Review - Frozen

Casual moviegoers with kids to entertain for an hour or so can be forgiven for thinking that the latest animated effort from Walt Disney Studios is little more than a slapsticky romp about an impish snowman. That is, after all, the only clue they've been given by the TV ads and movie posters, but those only represent the tip of the proverbial ice berg. With Frozen, Disney actually makes as earnest an attempt as they have in the last 15 years to recapture the magic of their 1990s musical heyday, with a Broadway pedigree cast and not one, but two new Disney princesses front and centre.

The story, written by Shane Morris and co-directors Jennifer Lee & Chris Buck, is based very loosely on Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen, although its vague Scandinavian setting seems to be all that was retained from Anderson's original 19^th century fable. This re-imagining tells of two princesses in the fictional land of Arendelle. Elsa, the eldest and therefore first in line to inherit the crown, was born with the magical ability to form ice and snow with the slightest gesture. Anna, the youngest, adores frolicking in the indoor winter wonderlands her sister can conjure, until a near-death accident convinces their parents that the girls should be separated and Elsa's powers kept under wraps.

Review - Gravity

220 miles above the earth and with little chance of coming back down. That's not only the basic premise, but also the way one feels after having just watched Gravity, Alfonso Cuaron's long gestating follow-up to 2006's Children of Men. After literal years of hype and ecstatic festival buzz, the question for me was whether Cuaron's magnum opus could possibly meet my out-of-this-world expectations. The answer is a resounding YES. Gravity is a triumph; A groundbreaking invention of pure cinema that captivates from its awe-inspiring start to its potent final images.

The opening title card ominously warns that life in space is impossible, before cutting to the still serenity of Earth, glowing blue against the infinite blackness. A white dot creeps into view, slowly growing in the frame until we can recognize it as the space shuttle Explorer. Veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney doing his best George Clooney impersonation) and rookie Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) are making repairs to the Hubble telescope. Matt makes jokes and regales mission control with amusing anecdotes while he putters around on his mobile thruster pack. Ryan is nervously tethered to her work, trying hard to keep her breakfast down on this routine mission. But of course, nothing about space travel is routine. With little warning, a field of satellite debris tears through the shuttle and leaves the space walkers stranded. From here, Gravity takes off on a dazzling roller coaster ride that rarely lets up, as Ryan must learn to defeat her traumas (past and present) and muster up the courage to make it back home.

Review - Pacific Rim

In yet another summer bursting at the seams with sequels and franchise tentpoles, some of us can be forgiven for chomping at the bit for any blockbuster that wasn't made simply to sell tickets to an established fanbase of some proven brand. We get it this year in the form of Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro's sloppy kiss to the subgenre of “kaiju eiga”; the Japanese monster movie. It's debatable whether or not Pacific Rim is the best of this year's big, loud, spectacular summer blockbusters, but it cannot be denied that the movie is big, that it is loud, and that it is spectacular.

The original premise behind Pacific Rim – “original” insomuch that it was not directly adapted from preexisting source material, although decades of kaiju eiga and anime/manga, from Godzilla to Neon Genesis Evangelion and more, serve as its inspiration – was initially concocted by screenwriter Travis Beacham. In his story, we are plunged into a world that has been at war with malicious alien life for some years now. A brief expository prologue sets the stage: from a space-time rift between two tectonic plates on the floor of the Pacific, skyscraping monstrosities (the kaiju) emerge and lay waste to coastal cities.

Review - The Great Gatsby

When Baz Luhrmann announced that he was adapting the American literary classic The Great Gatsby, anticipation and skepticism abounded in equal measure. Would the Aussie auteur's in-your-face-stylistics be the right fit for the F. Scott Fitzgerald's subtext and symbolism? An unexpected schedule change that shifted its release date from the thick of last year's awards season to a less crowded May 2013 slot only heightened the nervous curiosity. The production became enshrouded in as many rumours and unsure whisperings as the mysterious titular antihero of the novel itself.

At first it appears as though Luhrmann might be adopting a style more conducive to his source material. In a opening that recalls Citizen Kane, we push on a flashing green light – just one of the story's many recurring symbolic motifs – before meeting our narrator; Nick Colloway (Tobey Maguire), a baby-faced but disillusioned Wall Street pencil pusher now confined to a sanitarium where he recounts his experiences with a wealthy and elusive tycoon named Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio).

A few thoughts on Jurassic Park 3D

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship of 3D re-releases. On the one hand, I'm more often unimpressed with 3D movies in general, and go out of my way to avoid them unless I've read that the extra dimension is actually an additive experience. On the other, no 3D conversion can turn a good movie bad, and the temptation of revisiting old favourites on the big screen is often all the convincing I need.

To wit, I give you Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, a sci-fi spectacle with which I fell in love growing up as it became commonplace on VHS and television, but had never gotten the opportunity to see in a theatre. At the tender age of five, I was far too young to go see it in the summer of '93. Naturally, I was eager to finally behold the film's Oscar-winning sound design and groundbreaking effects in their proper theatrical format. I was not disappointed. Jurassic Park 3D proved to be a perfect post-Oscars palette cleanser at the outset of a long awards off-season.

Review - ParaNorman

Taking cues from their own deliciously creepy Coraline from 2009, the animation studio Laika Entertainment serves up another stop-motion spooker for kids, the often charmingly macabre ParaNorman.

Kodie Smit-McPhee (The Road) voices the spiky-haired misfit Norman, a low-key loner with a peculiar knack for communicating with the dead. Maligned and tormented by his peers and even family, Norman escapes their harsh judgments by watching cheap zombie flicks and indulging in conversations with his late grandmother. His sixth sense may cause him troubles, but it comes in handy when an ancient witch's curse raises a septet of pilgrim corpses from the grave, and only he has the ability to stop it.

Review - Beauty and the Beast 3D

Aiming to take a load off my awards-addled mind – something I recommend everyone do this time of year – I spent the afternoon taking in the 3D resurrection of an old favourite. Springboarding from the surprisingly profitable release of The Lion King last fall, Disney is giving their timeless musical romance Beauty and the Beast the same treatment in hopes of drawing in audiences over less-than-compelling January fare.

It didn't take much to get my butt in a seat. The film is, in my opinion, a high watermark for Walt Disney Animation. While The Little Mermaid is justly adored and credited with being the game-changer for the struggling studio in 1989, Beauty and the Beast must be acknowledged as the film that refined the new formula to the point of near perfection, approaching the love story with more emotional maturity and the musical format with more sophistication than any of its many predecessors in the Disney canon. It won unanimous critical praise and a cool Best Picture nomination as reward. That it continues to charm new generations of movie lovers to this day is merely a verification of the "instant classic" status that was bestowed upon it in 1991.

Review - Hugo

A lonely orphan who winds the clocks from within the walls of a Parisian train station attempts to decipher the mystery of a mechanical man in Hugo, Martin Scorsese's courageous foray into 3D family entertainment.

Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), for that is his name, used to love fixing things with his clockmaker father before his untimely death. A rusty old automaton designed to write on paper is all he has to member his dad, and repairing the robot has become a project on which the boy has become dependent. He often pilfers parts from a sad old toymaker, Papa George (Ben Kingsley), who seems somehow connected to the machine, but reluctant to divulge. Hugo finds an ally in the toymaker's goddaughter (Chloe Moretz), an avid reader who yearns for adventure beyond her leather-bound tomes. Together, they attempt to discover the secret concealed within the automaton's intricate clockwork and seek a window into Papa George's past.

Review - The Lion King 3D

It's become all too fashionable these days to hate on 3D movies. And not completely without good reason. Many films use the technology merely as a vacuous gimmick to jack up ticket prices, and just as many more employ a relatively inexpensive post-production conversion process that can result in an image that's dim and/or distractingly cluttered. I don't consider myself an advocate of 3D movies, BUT I do make a point of championing those of them that use their medium effectively. To that end, if you must pay the extra three bucks to wear those silly glasses to any movie this year, make sure it's for The Lion King 3D, a magnificent exemplar of the potential effectivity of the post-conversion process, and indeed, for 3D in general.