CAST: Voices of Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Sacha Baron Cohen, Cedric the Entertainer and Andy Richter
SYNOPSIS: Animated animals from the Central Park Zoo wind up in Africa, where they can't adapt to wildlife.
WHAT WE SAID: St. Petersburg Times reviewer Philip Booth gave the movie a B. He wrote that the the animation is "gorgeous-looking but less inspired than its computer-generated predecessors . . . It gets off to a rousing start, with a little help from a quartet of slap-happy, heist-minded penguins (two are voiced by co-directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath) who deserve their own short film. The Manhattan scenes, including a long chase sequence with a mad dash across city streets that ends in a standoff with authorities at Grand Central Station, are the film's funniest and most dramatically potent."
MPAA RATING: PG; comic animal violence
RUNNING TIME: 86 min.
The Skeleton Key
DIRECTOR: Iain Softley
CAST: Kate Hudson, Gena Rowlands, John Hurt, Peter Sarsgaard, Joy Bryant, Ronald McCall, Maxine Barnett
SYNOPSIS: Hudson rattles around a spooky Louisiana bayou house, tending a dying man and unlocking the house's mysteries.
WHAT WE SAID: St. Petersburg Times film critic Steve Persall gave the movie a C. "Louisiana's bayou backdrops and supernatural traditions can't entirely disguise the fact that The Skeleton Key is an ordinary haunted house yarn. Take away the moss-draped trees and hoodoo machinations, and this could easily be Amityville again, a prospect scarier than anything director Iain Softley puts on screen," he wrote. "The Skeleton Key eventually offers a couple of nifty nightmare sequences and a Twilight Zone finale that probably makes sense if you think about it. Whether the movie deserves that effort after so many cliches and phony shocks is a matter of personal taste."
CAST: Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx, Sam Shepard, Richard Roxburgh, Joe Morton, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Wentworth Miller (voice)
SYNOPSIS: Oscar winner Foxx (Ray), Biel and Lucas are hot-shot Navy pilots with an android aircraft as their new "wing man."
WHAT WE SAID: Times reviewer Rick Gershman gave the movie a D. He wrote that it is "is a headache-inducing, bombastic, utterly soul-crushing mess. It looks pretty, sure, with all its computer-generated bells and whistles, and its way-too-pretty cast. But it also plays out like a movie written by an 8-year-old boy, intended solely for 8-year-old boys. Every scene seems like it exists because the filmmakers said, "Wouldn't it be cool if . . .' and "Then it would be supercool if . . .' without concern for whether any of it made a whit of sense."
MPAA RATING: PG-13; intense action, violence, brief strong language
RUNNING TIME: 121 min.
Happy Endings
DIRECTOR: Don Roos
CAST: Tom Arnold, Jesse Bradford, Bobby Cannavale, Sarah Clarke, Steve Coogan, Laura Dern, Lisa Kudrow, Jason Ritter, David Sutcliffe and Maggie Gyllenhaal
SYNOPSIS: Writer/director Don Roos weaves stories of love, relationships and other emotionally complicated connections into an often unsatisfying comic drama.
WHAT WE SAID: Persall gave the movie a B-. "Nearly half of Happy Endings is devoted to setting up emotionally complicated situations for people of middling interest - at least a half-dozen subplots to describe and twice as many characters to sketch," he wrote. "This should have been a much longer movie, or else a much shorter one. . . . Happy Endings is a movie of wonderful moments interrupted by stretches of clever insignificance."
MPAA RATING: R; sexual content, language and some drug use
RUNNING TIME: 128 min.
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
DIRECTOR: Jacques Audiard
CAST: Romain Duris, Niels Arestrup, Linh-Dan Pham, Aure Atika, Emmanuelle Devos, Jonathan Zaccai, Gilles Cohen, Anton Yakovlev
SYNOPSIS: An aspiring concert pianist (Duris) works as an enforcer for his slumlord father. French remake of James Toback's 1978 film, Fingers. Shown with English subtitles.
