SNAILED IT

Opening this weekend:

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On--The title character is a teeny-tiny, rather generic-looking seashell with a single googly eye in his aperture and a tiny pair of shoes attached to his underside. He lives in a sunny AirBnB with his "Nan," a slightly larger shell named Connie, and the two of them devise ingenious ways to eke out a subsistence.

Once they were part of a larger community of other anthropomorphic random tidbits--other shells, cheese curls, Chex mix, pencil stubs. But lately they've been on their own, and supportive as Connie is, Marcel feels the loss of society keenly. Even Marcel's pet--a miniscule bit of lint named Alan that he leads around on a leash--doesn't make up for it.

The conceit is that we're seeing a documentary in which the director, Dean Fleischer-Camp, interviews and bonds with Marcel, and eventually helps him try to find the old gang, a process which involves Marcel and Connie's favorite TV star, Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes. Marcel's piping, guileless yet keenly perceptive voice is provided by Jenny Slate, and Isabella Rossellini voices the firmly loving Connie.

Somewhere, I suppose, there's a critic working up a venomous pan of this animated feature, based on the viral 2010 online short and its sequels. But I'm not that critic. The movie has a paradisal atmosphere and is very, very funny, with sprightly timing of its visual gags and surprising verbal interplay, much of it probably improvised, between Slate and Fleischer-Camp (formerly Slate's significant other in real life). Yet from the start there's a hint of bittersweet melancholy to it as well, underscored by passages from Philip Larkin to "Peaceful, Easy Feeling."

Thor: Love and Thunder--Embodied once again by the jovial Chris Hemsworth, Marvel's version of the Norse deity must make a big personal adjustment in this latest adventure. The thunder god's beloved hammer Mjolnir, which formerly only he could wield, is now responding to his ex-girlfriend Jane Foster (Natalie Portman). Thor is now in a relationship with a perfectly nice battle axe, Stormbreaker, but he can't forget his old hammer, and the sight of his ex effortlessly swinging it takes some getting used to.

Thor and Jane, along with their pals Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) and rock man Korg (director/co-writer Taika Waititi), must here work together to rescue a group of children abducted from New Asgard, a rather bougie beach town and tourist destination, into dark dimensions. The kidnapper is Gorr the God-Butcher (Christian Bale), a rasping, chalky-skinned, spectral figure whose religious disillusionment early on has led to his desire to, you know, butcher all the gods. Thor's appeal to Zeus (Russell Crowe) for help reveals a distinct lack of cross-cultural amity in the Olympian, who comes across like a tacky billionaire showman of the new school.

As in 2017's delightful Thor: Ragnarok, Waititi plays this material for goofy laughs; there are cosmic gags here worthy of Melies. It's very silly, but unlike Ragnarok, it isn't only silliness. Bale's Gorr is genuinely creepy, and the scenes in which the characters are faced with loss and love are emotionally substantive. Love and Thunder has an airbrushed-van rock-n-roll sensibility that Waititi doesn't mock; borderline-campy as the movie is, its use of "Sweet Child of Mine" can bring a tear to the eye.