Sausage Party, Pete's Dragon, Florence Foster Jenkins, Anthropoid, Hell or High Water, Little Men, Disorder, Joshy, Ants on a Shrimp

Sausage Party

Pete's Dragon

Florence Foster Jenkins

Anthropoid

Little Men 

Hell or High Water

Disorder

Joshy

Ants on a Shrimp

Four extremely enthusiastic recommendations and a few turkeys in a busy week at the movies:

Meadowland, I Smile Back, Suffragette, A Ballerina's Tale

Meadowland

I Smile Back



Suffragette

A Ballerina's Tale



Quick capsules on a mixed week at the movies:

The Gift, Ricki and the Flash, Shaun the Sheep Movie, Cop Car, Diary of a Teenage Girl, Dark Places

Ricki and the Flash

The Gift



Shaun the Sheep Movie

Cop Car



Diary of a Teenage Girl

Dark Places






Notes on a good week in film:

Into the Woods

Rob Marshall, who directed the Oscar-winning adaptation of “Chicago” (2002), again gives moviegoers a Christmas gift with the disproportionately enjoyable “Into the Woods,” with book by James Lapine and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.

The Homesman

"The Homesman" is as much a head-scratcher as its title, a two-hour exercise in the pointless prolongation of miserablist material.

The Giver

"The Giver" is not the first - or even the seventh - bad movie Meryl Streep's appeared in, but it is bad, sententious YA sci-fi. In case you hadn't heard: conformity and eugenics, boo; freedom and self-definition, yay.

August: Osage County

Now, for the good stuff. 

Hope Springs

MGM has falsely advertised the Meryl Streep-Tommy Lee Jones vehicle “Hope Springs” as a laugh-a-minute sex romp for the 50+ demographic. What it is, at its best, is a somber, often sad portrait of a marriage in long, slow declension, with a few small chuckles interspersed for comic relief. Director David Frankel – fresh off the ornithological Jack Black-Steve Martin-Owen Wilson bomb “The Big Year” – never commits to either the drama or the comedy, leaving “Hope Springs” in a state of limbo that produced queasy discomfort among my audience, who clearly didn’t get what they expected.