SUTURE SELF

Check out my reviews of Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride!...

...and the Disney/Pixar animated feature Hoppers...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

MUST BE THE SEASON OF THE SWITCH

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

Freakier Friday--Any movie with Jamie Lee Curtis has something going for it right off. Freakier Friday is no exception. Curtis is exuberantly unafraid of looking silly, and this Disney sequel to their 2003 version of the Mary Rodgers novel Freaky Friday gives her plenty of opportunity. Intrepidly mugging and pratfalling in age-inappropriate costumes, Curtis helps the movie, certainly, but not enough to save it.

The 1972 novel, oft-remade for movies and TV since the 1976 version featuring Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster, is one of the many, many stories, possibly starting with F. Anstey's Vice Versa (1882), in which a youth exchanges bodies with an older person. It's a common fantasy for kids, and not uncommon for adults too, even though the ostensible point of such yarns is usually that being any age comes with hassles and stresses that aren't easily seen from other ages.

Back in 2003 Tess (Curtis) and her daughter Anna (Lindsay Lohan) accidentally found themselves in each other's bodies. In this version, the grown up Anna has a surf-loving teen daughter of her own, Harper (Julia Butters), as well as a fiancé, Eric (Manny Jacinto) whose fashionista Brit daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons) doesn't get along with Harper.

After an encounter with a wacky palm-reader (Vanessa Bayer, who's pretty funny) all four of them switch places; Tess with Lily and Anna with Harper. In this decidedly freakier situation, the stepsisters-to-be, in their hijacked adult bods, call a truce and try to sabotage Anna and Eric's impending wedding, while Tess and Anna try to navigate teen life.

The movie feels well-intentioned, in the vague, general Disney manner, and the four leads are all appealing. The trouble is that their characters here aren't really distinct enough from each another to keep straight when they switch, and the actors don't make more than a half-hearted effort to recreate each other's accents and mannerisms. Combined with the frenetic, hyper-edited approach of director Nisha Ganatra, it leaves Freakier Friday's twisty complications mostly chaotic and confusing rather than hilarious.

MANSE MACABRE

Opening this weekend:

Haunted Mansion--Bereaved, bitter and a staunch nonbeliever in ghosts: These are perhaps not the optimum character traits for a tour guide of supposedly haunted houses in New Orleans. But before Ben (LaKeith Stanfield) unhappily landed in that job, he was a scientist who invented a camera intended to detect ghostly presences.

Thus Ben is drawn into a team of paranormal misfits, along with shady exorcist Father Kent (Owen Wilson), shady medium Harriet (Tiffany Haddish) and Bruce (Danny DeVito), a rumpled history professor, to help a young single mother (Rosario Dawson) and her son (Chase W. Dillon) who have moved into the title Louisiana domicile. The place isn't just a little bit haunted; this mansion is teeming with nearly a thousand unquiet spirits, tyrannically presided over by the "Hatbox Ghost" (Jared Leto).

After my visit in 1972, if you had asked my ten-year-old self which was my favorite ride at Disney World in Florida, I would probably have told you that it was the Nautilus submarine ride from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (long since retired). But the close second place would have gone to The Haunted Mansion, on which this extravagant Disney feature is based. I vividly remember riding past the mirrors and seeing a greenish spectral figure sitting between me and my sister in the car. The movie brought back other flourishes from the ride: the talking busts, the stretching portraits, the dueling ghosts.

There was an earlier film based on the ride in 2003, The Haunted Mansion (the new version's title dispenses with the definite article), starring Eddie Murphy. The current movie, directed by Justin Simien from a script by Katie Dippold, seems better to me than that forgettable effort, but unfortunately only a little better. Simien and Dippold and the actors try for a little depth of feeling along with the comedy, but the film feels poky and unfocused, and doesn't pick up much momentum until the reasonably exciting last twenty minutes or so.

Still, it's a good-hearted movie, with an engaging cast. Stanfield, chillingly haunted in Get Out, makes a sympathetic leading man here. Haddish's hoarse, hammy inflections as the soothsayer are funny, as are DeVito's blunt line readings as the prof; Dawson and young Dillon are pleasant as the hapless householders. As Madame Leota, the disembodied head in the crystal ball, Jamie Lee Curtis proves, if you'll pardon me saying so, spirited.

Mild as this Haunted Mansion is--I can't imagine it being truly scary to any but the littlest moviegoers--I was a bit startled, and amused, by its subtext. When we finally get some backstory on the Hatbox Ghost, there are striking paralells to another power-hungry figure who stubbornly refuses to depart from the contemporary American psyche. It could be that our nation's most perniciously haunted mansion these days is Mar-A-Lago.

ONE THAT GOT AWAY

Opening this weekend...

The Little Mermaid--It may be hard for younger people to understand what a big deal the original Little Mermaid was back in 1989. Disney is now so monolithic that it may be difficult to grasp the degree to which the firm, while still tops in the theme-park world, had become something of a lazy backwater in movie terms in the '80s. Animated features like The Black Cauldron and The Great Mouse Detective and Oliver & Company were profitable enough, but they weren't pop-culture landmarks that characterized childhood for a couple of generations.

With The Little Mermaid, one could immediately sense a sea change (sorry). Later animated Disney flicks like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King became more beloved, perhaps, but that adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen tale set the trend, and the template. When title character Ariel looked toward the surface, opened her mouth and warbled, in the voice of Jodi Benson, that she wanted to be where the people were, she redefined what the word "princess" meant in our culture, and reshaped children's entertainment.

The key, of course, was the musical form. Earlier Disney flicks had songs, some of them classics, but The Little Mermaid was a true musical comedy. The tunes, by composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman, were charmingly playful, but they also channeled adolescent longing into their fantasy situations. Ashman, who died in 1991 before the release of Beauty and the Beast, didn't know what he started.

The songs are the best thing about the new Little Mermaid too. I hadn't heard Ashman and Menken's tunes in decades, but they shake the movie to life at once, and a couple of new numbers by Menken and Lin-Manuel Miranda, including a rap for Awkwafina as the seabird, are strong as well. Halle Bailey sings "Part of Your World" with an expressive warmth that deepens the lyrics, and she brings a lovely, openhearted wonder to the role that's hard to resist.

The calypso number "Under the Sea," performed here by Daveed Diggs, is a crowd-pleaser again, and Jonah Hauer-King, in the comparatively thankless role of the Prince, rousingly handles his solo tune "Wild Uncharted Waters" (by Menken and Miranda). Melissa McCarthy brings sly humor--but not too much camp--to Ursula the Sea Witch in "Poor Unfortunate Souls."

The film could have used more music, and less filler. This Little Mermaid's director is Rob Marshall of Chicago and Dreamgirls, and he shapes the numbers excitingly--with the help of the Alvin Ailey Foundation, in the case of "Under the Sea"--but he can't do much with the in-between stuff. And there's a lot of in-between stuff; the new movie runs well over two hours, while the '89 original clocked in at well under an hour and a half.

Most of the non-musical sequences are poky, even interminable. This is especially true of the dry-land scenes, shot on a beautiful Sardinian coastline and set in a Caribbean-tinged storybook alternate past that feels much more like an overpriced, ersatz resort. The underwater scenes, with their immersive fanciful glitz, play better, but even they dawdle.

I've avoided most of the "live-action" (though heavily CGI-enhanced) remakes of Disney animated films in recent years. I did see Jon Favreau's 2016 Jungle Book, which was okay, mostly because it didn't stick too slavishly to the '67 film. But the idea of re-doing Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King in slick but unconvincing live action seemed, beyond the obvious profit potential, gratuitous. Fine as the performers are, this Little Mermaid seems that way too.

A LIGHTYEAR IN THE LIFE

Opening this weekend:

Lightyear--At the beginning of this animated feature from Disney/Pixar we are informed that back in 1995, a little boy named Andy got a toy from his favorite movie. "This is that movie."

The reference, of course, is to Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story, the "Space Ranger," voiced in that film by Tim Allen, who competed for Andy's affections with Woody, the cowboy voiced by Tom Hanks. In this new feature Buzz, voiced here by Chris Evans, is the troubled hero of a far-flung sci-fi yarn. At the beginning Buzz, an intrepid hero in the Roger Ramjet vein, screws up while exploring a habitable but dangerous planet, with the result that a huge, radish-shaped spaceship full of scientists in suspended animation gets marooned there.

In trying to resume the space odyssey, Buzz makes repeated attempts to achieve "hyperspace," always falling short, and skipping ahead years each time. He keeps returning from these failed test flights to find a larger and more settled colony than he left, always seemingly less interested in leaving the planet; his fellow Space Ranger and best friend Alisha (Uzo Aduba) is also grayer and has moved on further with her life each time.

The movie has plenty of humor--the best of it, perhaps, from Buzz's deadpan, blandly capable robot cat Sox, voiced by Peter Sohn (Sox reminded me a little of Rags, Woody Allen's robot dog in Sleeper, though Sox proves far more useful). But Lightyear doesn't really have the tone of a comedy; it's surprisingly ambitious and surprisingly poignant. It's about the pain of living with our mistakes, and about the speed with which our lifetimes seem to get away from us.

Like so many of the Pixar films, it's an impressive, thematically complex piece of work. But despite a second act in which Buzz and his band of pals, voiced by the likes of Keke Palmer, Taika Waititi and Dale Soules, battle invading robots, this isn't a rollicking space opera, and it's a little hard to imagine it being Andy's favorite movie.

Culturally, what may be most significant about the film is that it includes a same-sex marriage, complete with a kiss. The significance isn't so much in the relationship itself, which is peripheral to the story, but rather in the splendidly matter-of-fact manner with which it comes across. Again, it belies the supposed conceit of the movie; it's hard to imagine the intensity of the reaction this element would have stirred up in 1995. But it's cheering to note how commonplace it seems today.

UPTON-LY MOBILE

Disney's animated masterpieces get rapturous acclaim; the studio's live-action movies get less love, and far less critical attention. While this is no doubt appropriate, Disney's live action flicks shouldn't be completely neglected. A few of them, like Old Yeller and Swiss Family Robinson and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Darby O'Gill and the Little People, qualify as classics, but even apart from these, Disney's adventures and slapstick comedies of the mid-20th Century, corny and sentimental and formulaic as many of them were, formed an important part of the early moviegoing experience for kids of the '50s, '60s and '70s. Including me.

But recently I caught up with a live-action Disney I managed to miss when it came out in 1967, and again when it was re-released in the '70s: The Gnome-Mobile. It was among the last productions worked on by Walt himself, who died before its release. It's pretty hokey and syrupy, with a bouncy, cringe-inducing theme song by the Sherman Brothers that can get stuck in your head. But it has a great roster of character actors, and an environmentalist message, and it raises some startling questions that left me, for a few weeks, with an interest in the film out of scale to its triviality.

The Gnome-Mobile is about a logging tycoon (Walter Brennan) who is driving his grandkids Elizabeth and Rodney (played by Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber, the kids from 1964's Mary Poppins) through a redwood forest in Northern California in his opulent 1930 Rolls Royce Phantom II Sedanca De Ville. They stop to have a picnic, and Elizabeth wanders off and meets a friendly young gnome named Jasper (Tom Lowell). She convinces Rodney and Gramps of Jasper's existence, and then they meet his crotchety 900-something-year-old gnome grandfather, Knobby (also played by Walter Brennan).

Jasper and Knobby are apparently the last of their kind, at least in that forest, and old Knobby has given up on life and is prepared to slip into the gnome Great Beyond. But Gramps and the kids whisk them off in the backseat of the Rolls, now designated "The Gnome-Mobile," in search of a forest with a gnome population, and in particular with some fetching and eligible young lady gnomes for Jasper to meet. Trouble arises in the form of the lumberman's conniving corporate crony (Richard Deacon), who questions the sanity of his boss, and also of a rotten showman (Sean McClory) who gnome-gnaps, and plans to exploit, the diminutive forest folk.

So it's a '60s-era Disney product; sometimes cute, sometimes treacly, maybe a little more eccentric than usual but more or less routine. Three time Oscar winner Brennan, most remembered for playing lovable cantankerous galoots in Westerns like Red River and Rio Bravo, is said to have asked, when offered any part, "With or without?" by which he meant would he play it with or without his dentures. With his dual role in The Gnome-Mobile, probably for the only time in his career, he had one of each kind in the same movie.

It was great to see the other vets in the cast, too, including Charles Lane, Jerome Cowan, Maudie Prickett, Byron Foulger, Ellen Corby, Frank Cady and the great Ed Wynn, whose final film this was.

Not long before I saw the movie, I had turned up the Gold Key comic tie-in...

...and my friend, who showed me the film, also showed me the toy Gnome-Mobile he got as a premium from Clover Club Potato Chips when he saw the movie back in the day...

...and still had in his collection. But even with all these connections, the movie probably wouldn't have rated more than a passing mention, if it hadn't been for its source.

Upton Sinclair.

That's right, The Gnome-Mobile is based on a 1936 book called The Gnomobile by Upton Sinclair, prolific muckraking socialist author remembered for his 1906 novel The Jungle, which blew the lid off conditions in the Chicago meatpacking industry, and for dozens of other vigorously leftist works, both fiction and nonfiction (Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood was very loosely based on Sinclair's 1926 novel Oil!). In the 1920s he was a Socialist candidate for Congress from California, and three times a candidate for Governor of that state, twice as a Socialist and then, in 1934, as a Democrat (all of these campaigns were unsuccessful).

The Gnomobile is Sinclair in a lighter vein, obviously; it was written for his granddaughter Elizabeth, and he subtitles it "A Gnice Gnew Gnarrative With Gnonsense, but Gnothing Gnaughty." Still, I had to wonder how the two Walts--Disney, a staunch Republican, and Brennan, who is said to have been such a rabidly reactionary John Birch-style right-winger that he was gleeful when he heard of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and thought that the Watts riots should have been handled with a machine gun--felt about bringing lefty environmentalist propaganda to the screen.

So I read Sinclair's Gnomobile. It's available on Kindle, but I also obtained a 1966 paperback reprint from Tempo Books, a tie-in to the Disney movie...

This edition seems to have been slightly revised (maybe by Sinclair himself?), to avoid datedness, from the 1936 text on which the Kindle edition appears to be based; some references to "Shirley Temple" are replaced with "Jacqueline Kennedy," for instance. And the original dedication, to Sinclair's granddaughter, is changed in the reprint to "FOR ALL WHO LOVE AND PROTECT OUR FORESTS."

The story of The Gnomobile is different from that of Disney's The Gnome-Mobile in several respects. The tycoon is a minor background figure in the book; Rodney is here Elizabeth's whimsical, poetry-minded older uncle, not her brother, and it's he who drives her and the gnomes in the title vehicle. And the names of the gnomes are not Jasper and Knobby but "Bobo and Glogo"; in this, at least, the Disney version may have been an improvement.

On the whole, however, the book has a distinctive flavor that is homogenized out of the movie. Sinclair's tone has that self-consciously jocular quality which authors who normally write for adults sometimes adopt when they try their hand at writing for children. But it also has an unpredictability, an endearing sweetness, and moments of effectively deadpan humor. And Sinclair's descriptions of the various forests our heroes explore (they wander much farther than they do in the movie) have a lovely reverence.

It would be interesting to know how much Disney knew about this source material. Probably it's naive of me to imagine that the lefty tendencies of the author would have especially upset the producer; it may be, indeed, that moguls like Disney, if they thought about it at all, regarded this sort of adaptation as the most expeditious method to handle spiky material: Buy it and neutralize it into inoffensive insipidity.

This was, essentially, the process we saw dramatized in Saving Mr. Banks, where Walt and the boys do to Mary Poppins almost exactly what P. L. Travers fears they will. But that movie presented it as a positive, even redemptive experience for Travers. I wondered at the time if Travers really felt that way, and I likewise wonder if Sinclair, who died in 1968 at the age of 90, saw The Gnome-Mobile, and what he thought of it if he did.

One last note: Turns out the Rolls used in the movie now resides in the Gilmore Car Museum in Hickory Bluffs, Michigan, along with the oversized backseat set. Anyone up for a road trip?

EXTRA! (ORDINARY!) READ ALL ABOUT IT...

Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of the delightful Irish horror comedy Extra Ordinary...

...of Greed (not Von Stroheim's masterpiece but a satire starring Steve Coogan)...

...and Disney-Pixar's Onward...

AUGUST OCCASION

Happy August everybody! Check out this month's issue of Phoenix Magazine...

 
...now on the stand, for my "Four Corners" column on some newish Valley eateries. It's also this year's "Best of the Valley" issue, and several of those entries were penned by me.

And if all that isn't a potent enough dose of Your Ever-Humble Narrator, check out my reviews of McQueen and Christopher Robin.

FEELING A LITTLE WOOZLE

With Disney's Christopher Robin opening this weekend...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...our honoree is the ever-elusive Woozle...

 
...from the 1968 short Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day.

A NEW WRINKLE

Opening this week:

A Wrinkle in Time—14-year-old Storm Reid plays heroine Meg Murray in this first big-screen adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's much-loved novel of 1962. She brings the role a sober, guarded manner that is very touching. Meg's father (Chris Pine), a scientist who was working on a method of instantaneous time/space travel called a "tesseract," disappeared a few years earlier, and Meg's thick glasses and mop of curls can't hide her pain and anger at the loss, or her worry about its implications for her family. They can't hide her intelligence, either.

Young Reid is impressive; unfortunately she's the best thing about the movie. I read and liked the book as a kid, though it wasn't the knockout for me that it was for many readers of my generation. The makers of this version, however, seem to have missed the book's charming originality: It's an epic sci-fi tale told in the prosaic manner of a rural-Connecticut adolescent coming-of-age story, with a strong undercurrent of liberal-ecumenical Christianity (L'Engle was a devout Episcopalian). In its less ambitious way, it prefigures the Harry Potter books, with their inspired blend of high fantasy and school story.

The difference in the approach of director Ava DuVernay and the screenwriters, Jennifer Lee and John Stockwell, shows up nowhere more plainly than in the characterizations of the dotty Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), the quotation-spouting Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling) and the lofty Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey), who take Meg, her prodigal little brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), and her school friend Calvin (Levi Miller) on an odyssey to distant worlds in search of the missing dad. In the book, the three strange, kindly ladies are venerable old bats.

In the film, they are glitzed-out in costumes and makeup that seem more appropriate to a Mardi Gras parade float, or maybe a Bette Midler back-up singer from the '70s. All three are formidable actresses, of course, and Kaling, in the most enigmatic role, makes good use of her sly, knowing smile. But on the whole, as New Age angels, the trio feels ersatz and unconvincing and simply way too young.

This feel extends to the production as a whole. Backed by a bottomless Disney budget, this Wrinkle in Time turns into a typical blockbuster effect spectacle. There are times when this generates some magic, as when Mrs. Whatsit takes the kids on an aerial tour of a paradisiacal planet. But at least as often, the story gets lost or disjointed in all that CGI, and the pace curdles.

The movie has its vivid moments, particularly in the visit to Camazotz, a world of conformity where the inhabitants are in thrall to IT (here called, for some reason, "The IT."), a sinister alien entity. There's a sunlit spookiness to the scene in which our heroes pass through a cul-de-sac of stucco houses, which looks startlingly like a subdivision in west Phoenix, and see children bouncing identical red balls in unison before their midcentury-magazine-cover moms call them inside to eat. Still, there may be something disingenuous about a movie from this particular voracious conglomerate inveighing against social uniformity. After dinner, I bet all those kids sit down to watch the Disney Channel.

The Leisure Seeker—The title refers to a faded ‘70s-era Winnebago in which an elderly married couple decide to take a last road trip, from Wellesley, Massachusetts to Key West, Florida. John (Donald Sutherland), a retired English professor, has Alzheimer’s, but can still pilot the huge vehicle, and Ella (Helen Mirren), a cheerful southern belle, is determined that that they will at long last make the trip to see the house of John's literary hero Hemingway.

So while their kids (Christian McKay and Janel Maloney) sit home and worry, Ella does her best to navigate both the roads and her husband’s ever-shifting mental state. One minute he's holding forth on literature to a waitress, or remembering a former student with perfect clarity, and seconds later he's monosyllabic and primal, like the half-wit handyman Sutherland played in Die! Die! My Darling! back in 1965. Painful, long-held family secrets leak out, and in the movie's one ripe moment of satire, we see John, a lifelong Democrat, wander off and happily join in cheering at a Trump rally.

Directed by Paolo Virzi from a novel by Michael Zadoorian, The Leisure Seeker shows some signs of having sat on the shelf for a while; for one thing, Dick Gregory, who died in August of last year, has a small but funny role in it. It's a highly uneven movie, with many heavy-handed episodes and some curious loose ends. But the star power of the leads makes it moving, both in the tragedy, and the grim comedy, of dementia, and in the exhilaration of travel.

HERE COMES THE BRAIN AGAIN

With the film version of A Wrinkle in Time opening tomorrow, I'm reminded of IT, the terrifying alien brain that rules Camazotz, the world of conformity, in the beloved 1962 novel by Madeleine L'Engle.

So...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...let's acknowledge the huge extraterrestrial brain in Jack Arnold's 1958 movie The Space Children...

...who also exerted telepathic influence on kids. The title kinder (the unnerving little girl from the beginning of Them! among them), who find the big cerebrum hiding in a seaside cave on the California coast, are the offspring of Cold War rocket scientists, and the brain tries to get them to sabotage their parents' anti-Commie efforts. I've long wondered if this underrated, atmospheric, dreamlike little movie, with its chilly, formal visual elegance, might have been an inspiration for L'Engle's IT.

OLD SCHOOL TYRUS

This Sunday afternoon No Festival Required shows Pamela Tom's fascinating documentary Tyrus...

...at 1 p.m. at the Third Street Theater. Check out my review on The PHiX.

TUSKMASTER

Your Humble Narrator wasn't able to get to the screening of Disney's new live-action version of Beauty and the Beast, opening this week, but in its honor...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...let's give the nod to this cool, warthog-ish looking incarnation of the Beast, played by George C. Scott...

...opposite the undeniable Beauty of his real-life wife Trish Van Devere, in a 1976 Hallmark Hall of Fame production of the tale...

I saw it at the time, and remember it being pretty good.

UGANDA LOVE IT

Opening this weekend:

Considering how few people play or understand chess, it’s surprising how many movies about chess there are, and how enjoyable a lot of them are. We watch the actors move the pieces around the board, and dramatically react to these moves, and just sort of take the film’s word for it that we’re seeing tactical brilliance. There are life-and-death chess games, like Karloff versus Lugosi in The Black Cat, or life-versus-death chess games, like in The Seventh Seal, or magical chess, like in Harry Potter.

Then there is chess as the subject of a standard inspirational underdog sports flick, as in Searching for Bobby Fischer in 1993 and Pawn Sacrifice, which was about Fischer, two years ago. Disney’s Queen of Katwe is of this sort. 

The real-life heroine is Phiona Mutesi, who around five years ago, in her mid-teens, began winning junior chess championships in her native Uganda, and representing that country in international tournaments. What made this remarkable enough to be the subject of an ESPN book by Tim Crothers wasn't just the excellence of Mutesi's play but the circumstances of her background: She was from Katwe, a massive slum neighborhood in Kampala, where she worked selling maize in the street for her widowed mother. According to the movie, she was illiterate when, by chance, she learned to play, and she learned to read mainly so that she could study chess manuals.

If you're cringing already, granting that it's a wonderful story but worried about a Disney-fied tone of cultural condescension and saccharine uplift, have no fear. The script, adapted from the Crothers book by William Wheeler, undoubtedly follows the Rocky/Hoosiers template. But the director, masterly Mira Nair of Salaam Bombay!, avoids the potential schmaltz in the yarn without sacrificing its potent emotion, and she shows her usual skill at giving third-world settings their teeming, at times almost epic due without denying or sanitizing their squalor and hardship.

Best of all, she gets terrific performances. There are two star turns, from Lupita Nyong'o as Phiona's desperately wary mom, and by David Oyelowo as her saintly mentor and teacher. But Nair's real triumph was with the kids; chattering in their oddly-inflected, somehow musical cadences, they're believable and funny. Especially fine is Madina Nalwanga as Phiona, whose uncertain but probingly intelligent gaze suggests that she has inherited, along with a high fighting spirit, some of her mother's fretful distrust of good fortune. It's easy to believe that she's a natural at chess. She always seems to be thinking many moves ahead.

HOW DARE THEY

Opening this week:

Nerve—Emma Roberts is Vee, a straight-laced Staten Island high schooler who becomes a “Player” in the illicit online game of the title. Play involves taking, and video-recording, outrageous, often extremely dangerous dares, in return for money and views by “Watchers.” Vee thinks she'll take one dare as a lark and to prove to her friends (and to herself) that she's not so square. But then she meets Ian (Dave Franco), a motorcycle-riding Player, and the ante, both in money and peril, keeps getting upped, and before long she's riding through Manhattan on the back of his bike while he's blindfolded, or crossing a ladder extended between two buildings.

Early on, we're invited to share Vee's fun and exhilaration at her first few relatively harmless dares. As the story progresses, it grows more sinister and suspenseful. At least until its rather improbably epic finale, Nerve, directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman from a script by Jessica Sharzer (based on Jeanne Ryan's novel) is well-paced and engagingly acted—it has the potential to be a minor teen-flick classic.

But there's a worrying side to this. While they usually aren't on this scale, idiotic dares among teenagers are a very real thing. I hope that the target audience here doesn't ignore its cautionary side in favor of the glamorized risky behavior. The idea of attempting to act out this movie in real life could get on any parent's last...well, you know.

Life, Animated—The life in question in this documentary is that of Owen Suskind, the younger son of Wall Street Journal writer Ron Suskind. Owen stopped speaking when he was three years old, was diagnosed with autism, and seemed only to be pacified by watching Disney animated films. Gradually his family realized that his movie watching wasn't mindless self-stimulation; he used the characters and conflicts to make sense of his own life, and this enabled him to re-engage with the world.

Directed by Roger Ross Williams from Ron Suskind's like-titled book, the movie is initially heartbreaking, then thrilling. We soon see that what Owen does is only a slightly more extreme version of what many of us do with, say, Shakespeare, or Marvel Comics, or Star Trek—use them as an allegorical shorthand for our own life challenges.

Owen has a fine screen presence, with hints of an ironic sensibility, as in his offhand use of effusive adjectives. But he also has a straightforward lucidity, especially in the face of sadness, that's highly admirable. And he has the soul of a storyteller himself—his own hero narrative, about a boy protecting the Disney sidekicks from a mind-clouding villain called Fuzzbutch, is stirringly rendered in this movie by the French animation company Mac Guff.

Owen's adoring parents and older brother also make a deeply touching impression. And a word should be said for Ron Suskind's performing skills—when he recounts imitating Iago, the nasty little parrot from Aladdin, as the first time he used a Disney character to connect with his son, he does a pretty respectable Gilbert Gottfried.

Phantom Boy—While we're on the subject of French animation: This French-Belgian co-production by Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli (the guys who made 2010's A Cat in Paris), is a gem. Set in New York, it follows title character Leo, a gravely ill boy who has learned to leave his own body and zip around the Manhattan skyline.

In this manner Leo helps a hospital-bound young police detective and a Lois Lane-ish reporter outfox The Face, a super-villain so called because his mug resembles a Picasso portrait (he's voiced here by Vincent D'Onofrio; the voice cast of the English version also includes Fred Armisen and Jared Padalecki). The movie's best comedy arises from The Face's attempts at high villainous flourishes, undermined by his doltish henchmen and his hapless dog Rufus.

The story elements have the familiar flavor of old-school cartoons and European kids' adventure books or comics, but they're wittily recombined here—Tintin meets Casper—and the two-dimensional drawing of the characters, with their simplified, dot-and-dash facial features, is effective. Better still is the rain-on-the-sidewalk atmosphere of the settings. There's a light touch to this movie, an un-fussy feel that it's not oppressively overproduced. It's refreshing.

TIGERS & BEARS, OH MY!

Opening this weekend:

The Jungle Book—Disney’s 1967 version of The Jungle Book is probably my favorite of that studio’s animated features. This is partly sentimentality—it’s the first movie to which I can remember being taken, when I was four or five years old. But it’s also looser, lighter, funnier and far richer in personality than a lot of Disney fare, with vibrant primary colors, wonderful voice acting and a couple of catchy big band numbers.

It was hard to imagine that this same charm could be captured in live action. There was a live-action attempt in the 1940s, made by the Korda Brothers and starring Sabu. Heavily narrated, it used live animal footage, but also had a much more human-oriented story.

But Disney’s new version of Kipling’s tales of Mowgli the wolf-raised “Man-Cub,” featuring a live actor as Mowgli and CGI as his animal co-stars, takes a different approach from either earlier version, and finds some unexpected grit and emotional range. Directed by Jon Favreau from a script by Justin Marks, the film uses bits of Kipling’s language and gets across some of his near-peerless storytelling panache. Bits of his icky colonialist presumption inevitably creep in here and there, too, though to my mind this film wasn’t nearly as bad on this score as The Lion King.

As before, young Mowgli (Neel Sethi) is menaced by the scarred tiger Shere Khan (voiced by Idris Elba), who bears him a grudge. It’s decided that the black panther Bagheera (Ben Kingsley) will return Mowgli to the “Man Village,” and episodic adventures ensue. He’s befriended by the leisure-loving bear Baloo (Bill Murray) and threatened by the python Kaa (Scarlett Johansson) and the primate King Louis (Christopher Walken), here presented much like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, before he and Shere Khan have their big confrontation.

It’s an odd hybrid, with the Brit actors declaiming high drama alongside Murray’s Chicago-accented shtick, but mostly it works. Lupita Nyong’o, voicing Mowgli’s lupine mother, brought tears to my eyes with her avowals of love for him. It should be noted that there are a few funny but retroactively wistful lines spoken by the late Garry Shandling, as the porcupine.

There are also a few missteps, the most glaring, for me, being the decision to allow Murray and Walken to perform their character’s songs from the 1967 film. Both are great performers in their own right, but musically Murray is no Phil Harris and Walken is no Louis Prima, and they seem to know it—their numbers feel halfhearted, almost sheepish.

Parents of smaller kids—and anyone sensitive to animal suffering—should be aware that the film is violent at times, especially by current kid-movie standards, and that a couple of characters are killed in the course of the story. As the saying goes, it’s a jungle out there.