BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
PG, 125 minutes. Through tonight only at Niantic. Still playing at Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. The chaotic, pushy remake of Disney’s 1991 screen musical “Beauty and the Beast” stresses the challenges of adapting a success in one form (animation) for another (live-action). We’re in for a long line of Disney remakes in the coming years: Everything from “Dumbo” to “Aladdin” is headed for a wallet near you, banking on nostalgia and brand recognition. The financial wallop of the recent, pretty good live-action “Jungle Book” redo, and the live-action “Cinderella” before that, set a high bar of corporate expectation. “Beauty and the Beast” will no doubt please the stockholders. It’s just not a very good movie, is all. Why? The high points of director Bill Condon’s resume suggest he was the right person for this big-budget remake. The maker of “Gods and Monsters” and “Kinsey” possesses a basic understanding of the musical genre’s building blocks, given his success with “Dreamgirls.” And since he made one of the “Twilight” movies, “Breaking Dawn: Part I” (which he himself called “a disaster”), Condon is certainly familiar with the live-action/ digital effects mashup currently overwhelming contemporary screen fantasies of all kinds. The new movie is more of a grating disappointment, despite its best supporting turns, human and animatronic. Condon races through the story beats at an unvarying pace, usually with his camera too close to the performers while the digital effects overwhelm the screen. Emma Watson makes for a genial, bland-ish Belle, the freakish outsider in her provincial French village because of her interest in books and her indifference to the local hunky baritone, Gaston (Luke Evans). Underneath the digital fur and digital roars, Dan Stevens as the Beast, the transformed prince working on a rose-petaled deadline to become human again, locates some moments of pathos that stick. The problems here, I think, are weirdly simple. The movie takes our knowledge and our interest in the material for granted. It zips from one number to another, throwing a ton of frenetically edited eye candy at the screen, charmlessly. — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
THE BOSS BABY
PG, 97 minutes. Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. The idea of a baby (voiced by Alec Baldwin) who is more worried about the formula for a good stock market buy than the formula he drinks has potential. A genius baby hiding his abilities is the set-up for a lot of potential plot points. But Michael McCullers’ script, based on the book by Marla Frazee, takes the least interesting option. Even in the flexible world of animation, the idea behind “Boss Baby” is too convoluted and confusing to be interesting. Tim (Miles Christopher Bakshi) is convinced he has the perfect life. When he’s not imagining himself on a wild adventure or living a spectacular life, his parents treat him with waves of love and affection. The idea of a boy who can’t stop daydreaming is interesting but done far better in the 1954 cartoon “From A to Z-Z-Z-Z.” The life Tim loves so much changes when a baby brother arrives one day. In this world, it is a taxi driver who delivers the new bundles of joy. This is no ordinary baby brother but a representative of a mysterious baby corporation made up of serious minded babies. Other than working in cubicles, their purpose is not clear. It seems their only mission is to stop a major corporation from launching a new product that will transfer all parental love to their pets. Tim’s parents work for the corporation that is causing the baby’s so many sleepless nights. The only way Tim can win back the love his parents have shifted to Boss Baby is to help the suit-wearing infant stop the evil corporation’s plan. — Rick Bentley, Fresno Bee
THE CIRCLE
PG-13, 110 minutes. Niantic, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon.
A woman lands a dream job at a powerful tech company called the Circle, only to uncover a nefarious agenda that will affect the lives of her Dystopian tech drama “The Circle” capitalizes on the exploding role of technology in our lives, seeking to capture the zeitgeist while grappling with the heavy duty issues of the day. It’s a noble, if failed effort, because ultimately, the film is all buzzwords and no substance. It’s based on Dave Eggers’ novel, and Eggers himself adapted the book for the screen with the film’s director, James Ponsoldt. Ponsoldt’s previous films have been intimate two-handers, from the alcoholism drama “Smashed” and high school romance “The Spectacular Now,” to the excellent David Foster Wallace biopic “The End of the Tour.” As we discover in “The Circle,” there have been some glitches in scaling up. There are too few characters and they’re all poorly established, sketchy ciphers and stereotypes, lacking depth and nuance. The story follows a young woman, Mae (Emma Watson), who lands her dream job at tech giant The Circle, which is behind the social networking