Three mammals and a baby. A computer-animated woolly mammoth, sloth, and saber-toothed tiger (your species needs to have an interdental sound in it -- oth ... oth ... ooth -- in order to join this fraternity) on a trek to restore a foundling to his migrating tribe. The wordless prologue …
Three mammals and a baby. A computer-animated woolly mammoth, sloth, and saber-toothed tiger (your species needs to have an interdental sound in it -- oth ... oth ... ooth -- in order to join this fraternity) on a trek to restore a foundling to his migrating tribe. The wordless prologue …
With each passing entry in the Ice Age franchise (this is number five), the gap between the anarchic joy of the brief bits featuring Scrat the Squirrel and the plodding, on-the-trunk bulk of the film starring Manny the Mammoth & Family & Friends grows wider. (The image of a world-splitting …
There are three good things about this film. One, Scrat's relentless pursuit of acorny pleasure. Two, Sid the Sloth's venture into physical comedy when he eats a berry that leaves him a paralyzed bag of jelly. Three, the adorable army of hyraxes, never mind the silly blue facepaint indicating battle-ready …
A deferral of extinction and a detour to a subterranean tropical paradise, save some rapacious reptiles and a river of molten lava. The intermittent enlivener of the two earlier installments, the obsessive squirrel, is now as tedious as everyone else (in a mating dance, to a Barry White tune, with …
More straightforwardly, Ice Age: The Sequel. Our three inseparable prehistoric mammals -- woolly mammoth, sloth, and saber-toothed tiger -- face global warming (as they are already calling it) and the impending inundation of their frozen valley. Even if they can escape the flood, outrun the rapacious sea beasts, and catch …
A late-blooming but God-gifted figure skater from Iowa begins her Cinderella climb toward the Winter Olympics (after one look at her new rival, the favored French champion is skidding all over the ice on belly and knees), and she gets as far as a Sports Illustrated cover before she is …
Directed by the consistently lightweight Harold Ramis, this incomprehensible embezzling caper, off-puttingly flippant in tone, nonetheless generates an atmospheric sense of weather and of environment: Christmas in Wichita, under a freezing rain, on skating-rink roads, around and about the seedy strip clubs and massage parlors, names like Tease-o-Rama, The Sweet …
Michael Shannon is incapable of delivering anything but brilliance, and all too often, the success or failure of one of his pictures hinges on a filmmaker’s ability to meet him halfway. Ariel Vromen (Rx, Danika) isn’t quite there yet, as evidenced in The Iceman, a true-crime mob movie based on …
Rip van Winkle multiplied by 2,000. And the product (to use the proper mathematical term) is a God damned Neanderthal,' preserved in the ice for 40,000 years and revivified by an Arctic research team violently divided on what to do with him. The situation is engrossing from the start, despite …
With less than thirty hours to save the twenty-six excavators trapped in a diamond mine cave-in, it’s up to Mike (Liam Neeson) and five other truckers to undertake a suicide mission by transporting, across the coldest region of Canada, three trucks containing the wellhead needed to save the day. Chances …
Ang Lee's adaptation of a 1994 novel by Rick Moody, set in John Cheever country at Thanksgiving, with the ice outdoors outweighing even that in the cocktail glasses. The view of the people -- alienation as a spectator sport -- is no less aloof than in the filmmaker's Jane Austen …