King Kong

It’s New York in 1933 and the Great Depression has just clipped the wings of many a dreamer. But an adventurer-filmmaker (Jack Black of The School of Rock) is determined to accomplish his own dream to shoot a movie on an uncharted island. He tricks a starving vaudeville actress (Mulholland Drive’s Naomi Watts) forced to steal and a sensitive intellectual (The Pianist’s Adrien Brody) whose socially critical plays don’t sell well in escapist Manhattan, into joining him onboard a steamer going to the mysterious Skull Island.

Here, they are thrown into an unknown universe where creepy humans and a cocktail of beasts from various primordial ages fight for survival.

Peter Jackson, triple Academy Award winner for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, has been nominated for a Golden Globe as best filmmaker for the direction of this remake of the RKO’s 1933 masterpiece King Kong. Just as the original used the most advanced visual effects available at the time (stop-motion animation, rear screen projection, multi-plane glass paintings, tabletop miniatures), Jackson makes the most of today’s effects with stunning results. He approaches King Kong as a fourth Lords of the Rings in terms of production infrastructure and logistics (visual effects are by New Zealand-based Weta Digital, directed by Joe Letteri, and Weta Workshop). Rather than using real locations for Skull Island, Jackson’s team rebuilt a whole world, making it look like conceptual art, “with huge, over-scale, twisted, deformed trees and rock bridges and endless chasms that plummet down,” the director says. “It’s like a jungle from hell.”

Maggie Feller’s feet are size 8½. So are her sister Rose’s. But that’s about all they have in common. While Maggie is an infinitely unemployed party girl who barely got a diploma and whose looks are her only asset in life, Rose, who collects shoes she loves but will barely use since her social life is practically nonexistent, is a Princeton graduate and an attorney at a top law firm. The sisters finally get a chance to know one another when they discover that their grandmother (Shirley MacLaine, who has been nominated for a Golden Globe for best supporting actress for this performance) is still alive.

Yes, this is one of those films about “characters who are struggling to figure out what they’re doing with themselves and what they’re doing with their lives, characters who are yearning for human connection and family,” as director Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys, 8 Mile) clearly states.

You’ll walk away with the knowledge that it is possible to be comfortable in one’s own shoes. That it’s never too late to change one’s path and that a woman can indeed find a man who sees her true beauty. Don’t people grow tired of such stories? Never.

While London is being bombed in the Second World War, four children — Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy — are sent by their parents to the country house of a professor for safety. While they’re playing in the house, Lucy discovers a wardrobe and through it enters the parallel world of Narnia. The inhabitants need the children’s help in the struggle between good and evil, between the lion messiah Aslan and the white witch Jadis who keeps Narnia in perpetual winter.

The film is based on C.S. Lewis’ 1950 novel (the first of a seven-book saga which the Irish writer and religion expert published against the recommendations of his agent). The Chronicles have since sold over 100 million copies worldwide. Lewis originally penned the masterpiece as a series of Christian allegories, but today, a new religious controversy is arising with the release of the Disney movie. Although some viewers may approve or disapprove of the proselytizing, most might not even notice the Christian ideology.

Still, other critics have dubbed the movie “The Lord of the Rings junior” — but not in a good way, writing it off as a lesser accomplishment. Interestingly, J.R.R. Tolkien himself did not like The Chronicles: After the release of the first book, he observed that Father Christmas, an evil witch, talking animals and children all in the same novel were just too much for him.

Still the movie has been an instant box-office success and director Andrew Adamson (Shrek) is already planning a sequel.

Wallace and his dog Gromit — the protagonist of the British clay-animated shorts by Nick Park — finally appear in their first full-length feature film. There’s great excitement in their neighborhood as the annual Giant Vegetable Competition approaches. Wallace and Gromit have made money by helping protect the town’s gardens from rabbits. But then a mysterious veggie-ravaging beast appears

This biography of Johnny Cash tells the story of the sharecropper’s son’s days in Depression-era Arkansas and his rise to stardom. From his wild tours with rock and roll pioneers Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis and Waylon Jennings to his 1968 concert in Folsom Prison, this movie explores Cash’s passionate love story with June Carter Cash and his personal transformation from a self-destructive pop singer to the “Man in Black,” who became an icon with his intense voice and songs of survival.

A nominee for three Golden Globes (best comedy/musical, best actor in a comedy/musical for Phoenix, best actress in a comedy/musical for Witherspoon), the film is based on Cash’s books Man in Black and Cash, the Autobiography and has been seven years in the making for director Mangold (Heavy, Cop Land, Girl, Interrupted, Identity) in cooperation with Johnny and June Carter Cash before their deaths in 2003. Phoenix and Witherspoon sing their songs in live performances. et