Chappie, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Chappie

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Dev Patel is the common thread in the week's two new features:

Philomena

Having set the bar for least screen time in an Oscar-winning performance in "Shakespeare in Love," Dame Judi Dench occupies almost every scene of the new tearjerker "Philomena," about an English nurse's search for the boy she was forced to give up for adoption fifty years earlier.

Skyfall

The 23rd installment of the James Bond series, the crowd-pleasing "Skyfall" brings back a sense of sophisticated and stylish fun that's been missing in such forlorn recent entries as "Quantum of Solace." Daniel Craig may not live up to your memories of the better Bonds of the past, but he's settled into the role and gives us a 007 to match the current mood: a bit drawn, a bit dour, ever stoic and taciturn - all business. There's an almost puffy solidity to the prematurely grey Craig that's part masculine and part cyborg. You get the sense that for his Bond girls, sex with him is a joyless if technically effective enterprise.

Stars in Shorts

Shorts HD has released an anthology of seven short films with the highly imaginative title “Stars in Shorts” (maybe it is imaginative – has Julia Stiles been a star anytime in the last 15 years?). It’s all downhill after the first short, a mildly amusing trifle called “The Procession” with Lily Tomlin and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as a mother and son reluctantly at...tending the funeral of a friend of Ferguson’s sister that neither of them knew. (Perhaps nobody else could give quite the same line reading when Ferguson asks, “Oh, that’s terrible. I’m sorry…who is Susan?”) When a red light leaves half the procession too far ahead for them to find and half blindly following them, all they want to do is exit stage left.

First Position, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

First Position

The Pirates! Band of Misfits

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Since Jeffrey Blitz's great 2002 documentary "Spellbound," you can write the treatments for such pix by Mad Libs (choose activity: spelling bee, crosswords, ballroom dancing; add backstory; climax at national finals). Bess Kargman's youth-ballet-competition doc "First Person" is formulaic, cheesy, and not particularly well-made, but Kargman chose a delightful sextet of kids to track, and they imbue the flick with more humor and joy than it deserves. What makes the kids so impressive is not so much their virtuosity as their seriousness (often singleness) of purpose, their perseverance through intense physical pain, their professionalism. Everyone comes off well except a couple of the parents, one a total Tiger Mother, another who with a few words manages to put the weight of the world on his daughter's shoulders. Kargman needed to tighten up the story - at times, despite the supposed rigor of the Youth America Grand Prix, it seems everyone who fucks up gets a Tonya Harding retake - but she's made sharp enough casting choices to overcome her directorial failings and the movie's good clean fun.