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.

FOUR, SQUARED

There seem to be certain actresses who, having attained some popularity and acclaim, are suddenly subject to a peculiar fashionable backlash. Jennifer Aniston has been a major star for almost twenty years now, but I can only think of one person I know who would admit to liking her.

Except me, that is. I like her. She isn’t, perhaps, an actress of any great range, but within the scope of what she does she has an easygoing, companionable manner, an unpretentious, goodhearted air of common sense that I find fairly irresistible. She has what used to be called a girl-next-door quality.

She’s also managed her career with remarkable shrewdness. The adult comedy We’re the Millers would probably be a very small blip on the summer movie radar if the movie’s trailer didn’t make it clear that Aniston performs a striptease. The scene in question is nothing especially eye-popping in itself—though Aniston, at 44 years, has every reason to feel confident with her clothes off—but there’s somehow an unearned pop-culture piquancy because it’s sweet little Rachel from Friends gyrating up there.

Aniston is the story about the film, but she isn’t the central character. That distinction belongs to the likable SNL veteran Jason Sudeikis as Dave, a scruffy, single, small-time weed dealer in Denver. Dave’s not a bad sort, but when he gets robbed of his stash and cash, and is forced to make a huge smuggling run to Mexico and back to make up the loss to his noxious boss (Ed Helms), he realizes that “disreputable loser” is written all over him, and that he’ll never get past the border guards alone.

His wacky solution is to enlist three neighbors from his building to masquerade as his square middle-class family, taking a trip south of the border in an RV the size of a small continent; he figures this hide-in-plain-sight cover will make him invisible to the authorities. So a neglected adolescent boy (the terrific Will Poulter) plays his good-hearted son, a guttersnipe runaway (Emma Roberts) plays his teenage daughter, and a broke, fed-up stripper (Aniston) poses as the little woman (a thieving boyfriend is used to explain how a stripper with no drug problem comes to be broke).

The plan works perfectly, and the trip goes smoothly. Just kidding. All manner of humiliating—and rather xenophobic—complications arise for the foulmouthed, sarcastic quartet, all in roughly the manner of The Hangover and its imitators. “The Millers” end up entangled with drug lords and DEA agents and crooked motorcycle cops; they’re pulled into other people’s marital frustrations. A tarantula crawls up a pantleg, resulting in a sight gag similar to a notorious one in 1998’s There’s Something About Mary.

It’s a sentimental comedy, of course—the four start to truly bond as a family through all of this and to look out for each other. Director Rawson Marshall Thurber gets the picture off to an excellent start, setting up the premise with admirable speed and efficiency. But the contrived, heavy-handed shtick slows it down as it progresses.

Still, the actors keep it from grinding to a halt. I thought there were plenty of laughs—mostly rising from the characterizations, not the coarse gags—even if the movie loses some energy in its second half. The four Millers really do seem to connect and learn to enjoy each other’s company. It’s soon easy to perceive affection just under the surface of their casual, almost reflexive exchange of obscenities and aspersions.

In this way, their behavior probably isn’t too different from most square middle-class families. They just think it is, because they’ve gotten their image of such families from movies and TV. But then, the makers of We’re the Millers have probably gotten their image of outcasts and misfits from the movies.