ROMANTIC COMEDY
Enchanted is, in a word, enchanting. It's a clever, high-spirited romp spoofing fairy tales and the animated, musical versions of them that have been around since 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
The movie's droll big idea is to have its beauteous heroine, Giselle (Adams), banished from the cartoon world to contemporary Manhattan by a wicked queen (Sarandon, right, who's a hoot). In the big city, a now flesh-and-blood Giselle continues to behave as if life were a fairy tale, summoning New York City's version of woodland creatures (rats, pigeons and cockroaches) to help her tidy up the flat of a bemused single dad (Dempsey) who's aiding her.
Adams is a bubbly delight; Dempsey is solid as her urban cavalier; and James Marsden is amusingly dashing as a cartoon prince who follows her to N.Y.C. The film runs out of inspiration near the end, opting for showy special effects with a battle with a dragon, but Enchanted's spell is strong enough to survive. Take the kids to this—everyone will have a swell time.
Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden, Andre Braugher| R |
HORROR
You don't need a weatherman to know which way Stephen King is heading when he forecasts fog. In The Mist, an overwrought but cheesily enjoyable horror film, a Maine town is enveloped by a mysterious haze, bringing terror and death and maybe something non-human with it. Based on a novella by King and directed by Frank Darabont (The Green Mile), Mist follows the fortunes of a band of survivors trapped in a grocery store after the murderous pea soup descends. The movie offers some toe-curling scares, and Harden is a kick as a religious zealot who decrees the excess humidity is God's wrath made manifest, but all the Twilight Zone doomsday nonsense feels painfully stretched out at just over two hours.
Keri Russell, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Freddie Highmore, Robin Williams, Terrence Howard PG |
DRAMA
Plots don't come sudsier than this one: A gorgeous young cellist (Russell) spends a single night of bliss on a Manhattan rooftop with a soulful rocker (Meyers) before being hustled quickly out of town by her controlling father. She's pregnant but loses the baby after an accident—or so she thinks. Actually, Dad sent the infant away. Now the child (Highmore, of Finding Neverland), age 11 and musically gifted, lives in a boys' home but longs to reunite with his parents, who he just knows are out there. Fittingly, music eventually brings these three unhappy souls together in a gloriously sappy, drenched-in-strings harmonic convergence.
Russell glows radiantly through her tears, Meyers longs fervidly, and Highmore is adorably hopeful. All told, Rush is an exceedingly peculiar movie. Although the film is hugely melodramatic (Williams plays a Fagin-like character who makes money by turning kids, including Highmore, into street musicians), its characters yearn with such conviction that by the end you can't help but root for them to find happiness. But bring a hankie.
• The Oscar winner, 48, is one spooky religious nut in her new horror movie.
YOU FILMED IN A SUPERMARKET. HUNGRY MUCH? Did we steal the props? Of course we did! We took a candy bar or two.
WHAT DID YOU DO BETWEEN DEATH SCENES? The minute they called cut, [co-star] Toby Jones and I fled to play the Scrabble game we had set up.
DID YOUR 3-YEAR-OLD TWINS HUDSON AND JULITTA DEE VISIT? Yes. They're really good on-set! They told director Frank Darabont to be quiet. They said, "Shh! You have to whisper."
• Six months after having son River, the August Rush star, 31, talked Parenting 101 to PEOPLE's Lesley Messer.
1 I thought before that you have a baby and you would instantly be like, "I'm a mom!" But I still feel like a kid. I didn't anticipate that. I have this [baby] I love very much, but I'm the exact same!
2 You can't control things like you used to, and you have to roll with things better. I like to keep things very clean, but all that goes out the window.
3 You still have to see your friends, but the one thing that changes is you have to develop weird bedtime rituals to get the baby to sleep, so that kind of exes out the dinners with them. [My husband and I] sing, play guitar and do bath time.
4 He throws up, so you can't wear nice clothes. But none of that stuff matters as much anyway. There's something else that's so much more important.
5 You just become that much more [empathetic], and your heart is that much bigger. It's wild, but it happens!
Of the more than 30 movies based on King's books, Cujo, the 1983 film about a drooling killer dog, makes me squirm the most. Next is 1990's Misery, with Kathy Bates (below) as a fan gone psycho. Least scary: 2003's laughably lousy Dreamcatcher, with aliens bursting from people's backsides.
THIS CHRISTMAS The Whitfield clan—three brothers and three sisters—gathers for Christmas at Mom's house in this convivial comedy. They bicker and spill secrets, but since everybody loves each other, of course it's going to turn out all right. The holiday treat here is watching such gifted performers as Loretta Devine, Regina King and Sharon Leal (above, right, with Mekhi Phifer) strut their sassy stuff. Delroy Lindo, Idris Elba and singer Chris Brown lend able backup. (PG-13)
BEOWULF The ancient epic poem upon which this eye-popping, computer-animated action saga is based gets the comic-book treatment here: lots of battles, blood and guts and a curvy facsimile of Angelina Jolie. It's energetic, but no more. (PG-13)
HITMAN Timothy Olyphant (left) plays Agent 47, a chrome dome bred from birth to be a professional assassin in a stylishly shot but stupefyingly generic action thriller. The film is based on the popular video game of the same name, which may explain why Hitman's plot and dialogue seem to have been written by a computer programmed to simply replicate elements from a string of earlier action hits. The only mystery worth contemplating here is how, in between his constant killings, Agent 47 finds the time to keep shaving his shiny pate. (R)
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