Contrived concentration-camp fable, from the novel by John Boyne, about the budding friendship, through barbed wire, between the eight-year-old Aryan son of the camp commandant (in his innocence, he thinks it’s a farm) and a same-aged, shaved-headed Jew. It roughly recalls Life Is Beautiful in its mixture, or collision, of …
For his first narrative feature, documentarian Morgan Matthews (Shooting Bigfoot) learns the hard way that a safe blend of comedy and autism make for an unremarkable movie. Asa Butterfield (Hugo) puts his transient lack of motor reactions to the test as a gifted teenager whose life changes when an unconventional …
Brilliant young tactician Ender Wiggin is called upon to defend earth from nasty foreign invaders — and you know what they say about what makes the the best defense. Not for nothing does space commander Harrison Ford say that "What we need is a Julius Caesar, a Napoleon." But while …
Prominent designer, futurist, and second World President of Mensa Buckminster Fuller befriended Ellen Burstyn in 1972 and spent the last decade or so of his life sharing with her his philosophies on the care and nurturing of “Spaceship Earth.” A few of his concepts are repackaged for the masses in …
Martin Scorsese goes to town (Paris) with CGI effects and 3-D and the fantasy story from Brian Selznick’s book about Parisian orphan Hugo Cabret. Asa Butterfield is Hugo, maintaining the clocks in a train depot in 1930. Lonely, brilliant, and cute, he wins the friendship of a girl (delightful Clöe …
Children plays a cruel trick. After the ponderous opening monologue about whether anything you do really matters (this is adapted from a YA novel, after all), the opening is vintage Tim Burton: a splendidly gangly social outcast (Asa Butterfield) gets a panicked call from his beloved, dementia-addled grandpa (Terrence Stamp), …
Britt Robertson and Asa Butterfield star in an interplanetary adventure tale of the first human born on Mars.