A boy and a wolf develop a strong bond

Alpha does a decent job as a prehistoric adventure with an emotional core.

Alpha tells the story of a boy and his dog . . . er ...I mean a boy and his wolf . . . er ... make that a wolf that’s morphing into a dog.

Set in Europe 20,000 years ago, Alpha introduces us to a small tribe of hunters struggling to survive at the end of the Ice Age. The tribe has a leg up on other movie residents of pre-history: These tribesmen already know how to start fires. They wear clothing made from animal hides. They speak a language that seems reasonably well developed. (Promotional material for the movie says the language was created for Alpha.)

Food remains a problem. Each year, the men of the tribe set out on a hunt for steppe bison, beasts that will help them make it through the brutally cold winters.

The hunt also provides a testing ground for the tribe's young men. Do they measure up? Will they prove themselves able to close the deal when it came to killing for food?

Directed by Albert Hughes, who with his brother made the great 1990s film, Menace II Society, Alpha focuses on young Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a young man who must make the transition from boyhood to manhood. Keda’s mother (Natassia Malthe) worries that the Keda has more heart than killer instinct, but his father (Johannes Haukur Johanneson) pushes the boy, offering him some Darwinian advice: Life is for the strong. Dad wants Keda to emerge as a leader.

Full of raw imagery and gripping action, Alpha includes a heart-pounding scene in which the men of the tribe close in on a herd of bison. In the ensuing stampede, Keda is thrown off a cliff and left for dead on a ledge from which there appears to be no escape.

I won't say more, but Keda manages to revive himself and then tries to return home. The adventurer’s journey gives Alpha a tried-and-true storyline. The hero must battle long odds to return to the place where the story began.

Along the way, Keda develops a relationship with a wolf, a wounded animal that slowly makes the transition from foe to friend. Keda names the wolf “Alpha.” Alpha learns to help Keda hunt and also provides the boy with companionship. The young man and wolf develop mutually beneficial dependencies.

Ample use of CGI helps Hughes deliver the adventure goods in a movie that doesn’t skimp on sights that might put you off your popcorn, eating maggots, for example.

Quibbles? Many. The men look a bit too clean for their historical moment and their use of language seems overly advanced. Early on, Keda’s mom talks about how much she loves her son. I couldn't help but wonder what the word "love" might mean in the Ice Age anyway?

Young Keda also complains about the odor of some of the characters, something you'd think he'd have gotten used to in this pre-deodorized age.

For all that, Hughes works to create a convincing natural environment, creating a feeling for a time when darkness really was dark and the sky brimmed with twinkling stars. He captures some of the mystery of an encounter with nature that has been lost to progress.

I wouldn’t call Alpha a classic and I can’t keep myself from sometimes chuckling at prehistoric dramas featuring men who have been groomed to look as if they’ve never seen a mirror without totally persuading us that these same men haven’t just arrived fresh from a make-up trailer.

Still, Alpha succeeds in blending a simple and affecting story with lots of action. It's a reasonable exercise of imagination -- if not an entirely convincing one -- about the time when our enduring bonds with dogs began.

Man vs. ape: Can there be a winner?

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes makes for a smart, involving sequel.

The screenplay for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is smart enough to make you wonder whether the movie's intelligent apes didn't have a hand in writing it. This sequel maintains the overall arc of the revitalized series, pitting man (or at least some men) against ape (or at least some apes).

But if we take the apes as metaphors for the natural environment, the one which we tend to intrude upon and despoil, the movie becomes deeper, more resonant.

Director Matt Reeves not only peppers his screenplay with ideas, he tells a story that can be enjoyed on the most rudimentary of levels.

So where exactly are we in the evolutionary saga of the human and ape populations? We're in the near future just after a terrible Simian Virus has wiped out a substantial part of humanity.

A group of survivors -- perhaps numbering in the hundreds -- has assembled in a ruined quarter of a devastated San Francisco.

The apes, who have attained various levels of intelligence and some of whom have developed the ability to speak, live in the Muir Woods, where they've constructed an elaborate wooden village and are in the process of developing an ethos: Apes don't kill apes.

The apes do, however, kill deer: They hunt for food with spears and evidently are carnivorous. They also have family structures and a form of governance.

The apes are led by Caesar (Andy Serkis), a leader devoted the ape population. Caesar has strength, but also a reflective sense of sadness about where the world has been and where it seems to be headed.

The potential for additional trouble arises when the San Francisco humans launch an expedition into the Muir Woods. They hope to reactivate a power plant that's badly needed to maintain the city's supply of electricity and to keep matters from returning to total barbarity.

The mission includes a trio that has formed an impromptu family in the wake of the virus that has taken away husbands, wives and children. There's Malcolm (Jason Clarke), his girlfriend (Keri Russell) and Malcolm's son (Kodi Smit-McPhee).

The apes reluctantly agree to allow the mission to proceed, but Koba (Toby Kebbell) objects. It's understandable, maybe even justifiable: Koba -- a victim of cruel human experiments in the last movie -- has no reason to trust mankind.

Eventually, Koba sets himself up in opposition to Caesar, and we know that an eventual battle looms. The clash between Koba and Caesar allows Reeves & company to serve up some strong action while also examining the role of guns in building a civilization, as well as what happens when a society is fractured by two opposing narratives.

That conflict, of course, inevitably pits Koba and his marching minions against Dreyfus (Gary Oldman), a human who takes responsibility for wiping out the apes and protecting humanity.

Reeves (Cloverfield and Let Me In) handles the action, effects and story with great aplomb, developing a sense of mystery and awe from the outset -- with help from Michael Giacchino's powerful score.

The San Francisco-based battle sequences don't disappoint: They're even coherent.

To its credit, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which follows 2011's Rise of Planet of the Apes, doesn't entirely resolve the conflict between all its warring impulses. The movie does what few blockbusters would dare: It leaves us with a lingering, sorrowful feeling about the possibility of resolution.

A remake that sticks close to the original

Moretz and Smit-McPhee locked together.

We’ve seen so many vampire movies lately that these blood-sucking creatures of the night have come to seem like neighbors, a bit more remote perhaps but also distressingly familiar. It’s worth remembering, then,that the Swedish movie, Let the Right One In (2008), was one of the strangest,most original and emotionally resonant of all the vampire movies to hit the screen within the last several years.

Built around the torments of a lonely boy living in the chill of what seemed an endless winter, Let the Right One In echoed with the sadness of something that felt like eternal soullessness. The 12-year-old boy at the movie’s center was caught in a trap that never allowed the kind of triumphant release we’ve come to expect from horror movies.

Now comes the inevitable American remake, and the surprise, I suppose, is that Let Me In (a slightly altered title) doesn’t betray everything about its bleak predecessor. A little more vivid, a little more graphic and significantly less ambiguous than the Swedish original, Let Me In nonetheless follows a course that’s steeped in horror – not only the shock of bloody attacks – but also of being caught in an unbreakable cycle of deterioration and woe.

Kodi Smit-McPhee's Owen lives with his single mom (Cara Bouno) in a nondescript apartment complex in what seems to be a small town in the middle of nowhere, the kind of remote place where the cold invades bones.

One evening, a man (Richard Jenkins) and his daughter (Chloe Moretz) move into one of the apartments. Director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) quickly establishes that there’s something different about 12-year-old Abby. Abby doesn’t wear shoes, even in the cold. She doesn’t attend school. She seems tougher (and smarter) than most 12-year-old girls. And maybe the man who accompanies her isn’t her father.

Reeves mostly follows the lead of the original in a story that deals with the way Owen is bullied at school. His mom – intentionally photographed in ways that never allow her to emerge as a full presence -- doesn’t understand her son’s loneliness. His father isn’t around. He’s one of those kids left to cope with difficult situations without adult help.

Reeves slowly develops the relationship between Owen and Abby, and for those who haven’t seen the Swedish original, the movie may seem a revelation, the antithesis of the garish shock machines that typify most American horror, as well as a kind of commentary on alliances formed at a time when one is too young to make significant decisions.

It’s no surprise that Jenkins gives a fine performance. Same goes for Elias Koteas, who plays a cop. But the movie couldn’t possibly work if its two young actors weren’t up to the task. Smit-McPhee, who played the boy in the unrelentingly grim big-screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, has a wounded quality that’s perfect for the movie, and Moretz, last seen as a profanity-spewing dynamo in Kick-Ass, projects just the right amount of eerie resolve.

If there must be remakes of foreign movies, Let Me In probably qualifies as a model for how it should be done. The movie may be have moved from Sweden to the U.S., but in a way location hardly matters. The story really takes place in the land of loneliness and in the bruised areas of the human heart.