Three high schoolers stumble onto a sinkhole in the middle of a field. They descend into it and encounter a mysterious, supposedly alien force that imparts each of them with superpowers in director Josh Trank’s debut feature, Chronicle. Employing the by-now familiar, low-budget artifice of “home video” footage (made famous by The Blair Witch Project on through Cloverfield and the Paranormal Activity series, to name a few), Trank follows the boys’ exhilarating discovery of their telekinetic abilities, beginning with the playing of harmless pranks and culminating in the near-destruction of Seattle.

Chronicle is positioned as a superhero origin story as the teenagers — happy-go-lucky jock Steve (Michael B. Jordan), charming misfit Matt (Alex Garetty) and disturbed loner Andrew (Dane DeHaan) — must contend with whether and how to use their powers. While Steve and Matt are content to limit the use of their abilities for the mere pursuit of fun, Andrew veers off-course and begins a downward spiral into criminality. Andrew’s choice isn’t surprising; as a victim of abuse, a son of an alcoholic father and an ailing mother, it’s only natural that his mind would steer towards revenge and mayhem. That forces the iconoclast Matt into the role of superhero, something he wants nothing to do with, but he’s all that the world has in terms of a defense against Andrew’s armageddon-scale abilities. So, in that sense, we have the creation of the classic Marvel Comics dynamic of the unwilling superhero (in the Peter Parker/Spider-Man mold) against the psychologically damaged arch-villain).

As always in the case of first-person, home video-style movies, the artifice gets in the way of the action. That characters would tote along a camera and have the presence of mind to shoot video while in the midst of wildly traumatic or ecstatic events (whether being chased through the woods by a witch, intruded upon in the middle of the night by a demon, invaded by an alien monster or, in the case of Chronicle, discovering that you have the ability to fly) is simply ridiculous. It’s an artifice that appeals because of its approximation to cable news, YouTube and home videos — things that are as much a part of our lives as the laptop I’m writing on or the tea I’m drinking. The merging of the familiar with the supernatural or the uncanny is what viewers find so irresistible (including me). But when the action ramps up, the artifice reveals itself to be the clumsy gimmick that it is. And it doesn’t fare any better here than it did in the case of its predecessors. While we’re on the subject, Chronicle breaks its own rule by frequently shifting to a smoother, objective visual style when the need arises, thereby wanting the best of both worlds. We only see it, though, as cheating.

That said, Chronicle is an enjoyable spin through the tropes of the superhero origin story. And it takes time to develop its characters richly, Andrew in particular. DeHaan nicely modulates Andrew’s sweet, soft-hearted interior in the movie’s first half with the hardening, monstrous anger that takes over in the second half. And while Russell’s Matt is a somewhat hazier, less sure-footed characterization, we can get behind any character with a dimpled smile who can quote Jung and use the word “hubris” in conversation.

Predictably, Chronicle unravels into forgettable mayhem in its third act as Andrew takes out his pent-up rage on Seattle leading to an Andrew-Matt showdown. Yet the movie’s first half contain enough unique moments to prove that Trank and screenwriter Max Landis have more than spectacle in mind. The scenes in which the boys first try out their powers come off best. Trank maintains a low-key, open-eyed curiosity throughout these scenes and a childlike sense of wonder prevails, most memorably in the “I-can-fly” sequence, which unlocks a primal sort of exhilaration in the viewer to match that of the characters. Moments like these demonstrate perhaps the most effective use of the home video style since “The Blair Witch Project,” anchoring their characters’ (and our) shock and surprise at the supernatural in the background of the familiar.

Grade: B-

Directed by: Josh Trank
Written by: Max Landis
Cast: Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell, Michael B. Jordan, Michael Kelly, Ashley Hinshaw, Anna Wood, Bo Petersen

Leave it to the bleakest of movies to be about Faith. The meaning and purpose of Faith in a higher power to deliver one from suffering comes up often in director Joe Carnahan’s absorbing wilderness thriller The Grey as its beleaguered plane-crash survivors must fend off a pack of arctic wolves hell-bent on picking off them off one by one. Principally, Faith is on the mind of Ottway (Liam Neeson), a marksman hired by an oil rigging outfit in the snowbound wilderness and a loner patterned after the classic noir mold — that is, self-reliant and goaded on through life by his own private agenda.

Ottway is haunted by thoughts of a woman he still loves and with whom he has no hope of reuniting. He wanders his territory, rifle in hand, protecting the oil riggers from predator wolves who’ve encroached onto the company’s land. But after the plane ferrying Ottway and his fellow ragtag crew of bedraggled oil workers crashes on a desolate plain, it’s the humans who now find themselves the trespassers in the wolves’ domain. With no help forthcoming, the survivors must trudge the indefinite distance from the crash site to civilization, across forbidding, wind-blasted expanse and wilderness forest, all the while falling prey to wolves with a newfound taste for human flesh.

Ottway assumes the role of the group’s leader. He’s no more familiar with the terrain than the others, but he is the closest the men have to a wilderness expert. That’s not to say there isn’t dissent in the ranks: The ex-con Diaz (Frank Grillo) mocks Ottway’s attempts to find safety and even the very idea that the group has any chance of making it out of their predicament alive. A little of Diaz goes a long way though — Carnahan and co-writer Ian Mackenzie Jeffers (on whose short story The Grey is based) err in packing in too much of Diaz’s generally cliched shows of grandstanding at the expense of developing a more nuanced chemistry among the men. As a result, the men — among them the sensitive Hendricks (Dallas Roberts), the companionable Talget (Dermot Mulroney), the gentle giant and token minority Burke (Nonso Anozie) and the young punk Flannery (Joe Anderson) — are little more than pieces in the screenplay’s easy-to-fit puzzle box of character dynamics. In various tense conversations and campfire monologues, they reveal just enough to humanize themselves before each meets his grisly end in the next man vs. wolf standoff. Here is where The Grey cannot measure up to superior survivalist adventures like Flight of the Phoenix, The Great Escape, The Wages of Fear, Le Trou and so forth; the latter films benefitted from finely tuned and differentiated supporting characters, each one adding color and depth to the ensemble, making our investment in their go-for-broke scenarios that much deeper.

The Grey is a lesser achievement and might have been standard-issue B-movie fare were it not for Liam Neeson, who’s towering presence and gravitas turn the movie into a worthy study of heartbreak, courage and mortality. As resourceful and commanding as Ottway is, he is also a broken, desperate man with the barest wisp of regard for God. And, in one of the movie’s most nakedly honest and wrenching scenes — he rails at the heavens, daring God to intervene in his plight. Most startling in this scene isn’t Neeson’s acting chops — they’re considerable — but Carnahan’s choice to insert a reverse shot of a blank, impassive sky. He could have shot this moment entirely as a close-up on Ottoway, a statement of his encroaching madness, but he stages it as a two-character exchange, albeit with a second character remaining mute, a mystery. The result is a powerful, intimate spiritual plea, something we rarely see in this — or any — Hollywood genre nowadays.

Indeed, The Grey is a rarity in important ways. For one, this is a decidedly bleak film, damn bleak — one that goes against the grain of the dominant Hollywood instinct for last-minute rescues, miracles and uplift. It’s not nihilistic exactly, but it’s not feel-good either. The film maintains a brave existential detachment in tone, a kind of Camus-esque acceptance of the brutality of fate as demonstrated in one scene in which the camera simply holds on a character over a single take, one that lasts for what feels like an eternity, as he resigns himself to death.

From what I just said, The Grey might seem like too much of a downer. But it has ample rewards too. Aside from Neeson’s top-caliber performance (one that’s on par with or surpasses the best performances in any given year), the movie’s got several excellent set pieces, from the solidly terrifying plane crash (though, eliciting terror from turbulence is among the suspense genre’s more delightfully simple tricks) to the series of deadly ambushes by the wolves and one white-knuckle, high-altitude scene of characters clambering across a gorge on a tenuous rope. And, while silver linings are in short supply here, what The Grey ultimately offers is something far richer — it offers a chance to become involved with one man’s search for inner strength. How rewarding you find that will depend perhaps on your own search for the same.

Grade: B

Directed by: Joe Carnahan
Written by: Joe Carnahan, Ian Mackenzie Jeffers
Cast: Liam Neeson, Dallas Roberts, Dermot Mulroney, Frank Grillo, Joe Anderson, Anne Openshaw, Ben Bray, Nonso Anozie

In 2003, Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinski shanghaied Disney’s ride into a madly popular swashbuckler. The movie made a boatload of booty, and made Johnny Depp a bona fide movie star. Its sequel, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” takes all that was so charming about the first “Pirates” — its resurrection of a classic Hollywood genre, pirate-talk humor and Depp’s fey mincing as Capt. Jack Sparrow — and amps it up to the wattage of a Looney Tunes cartoon. “Dead Man’s Chest” hails from the “Bigger Is Better” school of filmmaking, whose dean is Jerry Bruckheimer. By “bigger,” I mean in all its dimensions: the movie is the original’s louder, faster, more effects-crazy twin brother. It’s also snottier and more spoiled — a Bruckheimer spawn, after all. What did you expect?

Once again, scribes Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio shunt Sparrow and the ever-hapless lovers Will (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) through another treasure-hunt storyline, and tangling with yet another crew of preternatural villains. The latter are captained by the squid-faced Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) who, after a thwarted romance, secrets his broken heart into the titular chest and commences to terrorize the high seas. Because Jones and his shipmates’ fates are entwined with the seas’, they’ve anthropomorphized into various icky-looking sea creatures. What’s more, Jones’ possession of the chest also lends him the power to summon the Kraken, that ship-destroying sea monster of ancient Norse fables. Who let him in here is anyone’s guess.

Anyway, when news of the chest reaches tight-assed seaman Culter Beckett (Tom Hollander), he blackmails Will into recovering it, holding his spunky lass Elisabeth as ransom. For help, Will seeks out pirate-at-large Jack Sparrow. Sparrow’s got the dirt on Jones’s curse; he’s himself condemned to share in Jones’s fate if he doesn’t figure a way to break it. Elizabeth escapes Cutler’s custody, and, in her wedding gown, hotfoots it in pursuit of Will. By now, Elliott and Rossio’s script resembles a big-budget clusterfuck, crashing towards the inevitable throwdown with Davy and the Kraken. A superfluous plot detour on a cannibal island is but a clumsily staged send-up of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” complete with Sparrow outrunning large rolling objects and hungry natives. “Dead Man’s Chest’s” climax involves yet another instance of antics atop and inside rolling objects, proving the old adage: Why settle for one when you can have two for twice the cost?

“Dead Man’s Chest” taps into our need for air-conditioned escapism, and, to be fair, it’s effects are a marvel of digital realism. But Bruckheimer’s effects-makers go to gratuitous lengths to force a gee whiz out of their audience, especially in the case of Jones and his gnarly crew, whose slimy deformities don’t so much amaze as repel, and expensively so. This leaves Depp and his cohorts to mug, pose, and caper through Verbinski’s frenetic telling. Depp, rather than stretching his characterization of Sparrow, is sadly limited to playing up his cartoonishness; more than once, Sparrow’s panicked face is the punchline to another in a minefield of effects-rigged comic setups. Right from the get-go, there’s an unsettling immodesty about “Dead Man’s Chest,” a presumption of its own charm and popularity without bothering with anything as unsexy as story craft, character development, or a cleanly defined narrative arc. No, it pummels us into submission. And if you’re going to mutiny, matey, then you can just walk the plank.

Grade: C

Directed by: Gore Verbinski
Written by: Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio
Cast: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Bill Nighy, Jack Davenport, Jonathan Pryce, Lee Arenberg, Mackenzie Crook

Gutsily made by husband-and-wife filmmakers Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, “Open Water” disarms the viewer (à la “The Blair Witch Project”) with its no-frills, home-video ethos, but, make no mistake, this is shrewdly calculative filmmaking. The story is straightforward, opening in Susan and Daniel’s leafy, SUV-appointed home as the cell phone-toting couple pack up for an island vacation, wondering if they’ll still get email where they’re going. In a few deft strokes, the filmmakers establish their couple and whisk them off to their tropical getaway.

Kentis and Lau assuredly develop the couple’s close-knit but none-too-romantic routine, intimately conveyed by actors Ryan and Travis. To soothe away workaday stress, they embark on a deep-sea dive. From the movie’s premise, we know that this is an ill-fated outing, that the couple will be left behind by a bungling boat crew. But we watch anyway, uneasily but riveted, as the movie puts its pieces into place. Then, from their initial petulance at finding themselves abandoned, through their spasms of antagonism, their attempts to cope and overcome and, finally, their realization that all is futile against a menace largely unseen, “Open Water” becomes an expertly modulated horror movie.

Perhaps the greatest irony in “Open Water” is the claustrophobia of its setting. The sea that looks so limitless and wide-open eventually feels so confining, availing the characters with the barest hopes for survival, not least of which is that its predators simply stay away. The water’s lapping and splashing sickens us as much as it does Susan and Daniel, and the predators most definitely do not stay away. Kentis and Lau know that horror can never be fully realized till the lights are out, and they gain maximum fright wattage out of the all-enveloping darkness of night with only flashes of lightning to orient us. At this point, the filmmakers teasingly cross-cut to scenes of island revelry, but the festive music is muted, faraway, thereby punctuating the ever-growing distance between Susan and Daniel and the lives they’ve left behind. It is here that the absolute meaninglessness of the material world, one of comfortable jobs, SUVs and cell phones, is most keenly felt, pitted against the cunning and merciless forces of nature.

Grade: B

Written/Directed by: Chris Kentis
Cast: Blanchard Ryan, Daniel Travis, Saul Stein

When he isn’t curled up on a desolate platform, Bulcsú is riding the rails as a ticket control officer for the metro. Alongside his ragtag crew, he patrols the subways, making sure they’re free of freeloaders. Judging from Antal’s depiction, it’s a hellish gig, prone to frequent scuffles with authorities, fellow inspectors, not to mention the host of belligerent, ticketless commuters, each itching for a fight, a chase or both.

“Kontroll” finds its footing not upon the rungs of plot, but through a succession of vignettes depicting the inspectors’ workaday grind. Antal gets the textures right, all urban grime and pallid lighting that gets under your skin, but there’s a jokiness to these sequences, a gimmickry in the cutting and the theatrics, that points to the filmmaker’s background in commercials and music videos And for a movie about a killer on the loose, there is scant dread and paranoia at work here: Neither the ticket inspectors nor commuters seem terribly concerned, and there’s none of the morbid sense of inquiry behind the killer’s motives, both ingredients with which thrillers achieve their credibility. The movie, instead, settles in on Bulcsú as he tangles with rival inspectors, falls for Sofie (Eszter Balla), the lovely, self-assured daughter of an aging metro driver, before he finds himself the lead suspect in the subway killings. You can see the final showdown between Bulcsú and the killer coming as clearly as the headlights of the next train. It’s not the destination that counts in “Kontroll,” however, but the visceral delights to be had in getting there.

Above all, “Kontroll” is a gleeful demonstration of Antal’s flair for the medium. He is clearly a natural, as comfortable with the classical fundamentals of craft as with the hyperkinetic attitude of the modern action movie. Propelled by a dance-fevered soundtrack, Antal has fashioned an enticing allegory about lives suspended in self-imposed purgatory and seeking to rise again into the light of the real world.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Nimród Antal
Written by: Jim Adler, Nimród Antal
Cast: Sándor Csányi, Eszter Balla, Csaba Pindroch, Zsolt Nagy

Yimou is a wonderful filmmaker, renowned deservedly for his incisive studies of Chinese society–using interpersonal politics as archetypes for society at large and the historic past as an allegory for the present. Indeed, “Flying Daggers” may be read as sociopolitical allegory, but that fancy stuff matters little if you can’t deliver on the fundamentals of story, a love story in this case.

Of concern is a love triangle involving a blind girl, a government cop and a rebel. It’s Yimou’s way of saying that true love is blind and goes deeper than whose side you’re on, whether it’s the establishment or the resistence. Zhao Xiaoding’s sumptuous cinematography introduces us to 9th century China. A rebellion led by the eponymous guerilla fighters against the corrupt Tang Dynasty fractures the country. When cocksure cop Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) discovers that blind dancing girl Mei (the ever-gorgeous Ziyi Zhang) is, in fact, a Flying Daggers infiltrator, he poses as a raffish vagabond and tries to win her trust (and her heart), aiding her escape from government soldiers so as to worm his way into the rebellion’s inner sanctum. After saving her life–at least three times, by my count–Jin and Mei realize they love each other madly, in spite of their differences. Vexing their thorny affair is Leo (Andy Lau), one of Mei’s comrades and a former flame, posing now as a government officer. Passions among the trio lead to predictable territory: Leo fumes with resentment over Mei’s waning love for him while Mei and Jin bid desperately to keep their love burning in a time of windy upheaval.

There’s much in “Flying Daggers” to fill the eye and distract the senses, whether it’s Huo Tingxiao’s exquisite production design — especially the mandarin-baroque interiors of a royal bordello — or Emi Wada’s meticulous costumes. And Yimou knows how to stage himself an action scene: Flashing swords, daggers and bodies swirl amid a gamut of dramatic setpieces and, as a showcase for pure cinema, it’s riveting stuff. At its worst, the movie’s action feels repetitious, a tiring succession of climaxes, a tedious two-hour excuse for this director to indulge his fetish for digitalized blood and daggers and for immaculately composed nature shots. It’s all an empty shell of sound and fury that Yimou’s script (co-written by Li Feng and Wang Bin) fills with skimpy characters, clichéd plotting, and a lot of hand-wringing. “Flying Daggers” is epic tedium–the best reason yet to wish that Ang Lee had never let slip that Pandora’s Box of digital gimmickery, allowing for an entire genre to lose its down-and-dirty essence.

Grade: C

Directed by: Zhang Yimou
Written by: Li Feng, Wang Bin, Zhang Yimou
Cast: Takeshi Kaneshiro, Andy Lau, Zhang Ziyi, Dandan Song

From its dazzling opening scene to its last, “Finding Nemo” is the crown jewel in Pixar’s 8-year association with Disney. Ever since “Toy Story” in 1995, Pixar has consistently pushed the boundries of digital animation while managing to tell clever, inventive stories, and “Nemo” is their most sublime balancing act yet. Coral reefs and marine life of every size and stripe burst forth with startling vibrancy, their textures and movements so vivid and lifelike that it seems Pixar has raised the CGI bar to spectacular new heights.

On the storytelling front, writer-director Andrew Stanton breathes fresh life into a familiar genre—the Quest Film—with a brisk and spirited script. What makes Pixar’s productions a cut above the rest—and “Nemo” is several notches above that—is not just that they take their cue from the fears and fascinations of childhood, but that they do so with such a genuine sense of awe and wonder. It’s what nourishes their stories and makes them consistently involving, even for those of us made jaded and cynical by adulthood.

Marlin, a hapless, overprotective clown fish, voiced with neurotic gusto by Albert Brooks, loses his son, Nemo, to a scuba diving dentist, eager to stock up his office fish tank. What follows are Marlin’s anxious, frenetic efforts to track down his son. Along the way, he’s joined by addle-brained Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), herself a bit of a lost soul, and, together, they brave various undersea perils in a journey that takes them from their coral home in the Great Barrier Reef to the Sydney waterfront. Meanwhile, having befriended his motley bunch of fish tank inmates, Nemo plucks up his nerve and schemes with them for a way to foil their white-coated overseer and escape back to sea.

Stanton mines the tropes of the episodic adventure yarn and comes up with memorable sequences and characters at every turn. A fish tank has never felt so oppressive till seen through Nemo’s eyes, and it’s certainly never been the setpiece for a daring jailbreak till its hatched by the cunning, resourceful Gill (Willem Dafoe). Likewise, Marlin and Dory’s run-in with a trio of sharks at a Fish-eaters Anonymous meeting, their precipitous jam inside a whale’s mouth, and their encounter with a colony of sea turtles migrating through a winding, twisting oceanic current are among the delights that keep us rooting.

“Finding Nemo” is a flat-out visual marvel and an inspired summertime entertainment. Best of all, it secures Pixar’s place as perhaps the greatest and most ambitious animation studio since it mouse-eared distributor was in its heyday.

Grade: A

Directed by: Andrew Stanton
Written by: Andrew Stanton, Bob Peterson, David Reynolds
Cast: Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, Alexander Gould, Willem Dafoe, Brad Garrett, Allison Janney, Geoffrey Rush, Andrew Stanton, Eric Bana

Throughout his career, Gondry has mined the trove of his own dreams and childhood memories. Nothing quite makes sense in Gondry’s world but, in that secret language of dream-logic, in which sound and image mingle like the synaptic phantasmagoria of deep sleep, his cinema can be downright revelatory as you’re experiencing it.

Dream-logic lies at the heart of “Eternal Sunshine,” a romantic comedy that questions what it would be like if we could eliminate our worst, most troubling memories. Joel and Clementine’s relationship was littered with them. So, it’s no surprise that, when they break-up, Clementine (Kate Winslet), a hippy-trippy party girl, decides to erase her memories of shy loner Joel (Jim Carrey), using a memory-erasure process invented by a charlatan-neuroscientist, Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson). When Joel finds out, he decides to follow suit, if only to spite the impetuous Clementine. Assisted by a pair of feckless technicians, Stan and Patrick (Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood), Mierzwiak places what looks like a souped-up colander on Joel’s head and, with his subject in deep sleep, sets out to slash-and-burn all traces of his Clementine memories.

But, about halfway through his “erasure,” Joel realizes just how much he loves his memories and decides to go AWOL. What follows is a most unusual chase picture as Joel, with Clementine in hand, flees across the far-flung regions of his mindscape, as Mierzwiak tries desperately to track him down, mercenary-like. As Joel and Clementine encounter figments of his darkest memories, she helps him to make peace with them, and, as they re-live the rosiest days of their courtship, they brace against the inevitable destruction at the hands of the memory-erasers soon to come.

Kaufman’s script also interweaves Mierzwiak’s own woes with Mary (Kirsten Dunst), his lovestruck office assistant. She’d rather be musing over Alexander Pope quotations with the good doctor than getting naked and stoned with her boyfriend, Stan. What’s more, Patrick, privy to Clementine’s past, finds himself smitten with her and, cribbing from Joel’s notes, he clumsily woos her with his schoolboy wiles.

If anything, Gondry could have pared Kaufman’s script to its essence—Joel’s odyssey—and used its taut frame to develop his abundance of visual ideas. Gondry’s kinetic style, along with Kaufman’s crammed script, overwhelms its otherwise pitch-perfect cast. Carrey and Winslet are terrific, but their wonderfully moody scenes together seem needled by the material’s frantic demands, as if Gondry is constantly jabbing at them with his restless, anxious camera. Still, “Eternal Sunshine” is undeniably ambitious filmmaking and a feather in this year’s cap of indie movies. Its message that, try as we might, we’re forever stuck with the very people who drive us crazy can be read as Kaufman-esque in its cynicism, but I’m too won over by Gondry’s sunshine to be anything but delighted by it.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Michel Gondry
Written by: Charlie Kaufman
Cast: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo, Jane Adams, David Cross, Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson

Revenge is the name of the game as Bazil (Dany Boon), sweet and somewhat dopey (a common character trait in this director’s cinema), goes after the weapons manufacturers responsible for his father’s death in a landmine accident long ago, and, now, for his near-fatal wounding from a bullet made at one of their factories. Bazil enlists the help of a quirky and talented band of social outcasts, who go by such names like Slammer (Jean-Pierre Marielle), a cheerfully grizzled prison veteran; Remington (Omar Sy), a towering, garrulous African prone to verbal clichés and “I Spy” histrionics; Buster (Dominique Pinon), a world-famous human cannonball; Calculator (Marie-Julie Baup) and Elastic Girl (Julie Ferrier), both of whose talents are obvious.

By day, the misfits scavenge for junk that they cleverly and resourcefully transform into wonderful, magical knick knacks, and, by night, they share a comfy camaraderie over meals cooked up by their feisty matriarch (Yolande Moreau) in a ramshackle version of what the movie’s press notes aptly call their “Ali Baba’s Cave.” Jeunet and co-writer Guillaume Laurant find entertaining ways to develop the group’s chemistry as Bazil orchestrates elaborate measures to get back at the nasty, rival war profiteers (Andre Dussollier and Nicolas Marié), both drawn as amusingly cutthroat baddies. By shaping his film in the spirit of a convoluted heist flick (think Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s 11”), Jeunet both sustains our interest as “Micmacs” becomes a series of comic traps and stunts, and creates a spunky dynamic among Bazil’s comrades as each brings his or her special skills to bear on the high jinks.

Bazil’s big plan is to play the profiteers against each other as each tries to negotiate an arms deal with African warlords. Eventually, the “Micmacs” gang gums up the deal, and make the profiteers’ lives increasingly paranoid and miserable. The convolutions of the plot are really beside the point as the main attraction here is the Rube Goldberg plot mechanics, held together by Jeunet’s pacing and spirited style, along with a game cast in which every member – while not exactly a fully rounded creation – feels like a nicely delineated cog in “Micmacs’” wheel.
In its smoothest moments, Jeunet’s set pieces have the feel of Tati and, as the well-meaning hero, Boon has a pleasing facility of physical comedy that would be right at home in Monsieur Hulot’s world.

Don’t scrutinize the revenge storyline too closely, though, because it’s all but perfunctory. Bazil’s determination to teach the war mongers a lesson gives impetus to the plot, but, because everything here is played for laughs, Jeunet’s characters are too broad for us to take any of them seriously, including the villains. That’s why the movie’s last-act bit of activist outrage, as characters hold up photographs of war victims for the profiteers to see, feels so disingenuous, if not downright inappropriate. Still, there’s a soul to “Micmacs,” and it lies in the moments in between all the plotting, when its characters get to share their personalities, yearnings, and heartaches, and where Jeunet gets to redeem himself.

Grade: B

Directed by: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Written by: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Guillaume Laurant
Cast: Dany Boon, André Dussollier, Omar Sy, Dominique Pinon, Julie Ferrier, Nicolas Marié, Marie-Julie Baup, Michel Crémadès, Yolande Moreau, Jean-Pierre Marielle

After being released from the San Francisco police force for being impetuous and resistant to training, the loveable loose-cannon Diggs (James Marsden) is recruited by the gruff, seasoned Butch (Nick Nolte), an agent from a global, doggie-spy network. Their mission is to track down the sinister, titular villainess – a hairless, sinewy feline, and a former agent herself who harbors bitterness towards both cats and dogs for a past injury and humiliating exit from the feline spy agency, MEOWS. Kitty Galore has concocted a plan to transmit, via a global satellite, a signal that’ll drive the world’s dogs insane. To get the job done, the dogs do the unthinkable: They team up with their arch-nemeses, the cats, represented here by Catherine (Christina Applegate), a MEOWS agent.

Voiced by Bette Midler, Kitty Galore’s voice and mannerisms are unmistakably patterned after Gloria Swanson’s delusional Norma Desmond from Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Blvd.” Midler does a canny job of mimicking Desmond’s flamboyant, half-crazed theatrics. Similarly amusing is ex-James Bond Roger Moore’s “appearance” as head of MEOWS, and Sean Hayes as Mr. Tinkles, a kitty version of Hannibal Lector, outfitted with muzzle and restraining harness. The Lector sequence itself, set inside a feline wing of Alcatraz, is a cheeky homage to “Silence of the Lambs.” It’s all cute enough (and completely over the heads of the movie’s target audience), yet insufficient given the uninspired jokes and antics that dominate the rest of the film.

Much of “Kitty Galore” is a connect-the-dots slog through spy-movie tropes as our threesome, together with the streetwise pigeon Seamus (Katt Williams), piece together the nature of Kitty’s plan and follow clues to her whereabouts. Every beat, chase and action sequence feels stale and perfunctory, from Diggs’ disgraceful ouster from the mission (cue third act!) to the rocket-propelled chases all trumped up in 3D. While the occasional movie-inspired riffs elicit sporadic chuckles, all that will keep kids and their parents hooked are the undeniably cute animals and the message of working together to achieve common goals. Otherwise, neither the plot nor the action nor most of the jokes offer the joy or delight to make “Kitty Galore” worth the trip to the multiplex. For parents and kids seeking a witty, inventive story featuring cute, collaborative animals, look instead to Disney’s original “101 Dalmatians,” the single best talking-animal adventure ever made.

Grade: D

Directed by: Brad Peyton
Written by: Ron J. Friedman, Steve Bencich, John Requa, Glenn Ficarra
Cast: James Marsden, Nick Nolte, Christina Applegate, Katt Williams, Bette Midler, Neil Patrick Harris, Sean Hayes, Wallace Shawn, Roger Moore, Joe Pantoliano, Michael Clarke Duncan, Chris O’Donnell