DreamWorks has struggled to emerge from Disney/Pixar’s long shadow and establish a creative identity of its own, but with Kung Fu Panda and the terrific How To Train Your Dragon (Paramount), the studio is finally hitting a groove in visually sumptuous adventure tales. The strong 3-D effects won’t make the translation to DVD, but the relationship between a wimpy Viking boy and the dragon he can’t bring himself to slay would resonate in any format…
Bad movies are common in the modern studio system, just as they have been for the last hundred years, but there’s a usually a base level of competence and professional sheen that prevents studio projects from dipping into out-and-out ineptitude. Adapted from DC Comics’ revisionist Western series about a badly scarred bounty hunter (Josh Brolin), Jonah Hex (Warner Bros.) represents an anomaly: a film so haphazardly stitched together that it’s a miracle it didn’t break apart in the projector…
By almost any metric used to measure TV ratings, Dollhouse: Season Two (Fox) should never have happened, so it’s a tribute to the passionate few—and a Friday timeslot where nothing much was at stake anyway—that Joss Whedon’s ambitious science-fiction series got a bonus season. Rather than feebly trying to hook new viewers, Whedon and his writers took advantage of the extra time by going deeper into the show’s complicated mythology and giving fans something worth championing…
Victimized by distribution hassles that had it pulled just before release in March, then dribbled out to a few theaters at the end of summer, the raucous, Southern-fried pot comedy Leaves Of Grass (First Look) deserved a more dignified fate. Edward Norton leads a ridiculously overqualified cast in a dual role as identical twins—a goofy pot dealer and an uptight Brown professor. The film begins as broad slapstick farce, then darkens into something deeper and more substantive.