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"Margot at the Wedding" (R, 1 hr., 31 min.) (LIMITED RELEASE)
In this darkish comedy-drama, Nicole Kidman plays Margot, a brittle, emotionally destructive, stunningly self-absorbed author who creates havoc at what is supposed to be her sister Pauline's (Jennifer Jason Leigh) big wedding weekend. Filled with squirmily familiar family dysfunction, the movie might fascinate teens 16 and older, especially if they're interested in more serious filmmaking and acting. However, the myriad hurts unfolding on the screen could hit close to home for some. The film contains much profanity and some crude sexual language, as well as seminudity, a graphic masturbation scene, a sexually explicit drawing, talk of marital infidelity, recollections by the two sisters of their promiscuous youth, and a jokey reference to child molestation. Characters drink, smoke and talk of being high. Their kids spy on neighbors and talk about mental retardation and homosexuality. A local bully bites Margot's sensitive son Claude (Zane Pais), and we see an injured dog.
Margot overprotects her adolescent son Claude, ignoring the fact that he's growing up, then she'll make a self-esteem-killing remark to him in the next breath. At the family homestead she psychoanalyzes everyone -- always incorrectly and negatively -- and instantly judges her sister's second husband-to-be, the genially crass painter and rock musician Malcolm (Jack Black) as a loser. The two sisters' lifelong rivalry keeps reigniting and singeing everyone else, including their kids, who don't quite know they're being burned. (Years of therapy will follow.)
Writer/director Noah Baumbach, who showed a knack for portraying narcissistic, hurtful parents in his more effective and devastating "The Squid and the Whale" (R, 2005), has created a film that is often affecting, but also frustrating in its herky-jerky flow and the odd way in which characters' relationships are left vague too far into the film.
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BEYOND THE RATINGS GAME
-- OK FOR KIDS 6 AND OLDER:
"Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium" (G) -- This unpretentious little fantasy should entrance kids 6 and older, despite occasional glitches. Kindly, 243-year-old Mr. Magorium (Dustin Hoffman) announces he is soon to leave this world and will turn over his store full of beautiful, magical toys to manager Molly Mahoney (Natalie Portman), a timid would-be composer. Eric (Zach Mills), a little boy who hangs out at the store, tries to help her. Henry (Jason Bateman), Mr. Magorium's staid new accountant, has no clue. PG-ish elements include hints of Mr. Magorium's mortality. (PLOT GIVEAWAY ALERT: When he dies, the camera pans down to his shoes. Then we see his headstone.) Little ones could be unnerved by a wall in the store that bulges and darkens with anger. An innocent friendship between Henry and Eric has the two playing in Eric's room, so Eric's mom finds a stranger with her son -- an awkward moment.
-- OK FOR KIDS 8 AND OLDER:
"Enchanted" -- Fantasy and reality collide in this cleverly conceived romantic comedy, which fizzles a bit in its second half, but still has charm, wit, and a couple of ingenious musical spoofs. A lovely lass in an animated Disney-esque fairy tale is about to marry her prince when his sorceress stepmother shoves her down a hole. Giselle (Amy Adams) bursts through a manhole cover in Times Square as a flesh-and-blood person in a live-action world. Wandering in her wedding dress, she's rescued by a divorced lawyer (Patrick Dempsey) and his little daughter (Rachel Covey). Giselle's prince (James Marsden) and the sorceress (Susan Sarandon) soon turn up as live people too, and the plot thickens. There is brief talk of the lawyer's fiancee (Idina Menzel) not spending the night as a good example for his daughter. Adult characters drink. A chipmunk pal of Giselle's commits toilet humor, and rats and roaches swarm in one droll scene. Giselle gradually senses that kissing isn't all there is to love, but the sexual innuendo is very mild.
"Fred Claus" (PG) -- Vince Vaughn effortlessly combines hipness and warmth as Santa's ne'er-do-well older sibling Fred from Chicago in this amusing but odd hybrid of cleverness and cliches. Fred gets arrested for impersonating a Salvation Army Santa. His brother Nick, aka the real Santa (Paul Giamatti), sends bail and his sleigh, insisting Fred come to the North Pole for the Christmas rush. When a snide efficiency expert (Kevin Spacey) threatens to close Santa's workshop, Fred must come through for his bro. There is occasional semi-crude language and mildly suggestive humor, likely to go over heads younger than 10. Tall Fred and short elf Willie (John Michael Higgins) stand at urinals in a visual gag. There are slapstick fights with no injuries and Santa has ninja elf bodyguards. A boy (Bobb'e J. Thompson) Fred befriended in Chicago lands in an orphanage.
"Bee Movie" (PG) -- A restless worker bee, Barry (voice of Jerry Seinfeld), ventures out of his utopian hive into the human world and meets a florist (Renee Zellweger) in this colorfully imagined but narratively weak computer-animated 'toon. Its odd blend of Seinfeldian irony and childlike whimsy may not fully transfix 8- to 13-year-olds, though there's nothing in it they can't handle. The film could be alternately scary or dull to under-8s. There is mild sexual innuendo in the stinger jokes. Barry gets slammed around on a tennis ball, sucked into car engines, caught on a windshield and a human tries to kill him by igniting an aerosol spray. Bees testing helmets get flattened by shoes and swatters, a scary scene unfolds on an out-of-control airplane, and humans smoke. "Bee Movie" themes: keep your temper, remember life is short, follow your bliss.
-- OK FOR KIDS 10 AND OLDER:
"August Rush" (PG) -- Kids 10 and older may be swept up in this modern fairy tale about an orphaned music genius (Freddie Highmore) who reconnects with his lost parents through music. Yet it is a preposterous, pretentious film that plays like a long, dizzying music video. The 11-year-old boy is obsessed with sound and rhythm. He runs away from his group home to Manhattan, where a Fagin-like hustler called Wizard (Robin Williams) recognizes his unschooled talent and turns him into a street guitarist, naming him August Rush. He escapes Wizard and becomes a prodigy at Juilliard. Seriously. Intercut with the boy's tale is that of a cellist (Keri Russell) and an Irish rocker (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who came together 11 years earlier. Wizard shoves August and threatens him with a blade. That and other lost-in-the-city moments could scare under-10s. Adult characters drink, make rare drug references and use mild profanity.
-- PG-13s OF VARYING INTENSITY:
"This Christmas" -- This sprawling comedy-drama brims with good actors and good cheer as well as soap-opera cliches. Teens could well be drawn to such a character-rich story. Members of a large African-American family gather in the L.A. home of their mother (Loretta Devine) and her boyfriend (Delroy Lindo) for Christmas. The sparks soon fly among the siblings, who include a jazz musician (Idris Elba), a meek housewife (Regina King) married to an arrogant mogul (Laz Alonso), a career woman (Sharon Leal) who falls for a fireman (Mekhi Phifer), a Marine (Columbus Short) home on leave, and a teen (singer Chris Brown) with a secret ambition to sing. The sexual innuendo includes a vibrator joke, implied overnights among married and unmarried couples, an infidelity subplot, but no nudity or explicitness. There are muted fights -- one with a gun brandished -- mild profanity, smoking and drinking. OK for most teens.
"Beowulf" -- Robert Zemeckis' computer-animated take on the ancient Anglo-Saxon saga (with live actors digitally morphed into animated figures) looks like a handsome graphic novel and has an effectively mythic tone, though at times it is comically grandiose and decidedly unpoetic. The monster Grendel (Crispin Glover as a decaying, skeletal figure) attacks King Hrothgar's (Anthony Hopkins) court, and Norse hero Beowulf (Ray Winstone) arrives to kill the creature. The violence is graphic, with men impaled or torn in half. (PLOT GIVEAWAY ALERT: In a climactic battle, Beowulf rips out the heart of a dragon.) Aside from drunkenness, the film's many R-ish elements are sexual, with references to lust, fornication and ravishing of virgins. Weapons become comically obvious phallic symbols. The hero's nakedness as he fights Grendel is hidden behind strategically placed swords and scenery. We see bare behinds and Grendel's mother (Angelina Jolie), a kind of supermodel with tentacles, is naked-ish, but with details hidden. Too violent and sexualized for some middle-schoolers.
-- R's:
"Margot at the Wedding" (NEW; LIMITED RELEASE) -- Teens 16 and older interested in serious films could be transfixed by this darkish comedy-drama. Nicole Kidman plays the brittle, emotionally destructive Margot in writer/director Noah Baumbach's tale of parental dysfunction and family hurt. The film is often affecting, though far less devastating than his 2005 "The Squid and the Whale" (R). Margot and her adolescent son Claude (Zane Pais) come to attend her sister Pauline's (Jennifer Jason Leigh) second marriage to a lovably crass painter/musician (Jack Black). As Margot analyzes, criticizes and angers everyone, the sisters' rivalry reignites. There is profanity, crude sexual language, seminudity, a graphic masturbation scene, a sexually explicit drawing, talk of infidelity, recollections by the sisters of their promiscuous youth, and a jokey reference to child molestation. Characters drink, smoke and talk of being high. Kids spy on neighbors and talk about mental retardation and homosexuality. We see an injured dog, and a bully bites Claude.
"I'm Not There" (NEW; LIMITED RELEASE) -- The many facets of Bob Dylan inspired director Todd Haynes in this experimental epic, which is alternately brilliant and infuriating as it pokes around in the idealism, defiance and disillusionment of the 1960s and '70s and how the singer/songwriter/poet fit into it all. Six actors play Dylan personae -- a young African-American troubadour (Marcus Carl Franklin) who sees himself as Woody Guthrie; a film star (Heath Ledger); an outlaw a la Billy the Kid (Richard Gere); a spiritual searcher (Christian Bale); a hip dude (Cate Blanchett in male drag) who infuriates fans by playing electrified rock, and a burned-out icon (Ben Whishaw). The film includes much smoking, some profanity, a racial slur, a crude sexual remark, disrespectful words aimed at a crucifix, explicit sexual situations, nudity, nonlethal violence, drinking, and implied drug use. Teens 16 and older with a fascination for 1960s culture.
"Love in the Time of Cholera" (NEW) -- Director Mike Newell's valiant if ungainly attempt to lasso Gabriel Garcia Marquez' 1985 novel has richly atmospheric and romantic moments, but is also highly episodic and weighed down with wigs and age makeup. Set in Cartagena, Colombia, near the turn of the 20th century, the film, performed in English with Colombian accents, tracks the love of telegraph operator and poet Florentino (Javier Bardem) for Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), whose father (John Leguizamo) forbids the match. She eventually marries rich Dr. Urbino (Benjamin Bratt). Brokenhearted, Florentino sleeps with hundreds of women over the next half-century, but loves only Fermina. The film shows explicit sexual situations with nudity, a brothel, victims of a cholera epidemic, a threatened suicide, the implication that a jealous husband slits his wife's throat, wartime artillery fire, profanity, drinking and smoking. Literary and romantic high-schoolers 17 and up.
"The Mist" -- Alien creatures cloaked in a fog bank invade a Maine hamlet in this nifty little horror flick based on a Stephen King story. The understated gore (though there is some) and the theatricality of panicked townsfolk trapped in a supermarket all hark back to classic episodes of the original "Twilight Zone" TV show -- smart dialogue, hints of the supernatural and socially aware psychodrama. Frank Darabont ("The Shawshank Redemption," 1994, "The Green Mile," 1999, both R) directs a good cast. Thomas Jane plays the unelected leader of the sane folks after a religious zealot (Marcia Gay Harden) foments unrest. There are glimpses of headless bodies, severed torsos and limbs. The creatures appear as huge tentacles snapping out of the fog, then giant flying insects and reptiles. Strong suicide theme. OK for most high-schoolers.
"Hitman" -- Better than you'd expect a film based on a video game to be, "Hitman" still defies narrative logic and gets its thrills from mindless, machine-gun pumping mayhem and sophomoric sexist humor. Characters speak in short phrases (occasionally in Russian with subtitles). Our perversely moralistic antihero, Agent 47 (Timothy Olyphant), a laconic, genetically engineered assassin, is suddenly protective of Nika (Olga Kurylenko), a sex slave belonging to the (fictional) president of Russia, while he's targeted by Interpol (led by Dougray Scott). Along with blood-spattering violence, the movie has seminudity, strong sexual innuendo, a brief nongraphic sexual situation and profanity. Not for teens under 16.
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