Robert Zemeckis’ 3-D animated Disney's A Christmas Carol is clearly a labor of love and, like so many labors of love, it feels slightly ill-advised.
Yes, the motion-capture animation is gorgeous—saturated, detailed, almost hyper real. But Zemeckis seems strangely intent on showing us just how real it can be.

In one of the opening scenes, an undertaker’s apprentice is shown with a bulbous pimple on his chin. Later, the ghost of Marley spits some sort of otherworldly sputum at Scrooge. The Ghost of Christmas Present is a half-malevolent, half-jolly red head with a big beard and—ew!—a hairy red chest (he looks, disconcertingly, like the Burger King).

No one can argue with the depiction of Scrooge himself: Sunken-chested, hook-nosed, hunched, and thoroughly miserable, he seems, at first, to be a man completely devoid of spirit. But during the course of his night visitations, this character comes to life—he’s infused with dread, then sadness, then empathy, until he actually experiences a rush of unadulterated joy. The...

After seeing Amelia, you can only assume one of two things: That Amelia Earhart herself was an insipid, uninspiring woman or that filmmaker Mira Nair just blew it.

I think we can all draw the same conclusion.

How did this film go so far afoul? You have a talented director (I loved Nair’s The Namesake), a perfectly cast Hilary Swank as Earhart, and the kind of subject matter that seems destined to land on critic’s Top 10 lists.

But Nair made the classic mistake. She was so concerned with mimesis—yes, Swank looks like Earhart, the aviator-chic clothing is spiffy, and the planes look sufficiently rickety—that she didn’t bother with story. You can’t just present us with the details of Earhart’s life. You have to show us what drove her, what gave her lift off.

Instead, Earhart is depicted as an earnest, cheery lady who simply wants to fly. She wants to be free, she says over and over again. She wants to soar like a bird, roam like the buffalo. Oh, how I wish I was making this up.

“It was a night of stars. Of tropical loveliness,”...

It just makes sense that Spike Jonze, whose imagination is seemingly limitless and who always manages to bring a sense of off-kilter joy to his films, would be the perfect director to adapt Maurice Sendak’s beloved children's book, Where the Wild Things Are.

In the opening scenes, we meet Max (iconically adorable Max Records), a little boy who wears a wolf suit and runs around his house like a “wild thing.” In Sendak’s book, it’s not completely clear why Max is being naughty—he’s just being a kid—but in this film's bold reimagining, Max’s father has died, his older sister ignores him, and his stressed-out mother (Catherine Keener) has started dating a new guy (Mark Ruffalo). Max has all these feelings—anger, loneliness, uncertainty—and, of course, the boundless physical energy of an 8-year-old.

Jonze uses a hand-held camera, always from Max’s perspective, as Max flies through the house, builds a fort in the snow, starts a snowball fight—pow! When he is lying under a desk while his mom tries to work, we see his mother’s legs, plus the legs of the...

I think we can all agree that Drew Barrymore is one of the most lovable human beings on the planet. Not only is she totally BFF-approved, but she’s overcome a well-documented childhood-from-hell to become a major Hollywood player, both as actress and producer—all without losing her giddy flower girl charm.

I think the thing I like most about Whip It!, Barrymore’s directorial debut, is that it manages to capture so much of Drew herself. It’s spunky, it’s spirited, it has an undeniable indie cool—and it cheerfully celebrates female sisterhood and girl power.

Ellen Page—wisely choosing her first starring vehicle since her breakout role in Juno—plays Bliss Cavendar, a misfit from the small town of Bodeen, TX, who longs to escape the world of barbecue, beauty queens, and football. When she goes on a shopping trip to Austin with her hovering mom (Marcia Gay Harden), she sees a couple of loud, fierce, and sexy girls on roller skates—they’re roller derby players. These girls are not demure like her mother’s beloved pageant queens—they are defiantly badly...