Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015) ***

If you have kids, then you are going to have to take them to the movies once in a while, and you could do a lot worse than “Shaun the Sheep Movie.” While it isn't exactly “Wall-E” level, this animated film is funny and cute, and it won't make you groan.

The “Shaun the Sheep” clay-mation TV show is a “Wallace & Gromit” spinoff, featuring the same style of stop-motion animation. It's been around on the BBC since 2007, chronicling the antics of a clueless farmer and his farm animals. There's the faithful dog, always trying to keep the barnyard orderly, a trio of villainous pigs, and of course, the herd of sheep. Shaun is the de facto leader of the herd due to his penchant for cooking up crazy schemes, usually aimed at getting a delicious treat or at getting back at those pigs for something. The cool thing about the show is that there is no dialogue. Everything is told via action, and at most the characters produce the occasional unintelligible grunt.

It turns out these characters hold up reasonably well to a full-length feature. In “Shaun the Sheep Movie,” the animals find themselves getting tired of their daily farm routine, so Shaun hatches a plan to get them a day off. When the scheme goes awry, the farmer winds up in the Big City with amnesia, and the animals have to navigate the concrete jungle to get him back home.

I won't lie. There where times when I got a little bored, but I was never downright disgusted by the movie. The one baby sheep is perhaps a bit cutesy, and there are a couple of fart jokes to keep the kids happy, but the movie never stoops to the level of kid-pandering that you get in, say, an “Alvin and the Chipmunks” movie. They never break out into a hip-hop dance number, as has become standard in most cartoons. Shaun the sheep is mostly delightful, with his sideways grin and double-thumbs-up. Also, I like the way the story is told without dialogue, like an old silent film. Do kids like it? Of course they do. They like everything.

3 stars out of 5

While We're Young (2014) ***1/2

Josh (Ben Stiller) is a documentary filmmaker with a great debut who has now spent the last 10 years working on a second documentary that is going nowhere. He and his wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) are a couple of mostly happy New Yorkers in their mid-forties. They have some regrets about being childless, but as they watch their friends deal with a new baby, they congratulate themselves on how free they still are, although truth be told, they live a pretty routine life.

Then Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried) enter their lives. Josh meets the young couple while giving a lecture on film-making. Jamie is an aspiring documentarian and a fan of Josh's one film. Jamie and Darby are classic Hipsters, modern-day Bohemians who live with a hot roommate and a chicken, collect vinyl records, and hike the empty subway tracks at night. Everything about them seems to scream freedom and spontaneity, and their life is very seductive to Josh and Cornelia. As the friendship progresses, Josh starts to help Jamie with his own documentary. Soon, however, it becomes apparent that much of Jamie's charm is a facade, and he is all about using Josh's connections to further his own career.

Despite a strong performance from Adam Driver, the Jamie storyline ends up being a weak point in “While We're Young.” I did like how it deconstructs the way every generation has to try to re-invent life but mostly ends up doing all the things they despised their elders for doing. Jamie tells Josh, “Hey man, success is YOUR thing.”, but Jamie ends up being willing to do just about anything to achieve success. In a poignant summation of this storyline, Darby says, “Jamie and I would always wonder about how we would grow old. It turns out we'll do it just like everybody else.” This plot-line is uneven, however, and writer/director Noah Baumbach does not wrap it up very well.

The much stronger theme in this film is about what it's like to be in your mid-forties. By definition, that is “middle-aged,” but that term has connotations of over-and-done-ness that clearly do not apply to Josh and Cornelia. They are both good-looking and healthy. Sure, they get a few more aches and pains than they once did, but the life-style ossification they suffer is based purely on perception. Josh says, “I'm 44 years old, and there are things I will never do, things I will never have. What's the opposite of 'The world is my oyster?'” While their friendship with Jamie and Darby ends up being a disappointment, it helps break loose their rusty parts and shows them they can still start something new. The title, “While We're Young” ends up being very appropriate, as their flirtation with younger people helps Josh and Cornelia see that they still have a lot of life left in them.

3.5 stars out of 5

Wild Tales (Relatos Salvajes, 2014) ***1/2

Six short stories, all centered on the theme of revenge, make up this Spanish-language film from Argentina. Better translated as “Savage Tales,” the stand-alone short films are written and directed by Damian Szifron.

“Pasternak” is the tale of a plane full of travelers who discover, to their rising horror, that they share something in common. “Las Ratas” (The Rats) tells the story of a waitress who is presented with the long-hoped-for opportunity for revenge. “El Mas Fuerte” (The Strongest) is about road-rage that escalates out of control. “Bombita” (Little Bomb), starring Ricardo Darin (“The Aura”, “Nine Queens”) is about an explosives engineer with a short fuse who gets fed up with his city's parking enforcement. In “La Propuesta” (The Proposal), a rich kid commits a hit-and-run vehicular homicide, and his parents try to pay someone to take the blame. In the final tale, “Hasta que la Muerte Nos Separe” (Til Death Do Us Part), a bride discovers, during her wedding, her new husband's infidelity, and she wreaks a revenge as dramatic as it is hilarious.

I was highly anticipating this award-winning film, and for the most part I was not disappointed. The stories explore revenge from a variety of angles, with sometimes unpredictable results. They don't always follow the standard Hollywood message about revenge being a futile and destructive enterprise. Some of these characters actually enjoy their payback. The film is, perhaps, a bit uneven. The black humor sometimes just turns black, and the characters in “El Mas Fuerte” and “La Propuesta” are so uniformly unlikeable that those stories are a bit harder to watch. “Bombita,” on the other hand, is a beautiful morality tale that boldly subverts its own premise. The best of the bunch is the finale, “Hasta que la Muerte Nos Separe”. The bride's transformation from heartbroken princess to wild-eyed, wanton Fury is delightful and hilarious.

Montage films like this often link all the stories in some way, sometimes getting a little too cute with it. I like that Damian Szifron didn't do that. Other than the common theme of revenge, the stories here truly stand alone, yet they go quite well together. I had lately been in a drought when it comes to Spanish-language films, and “Wild Tales” was just what I needed.

3.5 stars out of 5

All is Lost (2013) **** -Spoilers-

This is one that I put off watching for a long time because it sounded pretty grim. It was billed as a story of a lone sailor battling the elements and, based on the title, presumably losing. So I'm going to break my usual rule against spoilers by saying that all is not necessarily lost. The sailor gets rescued at the end, although it's possible to interpret the ending as a dying hallucination, maybe even a metaphor for entering the afterlife. Director J.C. Chandor has said that audiences are split roughly 50-50 in terms of which interpretation they choose. He seems perfectly satisfied with this ambiguity. I found it thought-provoking, but I think some viewers may feel cheated by an ambiguous ending, which is why I am giving you fair warning.

Robert Redford plays the sailor, a grizzled but fit old guy sailing alone in the Indian Ocean. The story begins with an accident. The sailor wakes up to the sound of a crash, followed by water gushing into his cabin. Out in the middle of nowhere, where he should have been perfectly safe, his boat has crashed into one of those metal shipping containers, which must have fallen off a cargo ship at some point. There shouldn't be anything in this section of ocean, but there this container is, gouging a hole in his boat.

Our sailor sets to work dealing with the situation, getting his boat separated from the container, then working to patch the hole, pump out the water, and dry out all his damaged electronics. With no radio or navigation equipment, however, he wanders into the path of a massive storm, which ultimately damages his boat again. He never gives up, but despite his best efforts, the situation continues to worsen.

Robert Redford is the only actor in the movie, and he hardly uses his voice at all. I always thought it must be hard for actors to memorize all those lines, but I think what Redford does here is much harder, conveying everything through facial expression and body language.

“All is Lost” deserves the prize for Most Existentialist Film of 2013. The point of the film is summed up in a letter the sailor composes for his family, where he says, “I want you all to know that I fought until the end, if that matters.” No matter how dire things get, how bad the storm, he keeps trying, and he even takes a moment to appreciate the beauty around him. It may not matter how you interpret the ending, because the point is not the end, but how he comports himself along the way. The important thing is not how he dies, but how he lived, because even if the sea doesn't take him, something eventually will, and the fact is we all have a shipping container waiting for us out there.

4 stars out of 5

Life Itself (2014) ****

How do you write about a movie about a guy whose life was spent writing about movies? In this case, you do it with gratitude for a film that beautifully and sometimes heartbreakingly celebrates one of America's most beloved writers. “Life Itself,” based on film critic Roger Ebert's memoir of the same name, is Ebert's life story, focusing on his career as a film critic and on his end-of-life struggle with throat cancer. Given that Ebert essentially wrote it, this is an impressively warts-and-all biopic. The audience is not spared Ebert's history of alcoholism, his legendary petulance with his frenemy Gene Siskel, nor the gruesome facial disfigurement of his cancer surgeries.

Almost everyone is familiar with Roger Ebert's name, but if you have never read his movie reviews, you should do yourself a favor and check out his website. (www.rogerebert.com) Ebert once said that “movies are a machine for generating empathy.” By this he referred to the process of sharing human stories, of seeing not just the consequences of characters' actions, but also their struggles and motivations, of seeing the humanity of the villain and the frailty of the hero. A good movie doesn't just lull us with sex and violence, it helps give us the language to understand ourselves and each other; it generates empathy. All art is designed to do this, but I think film may be the most accessible to the masses of people, and thus it has the greatest overall potential to increase the amount of empathy in the world.

Ebert certainly believed this, and thus his writing, while always intelligent and literate, was essentially populist. He didn't talk down to his readers, but he wrote with an understanding that the movies and his reviews of them were available to a wide audience, and he attempted to consider the tastes of his entire audience in his reviews. “Life Itself” shows a clip from “Sneak Previews” in which Siskel and Ebert argue about the movie “Benji the Hunted.” Siskel hated the trite movie, but Ebert defended it, pointing out that it was aimed at children and should be evaluated in that light. That belief informed all of his reviews.

At a full two hours, “Life Itself” may be just slightly longer than it needs to be, but I only wound up feeling restless at one point, and that quickly faded. Audiences should also be prepared to see the grim results of Mr. Ebert's throat surgeries, which finally left him without a lower jawbone and with no connection between his mouth and his throat. Despite that, his face is still surprisingly expressive, his eyes still sparkle, and his warmth still shines through.

If I came away from “Life Itself”with a warm, fuzzy feeling about Roger Ebert's life, it isn't because of all he accomplished as a film writer. It's owing to the dignity and optimism with which he and his family are shown facing his death. I suppose we should keep in mind that Ebert had some creative control here, so we are seeing him as he wanted to be seen. Nonetheless, having read his movie reviews for years, I know that the humor and empathy are real. Roger Ebert was a man who loved movies and loved people, and loved helping people enjoy movies.

4 stars out of 5

Lock, Stock,and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) **

There was a moment there at the turn of the century when director Guy Ritchie seemed poised to be the next Quentin Tarantino. He followed up his debut “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels” with the insanely fast-moving, generally enjoyable “Snatch.” Somehow, though, Ritchie never turned into a Tarantino-esque film-god. I think that the problem is that his movies never felt as consequential as what Tarantino was doing. There was lots of fast-paced action, with speeded-up film shots, and cockney accents that required subtitles, but there was no heart.

“Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels” is a good case in point. The movie has several story lines filled with potentially interesting characters whose stories wind up intersecting. Ritchie never does anything with these scamps, however, other than to establish that they are lowlifes engaged in ripping off other lowlifes. He never made me care enough about any of them to care much what happens in the story.

The main characters, the ones we are theoretically supposed to root for, include Tom (Jason Flemyng), Soap (Dexter Fletcher), Eddy (Nick Moran), and Bacon (Jason Statham). These are low-level scumbags who hawk stolen wares and such. Eddy fancies himself a card player as well, and the boys pool their funds to get Eddy into a high-stakes poker game run by a gangster named Hatchet Harry (P.H. Moriarty). The game is a racket, as any idiot should have known. Harry not only cheats, he bullies Eddy into accepting credit in order to call a hand, which Eddy goes on to lose. Owing Harry a quarter-million pounds, Eddy leaves the game in a daze, and explains to his friends that Harry and his goons will be holding all of them responsible for the debt.

There's no way these guys can scrape up that kind of money on either side of the law, but when they overhear their neighbors planning a robbery, they hatch a plan to rob the robbers. Hijinks ensue.

There are several different groups of hoodlums, who are hard to tell apart at times, and much of the dialogue is unintelligible due to the thick, Cockney accents. The movie could still be quite good, however, if any of the characters had any sort of saving grace, which they don't. They are not only wicked, they are stupid. Fortunately, many of these assholes wind up killing each other off, which is about the only satisfaction the audience gets.

The problem with “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels” as a debut for Guy Ritchie is that its failures are not due to low budget or cinematography. Those are weaknesses you would expect in a first-time director, and easily fixable on future projects. “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels,” however suffers from a lack of heart, which I think is why Ritchie never lived up to his hyped potential.

2 stars out of 5

Re-Animator (1985) ***

I'm not sure it's possible to adapt an H.P. Lovecraft story to film without making a cult classic. I mean that in the sense of both words: The movie is likely to become a classic, but only for a certain cult of horror fans. As good as Lovecraft's stories are, there's a single-mindedness to them, an innocence, and an of-their-time element that may not translate well to a blockbuster film. As much as I love stories like “The Call of Cthulhu” and “At the Mountains of Madness,” it's hard to imagine a bunch of big-name actors making a straight movie version of them. To make a good film out of these tales, the filmmaker needs to be able to smile sheepishly at the audience and say, “We all know these stories take themselves too seriously, but we love them anyway, so let's just have a good time.” The 2005 movie “The Call of Cthulhu,” for example was made as a silent film, which somehow takes the over-earnest elements of the story and makes them work quite well.

1985's “Re-Animator” works by reveling in its 1980s campiness. We meet Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), Miskatonic Medical School's “most promising medical student.” We never see Dan doing regular med student stuff like studying, sitting in lectures, or seeing patients with a big team of other students and medical residents. Instead, he has loads of time to wheel bodies down to the morgue and bang his girlfriend, Megan, who happens to be the Dean's daughter. Megan (Barbara Crampton) is '80s-hot, by which I mean she's adorable, but she wears high-waisted pants.

Dan gets a new roommate in the form of Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs), a medical student transferred in from Switzerland after his mentor died during a bizarre experiment. Herbert's secretive behavior vexes Dan and Megan until they discover, to their horror, that he is conducting experiments in re-animation. He has a green, glowing chemical that, when injected into the brainstem, can bring the dead back to life. The problem is that the re-animated being, whether a cat or a human, tends to be murderously insane. The answer, according to Herbert, is to find ever-fresher subjects. In Lovecraft's tale, this led the scientist to commit murder in order to have the freshest corpse possible, but the movie “Re-Animator” doesn't take it's protagonists down that road. They simply sneak into the morgue to experiment. Nonetheless, they run afoul of both Dean Halsey (Robert Sampson) and Professor Carl Hill (David Gale), who is jealous of Herbert's science and lusts after Dan's girlfriend.

“Re-Animator” looks like it was filmed on the same camera they used for the old “Incredible Hulk” series starring Bill Bixby, which means it looks dated even for 1985. Enough time has passed, however, that that cheesy, soft-focus look actually makes the film seem somewhat timeless. The movie doesn't have any of that knowing, 1990's snarkiness (think “Scream”). The actors play it straight, letting the plot and the decidedly non-CGI special effects provide the humor. With many cult-classic movies, it's hard to know what the filmmaker was thinking. Did they mean to make it campy, or is it a happy accident? With “Re-Animator,” it seems pretty clear the director, Stuart Gordon, followed the standard B-movie formula: throw in some titties, some gore, and some humor, and keep the overhead low. He just classed it up a bit by getting some decent actors.

My only complaint about “Re-Animator” is that it isn't really scary. It's gory, yes, but it neither startles nor instills dread. I seem to recall that “The Evil Dead” and “The Evil Dead 2”, similarly campy, low-budget gore-fests, managed to at least be startling. “Re-Animator” broadcasts every death well in advance, and there is never any doubt as to how the protagonists will react to a death. They're gonna get out that green stuff and start re-animating!

3 stars out of 5

Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) **

For years, the cable channel Cinemax has filled its late-night schedule with soft-porn offerings, inspiring the nickname “skinemax.” This is basically what you have in the “Fifty Shades of Grey” movie: a titty-flick, although with a bigger budget and probably better acting than most.

Dakota Johnson plays Anastasia Steele, a virginal college student studying English Lit and living in the social shadow of her vivacious, blond roommate. When the roommate is too sick to perform her journalism class interview with businessman Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), she dispatches Anastasia to ask the questions for her. Anastasia and Grey wind up hitting it off, bonding over the banality of questions like “What is the secret to your success?” and “Are you gay?” Soon, Anastasia is being wooed by the crisply-dressed billionaire, who reveals his taste for sexual sadism and offers her a contract detailing what her role would be like as his submissive sex-slave.

First of all, let's hear it for those names: Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey. I haven't heard such awesome character names since Brock Landers and Chest Hardwell, from the movie “Boogie Nights.” If you can keep a straight face when these two characters introduce themselves, that's a good sign that this is the movie for you. If you can't keep the chuckles in, well, you can enjoy laughing your way through the unintentionally hilarious scenes of this film while you wait for them to get around to the kinky sex. They definitely take their time getting to it, spending time on helicopter and glider rides, and dragging out the nonsense about the contract forever. Once sexy-time finally arrives, the soft-core action is fairly good. Don't be expecting full-frontal nudity, but Anastasia spends a fair amount of time with her arms stretched over her head, wearing nothing but her panties, getting smacked with a riding crop.

The worst part about “Fifty Shades of Grey” (besides the self-loathing you will feel for watching it) is Jamie Dornan's acting. Dakota Johnson actually puts out some effort, and makes her character somewhat interesting despite the lame lines she has to recite. Dornan, on the other hand, plays Grey with absolutely zero personality, gazing at Anastasia with dead, shark eyes as he presents his contract to her like he's selling an insurance policy.

So should you rent “Fifty Shades of Grey?” Why not? It probably won't be the most miserable thing you do this week. Just know what you are signing up for: 30 minutes of soft-porn plus an hour and a half of laughable filler.

2 stars out of 5

The Imitation Game (2014) ***

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, the mathematics professor and electronics whiz who helped England crack Germany's Enigma code during WWII. “The Imitation Game” tells the story of how Turing and his team cracked the code. Jumping back and forth in time, the film also shows how Turing became interested in code-breaking as a nerdy, semi-autistic teen, and how in his later years he was convicted of indecency for being gay.

The story of Turing's persecution is certainly sad, but the movie is not a downer. I found “The Imitation Game” to be thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish. This is partly because Benedict Cumberbatch is such a compelling actor that it is simply impossible not to watch him. He gets assists here from an excellent supporting cast, including Keira Knightley as a fellow code-breaker, Charles Dance (Tywin Lannister on “Game of Thrones”) as the commanding officer, and Mark Strong as a shifty MI6 agent.

The code-breaking part of the story is exciting, with Turing's machine clicking and whirring, but the film doesn't do a good job of explaining the machine and how it works. Also, the brilliant insight that finally allows them to crack the code seems patently obvious, the kind of thing that any code-breaker would think of from the start. More interesting to me is that after the code is cracked, MI6 (England's intelligence service) puts the team to work using statistics to guide them in how to use all those de-coded messages. They can't simply start thwarting every German attack, of course, or the Nazis would quickly figure out that Enigma had been compromised. MI6 also uses the existence of a Soviet spy in the service to leak carefully chosen information to the Russians when it serves England's purposes. I found these insights into the layered intricacies of intelligence work fascinating, and wish they had explored them more.

Ultimately, “The Imitation Game” is a nicely-done, enjoyable film, but it does require you to turn your brain off a little, which is surprising given that it is about brilliant people doing brilliant things. Somehow all the mathematics doesn't translate onto the screen, and we are left with a movie about personalities. I get the feeling Turing would not have approved.

3 stars out of 5

9 to 5 (1980) ***

This is another of those cultural touchstone movies that I somehow failed to see back in the day. Thirty-five years later, I finally gave it a watch, and I have to say that it's pretty good. It's fairly predictable, and the humor is broad, but writer/director Collin Higgins (“Harold and Maude”) gives the movie something that makes it stand out from the other silly comedies of its time.

In the very first scene, “9 to 5” let's you know that it intends to be more than just a dumb comedy. Rather than immediately introducing the stars, Higgins shows a montage of a variety of women hustling through the streets of New York to get to their jobs. I found that poignant, like he was dedicating the film to all working women.

Then we meet Violet, a low-level supervisor at the Consolidated Company. She is smart and competent, but she can't break through the glass ceiling at Consolidated, because the men she trains keep getting promoted ahead of her. This includes Franklin Hart (Dabney Coleman), an egotistical, sexist jerk who takes credit for Violet's good ideas and sexually harasses his secretary, Doralee (Dolly Parton). Jane Fonda plays Judy, a recent divorcee new to the workforce. These women bear, as best they can, the indignities of working under Hart, but they share with each other their fantasies of doing him in. When one of these fantasies comes true, things get wacky.

“9 to 5” succeeds because it has a genuine social message packaged as comedy. The film got its start as a project of Jane Fonda's production company. The movie was originally to be a drama, but Fonda and her team found it too preachy, so they switched gears to comedy. The humor lightens up the mood surrounding serious issue like sexual harassment and equal pay for women. The movie gets in some biting satire, as when Doralee fantasizes about forcing Hart to endure the constant pawing and innuendo that he subjects her to. There's nothing like a little role reversal to show how messed-up a situation is.

The years have lent some bitter irony to this film. Violet manages to get a policy of equal pay for equal work instituted. The male executives mutter to themselves that that is a step too far and that they will have to reverse the policy. The joke was simple satire in 1980, but I'll bet the filmmakers didn't think that this would still be an issue 35 years later.

3 stars out of 5