Lightning McQueen, now facing the perils of being past his prime, returns in a touching sequel that gets the series back on track.

“Cars,” back in 2006, was the first Pixar movie that was far more beloved by audiences than critics. That meant something, since Pixar had long been a critical darling. The movie struck many reviewers as being less heady and artful, more insistently conventional, than the “Toy Story” films or “Finding Nemo.” And after it was followed up by the critically revered triple whammy of “Ratatouille,” “WALL-E,” and “Up,” “Cars” languished, in reputation, as a “lesser” Pixar movie. Yet it found a deep place in the hearts of kids (and in many adult kids too), and the critics, in my view, were always too down on its shiny and sentimental off-the-beaten-track-of-Americana appeal.

It was clear that the co-director of “Cars,” the founding Pixar guru John Lasseter, felt close to the film and even protective of it, so five years later, when he made “Cars 2,” you can sort of understand why he shot the works. The sequel, with its globe-trotting chases and Rube-Goldberg-on-STP narrative that wound up spinning, almost deliberately, out of control, was a true Pixar oddball: a piece of candy-colored virtuosity that sent cars flying off in every direction, to the point that you could scarcely keep track of them. It was one of the most visually astonishing films in the Pixar canon and, at the same time, one of the most impersonal. Lasseter had upped the ante on “Cars” by making a work of technological pop art that it was almost impossible to care about. The movie was a commercial success, yet it seemed to leave the legacy of Lightning McQueen lying in the dust of eye-tickling dazzle.

“Cars 3,” though, pointedly swings the pendulum back. Lasseter, with “Cars 2,” may have made the movie he wanted to make, but as Pixar’s chief creative officer, he surely registered the mixed reaction to it, and “Cars 3” feels like it has been conceived and directed, with scrupulous love and affection (and a bit of baseline corporate calculation), “for the fans.” It’s the first “Cars” film that Lasseter has handed off to one of his trainee/protégés  — Brian Fee, who has never directed a feature before. Fee honed his chops as a storyboard artist, working on “Ratatouille” and the two previous “Cars” films, and what he’s come up with is an exceedingly sweet and polished fable that unfolds with a kid-friendly, by-the-book emotional directness. The CGI animation has a detailed lush clarity highly reminiscent of “Ratatouille,” and the picture moves at such an amiable pace that even the drawling, dawdling pick-up-truck doofus Tow Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) doesn’t slow it down.

Lightning McQueen, voiced by Owen Wilson with his inimitable scratchy jocularity, is now past his prime — a celebrated stock-car racer who has been doing what he does for so long that he barely realizes the rest of the world has raced him by. The movie poignantly captures the paradox of the high-tech era: that you become ancient simply by staying the same. There is, of course, a new kid on the block, a wide-bodied jet-black sports-mobile named Jackson Storm (voiced with unctuous palsy bravado by Armie Hammer), who casually hits rates of over 200 miles per hour with the use of state-of-the-art numbers-crunching technology. Trying to cruise ahead of this next-generation speed demon, Lightning is all bluff confidence, but really, he doesn’t have a chance. He wipes out, in a spectacular sequence of flipping velocity and crushed metal, and the damage he does to his lollipop shell is the least of it. What he needs to recover is his spirit.

He winds up going on another off-ramp ambling odyssey, though this one is organized by his sponsor: Sterling (Nathan Fillion), who has set up a glassed-in training facility complete with treadmills, wind tunnels, and the mother of all VR racing simulators. He assigns Lightning to a trainer, Cruz Ramirez (Cristela Alonzo), who sees him as a fabulous relic (“I call you my senior project!”). But after Lightning has a disastrous session on the simulator, and Sterling reveals that he basically wants to cash in on Lightning’s name to sell Rust-eze mud flaps, it’s time for our hero to get back in touch with his racing roots.

He burns rubber on the beach, and he and Cruz pay a visit, incognito, to Thunder Hollow, a down-home mudslide of a track that turns out to be a demolition derby, ruled over by a drawling schoolbus with fire-spouting devil horns named Miss Fritter (Lea DeLaria). At this point, Lightning starts to seem like Pinocchio as a donkey-eared Lost Boy: He has fallen low, and the humiliation barely seems worth the price. (He doesn’t even win the demolition derby.) There’s only one figure, it seems, who can save him: his old mentor, Doc Hudson, even though Doc has passed on. So he seeks out Doc’s grizzled old repair truck, Smokey (Chris Cooper), who shows him that retired racers never die — they just hang around in bars talking about the glory days.

“Cars 3” is very much a tale of mentorship, of learning how to give up your ego in order to bolster someone else’s. As such, it’s touching in a pleasingly formulaic, pass-the-torch way. It turns out to be a girl-power movie: Cruz Ramirez is a trainer because she never believed in herself as a racer, and it’s up to Lightning to set her straight. Yet even as I was moved by the story, with its gender paradigm shift, that didn’t stop me from wishing that Cruz was a more idiosyncratic character; she should have been wilder and funnier, defined by something other than her self-doubt. And while it’s nice, on some level, to have Doc Hudson back (the presence of the late Paul Newman in the role seems based on a combination of vocal outtakes, which are dandy, and impersonations, which work less well), that dimension of the movie almost can’t help but play as an overly deliberate retread of the original “Cars.”

On the short list of movie sequels that are great (“The Godfather Part II” being the ne plus ultra), both the “Toy Story” sequels loom as brilliant follow-ups that audaciously extend the appeal of the original “Toy Story.” That’s the bar that Pixar set for itself. “Cars 3” is a friendly, rollicking movie made with warmth and dash, and to the extent that it taps our primal affection for this series, it more than gets the job done. Yet in many ways it’s the tasteful version of a straight-to-DVD (or streaming) sequel. Audiences should come out satisfied, and in satisfying numbers, but the upshot is that this year’s Pixar film is a finely executed product rather than an inspiring work of animated artistry.“Cars,” back in 2006, was the first Pixar movie that was far more beloved by audiences than critics. That meant something, since Pixar had long been a critical darling. The movie struck many reviewers as being less heady and artful, more insistently conventional, than the “Toy Story” films or “Finding Nemo.” And after it was followed up by the critically revered triple whammy of “Ratatouille,” “WALL-E,” and “Up,” “Cars” languished, in reputation, as a “lesser” Pixar movie. Yet it found a deep place in the hearts of kids (and in many adult kids too), and the critics, in my view, were always too down on its shiny and sentimental off-the-beaten-track-of-Americana appeal.

It was clear that the co-director of “Cars,” the founding Pixar guru John Lasseter, felt close to the film and even protective of it, so five years later, when he made “Cars 2,” you can sort of understand why he shot the works. The sequel, with its globe-trotting chases and Rube-Goldberg-on-STP narrative that wound up spinning, almost deliberately, out of control, was a true Pixar oddball: a piece of candy-colored virtuosity that sent cars flying off in every direction, to the point that you could scarcely keep track of them. It was one of the most visually astonishing films in the Pixar canon and, at the same time, one of the most impersonal. Lasseter had upped the ante on “Cars” by making a work of technological pop art that it was almost impossible to care about. The movie was a commercial success, yet it seemed to leave the legacy of Lightning McQueen lying in the dust of eye-tickling dazzle.

“Cars 3,” though, pointedly swings the pendulum back. Lasseter, with “Cars 2,” may have made the movie he wanted to make, but as Pixar’s chief creative officer, he surely registered the mixed reaction to it, and “Cars 3” feels like it has been conceived and directed, with scrupulous love and affection (and a bit of baseline corporate calculation), “for the fans.” It’s the first “Cars” film that Lasseter has handed off to one of his trainee/protégés  — Brian Fee, who has never directed a feature before. Fee honed his chops as a storyboard artist, working on “Ratatouille” and the two previous “Cars” films, and what he’s come up with is an exceedingly sweet and polished fable that unfolds with a kid-friendly, by-the-book emotional directness. The CGI animation has a detailed lush clarity highly reminiscent of “Ratatouille,” and the picture moves at such an amiable pace that even the drawling, dawdling pick-up-truck doofus Tow Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) doesn’t slow it down.

Lightning McQueen, voiced by Owen Wilson with his inimitable scratchy jocularity, is now past his prime — a celebrated stock-car racer who has been doing what he does for so long that he barely realizes the rest of the world has raced him by. The movie poignantly captures the paradox of the high-tech era: that you become ancient simply by staying the same. There is, of course, a new kid on the block, a wide-bodied jet-black sports-mobile named Jackson Storm (voiced with unctuous palsy bravado by Armie Hammer), who casually hits rates of over 200 miles per hour with the use of state-of-the-art numbers-crunching technology. Trying to cruise ahead of this next-generation speed demon, Lightning is all bluff confidence, but really, he doesn’t have a chance. He wipes out, in a spectacular sequence of flipping velocity and crushed metal, and the damage he does to his lollipop shell is the least of it. What he needs to recover is his spirit.

He winds up going on another off-ramp ambling odyssey, though this one is organized by his sponsor: Sterling (Nathan Fillion), who has set up a glassed-in training facility complete with treadmills, wind tunnels, and the mother of all VR racing simulators. He assigns Lightning to a trainer, Cruz Ramirez (Cristela Alonzo), who sees him as a fabulous relic (“I call you my senior project!”). But after Lightning has a disastrous session on the simulator, and Sterling reveals that he basically wants to cash in on Lightning’s name to sell Rust-eze mud flaps, it’s time for our hero to get back in touch with his racing roots.

He burns rubber on the beach, and he and Cruz pay a visit, incognito, to Thunder Hollow, a down-home mudslide of a track that turns out to be a demolition derby, ruled over by a drawling schoolbus with fire-spouting devil horns named Miss Fritter (Lea DeLaria). At this point, Lightning starts to seem like Pinocchio as a donkey-eared Lost Boy: He has fallen low, and the humiliation barely seems worth the price. (He doesn’t even win the demolition derby.) There’s only one figure, it seems, who can save him: his old mentor, Doc Hudson, even though Doc has passed on. So he seeks out Doc’s grizzled old repair truck, Smokey (Chris Cooper), who shows him that retired racers never die — they just hang around in bars talking about the glory days.

“Cars 3” is very much a tale of mentorship, of learning how to give up your ego in order to bolster someone else’s. As such, it’s touching in a pleasingly formulaic, pass-the-torch way. It turns out to be a girl-power movie: Cruz Ramirez is a trainer because she never believed in herself as a racer, and it’s up to Lightning to set her straight. Yet even as I was moved by the story, with its gender paradigm shift, that didn’t stop me from wishing that Cruz was a more idiosyncratic character; she should have been wilder and funnier, defined by something other than her self-doubt. And while it’s nice, on some level, to have Doc Hudson back (the presence of the late Paul Newman in the role seems based on a combination of vocal outtakes, which are dandy, and impersonations, which work less well), that dimension of the movie almost can’t help but play as an overly deliberate retread of the original “Cars.”

On the short list of movie sequels that are great (“The Godfather Part II” being the ne plus ultra), both the “Toy Story” sequels loom as brilliant follow-ups that audaciously extend the appeal of the original “Toy Story.” That’s the bar that Pixar set for itself. “Cars 3” is a friendly, rollicking movie made with warmth and dash, and to the extent that it taps our primal affection for this series, it more than gets the job done. Yet in many ways it’s the tasteful version of a straight-to-DVD (or streaming) sequel. Audiences should come out satisfied, and in satisfying numbers, but the upshot is that this year’s Pixar film is a finely executed product rather than an inspiring work of animated artistry.

-Variety 

The fifth time may not quite be the charm, but the latest entry in Michael Bay's crunched-metal robot-war mega-series is badder, and therefore better. Sort of.

The “Transformers” films, as befitting a series spun out of a Hasbro monster-truck toy system designed to connect with the inner worldview of nine-year-olds, started off, in 2007, as exceedingly wholesome. What a difference a decade of baroquely semi-coherent robot-fury overkill makes! “Transformers: The Last Knight,” the fifth film in the hugely popular, critically reviled franchise (has there ever been a movie series that put the red state/blue state divide between audiences and reviewers like this one does?), is also the most extravagantly brutish and lurid. There’s still a PG-13 gee-whiz-ness to the proceedings, but the towering, swivel-socketed machine men now seem like they’ve been around the block a few times, complete with pit stops at the race track and dive bars.

 The Decepticons — the fey gangsta Mohawk, the goofy bikerish Nitro Zeus — look as if they might be auditioning for “Suicide Squad 2,” and their leader, Megatron, skulks around with the angriest possible attitude, his face marked by a blood-red splash. The good-guy Autobots come off nearly as wasted: Bumblebee is introduced by getting blasted to pieces, and even the stalwart superhero Optimus Prime has slipped over to the sinister side. He has made a deal with the alien sorceress Quintessa, who looks like a very expensive hanging necklace, to salvage the Autobots’ dessicated home planet, Cybertron, by sucking the life out of earth.

 There is, in addition, a medieval backstory that returns us to the days of King Arthur, but even this potentially stodgy premise is staged in a heavy-metal Stonehenge-meets-bloodshed way that puts the dark back in Dark Ages. All of which makes “The Last Knight” the first “Transformers” movie that could actually be characterized as badass. Which isn’t a bad thing. It may, in fact, be better.

 So what does a better “Transformers” movie look like? There’s still a hurtling slovenliness to it — a sense that overly quick cuts and throwaway lines are taking the place of what, in another movie, would be calmly staged dramatic scenes. (Oh, those!) I can only speculate as to why Michael Bay, at a point long past which most producer/directors would have handed off the directorial reins of this series to someone else (hasn’t he — how can I put this? — said all that he has to say?), is still in there, directing this latest installment. It’s almost as if the series fulfills him: Instead of knuckling under to the system the way he had to do when he made such relatively austere works of artisanal craft as “Armageddon” and “Bad Boys,” here he can just let his destructo action-junkie freak flag fly.

 Yet part of what’s exhausting about the “Transformers” films is that hectic bland wholesomeness — the empty energy that can give you a seizure of antic tedium. “The Last Knight,” by contrast, has the somewhat sexier flavor of impending dystopia, and it’s actually, if this can be believed, even more over-the-top than the previous four films. For the first time, the messy hyperactive form and nihilistic crunched-metal content seem to reinforce each other.

 Mark Wahlberg has a knack for playing free-floating desolation that isn’t alienated enough to get in the way of his ripped-belly bravura. And though the previous “Transformers” film, “Age of Extinction” (the actor’s first), was so bad it was irredeemable, it’s now clear that he has the ability to ground these movies — to stand up to the metal — in a way that the softer, flakier Shia LaBeouf did not.

 Wahlberg’s character, the greasy-longish-haired Texas inventor Cade Yeager (sorry, but no matter how often you say it, that doesn’t sound like a name), is off the grid, running a sports-car junk yard where he looks after Autobots like Hound (voiced by John Goodman), a stogie-chomping brawler with Neptune’s beard. The rage of the Decepticons lures Cade out of his doldrums, and before long he’s thrown together with Viviane Wembley, an Oxford professor who is surely the first scholar in the university’s history to teach classes in strappy pumps that look like they were purchased during a Kardashian shopping spree.

 Viviane is played by Laura Haddock, a British actress whose greatest presence thus far has been as Peter Quill’s mother in the “Guardians of the Galaxy” films, but she’s a real find, with a puckish sensual vivacity, goldfish eyes that stare like laser beams, and an effortless ability to spar. Viviane gets drawn into the fray because she’s the last direct descendent of Merlin, and therefore the only one who can connect with the magical staff that’s buried in his coffin. (I know there are a number of screenwriters to blame, but really, who makes this stuff up?)

 Mystical medieval hokum aside, Haddock and Wahlberg generate the kind of hostile sexualized chemistry that is fast going out of style, and a movie like this one can use every ounce of it. The two bicker and pout through a plot that’s like “The Da Vinci Code” crossed with a “Terminator” sequel on Jolly Rancher candies, and they’re accompanied by Sir Anthony Hopkins, who plays Sir Edmund Burton, an elite astronomer who guides the events, but is really on hand as a kind of aging mascot of the happily unhinged. Hopkins helps to spank things along with his can-you-believe-this-is-what-it’s-come-to? reading of lines like “What a bitchin’ car she is!”

 The plot of “The Last Knight” turns on the apocalypse (and, therefore, the U.S. military), which lends the usual chaotic jumble of events a bit of organizing heft. In the epic climax of a picture like this one, the visuals tend to mean more than, you know, the meaning, and here the world-destroying energy on hand takes the form of a corrosive weapon that looks like gigantic floating shards of cardboard packing debris. It’s all pleasingly spectacular, and also rather empty — at least, until Optimus Prime returns to his true self, his words spoken by Peter Cullen in a voice of such deep rich square nobility that, coming after nearly two-and-a-half hours of hellbent robot-clanking decadence, he seems a cathartically old-fashioned figure. He reminds you that there are moments when this series is capable of making you think that you like it.

OK Jaanu movie review: Why do our young lovers sound so juvenile?

OK Jaanu movie director: Shaad Ali

OK Jaanu movie cast: Aditya Roy Kapur, Shraddha Kapoor, Leela Samson, Naseeruddin Shah, Kitu Gidwani

Ok Jaanu movie rating: 1.5 stars

The official remake of Mani Ratnam’s Ok Kanmani tries for everything that a winsome romance should have: good–looking young couple, perky dialogues, song-and-dance, picturesque locations.

Ratnam’s pass at young love in Mumbai was a hit, but wasn’t a great film, even though Dulquer Salman and Nithya Menen played really well together. Shaad Ali’s copy Ok Jaanu, with a screenplay by Ratnam, is faithful but pale and predictable, and doesn’t lift off the screen.

In the Hindi version, everything plays out the same way. Adi (Aditya Roy Kapoor) and Tara (Shraddha Kapoor) do the obligatory meet cute, and follow that up with a too-stretched prelude which sees them cosily shacked up in a leafy bungalow under the protective eye of an elderly couple.

In Ok Jaanu, we can see Shraddha has progressed on the acting scale, and looks pretty and fresh. Aditya Roy Kapoor has some nice bits too, but the whole enterprise is beset by a drabness, which is surprising because you can accuse Ratnam of anything but being drab.

And given that Shaad Ali did such a good job of the previous time he remade a Mani Ratnam film, it is even more surprising. I can see Saathiya and listen to its lilting songs any number of times (its Tamil original Alaipayuthey is mandatory viewing for anyone interested in mainstream romance).

The older couple, played by Prakash Raj and Leela Samson in Ok Kanmani, was the pivot around which the youngsters revolved, and learnt life lessons. The question that the immortal song asks — will you still need me, will you still feed me when I’m 64 — is answered. Of course it is. And Adi and Tara complete the arc we knew they were set for from frame one, in two long hours and some. Of course they do.

Leela Samson, who plays a character afflicted with a degenerative illness, reprises her part: she remains as gorgeous but less effective in Hindi. Naseerudin Shah aces it, though: he underplays beautifully, and speaks his lines as they ought to be spoken, with an ache in the voice.

-The Indian Express

It's gun-blazing, body-splattering business as usual for the fifth installment of the 'Underworld' series, in which fashionista Vampire Kate Beckinsale leads a war against the Lycans.

It’s always fun to see a classy, venerable British actor grunge it up by letting himself be cast in the role of a real black-leather badass. In last year’s “Green Room,” Patrick Stewart did reasonably well as the leader of a backwoods-biker white-supremacist cult (though he did kind of come off as the nicest hater you’d ever seen). Now, in “Underworld: Blood Wars,” the fifth installment of the vampires-kick-ass action horror series, Charles Dance, fresh from “Game of Thrones” and movies like “The Imitation Game,” shows up as a Vampire elder, and from the moment he strolls into the coven castle in his long black coat, looming over everyone with a look of extreme arrogance that says, “I am so bored by all of you that ripping your throats out would provide me with great relief,” he isn’t playing. Stewart, in “Green Room,” communicated that he was willing to kill people; Dance lets you know that he’d do it casually. This is what it looks like when a master actor updates British class snobbery to the debased imperatives of fantasy action cinema.

For half an hour or so, “Blood Wars” makes a token stab at actual theatrical drama in order to set up the ballistic body-splattering that is its real reason for being. At the Council of the Eastern Coven, the last stronghold of Vampire power in the war with the shape-shifting Lycans, who look like Ray Harryhausen creatures (and are now on the verge of winning the war), Dance’s Thomas shows up to help his fellow bloodsuckers mount a campaign to save their species. He knows there’s only one hope: They must summon Selene (Kate Beckinsale), the pure-blood heroine with the silver-grey alien eyes and the wet-look ’90s salon hair, to lead the rebellion.

Selene has been a pariah ever since she murdered Viktor, the Vampire Elder from “Underworld: Evolution” and “Underworld: Rise of the Lycans,” who was her mentor (though, of course, she had her reasons for offing him). Nevertheless, the leaders of the Eastern Coven are convinced to take her back so that she can train a new generation of recruits. The most interesting among them is the coven’s rising star, Semira, played by the terrific Lara Pulver, who masks her schemer’s evil in a twinkling moral elegance that wouldn’t be out of place in Jane Austen. Next to her and Dance and a few of their gnashing aristocrat Vampire colleagues, it’s no wonder that Selene, even after all that she has been through, comes off as something of an innocent.

Beckinsale, still twirling and kicking in the same vinyl S&M catsuit, has made this her franchise day job for 15 years now, and “Blood Wars,” directed with lugubrious competence by newcomer-to-the-series Anna Foerster, should satisfy fans of the “Underworld” movies just enough to live up to the previous films’ success (they have all generated in the range of $50-60 million domestic), and to guarantee that Beckinsale, if she so chooses, can ride out this saga some more. At this point she almost needs to, given that the story set up in “Blood Wars” hinges on her Vampire-Lycan-Immortal Hybrid daughter, Eve, the first of her kind (are you getting the symbolism?), who is only in the movie in flashback. The question is, who will play Eve in an upcoming sequel to be called something like “Underworld: Eve of Destruction” or “Underworld: Daughter of Death”? One can envision Anya Taylor-Joy from “The Witch,” if she hasn’t already moved on to bigger (or at least better) things.

Theo James, from the “Divergent” series, is on hand here, with his swarthy GQ impeccableness, as David, who becomes Selene’s partner. As soon as the two are forced to flee the coven, though, “Blood Wars” turns into a rote supernatural chase thriller that’s basically a countdown to the Vampire-meets-Lycan apocalypse. The two land at a coven of blond Vampires in long white frocks (who serve no real purpose apart from providing that heavenly peroxide look), where they gear up for battle. The reason the Lycans are doing so well in the fight is that they’re now led by Marius, who is some sort of enhanced Lycan. As played by Tobias Menzies, he seems kind of like a Hybrid too — of Benedict Cumberbatch and David Carradine. Really, though, there’s not much to this alleged uber-villain. The “Underworld” series is all about substituting endless prattling reams of backstory for what we would have referred to, in an earlier century, as “character development.”

In “Blood Wars,” the action slaughter is its own (numbing) reward, but there’s an element of kitsch built into the video-game mega-violence, since we’re supposed to be watching mystical creatures whose very existence defies death — yet to sate the audience demand for obliteration, they can be killed, seemingly at random, by such old-fashioned means as swords and machine guns. There’s a story, and a mythology, and a prestige actress who knows how to push moodiness to the point that, in this series, it’s just about her only mood, but none of it, in the end, gets in the way of the splatter.

-Variety 

A Bollywood girl-power drama about a father-coach turning his daughters into star wrestlers is too much of a formula thing.

Aamir Khan, the star of “Dangal,” is as formidable and celebrated a movie star as India has going. Two years ago, he played the lead character in “PK,” a sci-fi comedy about an alien who visits earth and points out everything wrong with it; the film went on to become the top-grossing movie in Bollywood history. Fifteen years ago, Khan starred in “Lagaan,” the transporting colonial cricket-match musical that was the last Indian film to be nominated for an Academy Award. In “Dangal” (the title means “Wrestling”), Khan has aged nicely. He keeps his short muscular body poised, and his cropped hair sets off jutting ears, plunging eyebrows, and a serene scowl that almost never leaves his face; he looks like a jock version of Salman Rushdie. Yet within that tight-lipped mask, he finds a hundred ways to communicate emotion.

That’s more than you can say for “Dangal,” a one-trick domestic sports drama that drags on for two hours and 40 minutes. “Lagaan,” which was close to four hours, earned every minute of its running time, but “Dangal” is just a thin inspirational tale stretched out well past the point that U.S. audiences will have much patience for it.

It’s based on the true story of Mahavir Singh Phogat, an amateur wrestler who lived for the proud dream of seeing his country take home athletic “gold.” (It sounds like he’s talking about the Olympics, but he means any international competition.) Due to a lack of government sports funding, Mahavir wasn’t able to go for the gold himself (he became an office worker). So he took his two eldest daughters, Geeta and Babita, and turned them into competitive wrestlers, cutting against the grain of what Indian society wanted and expected girls to be.

In “Dangal,” is Mahavir a domineering stage father, using his kids to live out his failed dreams? No doubt. That’s why he prays to have sons. But when God blesses him with daughters, he transfers his obsession with molding a champion right onto them; as a coach, he’s both a domineering egotist and a de facto feminist. If the movie has a theme, it’s that Mahavir is a patriarchal thinker forced, by circumstance, to move into the 21st century. He’s a lot like India itself.

That means, among other things, that he’s going to treat his daughters with no mercy. When they’re teenagers, he subjects them to a grueling training regimen (worst restriction: no spicy food), and the defining moment comes when he cuts off their hair. It’s a lot like a Marine cut; as the two see it, they’ve been shorn (tearfully) of their identities, which their father will now rebuild from the ground up. There is — or could have been — a resonance to all of this. But Nitesh Tiwari, the director of “Dangal,” works strictly on the surface. The movie isn’t a musical, but it’s got a lot of those tabla-meets-EDM Bollywood dance tracks, and when one of them is laid over a training montage, the effect is less Bollywood than cookie-cutter Hollywood. It’s the equivalent of watching an American movie with the same story starring Greg Kinnear as the dad/coach and Dove Cameron and Lizzy Greene as the daughters, only with the cliché training sequence set to “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now).” “Dangal” is that kind of movie.

When the girls get older, the film switches actresses (the two younger ones, Zaira Wasim and Suhani Bhatnagar, are big-eyed urchins who barely register), and Fatima Sana Shaikh, who takes over the role of Geeta, emerges as Khan’s co-star. She has a gentle, dimpled face, but with her hair cropped she resembles a competitively coiled Kate Winslet, and there’s something touching in her devotion. Geeta is so fierce, yet is so carrying out the will of her father (which becomes her will), that she’s a revolutionary and a bowing disciple at the same time. The movie is way too vague about the essential facts of female wrestling in India. In the first half, it implies that Geeta and her sister are breaking the mold — that they’re heading into boys’ terrain, to the point that they have no choice but to wrestle boys. By the time they land at the National Sports Academy, where the coach becomes a rival to Mahavir, they’re suddenly part of a whole team of young-women wrestlers. When did that happen? You think: Good for India, but it renders the film’s journey more conventional than it had implied.

“Dangal” culminates in a championship bout at the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, and Tiwari stages it well. Geeta has to face down an Australian wrestler with a raw-boned look to kill, and as much as any boxing drama, the movie makes you feel the human ferocity in both of them. To raise the stakes, Mahavir isn’t even there; a foe has literally locked him in an office. Geeta, to be true to her father’s dream, must do it on her own. There’s hardly a moment in “Dangal” that doesn’t go according to the numbers, but after 160 minutes’ worth of formula, the movie certainly hits a note of touching tribute to the way girl power is sweeping the world.

-Variety 

The beaming, long-haired cherub dolls get their own animated film, and it turns out to be a madly colorful and blissed-out ride.

There are certain animated films — like, say, “Inside Out” — that achieve rarefied levels of feeling, imagination, and head-boggling audacity. In their kid-friendly way, they aim high and sail over the bar of their own ambition. But in our desire to celebrate them, let us not overlook the unadulterated magic of a Day-Glo ride for tots like “Trolls.” On the surface (and what a surface! — it just about pops your eyes open with delight), the new feature from DreamWorks Animation, distributed by 20th Century Fox, may not be the kind of blatantly brainy and profound adult-movie-in-toon-drag we’re accustomed to seeing from Pixar. Yet the enchantment that “Trolls” achieves is all too real and, in its way, quite pure. Kids should adore it, but don’t let that scare you — the movie is every 3D psychedelic inch a fairy tale for adults. It’s another antic pop-culture whirligig, with some of the fast-moving prankishness of “The Lego Movie,” but it has a touching theme that dips into a major issue — namely, what’s the nature of happiness? “Trolls” is the right film to pose that question, because it’s an ecstatically happy movie, a giddy EDM kiddie musical that sends you out on a high.

A storybook prologue done in felt colorforms tells us that Trolls are “the happiest creatures the world had ever known.” That makes sense if you think back to your own childhood connection to the iconic Troll Dolls, created in 1959 (as the Good Luck Trolls) by the Danish toymaker Thomas Dam. They had androgynous cherub baby faces with big marble eyes and grins so wide it creased their cheeks, bellies that bulged with just a bit of prominent navel, and, of course, those electroshock billows of cotton-candy hair that seemed to shoot right out of their soft plastic heads. The hair, which came in different wild colors, was their most defining feature, yet what really made the Troll Doll special is that it seemed to be beaming, with an innocent mysterioso knowingness. It’s no accident that the dolls got big in the early ’60s: Away from their outfits, they looked like naked angels reborn as baby hippies. That made them, to a kid back then, the coolest toy in the universe.

“Trolls” was produced in cooperation with the Dam Family, but the movie makes no fetish of Troll Doll nostalgia. It’s very much a present-tense Troll movie, and though it’s always light and fun, there’s nothing quaint about its motivating conflict: The Trolls live like blissed-out Hobbits in the middle of a woods, but they also live in fear of their sworn enemy — the Bergens, a tribe of giant dyspeptic ogres who are miserably unhappy but don’t want to be, and the way they’ve devised to become happy is: to eat Trolls. They do it ritualistically, once a year, on the day they call Trollstice.

The hint of cannibalism — or, at the very least, high carnivorous content — helps to give “Trolls” an edge. So do the characterizations of the Bergens, who you might be tempted to call ugly, except that these are politically delicate times, so I’ll just say that they’re cosmetically challenged, with warts and double chins and ungainly physiques and buck teeth that hang out of their mouths in hideous uneven rows, like cracked and broken Chiclets. (In this case, it seems to be the film’s observation that physiognomy is — miserable — destiny.) The most devious Bergen is Chef (voiced by Christine Baranski), who looks like the Abominable Snowman from NBC’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” with an added touch of Carol Burnett. The Trolls have managed to keep themselves hidden from the Bergens for 20 years, but when they hold a raging party that throws off a great big beam of light, they give themselves away, and the Bergens go on a rampage, looking for Trolls to capture and chomp.

A word about that woodland Troll bash. It’s a genuine rave, an explosion of glitter and rainbow color and trippy beats, and it’s here that it becomes clear what an inspired decision the filmmakers made by hiring Justin Timberlake to be their executive music producer. The film’s disco pulse gives it a throb of ecstasy, and this does more than create a handful of kicky musical sequences. It lends resonance to what it really means to be a happy Troll — it lifts them out of the realm of the Smurfs or the heroes of a genial mediocrity like “Gnomes.” The Trolls may be cute-as-a-button and come in the assorted hues of a pack of designer cupcakes, but their party-animal grooviness is, in its way, infectiously adult, and that’s true from the moment the pink heroine, Poppy (Anna Kendrick), leads a running-and-jumping-and-hair-sprouting rendition of the Danish duo Junior Senior’s great 2002 track “Move Your Feet.” From that moment on, the audience has Troll Fever.

Timberlake is one of the film’s two lead actors as well, and he does a superb job of voicing the role of Branch, who’s a kind of Chicken Little/Debbie Downer among Trolls. He always thinks everything is going to turn out badly, and that attitude has made him — literally — gray, with dark hair and a slightly beetle-browed expression. But what might have been a one-joke character (the token unhappy Troll!) here becomes something more. Timberlake makes Branch an understated neurotic, who has good reason not to trust happiness (or even singing), and the film portrays his arc as a true journey. It’s an obvious variation on the one undertaken by Shrek in the first film of that franchise (also from DreamWorks), but this one carries its own wry sense of discovery, as in the terrifically funny scene where a character known as Cloud Guy — yes, he’s a walking cloud, who looks like a wad of cotton in gym socks — tries to get Branch to give him a simple high five. It’s not that intense a demand, but Branch has too much grouchy pride to do it. You want to get him some therapy.

The director, Mike Mitchell (whose credits range from “Shrek Forever” to “Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked” to “Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo”), with Walt Dohrn as his co-director, keeps the jokes — and the backgrounds — in constant flux, so that in the course of one musical number Poppy will fall through a chain of giant spider webs, only to balloon up moments later like Violet Beauregarde transforming into a giant blueberry in “Willy Wonka.” “Trolls” is ruled by the spirit of metamorphosis, most deliciously in the glorious geek romance of Prince Gristle (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), the young ruler of the Bergens, and his scullery maid, Bridget (Zooey Deschanel), who’s secretly in love with him. These two really are meant for each other, because they both look like the runt children of Paul Williams, but the romance doesn’t take until the Trolls give Bridget a makeover. She finds her new destiny as Lady Glitter Sparkles, even though the makeover consists of little more than weaving her a wig of synthetic rainbow hair. What a difference great tresses can make! That’s a lesson that no one understands better than Trolls.

The Trolls are happy, but the Bergens, in their depressive and unkempt brown-walled village, actually do want to be happy. What they don’t realize is that you can’t achieve happiness by stuffing your face with Trolls, or (by implication) with anything else. The feelings already have to be there — and, in fact, they are. That’s a lesson that Branch the faithless Troll needs to learn too, and when he does, to a rendition of Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors,” the use of that song — for once! — meshes so perfectly with the movie’s form and content that as a critic, I hereby defy you not to cry. (You’ll have to wait until Nov. 4, when “Trolls” opens.) The movie’s message, and it’s a lovely one, is that we all have a wild-haired, beaming doll of happiness inside. “Trolls” will put you in touch with yours.

Variety

In the increasingly cookie-cutter realm of Marvel comic-book movies, a little strange goes a long way.

Although Marvel Studios’ “Doctor Strange” offers very few insights into the childhood of its main character, applying what we know about bullying on American schoolyards, it’s safe to assume it wasn’t easy growing up with a name like Stephen Strange. Perhaps that explains the complex that has driven Strange (that rare superhero who keeps his name after acquiring his incredible new powers) to become such an arrogant New York neurosurgeon, flaunting his skills at work and his Lamborghini Huracán outside the office.

Cut from the same mold as playboys Tony Stark (Iron Man) and Bruce Wayne (Batman), Strange easily might have become world’s most insufferable superhero. But instead, it’s the very fact of this deeply insecure and wildly overcompensating character’s determination to prove himself — coupled with the setback by which texting while driving cripples his hands and very nearly derails him of that ambition — that makes “Doctor Strange” Marvel’s most satisfying entry since “Spider-Man 2,” and a throwback to M. Night Shyamalan’s soul-searching identity-crisis epic “Unbreakable,” which remains the gold standard for thinking people’s superhero movies.

Yes, this new project shares the same look, feel, and fancy corporate sheen as the rest of Marvel’s rapidly expanding Avengers portfolio, but it also boasts an underlying originality and freshness missing from the increasingly cookie-cutter comic-book realm of late. From this second-tier side character, the studio has created a thrilling existential dilemma in which its flawed hero’s personal search for purpose dovetails beautifully with forays into the occult New Age realm of magic and sorcery where Doctor Strange ultimately finds his calling.

While producer Kevin Feige deserves credit for bringing a master plan to Marvel’s big-screen slate, recruiting A-list talent on both sides of the camera and holding them to aesthetic standards that unify the various projects, those parameters are starting to feel every bit as restrictive as real-world physics can be to less-than-super movies. Like the original pulp comics, which were printed with a standard four-color process that permitted a very limited palette, Marvel movies are all starting to look and sound the same, boasting bright primary colors, magic-hour lighting, and bombastic orchestral scores.

Generally speaking, there’s less room for directors to experiment when introducing new heroes, and yet Doctor Strange’s tangential standing within the Marvel canon allows a welcome degree of freedom, while the supernatural dimension of his gifts permits filmmaker Scott Derrickson to bend the rules a bit more than his peers — not enough, some would argue. Like “Spider-Man” director Sam Raimi, Derrickson hails from the world of schlock horror, where he made such seat-jumpers as “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” and “Sinister,” and here, he transitions smoothly to a far bigger canvas (so big that Imax audiences will benefit from more than an hour of footage captured on the company’s large-format digital cameras).

The key is an in-on-the-joke script, which Derrickson co-wrote with Jon Spaihts and C. Robert Cargill, that ingeniously navigates major plot potholes even as it saddles its actors with ludicrous dialogue. But what actors! As Doctor Strange, Benedict Cumberbatch sheds his British accent but not the attitude, which both attracts and repulses fellow doctor Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams, the most competent — and human — of Marvel’s window-dressing girlfriends).

After the accident, Strange seeks advice from a man named Pangborn (Benjamin Bratt), who broke his back, but somehow learned to heal himself. Though skeptical at first, after meeting the former paraplegic on a basketball court, Strange takes his advice and heads east to Kathmandu, where he meets the Jedi-like Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his master, the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton). Mordo is a fascinating character whose motives are every bit as complex as Strange’s. Those who wish there were more of him in the film would be advised to stick around through both post-credits bonus scenes.

Meanwhile, much has already been written about the casting of the white-skinned Swinton in a role originally conceived as an old Asian man (as if the world needs yet another Mister Miyagi/Pai Mei stereotype), when the only real disappointment there is that the practically extraterrestrial star wasn’t asked to play the title role — because who is stranger? Swinton already walks this earth in some sort of enlightened state, and it’s no far leap to accept her as an ageless oracle with the power to bend matter and slow time. The latter trick, which turncoat ex-disciple Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen) uses for more nefarious purposes, lends the film a staggering visual effects innovation, in which the building-bending seen in Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” is taken to an extreme that would blow even M.C. Escher’s mind.

Whereas we can generally intuit the “rules” that govern most superheroes and their powers, Doctor Strange’s New Age training puts us in a vulnerable place where seemingly anything can happen: One near-death ER sequence manages to be tense, hilarious, and exhilarating at the same time, while another on a hospital balcony is among Marvel’s most poignant. To counter whatever disorder might result, the film is unusually heavy on exposition, and yet Derrickson understands that’s it’s far more satisfying to show than to explain, impressing with one psychedelic sequence after another. Burn a bit of incense or something stronger before watching, and this already hyper-vivid 3D experience is liable to carry you away entirely, especially when Kaecilius proceeds to fold first staircases and later the streets of New York into an elaborate moving kaleidoscope, in which Doctor Strange proceeds to jump, slip, and slide like a pawn in an elaborate, multi-dimensional chess game.

While it’s frustrating that each of these movies must build to a generic showdown between our superhero and some all-powerful, earth-endangering supervillain, “Doctor Strange” takes that tedious inevitability and spins it off into an alternate Dark Dimension, where wit (both humor and intellect) prevails. That’s an especially apt solution for this particular hero, since he’s been robbed of physical strength: The car crash left Doctor Strange practically handicapped, forcing him to learn tricks and spells to compensate for his lost dexterity. Since his enemies are martial arts experts with post-“Matrix” abilities, he has no choice but to get creative, conjuring shields and teleportation portals from plain air. At one point, facing off against Kaecilius and his henchmen, Strange stumbles across the Cloak of Levitation, a magical cape that proactively comes to his defense, absorbing blows while giving him hints on how to escape the situation.

Such scenes may be good for spectacle, but Doctor Strange’s most fascinating battle is within himself, as he fights first to regain the use of his hands and later to overcome everything he has learned — not only about the laws of physics, but also the social conditioning that taught this workaholic that his self-worth was tied to a job he can no longer perform. The character is literally fighting for his life in this film, and Cumberbatch captures both his humbling and the subsequent recovery of confidence. Here is a man who cockily swore off being an emergency room surgeon because he wasn’t interested in saving one life at a time, only to be rendered useless by his injuries. So, while we might yawn at yet another threat to all mankind, “Doctor Strange” has been presented in such a way that this higher calling restores his ability to help the world entire. We understand that this calling matters to him, even if his motives remain a mystery.

Variety 

A new Disney film starring Lupita Nyong’o and David Oyelowo follows the rise of Phiona Mutesi, a poor girl from Uganda who becomes a chess prodigy.

Most movies that fall under the umbrella of “feel good” have a few things in common. They’re often, to varying degrees, sentimental or agreeably superficial. They follow fairly straightforward emotional arcs that end in uplift—with a triumph or epiphany or a moral lesson learned. They can be guilty pleasures (Love Actually), nostalgic classics (The Princess Bride), romantic weepies (The Notebook), or tales of transformation (The Shawshank Redemption). Or, in the case of the latest Disney film Queen of Katwe, they can be biographical sports dramas.

Sports movies are especially prone to telling “feel-good” stories because they follow a simple formula: a protagonist’s journey to becoming a winner. And what feels better than watching someone struggle only to come out on top? The young woman at the heart of Queen of Katwe did precisely that. Directed by Mira Nair, the film follows Phiona Mutesi, a Ugandan girl living in the Kampala slum of Katwe who learns to play chess and quickly emerges as a prodigious talent despite not knowing how to read. Within a few years, she becomes good enough to play nationally—and then on a global stage. Today, she’s one of the first two women from Uganda to become titled chess players.

Like most feel-good films, Queen of Katwe doesn’t shy away from platitude-filled dialogue and “aww”-inspiring moments and meaningful swells of music. But neither does it feel like just another charming underdog story. Thanks in part to a wonderful lead performance by the newcomer Madina Nalwanga, Queen of Katwe offers a surprisingly nuanced portrait of a young woman learning—in the most difficult of circumstances—that “winning” can be a complicated joy. Victory sometimes equals redemption or happiness or money or fame, but it doesn’t always guarantee those things. Sometimes, winning can be confusing or isolating. Sometimes, it can even feel empty. These are unconventional, but worthy lessons for a family-friendly Disney movie like Queen of Katwe to unpack, and in some ways, the film’s streaks of realism—not fantasy—are what make it such a genuine pleasure to watch.

Queen of Katwe isn’t interested in offering an easily digestible account of Mutesi’s life, a fact that might help explain the film’s hefty 124-minute running time. The movie begins in 2007: Phiona and her younger siblings live with their widowed mother, Nakku Harriet (played beautifully by Lupita Nyong’o), in a hut they can barely afford with the money they make from hawking maize. Their community of Katwe is a desperately poor one, but Nair’s skillful directing finds the beauty in both the place and the lives of its inhabitants. The film neither pities nor romanticizes their poverty and industriousness. “How is your life, Phiona?” one neighbor cheerfully calls out to her by way of greeting early in the movie. “It is fine,” she replies with a smile that suggests by “fine” she means not “okay” but “wonderful.”

“Wonderful” is an optimistic overstatement, to be sure. Phiona only comes across a children’s chess club run by a local Christian ministry because she’s hungry, and they have free porridge. The other children aren’t kind to her at first (“She smells!” one screams), but their teacher, Robert Katende (played by David Oyelowo), welcomes her, saying, “This is a place for fighters.” Phiona’s curiosity is piqued when her peers begin to explain why they like the game so much. “In chess,” one boy says, “the small one can become the big one.” The David-and-Goliath metaphor is just one of many Queen of Katwe uses to sum up the existential appeal of chess: The game doesn’t care how strong or rich you are, but it can teach you to strategize your way to a better life. In other words, it’s about power and escape.

It’s no surprise that Phiona commits to practicing her game wholeheartedly,  soon becoming the club’s best player under Katende’s dogged mentorship. The movie is loosely structured around her rise—through local tournaments, country-wide championships, the 2010 Chess Olympiad in Russia—and the many bureaucratic challenges she and her fellow teammates face. But in between these dramatic inflection points, Queen of Katwe carries out an intimate psychological and emotional study of its subject.

Nalwanga fully captures the ambivalence Phiona feels as she improves her game and eventually gains international attention for Uganda. At times, Phiona sees her talent as a weapon, as a way to knock her smug, wealthy opponents down a couple pegs. Other times, it brings little more than anxiety and self-doubt. The film wisely stops short of selling Phiona’s chess genius as some kind of golden ticket out of Katwe, and takes care to spend time with Nyong’o’s character, who tries to protect her daughter from danger and disappointment, while keeping their family afloat.

- The Atlantic

Ransom Riggs' novel, about a group of special children with extraordinary powers, may as well have been written for Tim Burton to direct.

The title may read “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” but there can be no doubt for anyone buying a ticket: This is really Tim Burton’s Home for Peculiar Children. Not since “Sweeney Todd,” and before that all the way back to “Sleepy Hollow,” have the studios found such a perfect match of material for Hollywood’s most iconic auteur. It’s gotten to the point where the mere addition of Burton’s name to a movie title can justify an otherwise iffy prospect: You don’t want to see a “Planet of the Apes” remake? Well, how about a Tim Burton “Planet of the Apes” remake? Now you’re interested! Here, there’s nothing forced about the coupling of Ransom Riggs’ surprise best-seller with Burton’s playfully nonthreatening goth aesthetic and outsider sensibility, which should put the director back on the blockbuster charts.

One of the kid-lit sphere’s freshest recent surprises, Riggs’ novel was inspired by the author’s personal collection of vintage photographs — including a floating girl, an invisible boy, and other such darkroom dodges (not unlike retouch artist Mark Mothersbaugh’s “Beautiful Mutants” series) — and may as well have been written for Burton to direct. Known as “peculiars,” this eccentric mix of wartime refugees are like a cross between the Addams Family and the X-Men, each one blessed with some outré ability, from spontaneously igniting anything they touch to bringing inanimate objects (i.e. skeletons and dolls) to life.

While collateral damage from a Nazi bombing destroyed their beautiful Victorian orphanage during World War II, these kids have had few direct enemies, tucked away on the tiny Welsh island of Cairnholm, for more than seven decades. But that’s changed, now that a shape-shifting goon named Barron (Samuel L. Jackson) is on the hunt for peculiars, gobbling their eyes with great relish (and no one plays great relish, eye-gobbling or otherwise, like Jackson).

The kids have been safe all this time thanks to Miss Peregrine (embodied by Burton’s new muse, Eva Green), who possesses the gift of creating protective “loops,” or 24-hour safety bubbles wherein her charges can hide in a “Groundhog Day”-like cycle, forever repeating the day before the bomb struck. As guardians go, Miss Peregrine is what one might call an “ymbrine,” a rare breed of peculiar capable of transforming into a bird — in her case, a peregrine falcon, though there are others (including Miss Avocet, played by Judi Dench). Her ebony hair streaked with blue and swept up into a bird’s-nest ’do, Green cleverly suggests her avian alter ego, standing rigidly upright in her peacock-blue satin gown, glowering down through exaggerated eyeliner, and brandishing her long, slender fingers as if they were talons. Riggs may have imagined her, but she has clearly become a Burton creation, just one of many among her brood of adolescent oddities, who might otherwise be mistaken for so many sideshow freaks.

While hardly as elaborate (or inventive) as Hogwarts, Miss Peregrine’s eccentric quasi–orphanage shares the quality of remaining a well-kept secret from polite society. Even the other Cairnholm residents don’t realize who their neighbors are, so none can imagine why a boy named Jacob Portman (Asa Butterfield, who has literally grown up — if not necessarily into those endearingly big ears of his — since starring in Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”) would travel all the way from Florida to visit what remains of the old house. An aspiring “discoverer,” Jacob is reeling from the murder of his paranoid old grandfather, Abe (Terence Stamp), who died trying to defend himself from a long-limbed, eyeball-snatching creature called a hollowgast. (Of all the film’s design improvements, the hollowgast represents its most inspired, looking like a malicious, tentacle-mouthed twist on “The Nightmare Before Christmas” pumpkin king Jack Skellington.) No one quite believes Jacob’s firsthand account, though he cleverly manipulates his therapist (a hilariously “understanding” Allison Janney) into endorsing the trip to Wales, on the condition that his washed-up dad (Chris O’Dowd) accompanies him.

In the grand tradition of kid heroes who must circumvent their fuddy-duddy parents in order to accomplish great feats, Jacob manages to ditch his dad and locate Miss Peregrine’s loop, stepping back into 1943 to meet the children who had once been Abe’s closest companions. Some traits are undeniably genetic, and Jacob has inherited both his grandfather’s peculiarity and his taste in women. In fact, given the time-travel conceit, Jacob has the unique opportunity to swoon for the very same girl that Abe had loved so many years ago, a borderline-albino blonde bombshell named Emma (Ella Purnell), for whom screenwriter Jane Goldman (“Stardust”) has devised some deliciously romantic interactions, including a splendid reverse-“Titanic” love scene that sets up several key elements of the film’s finale, including a skeleton battle to rival the imagination of Ray Harryhausen.

Goldman’s frequently amusing script is the secret ingredient that makes “Miss Peregrine” such an appropriate fit for Burton’s peculiar sensibility, allowing the director to revisit and expand motifs and themes from his earlier work: With its time-skipping chronology and family-reconciling framing device, the entire tale could be another of Burton’s “Big Fish” stories (from the film of the same name); it offers opportunities for “Frankenweenie”-style stop-motion; there are ostracized freaks (and even a dino-shaped topiary) straight out of “Edward Scissorhands”; and its elaborate, meticulously decorated mansion manages to improve upon the wonky houses seen in “Beetlejuice” and “Dark Shadows.”

Perhaps it’s all a little bit too familiar for those who’ve been following Burton since the beginning. Although the director repeats more than he innovates this time around, for younger audiences, the film makes a terrific introduction to his blue-hued, forever-Halloween aesthetic. It’s clearly also an excuse for him to work with Green again after “Dark Shadows,” and rather than leaving audiences with the icky feeling that he’s twisting his leading lady to fit his admittedly kooky sensibility (as seemed to happen with Helena Bonham Carter and Lisa Marie), he appears to have met his match in Green. The already-outré “Penny Dreadful” star walks that razor-fine line between dignity and camp perhaps better than any other current actress — making for a partnership we can only hope to see continue.

LONGOR