The Croods

The Croods opens with a visual reminder that spiffy digital animation actually belongs to an ancient line of storytelling methods that can be traced back to cave-wall paintings. These doodles helped pass narratives down from one generation to the next. Sadly, Croods itself likely won?t enjoy such staying power, as its sentimental messages are garbled by its noisy, repetitive action sequences. But it?s entertaining enough for younger audiences seeking a colorful trip through a familiar land.

?Familiar? because an inordinate amount of kid-friendly entertainment is ? and, for a while now, has been ? set in prehistoric time. Blue Sky Studios squeezed four feature-length Ice Age films out of a woolly mammoth making his way through multiple geological eras. If you?re my age, you grew up on Captain Caveman cartoons, and The Flintstones was a primetime sitcom.

To this gaggle of Cretaceous characters we now add the Croods, a close-knit family who has managed to survive various hungry dangers because the overprotective father, Grug (Nicolas Cage), possesses a paralyzing fear of anything new. He?s content keeping his clan safe in their dark, dank cave ? an opinion that doesn?t necessarily sit well with restless teenage daughter, Eep Crood (Emma Stone). ?No one said survival was fun,? Grug barks at his unhappy offspring, and he?s right. The first act of Croods can be a dour affair.

One night, though, a glow emanating from outside the family?s cave lures Eep into the darkness where she encounters a free-thinking -- and blue-jean-wearing -- wanderer named Guy (Ryan Reynolds) and his ?pet? sloth, Belt (a crowd-pleasing character your children will be imitating for days). Guy boasts a number of skills Eep?s never seen, from conjuring fire to trapping animals he?d like to hunt. But he also warns of a vague threat on the horizon he calls ?the end of the world,? which forces the Croods to abandon their cave and seek safety in the higher grounds of a nearby mountain range.

You get the impression that Croods directors Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch) and Kirk DeMicco (Space Chimps) needed one idea big enough to place Guy and the Croods together on a unifying quest, so they rushed into a conventional road-trip movie without having a clear-cut motivation or any real idea what to do once the family reached its destination. Guy tries to get his new friends to ?ride the sun to tomorrow,? whatever that means. That leads to a colorful trip through a Seussian environment filled with imaginative yet dangerous creatures.

But I honestly couldn?t tell you exactly what was threatening to swallow up the Croods ? and that?s supposed to be an important plot point. Every once in a while, the ground would crack open underneath the fleeing family, and smoke or fire would rise up to consume them. But the obstacles are painfully unclear, and the hazards became repetitive after the third or fourth high-energy action sequence.

The journey?s worth taking because the aforementioned energy levels are sustained through some loopy, twisty and bombastic episodes that make decent use of the film?s 3D. Also, DeMicco and Sanders touch on emotional stepping stones shared between dads and daughters as rambunctious teenagers deal with first loves and prepare to fly from the nest. The Croods has a bad habit of circling back to its messages time and again, making the whole package feel a little uneven. But the repetition hammers home lessons about the importance of family, the need to adapt in order to survive, or the crucial difference between ?living? and ?just not dying.? These timeless parenting issues still feel modern, even if the story?s prehistoric setting is not. And the noteworthy morals bear repeating, even though your savvy young ones probably picked them up by the picture?s midpoint.

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The Place Beyond The Pines

The mythic-sounding title The Place Beyond the Pines is in fact the Mohawk name for a town often synonymous with the mundane: Schenectady, New York. Among verdant rolling hills and modest clapboard houses writer-director Derek Cianfrance unspools a large, deadly serious story about fathers and sons and generations shaped by one act of violence, like a working-class Godfather in which no one is powerful or clever enough to actually become a Don. The movie is rough but gorgeous, overwrought but also achingly sincere, and so well-acted by its massive ensemble that its three stories, each of them a bit thin on their own, combine with remarkable power.

We begin with Luke (Ryan Gosling), a motorcycle stunt driver who looks like a walking bad decision-- peroxided hair, filthy t-shirt, a face tattoo and plenty of others on the rest of his body. In lightly sketched details we see that he's arrived back in town with a traveling circus and reunited with Romina (Eva Mendes), a waitress who has given birth to their son without telling Luke. Already adrift, Luke finds himself living with a mechanic and petty thief (Ben Mendelsohn) who talks him into executing a string of bank robberies, all so he can hand Romina an envelope of money to help raise the kid.

Eventually, inevitably, Luke crosses paths with Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper), a nearly-30-year-old rookie cop who joined the force after law school despite his tony upbringing. As the film switches focus to Avery we see his struggle to be a good cop in a force wracked by corruption (led by the reliably slimy Ray Liotta), not to mention demands from his wife (Rose Byrne) and father (Harris Yulin) that he be more ambitious. Just when it seems Avery's story will make up the second half of the film it switches to a third act, this one set 16 years later and following Luke's son Jason (Dane DeHaan) as well as Avery's, AJ (Emory Cohen)-- neither of whom have grown up the way you would expect given what we know about their fathers.

The fulcrum of Place Beyond the Pines is a single, relatively minor act of violence, the kind of thing mentioned in passing on local news and quickly moved past in most films. Cianfrance, who so precisely probed heartbreak in Blue Valentine, takes a similarly unflinching approach to the violence here, watching its waves ripple out and its effects linger as long as they would in real life: forever. Perhaps feeling pressure to escalate things, he goes a bit too far with it in the third act, pushing the story toward unrealistic synchronicity with the past. But the Shakespearean dimensions of the story-- sons avenging fathers, fathers damaging sons, man grappling with his own demons-- allow for the grandiose high stakes, and Cianfrance's tenderness toward his characters keeps the heavy story just on the side of bearable. Small actions, like Luke's reaction to seeing his newborn son, or Avery's fumbling attempts to connect with a teenage AJ, make these people real, not pawns in a cosmic tragedy. Even more so though than in Blue Valentine, Cianfrance creates a layered and moving portrait of working-class life, of people trying-- in many of the wrong ways-- to improve lives for themselves and the generations to come.

Gosling, whose detached stillness made robbery so exquisitely cool in Drive, brings more jumpiness and genuine fear to Luke, and scenes between him and the eternally underrated Mendes crackle with the tension of a real romance that might have been. Freshly Oscar-nominated Cooper no longer has as much to prove, but you wouldn't know it watching his Avery, a constant striver who never stops living in fear that it will all collapse around him. And though by the time his story emerges there's not quite enough time to make all of the details work, DeHaan-- a quickly rising star who's been a standout in everything he's ever done-- makes a major impact, playing a thoughtful and intelligent teen who's still a little too fragile for what this rough world will throw at him.

In Westerns there's a trope of "the ranch across the border," the place where our hero and his gal can escape from the rules and violence of regular American life, the paradise on the other side of that sunset. Schenectady, "the place beyond the pines," may have been that haven once too, but Cianfrance's film lays out how that dream has curdled, and how the escape must happen in another way-- with ambition, or paternal duty, or a gun, those powerful American symbols all. The place beyond the pines isn't what it was when the Mohawks named it-- but there's got to be another one, just over that horizon, just out of sight.

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Admission

If nothing else, Admission is the chance to see two of the best-liked funny people on the planet finally get together onscreen. Tina Fey and Paul Rudd are both at the center of the Venn Diagram that includes nearly all of the best comedy from the past 15 years, and playing your typical rom-com couple struggling to find their way to each other, the two bring an unusual level of charisma and chemistry. The amiable and genuinely enjoyable movie that surrounds them isn't always as confident as its leads, careening sometimes wildly from broad humor to rougher-edged realism, but it's always got a rock-solid core to return to, making you wish for annual Fey and Rudd rom-coms for the rest of time.

Playing Princeton admissions officer Portia Nathan (what a perfect name!), Fey is a few screwball levels removed from 30 Rock's Liz Lemon and a lot more serious. Caught up for 16 years in the stolid world of academia, Portia is blindsided both when her longtime boyfriend (Michael Sheen, in a fun 30 Rock reunion) leaves her for Virginia Woolf scholar (Sonya Walger) and when a much-anticipated promotion turns into a contest between her and a prim colleague (Gloria Reuben). Charged with expanding the school's reach among applicants, Portia pays a visit to a crunchy farm-based high school in New Hampshire, where founder John Pressman (Paul Rudd) wants her to pay particular attention to brilliant, self-taught Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), who just might be the son she gave up for adoption.

That's a pretty wild premise for this story, which is much more about small moments between people than big plots, and Admission often requires its characters to act in slightly unrealistic ways just for the sake of a setup a hair too big for this kind of film. Portia regularly drives between Princeton and John's school in New Hampshire, a six-hour trek treated like nothing. When Jeremiah comes to visit Princeton overnight, Portia's dormant motherly instincts kick in as she sneaks into an undergrad party to check up on him. In a scene when Jeremiah is supposed to show off a talent that will tip the scales for his Princeton admission, everyone talks it up in such vague terms that you're hip to the joke well before he's revealed to be a goofy ventriloquist.

But likability goes a long way, as it has in many films from director Paul Weitz, who seems more interested in crafting stories that take jagged, realistic turns that setting up the pieces for a perfectly timed comedy. Admission can be awkward or unsure like teenage genius Jeremiah, but it's as endearing and guileless as he is too, asking us to spend time with people generally trying to do right by each other. It's a movie that takes a do-gooder like John and points out how his desire to save the world is unfair to his adopted son (Travaris Spears). It's a movie that introduces us to Portia's kooky feminist mom (Lily Tomlin), acknowledges how growing up around mottoes like "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" might have screwed Portia up, but also refuses to demonize feminism. It's a movie that includes Wallace Shawn as a hard-nosed admissions boss-- that alone ought to be enough to recommend it.

In this weird post-30 Rock time, when we already miss Tina Fey's incredible TV show and are impatiently wondering when she'll write the next Mean Girls, it can be a little jarring to see such a comic genius take part in a movie this low-key. But Fey shoulders the movie well, aided by the eternally charming Rudd and a surprisingly strong performance from Wolff, who made his name in TV's The Naked Brothers Band and crafts a teenage kid who's not crazy or damaged, just odd. Admission is pretty odd itself, but it's at least better at being a warm-hearted comedy than Jeremiah is at being a ventriloquist.

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Spring Breakers

Very few vacationers who embark on a weeklong spring break trip expect safe, wholesome, squeaky-clean, life-empowering experiences. They temporarily abandon the day-to-day grind of work, school or reality in search of guiltless, gratuitous debauchery fueled by gallons of booze and ounces of illegal substances. To paraphrase Nevada?s tourism bureau, what happens on spring break hopefully stays on spring break.

Similarly, audience members taking a chance on Harmony Korine?s buzzworthy Spring Breakers -- a dangerous, Day-Glo postcard to modern-teen excess -- shouldn?t be hoping for a satisfying film bolstered by multi-faceted performances that follow well-crafted story arcs. Korine shrewdly provides viewers with a stylish excuse to turn off their moral compass, to bathe in the foolish vices of some truly despicable on-screen characters, and to observe the potential repercussions of a generation influenced by MTV and the Girls Gone Wild video series ? the kids who wrongly believe life can be treated like a video game until reality creeps up and pimp-slaps them in the side of the head.

Korine?s Spring Breakers feels like the floor of a Tampa Bay strip club. It?s sticky, slimy, dirty and has seen far more depravity and corruption than one should handle. Already a cult classic thanks to a handful of festival screenings at last year?s Toronto International Film Festival, Spring Breakers somehow lives up to its own impossible hype. Younger audiences lured by the promise of Disney Channel royalty doing very un-Disney things will have found their Less Than Zero. They?ll also be quoting James Franco?s dialogue for decades.

Franco plays Alien, a South Florida gangster who encounters four bikini-clad beauties ? played by Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine ? after their vacation in paradise falls apart. In Alien, these girls see the bottom of the downward spiral that awaits any partygoers who succumb to the depravity and wickedness of spring break. Some run away from the empty promises of his criminal lifestyle. Others embrace the words of the serpent and take a big bite out of his juicy apple.

And yet, if we?re being honest, Korine?s Spring Breakers is a better movie-going experience than it is an actual movie. Character development?s limited to a few stiff growing pains. Outside of Gomez?s semi-religious character (not-so-subtly named Faith), the girls are primarily defined by their craven need for booze, drugs and dudes. The overall plot stays about as shallow as a shot glass, even when Korine escalates a turf war between Alien and his former childhood friend, Archie (played by rapper Gucci Mane). And Korine?s chief takeaway about the human condition could be boiled down to, ?Life is difficult, yet spring break provides a much-needed release from day-to-day pressures.? Clothing, of course, is optional.

It?s not often that we?re able to witness the birth of an iconic screen character, yet Franco pushes Alien into the annals of Hollywood lore with his magnetically gonzo performance. The actor?s performance has been at the forefront of almost every Spring Breakers discussion since the movie opened in limited release, and rightfully so. The metal teeth and corn-rowed hair are but a superficial artifice to the gangster who adores his material things (?Look at my shit,? a quote he repeats often in one of the film?s best scenes, earns its status as a gold-standard catchphrase for a new generation) and finds true soulmates in the bad girls eager to lose themselves on spring break (?forever!?)

I can?t emphasize enough, though, that the whole of Breakers isn?t as good as some of its parts. Korine musters pop-soaked schlock with ample style and a handful of stellar performances, notably from Gomez and Franco, who is off-the-charts amazing in this part. The film?s more surreal than recommendable, unless you grew up worshipping Britney Spears (a beacon of light for the characters on screen) and dreaming of a day when you can lose yourself ? in every way ? in the vodka-soaked sands of the Sunshine State.

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Olympus Has Fallen

It's still probably too soon for the 20-minute attack scene in Olympus Has Fallen. A full 11 years after 9/11 it is horrifying to see people in business suits running away from fireballs, to watch a major American icon (this time the Washington Monument) crumble, to watch people in power agog at the kind of destruction that's possible on their home turf. The improbable details of this attack-- which involves a North Korean plane with sophisticated missile-deflecting shields and a ton of North Korean moles in the South Korean government-- are irrelevant; this violent, visceral sequence is powerful and enraging. Director Antoine Fuqua is sharply raising the stakes of the action to come, offering not just a rah-rah adventure about saving the President, but the chance for retribution after what he's just put the audience through.

Is suffering through all that violence-- and the many, many acts of violence still to come-- worth it? Surprisingly enough, yeah. Essentially "Die Hard in the White House," with Gerard Butler's disgraced Secret Service agent Mike Banning as the only good guy left in action at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Olympus Has Fallen takes a star performance and gallons of fake blood and stretches it into something both captivating and queasy. Once you get the initial attack out of the way, the film is contained to the shattered White House-- following both Banning and President Asher (Aaron Eckhart) and his top staff held hostage in the underground bunker-- and a situation room where the head of Secret Service (Angela Bassett) and the Speaker of the House-turned-acting President (Morgan Freeman) talk Banning through his rescue mission. There are some weaker moments when the film diverges from that tight setup, like superfluous cuts to Banning's wife (Radha Mitchell), but the lean low-budget approach really works (at least, a whole lot better than the distractingly bad CGI).

Butler, who has careened from one awful rom-com to the next for the last few years, is the best he's been since 300 as Banning, gruffer and more skilled than John McClane but also ready with quips (on the phone with the North Korean baddie played by Rick Yune, he signs off thusly: "How about you and I play a game of fuck off. You go first.") The crushing violence of North Korea's initial attack allows Banning to get away with cracking a whole lot of skulls, including one memorable fight in which a bust of Abraham Lincoln offers the final blow. Butler threads the very fine needle of playing a ready-for-everything action hero while also reflecting the toll of all this destruction; in an opening sequence we see just how much the President and his family mean to Banning, and Butler keeps that emotional tie alive through all of the film's noisy action.

Fuqua puts his thumb on the scale a bit too often in giving the film gravitas, from the lingering on all that violence to dreamy shots of tattered American flags and an unforgettably bizarre scene in which Melissa Leo's Secretary of Defense is dragged out of the room by the North Koreans, screaming the Pledge of Allegiance all the way. But Fuqua, working from Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt's script, also backs off when needed as well, avoiding using the President's moppet son for cheap pathos, dispatching with twists efficiently, and leaning on Butler's appeal to sell moments that could have been overdone with dialogue. Olympus Has Fallen is as brash as a Super Bowl halftime show, bloodier than Gettysburg, and more far-fetched than Dennis Kucinich's endless runs for President. It is, in other words, very American. If you love this big, obnoxious country despite itself, you might feel the same way about Olympus Has Fallen too.

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