The folks at Dreamworks are probably feeling fairly cocky right now; Disney's lackluster CGI debut Chicken Little makes Dreamworks' latest CGI outing, Madagascar (Universal), look significantly better by comparison. The story of four pampered zoo-animal friends (including a lion voiced by Ben Stiller and his zebra buddy-slash-potential-entrée Chris Rock) who accidentally wind up out in the wild isn't a timeless classic, but it's energetic fun with a surprisingly savage twist, and its animation looks marvelous compared to Chicken Little's simplistic style…
Synergistic soundtracks are a common prerequisite for studio pictures with corporate ties to a major record label, but few films have gone to the ludicrous extremes of Stealth (Columbia Tristar), which features an evil A.I.-controlled plane that can download Incubus songs off the Internet. Though W.D. Richter's original script was intended as a moral inquiry into civilized nations raining death from above, director Rob Cohen has refashioned it into an action thriller made for those who found Top Gun too intellectually tasking…
Kate Hudson, John Hurt, Peter Sarsgaard, and Gena Rowlands are the highbrow thespians picking up paychecks in The Skeleton Key (Universal), a spectacularly silly, not particularly scary voodoo thriller set deep in the bayou. No, it isn't remotely redeemed by the obligatory mildly clever final plot twist, courtesy of screenwriter Ehren Kruger. K-Pax frightmaster Iain Softley directs…
Don Roos' The Opposite Of Sex and Bounce walk a fine line between glib and earnest, usually erring on the side of glib. The ambitious, character-packed Happy Endings leans the other way, and while it's uneven and unwieldy, it also goes down a lot easier than Roos' other films, thanks to top performances from Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jason Ritter, Bobby Cannavale, and Tom Arnold. Yes, that Tom Arnold. He's really good here…
Featuring as many footnotes, allusions, spontaneous flashbacks, and colorful asides as a David Foster Wallace novel, Arnaud Desplechin's exhilarating mess Kings & Queen (Wellspring) plays like a throwback to the anything-goes spirit of the French New Wave. Told in two long chapters and an epilogue, centering on a twice-divorced single mother (Emmanuelle Devos) and her manic ex-boyfriend (Mathieu Amalric), the film is an overflowing repository of ideas, not all of them great, but plenty worth consideration.