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Annie

Opens Fri., Dec. 19 at Meridian and 
other theaters. Rated PG. 119 minutes.

Musical-theater purists can be almost as fussy as Star Wars fanatics, so expect a certain amount of kvetching over the new adaptation of Annie (previously filmed in ’82). The beloved 1977 Broadway show gets a thorough reworking, with rewritten lyrics, funked-up music, and a time-shift to the present day. (The comic-inspired original was a Depression-era fable, complete with cameo by Franklin Roosevelt.) Though it’s going to get lambasted, this new Annie is actually kind of fun on its own terms, with a rapid-fire pace and actors who aren’t afraid to be silly.

The role of Annie usually goes to girls who sound as though they’ve swallowed Ethel Merman’s trumpet, but here the part is played by soft-voiced Quvenzhane Wallis, the kid from Beasts of the Southern Wild. Annie’s no longer a little orphan, but a foster child, raised in a Harlem group home by the booze-swilling Miss Hannigan (Cameron Diaz). The campaign managers (Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale) of a billionaire mayoral candidate named Will Stacks (Jamie Foxx, in good form) determine that this child would look great in pictures with their guy. So Annie becomes the ward of the workaholic tycoon, and you know where it goes from there. The storyline has been changed and some songs and characters trimmed, but we still hear the plaintive throb of “Tomorrow” and the kicky fun of “It’s the Hard Knock Life.” They’re just . . . rearranged a little. (The film’s producers include Jay-Z, who made a memorably weird hip-hop mashup out of “Hard Knock Life” some years ago.)

The movie gets messier as it goes, but the actors are peppy and a sense of goodwill pervades—even mean Miss Hannigan is revealed to be misunderstood. Director and co-screenwriter Will Gluck showed his antic talents in Easy A and Fired Up, and he keeps this film popping along with in-jokes and non sequiturs. He doesn’t display a particular gift for musical numbers, but then neither did John Huston in the odd 1982 movie adaptation. Gluck’s comic touch also keeps this film a little too zany to nail the Broadway show’s bet-your-bottom-dollar sentimentality, so the purists will have a point there. On the other hand, you’d really have to go out of your way to complain that the show’s two biggest roles have been given to black actors—but if you check the comments sections of online references to the film, you’ll find plenty of people going out of their way. Sigh. Tomorrow is only a day away, right? Robert Horton

Elsa & Fred

Opens Fri., Dec. 19 at Sundance Cinemas. Rated PG-13. 97 minutes.

Fifty years ago Shirley MacLaine was doing adorable-pixie roles in movies like Irma La Douce and What a Way to Go! and Christopher Plummer was, well, the Captain in The Sound of Music. Both actors are doing just about the same thing in Elsa & Fred. She’s still an unstoppable force of life, and he’s still moping around the house. MacLaine doesn’t break into a chorus of “My Favorite Things” to shake him out of his doldrums, but she does insist that they re-create the fountain-jumping scene from La Dolce Vita. Which is not a bad way for an old curmudgeon to get his mojo back, it turns out.

The film is based on a 2005 picture from Argentina of the same title. MacLaine plays Elsa, who takes on the challenge of waking up her new neighbor Fred (Plummer) to the pleasures of life. Fred, recently widowed, has been dumped in his apartment by his needy daughter (Marcia Gay Harden) and her overbearing husband (Chris Noth). Fred would prefer to be left alone, but that isn’t going to happen with Elsa kicking his butt. The movie doesn’t have many surprises in store, but director Michael Radford (Il Postino) adds a few dashes of vinegar around the general feel-good mood. The cast is pretty strong for the low-budget trappings, with George Segal dropping by as Fred’s old pal, James Brolin as a man from Elsa’s past, and the underused Erika Alexander as Fred’s caretaker. You might recognize the kid who plays Fred’s grandson as Jared Gilman, the boy from Moonrise Kingdom. Like other threads in the script, the grandson gets set up without much of a payoff.

The running theme about La Dolce Vita—the Fellini classic is Elsa’s favorite movie, and you know she’s going to wade into the Trevi Fountain before the fade-out—is pretty cute, but in general you keep wishing Elsa & Fred would shake itself out of the sitcom approach. Of course the main draw here is the two leads, and they play the whole thing with a great deal of zest. MacLaine is relentless and doesn’t miss a beat, and Plummer (who turned 85 last week) continues his elegant run of silver-fox roles. In the end, neither is given enough meat to chew on, which leaves us with a choice: cherish the chance to see two old pros stretching it out, or lament the fact that they don’t have better material. If you’re a fan, the glass is half full. Robert Horton

Foxcatcher

Opens Fri., Dec. 19 at Sundance and Meridian. Rated R. 134 minutes.

Repeat after me: “Ornithologist, philatelist, philanthropist.” Now imagine your future livelihood and independence depend on delivering that phrase correctly. Ornithologist, philatelist, philanthropist—it’s so easy, right? Only the wrestler Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum), who won gold in the 1984 Olympic Games, is having a little trouble with the words. Mark, to put it nicely, isn’t very bright. He’s got a puppy-dog earnestness; his ears have turned to cauliflowers after so much time on the mat; he’s accustomed to taking orders from his older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), who also won gold in ’84. Now Mark’s on his own, flying in a helicopter for the first time, doing cocaine for the first time, about to give a speech prepared by his new patron, the eccentric multimillionaire John E. du Pont (Steve Carell), on whose helicopter he’s riding, whose coke he’s snorting. One more time: Ornithologist, philatelist, philanthropist. Du Pont keeps repeating the self-aggrandizing benediction to the point of absurdity—as if those words will somehow bestow the status he so desperately seeks as a leader of men. Only then, about midway through Bennett Miller’s clinically chilly true-crime tale, are we sure he’s insane.

Foxcatcher’s murderous outcome is never in doubt. One brother will perish and du Pont go to jail (where he died in 2010). There was the same kind of underlying criminal inevitability to Miller’s 2005 Capote, where the surprise lay in how a talented, frivolous writer created his unlikely masterpiece. Here, I’m sorry to say, there’s no such consolation. Foxcatcher is uniformly well crafted and acted, though Carell playing the villain isn’t really the selling point. There was never any reason to expect that he, a trained professional, couldn’t share scenes with the likes of Ruffalo and Vanessa Redgrave (playing du Pont’s patrician, disapproving mother). With his birdlike prosthetic nose, craned neck, and opaque, upper-toothed smile, Carrell’s du Pont remains a mystery, but not an interesting mystery. His character recedes into a dull void. He’s got no spark or intelligence (like Mark); and Dave, the only guy here with any good sense, is absent for half the movie. Du Pont makes for a hollow, creepy villain whose inferiority complex is too obvious and whose sexual orientation is oddly uncharted. What does he truly want from Mark, and what did Mark give him? Mark’s midfilm debauch, with hair grown out and blonde highlights added, suggests he’s become a rent boy. But if he and du Pont were ever lovers, this Schultz-family-authorized film isn’t saying.

Like Miller’s Moneyball, Foxcatcher is strongest on process: Dave and Mark methodically practicing their moves in a great, near-wordless scene that’s both tender and full of latent resentment; or Mark rolling and feinting alone on an open lawn—he doesn’t know how to respond to freedom, even while pining to “become my own person.” Certainly Tatum is becoming his own actor: Once mocked, like Mark, as a lunkhead, he’s also been given the chance in the Jump Street movies and Magic Mike to show inchoate currents beneath that bulging brow. Even if Miller can’t find a satisfying denouement for Foxcatcher, Mark becomes a clay-footed figure of inarticulate tragedy. Brian Miller

The Hobbit: 
The Battle of the Five Armies

Opens Wed., Dec. 17 at Cinerama and other theaters. Rated PG-13. 144 minutes.

If you see the names Thranduil, Tauriel, Azog, and Thorin Oakenshield, and you know instantly who they are and how they fit into Middle Earth, then you are probably ready for the third part of the Hobbit trilogy. If you can’t place the names, please consider rewatching the first two films and probably the entire Lord of the Rings box set as well. Because it’s going to get very thick around here.

Peter Jackson’s crowded final film of the J.R.R. Tolkien universe begins in mid-breath. Fiery breath: The flying dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) was loosed at the end of Part Two, and his flaming rampage is in full swing as Five Armies commences. With no memory-refreshing from the previous chapters, we launch into a dozen or so plotlines: all those names and all those creatures, plus cameo appearances from LOTR cast members. (The Hobbit takes place years before the LOTR saga.) The hubbub renders nominal hero Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) a team player rather than a true protagonist. The second half of the picture is overwhelmed by a giant battle (there may be five armies involved, but I’m a little vague on that), which ping-pongs between thousands of computer-generated soldiers and clever hand-to-hand combat involving the principals. Jackson is as resourceful as ever at exploiting cool locations—crumbling bridges and iced-over lakes—for cartoony stunts. When pointy-eared archer Legolas (Orlando Bloom) climbs a set of collapsing stairs (one of several scenes that seems expressly designed for 3-D), we see how much more Jackson delights in pratfalls over carnage.

Such ingenuity is at the service of a project that lost its emotional core when Jackson decided to take Tolkien’s relatively streamlined novel and pump it up into three plus-sized movies. (Five Armies is the shortest of the bunch, at 144 minutes.) It’s still pleasant to see Bilbo in the company of the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), but the rest of the cast hasn’t taken up the slack. Richard Armitage, as corruptible dwarf leader Thorin, and Evangeline Lilly and Aidan Turner as star-crossed lovers (an elf and a dwarf—it can never work), do not match the charismatic ensemble of The Lord of the Rings. That terrifically entertaining trilogy looms especially large in this installment of The Hobbit: Jackson takes time for multiple foreshadowings of his 2001–2003 epic, which only underscores the suspicion that the Hobbit movies constitute a very long prelude to the main event. Robert Horton

Night at the Museum: 
Secret of the Tomb

Opens Fri., Dec. 19 at Majestic Bay and other theaters. Rated PG. 97 minutes.

All franchises have to end (James Bond perhaps excepted), most announce that intent, and the lucky ones make it to three. Here the end is predicted during a prologue in 1938 Egypt, where a young lad watches his archaeologist father grab a golden tablet said to bear a curse. (Later the thing will be revealed to work its magic, dwindling with disastrous results, by recharging itself with moonlight; thus the plot will seem familiar to anyone who’s sought to charge their iPad in the airport before a long flight.) After two Night movies, the core cast is well established: Ben Stiller’s security guard Larry overseeing a magically animated menagerie of historical characters (played by Robin Williams, Owen Wilson, Steve Coogan, etc.) and beasts (most notably an incontinent monkey). The plots of the Night trilogy aren’t important or even interdependent. What’s this one about? my 10-year-old companion asked. Not having seen the first two, I hedged: Oh, a bunch of museum exhibits magically come to life, and there are lots of chases. Good, he said, I like chases.

So do I, and though the balance of family-friendly comedy to life lessons is quite palatable, Secret of the Tomb is actually lighter on the chases and anarchic wreckage than expected. By now, the museum’s nighttime secret has become a showbiz attraction and humble Larry a backstage impresario trying vainly to get his ostriches, T. rex skeletons, and Neanderthals to perform on cue for their black-tied museum donors and guests. (Stiller also doubles as a dumb, sweet Neanderthal named Laaa, who has a mighty appetite for Styrofoam packing kernels.) But here comes the curse/plot: The Egyptian tablet has a corrosion problem that can be solved only by transporting the gang to the British Museum, where the mummy prince (a dryly funny Rami Malek) has mummy parents who know how to fix the enchanted device.

Apart from the chases, peeing monkey, and medieval ninja antics of Sir Lancelot (Downton Abbey’s quite amusing Dan Stevens), all pleasing to kids, parents will appreciate the interplay among the not-quite-condescending cast. Ben Kingsley, as a once-despotic pharaoh, has a nice bit about Larry’s tribe (“I love the Jews!”), while Coogan’s sour little centurion keeps slipping daft utterances and cowardly gibes. The latter, along with Wilson’s likewise tiny cowpoke, have buddy-movie chemistry. Yet other than Stiller, no one—including Williams in his rather stiff final role—has enough time to establish character. Larry’s teenage son is a split-demographic bore, and we don’t care about Larry’s parenting duties either.

What comes through most in this enjoyable hodgepodge adventure is Stiller’s all-too-recognizable brand of impatience and fatigue: a bit of the indie-world midlife panic from Greenberg, the realization that I’m getting too old for this shit. Larry can’t say it (nor can Stiller, obviously), though it’s significant that he skips the movie’s joyous final dance-party coda. But, hey, Laaa is thrilled to go in his place. Brian Miller

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