Creed - 3 smiles

You can’t deny that “Creed” is a crowd-pleasing movie.  It’s also the same old same old. A young boxer with something to prove teams up with a veteran trainer and signs up for the fight of his life against the reigning world champ who looks all set to destroy our spunky hero. This is the original Rocky and also “Creed,” the seventh in the series. In recent years, Stallone hasn’t so much acted in movies as appear in them, playing a plastic version of himself.  He hasn’t given a genuine performance in a long time. “Creed” suggests that Stallone simply needed to be inspired, which is probably why he agreed to appear in a movie he neither wrote nor directed. Director Ryan Coogler, who also co-wrote “Creed,” understands what makes Rocky connect so strongly with audiences – despite his personal accomplishments, Rocky is a tragic figure. He has been pummeled by loss in his personal life, but he finds a way to keep going, refusing to succumb to self-pity and depression. Stallone captures these facets of his character in “Creed,” keeping Rocky’s charisma and charm front and center. When Adonis shows up, Rocky isn’t interested. He’s content managing his restaurant and living an uncomplicated life. But Adonis doesn’t give up and this brash, good-hearted kid reminds him of his younger self. However, the movie belongs to Jordan. He has great physicality and he radiates warmth and compassion and drive that push Adonis, humanizing him as a result.

The performances alone would have been enough, but Coogler pushes further, choosing to shoot an entire boxing match from start to finish without a single cut. During one training montage, Stallone tries to keep pace with Jordan at the speed bag, can’t keep up and walks out of the frame, smiling. Another director would have cut the shot, but Coogler leaves it in. As for the movie’s big signature moments, Coogler surprises you by what he chooses to avoid and what he embraces. At one point in the film, Adonis reprises Rocky’s iconic training run through Philadelphia as passers-by look and root him on, except Coogler reimagines it in a way that’s magical and elevating. It’s a little corny, but you don’t care. Jordan is carrying movie history on his shoulders as he runs through the city and he makes the burden seem light. Sure, “Creed” is formulaic and predictable, but it’s also joyful and inspiring.

The Danish Girl - 3 smiles

“The Danish Girl,” based on the life of transgender pioneer Lili Elbe, has many things going for it: excellent acting, impeccable production values and socially relevant subject matter. Yet this well-crafted film often seems too restrained. Perhaps this approach may make the movie more accessible to a wider audience, but the script too often constrains the dramatic conflict of the story, which concerns a married Danish artist who undergoes gender reassignment surgery in 1920s Europe. Ostensibly, “The Danish Girl” is a historical biopic about this courageous transgender figure, but in reality, it’s more a love-conquerors-all tale in which Lili’s wife, Gerda, serves as the emotional core. That’s not a bad thing, but somehow Lili gets short shrift: we see her change on the exterior, but less so on the interior.

It’s telling that most of the powerful moments in this dramatic love story occur when Lili  (Eddie Redmayne) and Gerda (Alicia Vikander) are alone or interacting with other characters. The two lead actors deliver strong performances, but the script doesn’t allow the sparks to fly between them. As the story moves along, we get hints of how their heretofore sexual relationship has been affected by Lili’s self-revelation. It’s as if director Tom Hooper is afraid to venture too far into tricky territory for fear of offending anyone. More important, Lili’s courage seems to be an afterthought in the story. It took an extraordinary act of bravery for Lili to act on her gender identity, but we only see a little of the inner turmoil she must have felt. We actually see more of the conflict and its effects on Gerda.

Fortunately, the presence of Redmayne offsets some of the film’s deficiencies. Coming off his Oscar-winning turn as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, the actor proves once again his fearlessness and his dedication to his craft. His Lili is a technical marvel, an impressive assortment of gestures and expressions that are skillfully designed to show the Danish painter’s transition from Einar Wegener to Lili Elbe. Vikander has the less showy role, but her character is more three-dimensional and gives the film its emotional heft. Gerda’s pain, confusion and ultimate acceptance are evident. Her love for Lili is everything. Every frame of this movie is exquisitely shot and it’s obvious that this is a labor of love for those involved. However, Hooper’s strategy of keeping it safe is bound to affect how engaging audiences find “The Danish Girl.”

The Good Dinosaur - 2 1/2 smiles

“The Good Dinosaur” is an adequate family film, but it lacks the thematic depth and richness of previous Pixar classics like Up, WALL-E and this year’s Inside Out. And while it has the typical Disney messages of tolerance, friendship and perseverance, they seem obligatory and obvious. The storyline meanders a bit too much and offers a variety of cobbled together genres (there’s even a campfire and a cattle round-up). Essentially it’s a buddy/road trip movie. The opening sequence explains that the asteroid hypothesized to have caused the mass extinction event misses Earth, allowing the dinosaurs to continue their existence unimpeded. Several million years later, dinosaurs have developed into anthropomorphized creatures while humans favor walking on all fours and yapping like dogs. Our hero, Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa), is the youngest member of an Apatosaurus family with Dad (Jeffrey Wright), Mom (Frances McDormand) and older brother and sister. They’re farmers with a pest problem – a human child (later named Spot) is sneaking into their stores and eating their corn. Dad asks Arlo to exterminate the intruder, but the young dinosaur can’t bring himself to kill. A chase ensues and, when Arlo and his father are caught in a sudden storm, tragedy occurs. The rest of the movie follows Arlo and Spot, swept away by a river to a far-off place, as they make the homeward journey.

“The Good Dinosaur” has some of the most amazingly photo-realistic backgrounds, including trees, steep mountainous cliffs and raging rivers and waterfalls. The realism of the surroundings makes the dinosaurs seem too cute and cartoonish. A role reversal casts a non-human as the chatty protagonist and a prehistoric homo sapien as the sidekick/pet. And while having Spot never utter a word, scratch himself and occasionally howl is cute the first time, it gets old after a while. The best moment comes during a scene where Arlo and Spot, who don’t share a language, use sticks to communicate. There’s genuine emotion in this sequence, something the rest of the movie could have used more of. So, if you have high expectations that usually come with a Pixar production, you’ll be disappointed with “The Good Dinosaur.” Go in with lower expectations and it’s not to bad. Faint praise?

In the Heart of the Sea - 2 smiles

Visually, “In the Heart of the Sea” is worth seeing. But if you’re looking for epic story, you’re going to be disappointed. Don’t get me wrong. The movie has its moments, especially a successful whale hunt early in the story. However, the trailers create expectations of either a monstrous whale intent on revenge or an obsessive sailor seeking the destruction of the whale. You know, pretty much the story of Moby Dick. And, although Herman Melville is a character, the movie focuses on a group of men doing what is necessary to survive endless days on the ocean (remember the soccer team whose plane crashed in the Andes?) Director Ron Howard uses Melville (Ben Whishaw) and his curiosity about the mysterious circumstances of how the whale ship Essex sank as a framing device to tell this based-on-truth story. Melville finds Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), the ship’s only remaining survivor, who’s drinking his life away. At his wife’s pleading, Tom starts to recount the events of 30 years ago, when he was 14 (played by Tom Holland) (You might question the casting here as Gleeson is much older than his 44-yearold character.)

This is the story of two men, Captain George Pollard (Benjamin Walker) and his first mate, Own Chase (Chris Hemsworth). Pollard, the son of the expedition’s owner, is wealthy, arrogant, entitled and inexperienced. Chase is the real seaman, a working-class man with a chip on his shoulders. He’s also arrogant, but he has the skills to back it up. The most striking scenes are those that deal with the process of catching a whale, from spearing to the gory disemboweling. But after that, the whales are scarce and they must sail into less-traveled waters. It’s thousands of miles off the coast of South America where they encounter the big one. Once the monstrous whale sinks the Essex, the second half of the movie is spent with the survivors drifting on an empty ocean. In these interminable minutes, we don’t get anything resembling an understanding of character or how they survived. Of course, we didn’t get much character development in the first half either. “In the Heart of the Sea” tries to be about so many things: ambition, capitalism, greed and survival. In the end, it seems most interested in how Melville got the outline for his classic.