Anthony Anderson

This animated comedy adventure is based on the beloved children's book, which was published in 1936 and first adapted for the big screen by Walt Disney in an Oscar-winning 1938 short. Thankfully, that warm, funny story is preserved in the middle of this animated feature, stretched out with lots of the usual slapstick and action mayhem. So while the silly, pointless mayhem will keep children giggling, it's the story's big heart that makes it worth seeing.

Ferdinand (voiced by John Cena) is a young calf growing up on a ranch in Spain, being trained to become a fighter in the bull ring. But he's far more interested in smelling the flowers. So he escapes and is adopted by Nina (Lily Day) on her quiet farm, growing up to be a gentle-giant bull. The problem is that the local villagers are terrified of his behemoth size, and he's captured by animal control and taken back to the ranch. Now he's competing with his childhood cohorts (Bobby Cannavale, Anthony Anderson and Peyton Manning, plus David Tennant as a Scottish Highland bull) for a spot in a big upcoming Madrid bullfight. But Ferdinand just wants to get back to the flowers, so he enlists the help of goofy goat Lupe (Kate McKinnon) to escape again.

The central point about being true to your nature is important and moving, played with just the right balance of humour and sentimentality, especially as it makes a strong comment on choosing love over violence. But this message is somewhat watered down by the rather corny zaniness that fills the screen, including several massive action set-pieces that not only make very little sense but feel like scenes we've seen before. The characters are colourful enough to keep us smiling, but while the animation is technically adept it's not hugely original (see also director Carlos Saldanha's Ice Age movies), and it makes virtually no use of the 3D.

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Layers of real life and movie history combine cleverly in this postmodern horror film, which just might be too knowing for its own good. But at least it's an unusual approach to the genre, offering a twisted retelling of a legend while aiming for some emotional resonance along with the usual violent nastiness. It's also directed with an unusually artful eye by first-time filmmaker Alfonso Gomez-Rejon.

It was a series of unsolved murders in a small town on the Texas-Arkansas border in 1946 that inspired the 1976 movie of the same name, which screens here annually on Halloween. But this year, the screening is accompanied by a copycat murder, which escalates into a full-on rampage. Everything seems to centre around Jami (Addison Timlin), a teenager whose boyfriend was the first victim. After her parents died, she was raised by her straight-talking grandmother (Veronica Cartwright), who continually urges her to take charge of her life. So with the local cops unable to solve the case, Jami teams up with the local library archive clerk Nick (Travis Tope) to get the whole history of these past events. Meanwhile, a Texas Ranger (Anthony Anderson) arrives to head up the official investigation.

Screenwriter Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa gleefully blends fact, fiction and the movies together into a heady mixture of horror movie cliches and shockingly realistic grisliness. In other words, this is both a fictional sequel and a playful true-life drama at the same time, which makes it feel eerily like the Scream franchise. Although this film never becomes a pastiche, and the characters are so likeable that we genuinely root for them to survive the killing spree. Timlin brings the right amount of plucky stubbornness to her role, even if it's unlikely that a witness-victim would be quite so gung-ho about doing her own police work. And there are nice turns from veterans like Cartwright, Ed Lautner (as a stubborn cop) and the late Edward Herrmann (as a nutty preacher) to add some weight.

Continue reading: The Town That Dreaded Sundown Review

The Departed is based on the Hong Kong blockbuster Infernal Affairs, in which a cop goes undercover in the mob while the mob places one of their own as a mole in the police force. In Scorsese's version, the scene shifts to Boston, where mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) puts loyal-from-boyhood employee Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) through police training. As Sullivan rises through the ranks, Special Investigations Unit chiefs Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) recruit rookie Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) to get "kicked off" the force and do time to gain Costello's confidence.

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Scary Movie 3 sticks with the program: mind-bogglingly dumb characters hustle their way through spoofs of the industry's most popular recent films. It's no mistake that the roasted movies -- in this case: Signs, The Ring, and 8 Mile -- all pull in huge money and attract a young audience.

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Last year's kiddie secret-agent comedy "Agent Cody Banks" was a stupid movie that got by on clever charm. It starred Frankie Muniz (from "Malcolm in the Middle") as a junior-high James Bond who had to get over his fear of talking to girls in order to complete his mission and save the world from some contrived evil.

The picture got a enough mileage out of Muniz's amusing believability as a secret agent on training wheels and out of its tongue-in-cheek twists (to keep his parents in the dark, the CIA did his homework and housework while he was on assignment) to balance out a lot of slapdash screenwriting -- so all in all, it squeaked by as good family fun.

But the rushed-into-production sequel "Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London" is twice as stupid and without even an infinitesimal hint of the cleverness that kept the original afloat.

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There are exactly two funny performances in "Malibu's Most Wanted" -- a one-joke comedy about an over-privileged white-boy wannabe rapper -- and neither of them are by top-liner and co-writer Jamie Kennedy.

Expanding on a two-bit sketch character from his self-titled WB network variety show, Kennedy plays B-Rad G (nee Brad Gluckman), a pathetic poser "from the 'Bu," where "everybody's strapped with a nine" (nine-iron, that is) and "most of the time the police won't even come through" (because the town is pretty much crime-free).

Being from a straight-laced political family, Brad has become such an embarrassment to his father's gubernatorial campaign that daddy (Ryan O'Neal) hires two Juilliard theater graduates to play gangstaz, kidnap the brat and drop him in Compton to scare the imaginary "ghetto" out of him.

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If only Jim Carrey's uninhibited and completely unhinged, sweet-and-sour insanity was by itself enough to carry a movie, it might not matter so much that the plot of the Farrelly Brothers' "Me, Myself and Irene" is nothing but an undercooked on-the-run road movie.

Full of crooked cops and rich, double-crossing ex-boyfriends, it's a dim bulb script the boys had shelved ages ago and dusted off last year only after a couple post-"There's Something About Mary" projects fell through.

Sustained only by its outrageousness (breast milk gags, anyone?) and Carrey's hammy physical humor, the movie does have its fair share of laughs. But between guffaws there's nothing to keep the uneven "Irene" from collapsing under its own dead weight.

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