Animated (the
score for each short is listed before the summary)
4 – Get a Horse! – If you saw Frozen, the Disney megahit out in theaters now, you saw this
eye-popping 3D short. Mickey and Minnie Mouse and their friends Horace
Horsecollar and Clarabelle Cow enjoy a hayride until Peg-Leg Pete tries to run
them off the road. As Mickey and Horace fight with Pete, these hand-drawn,
black-and-white animated characters are forced through the screen, emerging as
colorful CGI versions of themselves. A frantic battle ensues as a raft of
Disney characters jump in and out of the screen and chase one another in
circles.
4 – Possessions – Visually impressive, this short is set in
18th century Japan and is a parable of healing in which a man, lost
in the mountains, enters a world of discarded umbrellas and kimonos and
proceeds to mend them. The story is inspired by a myth that after 100 years,
tools and instruments attain souls and trick people.
3 – Mr. Hublot – Mr. Hublot lives in a surreal world
dominated by old-fashioned, artfully designed heavy machinery. Its inhabitants
are made partly of salvaged mechanical parts. The title character is an
agoraphobic metal man whose hermetic existence is upended with the arrival of a
metal dog.
2 – Room on the Broom – An overlong (30 minutes) nursery
rhyme about a witch, her cat and the menagerie of friends she brings along on
her increasingly crowded broomstick.
1 – Feral – A wordless tale of a wild child discovered by a
hunter in a forest and brought back to civilization, where he doesn’t fit in.
Drawn in a wintry palette of white and gray, its characters are featureless and
abstract.
Live Action
4 The Voorman Problem – A psychiatrist (Martin Freeman)
visits an inmate (Tom Hollander), who makes increasingly persuasive arguments
that he’s god.
3 ½ – Just Before Losing Everything – An anxious thriller
about a department-store worker fleeing her abusive husband. There’s taut drama
in every breath as embattled mother and her two children weave through a maze
of domestic drama and impending violence.
3 – Helium – A hospital janitor tells a dying boy a
comforting tale about the world just beyond the clouds. It’s a little
manipulative in its effort to tug at the heartstrings.
2 – That Wasn’t Me – Concerns two Spanish doctors in an
African war zone where their fate s in the hands of armed, unpredictable child
soldiers. The subject is undeniably suspenseful, but the ending seems like
wishful thinking.
1 – Do I Have to Take Care of Everything? – A comedy of
errors following a flustered family racing off to a friend’s wedding and
contending with every imaginable hurdle on the way. Pretty much just a string of sight gags and slapstick. 1/31/14
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