In an admission that will come as a considerable disappointment to a former coworker (who, for the record, is decidedly not Goth), my initial memories of “The Nightmare Before Christmas” were somewhat fuzzy. My first viewing of producer Tim Burton and director Henry Selick’s stop-motion animated film, not too long after its original home video release, was marred with, umm, distractions. So I hadn’t the concrete impressions one might have with a more focused viewing — just an impression of the hand-crafted feel, and a lingering sense of disappointment in relation to the movie’s songs, from Danny Elfman. A re-visiting of the somewhat seminal work — which scored a visual effects…

“Thor,” an almost $450 million worldwide box office hit earlier this year, introduced audiences to one of the players in Marvel Studios’ grand, forthcoming ”Avengers” saga. And that’s part of the problem, honestly. However admirably ambitious the creation of a unified superhero universe spanning multiple movies, certain entries, like this one, play like little more than origin story pattycake – wan set-up for something of later, actual consequence. On the verge of ascending to the throne of Asgard, headstrong Norse God Thor (Chris Hemsworth) flips out over some nasty ice giant interlopers who are vanquished in fairly short order, and decides to seek revenge, against the counsel of his father Odin (Anthony Hopkins),…

Too many romantic comedies witlessly hone in on the differences between men and women to create a heightened-stakes backdrop in which every interaction with the opposite sex is imbued with some sort of grand, gender-statement significance, which is of course then supposed to be neatly resolved and tidily put away by the time a paired-off happy ending rolls around. Co-written by Annie Mumolo and “Saturday Night Live”‘s Kristen Wiig, “Bridesmaids” instead focuses a considerable amount of its energy on female friendships, yes, but also the things women want in relationships — love, security, availability — that are the same as men. The result is the best female-fronted Hollywood comedy in years, and a…

Directed by “Ice Age”‘s Carlos Saldanha, animated family film “Rio” centers on a rare, domesticated macaw, Blu (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg, who must have beaten out a crestfallen Simon LeBon), who lives an easy life in Minnesota. Believing he’s the last of his kind, Blu has never spread his wings and learned to fly — both figuratively and literally. When he learns of a female counterpart in Rio de Janeiro, Jewel (voiced by Anne Hathaway), however, Blu sets off a wild adventure and makes some new friends along the way. The supporting vocal performance (from George Lopez, Tracy Morgan and Jamie Foxx, among others) are energetic and peppy, but not always…

Back when he was busy being a figment of Russell Crowe’s imagination in “A Beautiful Mind,” no one likely would have much expected Paul Bettany to be an ass-kicking action hero. Of course, folks would have said the same thing about Liam Neeson too, and look how that turned out. While wrestlers-turned-actors like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and other muscle-bound he-men in the vein of Jason Momoa still fit the mold for a certain breed of action flick, there are other movies that don’t require the correlative “Men’s Fitness” magazine cover, per se, and in the slick streamlined “Priest” — a sort of vampiric re-telling of the classic Western “The…

Walt Disney Pictures rolled the dice with producer Robert Zemeckis’ “Mars Needs Moms”, which was trotted out in 3-D to great fanfare earlier this year, and took a critical and commercial beating, to the tune of a meager $39 million worldwide gross. The film — produced by the same team behind “A Christmas Carol” and “The Polar Express” — isn’t quite as much of a stinker as that dismissal might indicate, but neither is it a wonderful romp or, as Boxoffice Magazine’s Pete Hammond claims on the cover, “the perfect family film in every way.” The storyline — in which nine-year-old Earthling Milo (Seth Green, but also voiced by another,…

Science-fiction is often so terribly difficult to get right on screen because its makers get bogged down in minutiae, trying to craft expansive, futuristic and/or alien worlds, or over-explain the processes that differentiate and separate their plane of reality from that of the present day. “Source Code “, thankfully, is not one of those movies. It grooves, it pulses, it entertains — deftly balancing smarts with a streamlined aim to please. The sophomore effort of director Duncan Jones ( “Moon “), the high-concept techno-thriller is kind of amusingly impatient with some of the nitty-gritty specifics of its own conceit (“Every second explaining things puts more lives at risk!” one character…

The crushing ambivalence of young adulthood is often lost under the thick glaze of hormonal revelry typically applied to teenage and twentysomething coming-of-age tales. But “Take Me Home Tonight” — an in many respects pedestrian comedy that otherwise coasts along on its energy and the winning appeal of its cast — gets this crucial detail of feeling right, which helps mitigate direction that often lacks a sense of snappishness, and a second and third act that don’t emotionally resonate as much as they could or should. The film, co-written by director Michael Dowse, from a story co-conceived by star Topher Grace, unfolds in 1988 and centers on a recent MIT…

Millennium Entertainment’s action film “Blitz” starring Jason Statham, Paddy Considine and Aidan Gillen is about to be available on DVD and Blu-Ray. “Blitz” is based on a novel by Ken Bruen and adapted by Nathan Parker and directed by Elliot Lester. In the film, Statham acts as a hard-nosed cop who is on the hunt for a serial killer: Tough, uncompromising and totally un-PC cop Brant (Statham) joins forces with Officer DC Porter Nash (Considine) to hunt down a serial killer (Gillen) who has been targeting police officers. This fast-paced action-thriller is a raw, gritty tale of moral ambiguity, outsiders and the sacrifices the police make to keep crime off…

Julian Schnabel’s background as a painter and artist lends his films an undeniable quality lacking in not only many Hollywood studio films but most modern films in general — the ability to summon emotional connection through a sort of dreamlike, non-pandering visual subjectivity. He puts that same evocative stamp on his latest film, Miral, a look at the generations-old Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but it isn’t enough to save what is an inert, self-important script. Based on the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Rula Jebreal, Miral opens in 1948, with Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbas) coming across and rescuing more than four dozen orphaned kids in East Jerusalem. In the midst of…