with which younger audiences may not be familiar.

Those who know Zemeckis's work (from Back to the Future to Who Framed Roger Rabbit to Forrest Gump to Cast Away and The Polar Express) know that he makes little effort to hide his delight in artifice.

That tendency doesn't always serve him well in The Walk, which is at its best when Petit is alone on the wire, creating his "poetry." For all the technical wizardry required to create those moments, they don't feel nearly as self-conscious as much of what we've been watching.

Aside from the excruciating tightening of the gut I experienced during Petit's prolonged wire walk, what I'll most remember about The Walk is an image of Petit reclining on the wire as we hear him talk about the profound silence and serenity that are encompassing him, an unearthly stillness.

I can't begin to imagine what might have been going on Petit's head normally if this is how far he had to go to find such tranquility and grace.

Kingsley, Clarkson elevate 'Learning to Drive'

An odd-couple story built on a woman's search for control of her life.

Ben Kingsley and Patricia Clarkson play an interesting duet in Learning to Drive, a movie about a New York woman who responds to end of her marriage by taking driving lessons.

This may seem like a trivial premise, but during the years I lived in the mass-transit world of Manhattan, I knew many people who didn't drive. Some never even bothered to obtain licenses.

Based on a 2002 autobiographical New Yorker article by Katha Pollitt, Learning to Drive introduces us to Clarkson's Wendy, a woman at an emotional low point in what seems an otherwise successful life.

It doesn't take long for Kingsley's Darwan to enter Wendy's world, bringing with him hope for transformation.

A Sikh who had been a political prisoner in India, Darwan has been granted asylum in the US, and now lives in Queens, N.Y.

Obviously bright and capable, Darwan chooses to support himself driving a taxi at night and giving driving lessons by day because he doesn't want to abandon the beard and turban that help define his identity as Sikh.

As directed by Isabel Coixet (Elegy), Learning to Drive becomes a tasteful (and perhaps overly tame) look at two people from different worlds.

Although this sounds like a formula for predictability and boredom, Kingsley and Clarkson fill the movie with enough convincing life to make Learning to Drive palatable and entertaining.

The reason Wendy wants to learn to drive -- aside any metaphoric value -- involves her daughter (Grace Gummer). Gummer's Tasha and her boyfriend live on a food commune in Vermont. Wendy reluctantly decides that it's time she paid a visit.

As the movie evolves, we can't help wondering whether Wendy and Darwan will become romantically involved, but the script by Sara Kernochan is a bit cagier than that.

About mid-way through the movie, Darwan begins a new chapter in his own life with the arrival from India of his soon-to-be wife (Sarita Choudhury), a woman sent to him for a marriage arranged by his sister.

The difficult adjustment required of both parties could (and perhaps should) have made a movie of its own. Coixet handles this awkward relationship with sensitivity and a sense of realism.

Coixet does an equally good job of sketching the life of an immigrant who has landed in Queens. Economic pressures force Darwan to share an apartment with roommates, some of whom fear discovery by immigration authorities.

As a man of character and principles, Kingsley's Darwan tries to bridge the gap between cultures: one represented by the Sikh religion, which governs his behavior, and the other, by Wendy, who offers increased intellectual stimulation.

For the most part, Wendy is a wreck, an older woman forced to abandon her old life. Divorce forces Wendy to give up the brownstone to which she's extremely attached, move into a new apartment and otherwise accept the notion that she's now traveling without a co-pilot.

Learning to Drive is not a volatile movie or one that requires pressing into anyone's book of memories: all the more reason that Kingsley and Clarkson deserve credit for getting more out of it than a formulaic premise would seem to promise.

Escaping bondage -- with help

Ridley Scott directs, Christian Bale plays Moses and the Hebrews flee.

If I were able to talk to Ridley Scott, who directed Exodus: Gods and Kings -- a 3-D rendering of one of the best-known Bible stories -- I'd ask him what on Earth (or under the heavens) attracted him to the material.

It's a question the movie itself never entirely answers.

Cecil B. DeMille's Ten Commandments combined gaudy spectacle with an Americanized freedom agenda as the benighted children of Israel -- with a snarling Edward G. Robinson in tow -- fled 400 years of bondage in Egypt.

Scott downplays the story's religious/spiritual aspects, but doesn't find enough by way of replacement. I'm no literalist when it comes to Bible stories so I have no problem with an artist using the Bible's rich and venerable stories as a springboard for an interpretive statement.

But in skipping some of the key ingredients of the story -- serial confrontations between Moses and Pharaoh, for example -- Scott not only makes an interpretive choice: He abandons some of the story's most fertile dramatic ground.

Gods and Kings makes masterful use of CGI to create great battles (Egyptians vs. Hittites), the fabled plagues -- frogs, boils, rivers turned to blood, etc. -- and, of course, the parting of the Red Sea. It would be shocking if a 21st Century filmmaker couldn't outdo DeMille in the effects department. Scott clearly does.

But then there's the rest of the movie ....

I suppose the movie's most controversial element involves Scott's depiction of God, the prime mover in the Exodus narrative. Turns out that Moses sees God as a shepherd boy (Isaac Andrews) with a close-cropped hair, a British accent and a confrontational attitude.

This vision -- it should be noted -- may be a hallucination, an image resulting from a rock slide that beans Moses and leaves him buried under a ton of mud.

Hallucination or not, the relationship between God and Moses sometimes gets testy. They argue about such details as whether God has gone too far over the top with the plagues, particularly the final one which takes the lives of the first born of all the Egyptians, including Pharaoh's son.

Are we supposed to find irony in the fact that mighty Pharaoh is undone by a child whose voice has yet to change?

Then there's Moses himself. Poor Christian Bale. Any actor who tackles this kind of iconic role must pit himself against the cumulative weight of centuries of western art and kitsch -- from Michelangelo to Charlton Heston.

Bale opts for a contemporary interpretation, aided by language in a script by a quartet of credited writers (Adam Cooper, Bill Collage, Jeffrey Caine and Steven Zaillian) that does its best to avoid any trace of poetry. The movie treats Moses as a warrior/general and early action hero.

Moses's greatest internal struggle seems to revolve around his initial inability to accept his ethnic origins as a Hebrew, but even that conflict lacks much by way of urgency.

Joel Edgerton plays the movie's other key figure: Ramses. With a bulbous shaved head, Edgerton more resembles Kojack than a king.

Perhaps in an effort to give Ramses a bit of shading, he's presented as a cruel man, but one who loves his son and who sometimes seems confounded, particularly when his own priests and priestesses are unable to stem the tide of so many vicious plagues.

What's a Pharaoh to do? Grumble and, on at least one occasion, play with his pet snakes.

The rest of the cast largely is reduced to non-entity status. That would include Aaron Paul as Joshua, and Andrew Tarbet as Aaron, key figures in the story who are reduced to ... well ... almost nothing.

John Turturro makes an interesting Seti, Rhamses's father, a god/king who prefers Moses to his own son. Blink and you'll miss Sigourney Weaver as Seti's duplicitous wife.

Ben Kingsley makes a bit of an impression as Nun, a wise old Hebrew slave who knows Moses's true identity.

The always interesting Ben Mendelsohn brings a seamy twist to the role of Hegep, a conniving Egyptian who exposes Moses as a Hebrew, the development that pushes Moses into exile where he meets his wife (Maria Valverde), a woman made to look like a Bedouin princess.

Beset by structural flaws, including a tendency not to build toward the story's key events, Scott's Exodus shortchanges both the spiritual and political relevancies of a story that still resonates on many levels. The movie doesn't exactly break new ground as an action/adventure, either.

Most memorable shot: An upward look at the corpses of Egyptian soldiers floating in the Red Sea after the Hebrews have reached safety.

So what are we left with? At times, Moses seems like an actor who can't quite find a center for his portrayal -- or maybe that's Bale. Ramses can come off as a bit of a schlub, and God seems like a cosmic spoilsport.

When Moses reunites with his wife after his Egyptian exploits, she quite reasonably asks about the throngs who are traveling with him.

Who are they?

My people, says Moses, demonstrating that he finally has accepted his true identity.

What else to say but, "Mazel tov, Moses." Or maybe, where's Mel Brooks when we need him?

Things go topsy turvy in this asylum

A great cast tackles melodrama in Stonehearst Asylum.

Taking its cue from an Edgar Allan Poe story, Stonehearst Asylum makes literal use of an oft-posed question: What might happen if the inmates took over the asylum?

Although the movie's answer hardly qualifies as profound, its high-grade cast -- particularly Ben Kingsley, Michael Caine and David Thewlis -- seems to be having a good time with a Gothic tale set at the dawn of the 20th Century.

The movie wastes no time establishing a creepy atmosphere. Dr. Edward Newgate (Jim Sturgess) arrives at spooky Stonehearst Asylum to serve a residency as a staff psychiatrist, known in this movie as an "alienist."

Thrown off guard by caretaker Mickey Finn (Thewlis), Newgate is further flummoxed by the asylum's weirdly imperious superintendent, Dr. Silas Lamb (Kingsley).

Dr. Lamb believes that it's better to allow patients to follow their madness than to treat them abusively.

I doubt you'll be surprised when Dr. Newgate discovers that the patients have revolted and thrown the real staff into the asylum's dungeon.

The point: 19th century methods for treating the insane constituted a cruel and inhuman form of punishment. The staff, led by Caine's character, deserves to be punished.

That message plays second fiddle to the mixture of melodrama and macabre comedy that director Brad Anderson serves up -- with particular help from an acerbic and slightly unhinged Kingsley.

Also clear from the outset is Northgate's infatuation with a supposedly dangerous but beautiful patient (Kate Beckinsale), a hysteric who freezes when touched.

The movie's over-the-top and self-consciously melodramatic approach (cue the thunder!) works well enough, until final scenes engulf the screen in flames.

Warning: Caine's role is small. Same goes for Brendan Gleeson, who appears at the movie's beginning and at its end.

If you're looking for horror, look elsewhere: Stonehearst Asylum isn't particularly scary, but its production values are strong, and there's something to be said for watching a grade A cast take a bumpy journey through B-movie terrain.

A look a cheesy world that's pretty 'gouda'

Boxtrollscan be both distinctive and amusing.

The folks who made the popular animated movies Coraline and ParaNorman are at it again. The Boxtrolls falls a trifle short of previous Laika Studios work, but still manages to be both entertaining and distinctive, an expression of the appealingly cracked thinking we've come to expect from Laika.

This time, Laika imagines an inherently absurd world in which status in the town of Cheesebridge is signified by white, stovepipe hats that look as if they've been borrowed from Dr. Seuss.

True to the town's name, cheese has become the currency in which the status-hungry deal. Nothing in Cheesebridge exceeds the privilege of gathering in a tasting room to sample fine cheeses with other White Hats.

Loosely based on author Alan Snow's Here Be Monsters, The Boxtrolls focuses on a boy named Eggs (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) who lives among the Boxtrolls, lumpy-looking creatures who wear cardboard boxes and who run around the city scavenging from garbage piles.

For nourishment, the trolls pop multi-colored insects as if they were M&Ms. They also collect discarded objects from alleys as a way of furnishing their underground home.

Of course, the Boxtrolls have a nemesis. An exterminator named Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley) plans to eliminate all trolls. In true fairy tale fashion, he libels the poor creatures, blaming them for capturing and killing children.

Unwilling to wait for an elevated status, Snatcher sometimes gains entry into society's loftier regions by dressing in drag and posing as Madame Frou-Frou, a singer in full chanteuse regalia.

Snatcher hopes to shed his disguise and become a bona fide member of the White Hat society so that he, too, can feast on fine cheeses with Lord Portley-Rind (Jared Harris).

A cheese obsessive himself, the snooty Lord Portley-Rind pretty much ignores his young daughter (Elle Fanning).

Left to her own devices, Fanning's Winnie meets Eggs, and the two eventually join forces to save the Boxtrolls and bring balance to a world gone lopsided in its quest for status.

The world we discover in The Boxtrolls tends to be darkly hued, a look that isn't helped by 3D, which proves entirely superfluous in establishing the Dickensian mood directors Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable seem to be after.

I would have preferred a less action-oriented finale, but The Boxtrolls, with musical numbers by Eric Idle, has a fair share of off-kilter charm.

Be sure to stay put for the end credits, which are both amusing and instructive.

A game played mostly on the surface

In Ender's Game adult wisdom has become as rare as nuanced expression.

Orson Scott Card's 1985 novel Ender's Game has acquired a large and devoted following. I'm not an acolyte or even a reader of Card's popular books, so I approached the eagerly awaited movie version of the first novel in the series with an high hopes and open mind.

What I found in Ender's Game is a juvenile helping of sci-fi that wrestles with some big, topical issues, but would require ample applications of intellectual Clearasil® before it's ready to claim an unblemished place in the sci-fi big leagues.

Having said that, I certainly wouldn't dissuade fans of the books from seeing a movie that has been assembled by director Gavin Hood in ways that attempt to maximize action, much of it involving zero-gravity training exercises that pit teams of youthful combatants against one another.

If there's genius in the concept, it probably involves the way that the movie acknowledges that game-savvy youngsters are more easily adaptable to modern warfare than adults. In the future, killer instincts may not be applied at the end of a bayonet but at a digital console. Think drones on steroids.

Hood's kid-centered, tech-laden drama follows 10-year-old Ender Wiggen (Asa Butterfield) through various stages of training in facilities that orbit the Earth. Hood, who also wrote the screenplay, divides the movie roughly into thirds.

In the first (and skimpiest) section we meet Ender and his family, a sister (Abigail Breslin) and an older bother Peter (Jimmy 'Jax' Pinchak). The arrogant Peter quickly vanishes from the story, but Breslin's Valentine crops up intermittently, mostly to serve as Ender's emotional connection to a threatened world.

About that threat: It seems that at some prior time the Earth was attacked by insect-like creatures called Formics. Earth's warriors fought off the Formics, but the threat of another invasion remains.

Early on, Ender falls under the tutelage of Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford), a military commander who has been searching for a youthful warrior to lead the charge against the Formics.

A militarist to the bone, Graff believes that one big battle can eliminate the threat of future wars. For Graff, preemptive strikes are the quickest route to peace. If he weren't being played by Ford, perhaps Dick Cheney could have auditioned for the role.

Throughout Ender's training -- a combination of boot camp combined with a video-game competition -- Graff pushes Ender hard: He beleives he finally has discovered a kid with the requisite tactical instincts to take on the Formics once and for all.

Graff often is seen in the company of a psychological officer (Viola Davis). Davis's character advocates for Ender's mental well-being, something in which Graff has no interest.

Butterfield, who appeared in Martin Scorsese's Hugo, does an good job combing the geeky and violent impulses that define Ender. From time-to-time, Ender question's the idea that conflicts are best resolved with healthy applications of violence. Butterfield succeeds in making Ender's internal conflicts real.

As he advances through his training, Ender comes into conflict with another cadet (Moises Arias), a young man who seems to have a Napoleon complex. Petra, a cadet played by Hailee Steinfeld, helps Ender learn the ropes.

But the real star of this portion of the movie is a training facility where the cadets face off in a zero-gravity environment. Hood returns to this special-effects well a little too often. Repetition sets in.

The movie's third act offers some redemption. Ender moves into the final stage of his training, which involves preparing to lead the Earth's forces into a decisive battle with the Formics.

At this point, he meets Mazer Rackham (Ben Kingsley), the warrior who lead Earth's forces to victory in the first encounter with the Formics.

Replete with a Maori-style facial tattoo that makes him look like a futuristic Queequeg, Kingsley apes the one-note severity of the other adults in the movie, but projects more depth than Ford, who makes a return to sci-fi. Think Han Solo without a personality.

Hood and his technical team save the best for last, using Ender's final training exercise as occasion to unfurl a series of dazzling special effects that add a level of sensory thrill that should please genre fans.

I won't spoil the ending, but those familiar with the story know that the story probably is intended as a cautionary tale. In truth, though, Ender's Game derives more energy from its staunch militarism than from any other source.

A summary: Ender's Game has been made with enough competence to please fans of the series and perhaps to expand that audience a bit. The entire enterprise has a juvenile flavor, interrupted by occasional bouts of brow furrowing as the story attempts to grapple with Big Questions. Unlike Ender, the movie doesn't emerge at the top of the sci-fi class, but it's nowhere near the bottom. And if sequels loom, there's plenty of room for improvement after what can be called a decent enough start.

The fireworks of 'Iron Man 3'

The finale is explosive, but this installment of Iron Man is not without dull spots.
What must Iron Man 3 accomplish? Must the flawed superhero of Marvel Comics fame save the world from the evil machinations of terrorism-prone villain? Must he somehow reconcile the fragility of his humanity with powers bestowed on him when he dons his protective iron suit? Or must he navigate his way through an early summer mega-movie that might be deemed a dud if it doesn't outdo its predecessors at the box office?

Iron Man 3 seems to want to accomplish all of the above goals, throwing in an explosion that demolishes Grauman's Chinese Theatre in the bargain. A metaphor for the way the movie's supposed to explode at the box office or a bit of bad-taste, post-Aurora pyrotechnics? Decide for yourself.

So, the plusses: The action set pieces of the movie's finale are scaled to impress and include CGI work that leaves you marveling at its undisguised audacity.

The minuses: Iron Man 3 makes you suffer through some significant longueurs before it crosses its 130-minute finish line. The movie's end-of-picture rewards are tempered by mid-picture sags and talky stagnation.

Robert Downey Jr. does everything you'd expect of him in his third Iron Man outing. Iron Man -- who spends a lot of time out of his suit in this episode -- is lightning fast with a retort. He's amusing, especially to himself.

In the movie's early scenes, Iron Man, a.k.a. Tony Stark, is mired in a personal crisis. He can't sleep. He's having anxiety attacks. He's puttering around his laboratory with obsessive fervor, trying to figure out how to make parts of his Iron Man suit leap from the ground and attach to his body. He's also neglecting his relationship with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Director Shane Black (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) has been assigned the job of following Iron Man through his psychological malaise. Black, who also wrote the Lethal Weapon movies, assumes the franchise's helm to mixed effect, perhaps because he has limited experience with the heavy-lifting required to direct an effects-laden mega-movie.

Still, there are sights to be seen. A prime example: The finale includes a spectacular airborne rescue in which Iron Man saves 13 officials who've been jettisoned from a plane. Good stuff, but the main enticements of this third installment arrive in the form of tasty side dishes.

Ben Kingsley plays a terrorist called The Mandarin, a villain who evokes scary echoes of Osama bin Laden. Rebecca Hall, not the first actress who springs to mind when you think about franchise movies, makes a nice addition as one of Tony Stark's former girlfriends. And Iron Man finds a bit of temporary companionship in an eight-year-old kid (Ty Simpkins), who joins him for mid-picture plot duties.

Guy Pearce signs on as Aldrich Killian, an evil entrepreneur who mutates into a scorching, fiendish Iron Man foe. Pearce seems to be having as good a time as can be had with a sadistic -- if slightly off-the-rack -- villain.

One thing's sure: After this installment, Iron Man's going to need a new home. Early on, he's blasted out of his cliff-hugging Malibu home. This can't sit well with Paltrow's Pepper Potts, the woman who shares Iron Man's residence. Perhaps she's consoled by being Iron Man's main squeeze, although Paltrow's straight-shooting Potts seldom proves as interesting as Hall's morally ambiguous Maya Hansen.

Iron Man 3 is one of those critic-proof movies that has enough successful bits and pieces to keep general audiences and fanboys reasonably well-satisfied.

For me, the movie proved enjoyable in the same way that fireworks are fun. Moments of waiting are punctuated by vivid bursts of action and color that vanish into the night sky leaving only wisps of smoke to grasp at as we await the arrival of the next blockbuster. Iron Man 3 makes plenty of noise, but its pleasures are spectacularly insubstantial.

Strange bedfellows: tyranny and humor

Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator isn't as transgressive as his best comedy, but it's not laugh free, either.

Sacha Baron Cohen has a genius for turning inappropriate remarks and vulgar behavior into transgressive social critiques. Daring as he is dirty, Cohen first came to the attention of American audiences with Da Ali G Show, which aired on HBO. Cohen pushed Ali G -- an outlandish British hip hop journalist -- into the real world, where he conducted interviews that often left his prey foaming with outrage or shaking their heads in disbelief. Ali G was, if you can stand the contradiction, brilliantly ignorant.

Baron Cohen transferred these skills to the big screen with 2006 with Borat (inspired), a comedy that he followed with 2009’s less successful Bruno. Now comes The Dictator, a film that begins with a dedication to the late Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, a brazen bit of humor that sets the tone for a comedy that includes most of the Baron Cohen trademarks: blatantly stated bigotry, exceptional vulgarity and broadly aimed satire.

In The Dictator, the combination produces enough laughs to keep Baron Cohen fans happy, although the movie seldom seems as daring or dangerous as Baron Cohen’s bizarre mockumentaries, which brought him into contact with non-actors who weren’t in on the joke.

This time out, Baron Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, the cruel dictator of the fictional Middle Eastern country of Wadiya. Early on, Aladeen travels to New York City to address the United Nations. There, another Wadiyan leader (Ben Kingsley) leads an assassination attempt involving one of Aladeen’s many hapless doubles.

Not that plot matters. The point is to put this arrogant, self-absorbed tyrant into the middle of Manhattan, where -- shorn of his beard -- he can be the proverbial fish out of dictatorial waters.

Left to his own devices, Aladeen lands a job at the Free Earth Collective, an organic Brooklyn food store run by a feminist activist (Anna Farris). He also reunites with a Wadiyan nuclear scientist (Jason Mantzoukas) who escaped one of Aladeen's many execution orders, handed out by the capricious dictator as casually as others distribute business cards.

Among his many New York-based educational experiences, Aladeen learns to masturbate, an activity that gives director Larry Charles, who directed the two previous Baron Cohen movies, an opportunity to go gross -- not his first nor his last in a picture that probably contains a few too many such moments.

Oddly, the movie’s most trenchant bit of comedy comes in a speech Aladeen delivers at the end. Its target: Not the dictatorial abuses of the Sadaam Husseins and Muammar Gaddafis of the world, but conditions closer to home.

Did I think The Dictator was a great movie? No. Did I laugh enough to recommend it to Baron Cohen fans, as well as to those who arrive at the theater adequately forewarned? Yes.

A final thought: At February’s Oscar ceremonies, Baron Cohen walked the red carpet dressed as Aladeen, complete with fake beard. He proceeded to spill the ashy contents of an urn he was carrying on E! red carpet host Bryan Seacrest’s tuxedo. The ashes, said Aladeen, belonged to the late Kim Jong-il.

It was a great “oops” moment that fit Baron Cohen’s humor perfectly, soiling the usual red carpet orgy of praise and fatuous banter, and setting a standard of impropriety that The Dictator can’t quite match.

'Hugo," a dreamy triumph for Scorsese

Director Martin Scorsese makes a kids' film (sort of) -- and in 3D no less.

If you don't believe life is strange, consider this: Martin Scorsese, master of Mean Streets, Goodfellas and Raging Bull, has made a kids' movie - and not just any kids' movie, but a beautiful helping of 3-D that might make Steven Spielberg jealous.

Sure that seems out of character for Scorsese, but as you dig deeper into Hugo, Scorsese's elegant adaptation of The Invention of Hugo Cabret - a 2007 children's book by Brian Selznik - it becomes increasingly apparent why Scorsese chose to become involved.

In addition to being a first-rate director, Scorsese is also one of the most knowledgeable film lovers in the world, and Hugo brings him back to the time when movies had naïve innocence, and no one was quite sure whether moving images were more than a passing fad.

We're talking about the time, say, of the Lumiere brothers, a wonderful moment when audiences could be startled and thrilled by the simple sight of a train arriving at a station.

Don't be put off. Hugo is not an arcane helping of cinema history designed to impress buffs. It's a film in which a jaw-dropping mastery of craft is matched by a celebratory spirit about what movies can do.

The story revolves around Hugo (Asa Butterfield), an orphaned boy who lives in the walls of a train station in Paris where he has taken it upon himself to wind the station's clocks. Hugo also has a talent for fixing things, and he sustains himself by stealing bits of food and outwitting the station's police inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen).

Hugo has one remaining link to the father (Jude Law) he lost in a fire at the museum where Dad worked: an automaton, a wind-up creation with a passive face, clockwork innards and a skeletal frame.

Hugo hopes to activate the automaton, an aspiration that brings him into contact with a variety of characters: Georges (Ben Kingsley), the sour-faced owner of the station's toy booth; Georges' wife Jeanne (Helen McCrory); and their adopted daughter Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz).

The performances range from good to excellent, but the real star of Scorsese's movie may be the movie itself.

I don't think I've seen a film that has made much better use of 3-D than Hugo. Every shot seems to have been composed to maximize the capabilities of 3-D cameras. Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson move those cameras through the station's labyrinth of cogs, gears and wheels, through its bustling waiting room and through the streets of Paris in the 1930s.

The station itself is a triumph of production design, an urban hub that flirts with nostalgia without entirely succumbing to it.

All of this (and more) make Hugo a bona fide technical triumph. And that may be part of the point Scorsese and screenwriter John Logan are making. They're not interested in gadgetry for its own sake; they're interested in the equipment that helps make dreams real.

That brings us back to where I started: The love of cinema.

It turns out that Kingsley's Georges is none other than Georges Milies, a famous early filmmaker whose 1902 film, A Trip to the Moon, featured an iconic shot of a rocket landing directly in the eye of the Man in the Moon. By the time, Hugo begins, Milies has grown old, and his work mostly has been forgotten. Thanks to a late-picture development, a film historian (Michael Stuhlbarg) helps reconnect Milies with a part of himself he thought he'd lost.

It's possible that Hugo, which makes skillful use of film footage from Milies, Harold Lloyd and others, will prove more of a delight to adults than to children. But I'd take kids to see it because they'll be watching a story that has been beautifully assembled, because the kids at its center are smart, brave and sincere, because Hugo might teach them something about a cultural inheritance they didn't know they had, and because the movie doesn't debase itself by pandering to what it thinks kids might want to see.

Those familiar with Scorsese's passions will understand and appreciate the fact that Hugo also becomes a bit of a commercial for film preservation, one of Scorsese's prime concerns. He does this not by shortchanging the story of a lonely boy who's captivated by movies, but by enhancing it.

To his credit, Scorsese makes it clear that restoring old films is about more than finding bits and pieces of bygone footage in unlikely places; it's about the restoration of lost dreams.