20th Century Fox

Going underground: Fantastic Mr. Fox

***½ Fantastic Mr. Fox
Directed by Wes Anderson. Written by Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, based on the novel by Roald Dahl. With the voices of George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray. (PG)

Wes Anderson has always seemed happiest constructing live-action dioramas, little worlds — a theatrical set, a grand room in an old townhouse, an explorer's ship — over which he has total creative control. When his characters step off that impeccably upholstered train rumbling through India they are flummoxed by the outside world's unpredictability. So in stop-motion animation Anderson may have finally found his medium, one that suits both his cultural agoraphobia and his eccentric demands. It's easier to get puppets not to blink than actors.

Roald Dahl's children's book, about a fox who steals poultry from three farmers, has been mushed by Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) into the Wes Anderson mold: there's a cocky, impeccably tailored father (George Clooney), an artistic mother (why stick with Anjelica Huston when you can get Meryl Streep?), and a nerdy child (Jason Schwartzman) coping with a visit from his cousin Kristofferson (Wes' brother Eric), who can do anything. Mr. Fox has given up
his life of crime for a job as a newspaper columnist, but avoiding his true nature lasts only so long, and soon he is planning a three-night heist, plotted with the amusing detail also lavished on the game of Whack-bat, an Anderson invention at which Kristofferson naturally excels.

All of this is filmed like a Wes Anderson live-action movie, in wide shots with the main characters dead center, and with the traveling long takes that Anderson parodied in his American Express commercial. As in The Life Aquatic there's a cutaway set, this one of the animals' apartments in the sewers after they are forced to go into hiding. The craft of stop-motion suits the director's fondness for handmade things, and the animals' fur has a charming "boil," as animators call it, rippling from frame to frame.

In the end the animals are condemned to a life underground, but having found an inexhaustible supply of food they will never imperiled by that ugly, chancy world out there. In the book the joke is on the farmers, doomed to spend the rest of their lives waiting for the animals to emerge, but here it's really about the pleasures of being with your own kind in your own little diorama, a perfect world for Anderson perhaps, but a little depressing for the rest of us.

***½ The Road
Directed by John Hillcoat. Written by Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy. With Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Charlize Theron. (R)

Each era gets the literature it deserves, and in our era of fast food, faster culture and short attention spans Cormac McCarthy is king, parlaying short, declarative sentences, macho posturing (punctuation is for sissies) and a facile morality that flatters his readers (you wouldn't be a cannibal, uh-uh) into literary stardom. That McCarthy claims he doesn't understand James and Proust says everything, but simplistic novels are easier to bring to the screen (compare last year's disastrous film of Jose Saramago's similarly themed Blindness), and McCarthy has been fortunate to have been filmed by some of the best in the business: the Coen brothers, for No Country for Old Men, and for his 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winner The Road the Australian filmmaker John Hillcoat (The Proposition). Indeed, it is impossible to imagine a better adaptation than Hillcoat's excruciatingly faithful movie.

Viggo Mortensen plays The Man, making his way south with The Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) some years after the apocalypse. As they dodged cannibals and stumbled on a cellar full of canned fruit, I couldn't help thinking that this was more fun when it was called Zombieland. British playwright Joe Penhall has enlarged the supporting players' roles, particularly Charlize Theron as The Woman and Robert Duvall as The Old Man, and the Spanish cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe's work is exquisite, capturing the ravaged landscape (actually New Orleans, Pennsylvania mining country and Mount St. Helens) in ravishing sepia and gray. The one weak spot is Smit-McPhee, who is not always entirely convincing as a boy who never knew the world before the apocalypse, but then not even Jackie Cooper could have sold some of McCarthy's dialogue. And the portrayal of The Thief as a black street hustler adds a tinge of racism to a movie in which almost all the survivors of the apocalypse are white.

I was unmoved, but I guess that depends on one's tolerance for McCarthy's dichotomous morality. Are they the good guys? No, they're the bad guys. We're the good guys. We're carrying the fire. Are you carrying the fire? Are you going to shoot yourself in the mouth? Not now? Later? Okay, maybe later.

*½ Twilight: New Moon
Directed by Chris Weitz. Written by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer. With Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner. (PG-13)

The sequel to last year's blockbuster finds Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) turning 18, entering her senior year of high school, and still madly in love with vampire boy Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). But when a paper cut triggers blood lust (I am not making this up) the Cullens flee, and Bella consoles herself with indigenous teen Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), who looks like he's grown a foot since the first Twilight and put on 30 pounds of muscle. Jacob is changing (puberty comes late in Forks, Washington) and soon he's cut his hair, gotten a tattoo and learned to prowl on all fours. Meanwhile, Bella's dad (Billy Burke) is investigating the disappearance of several hikers in the woods.

At 140 minutes this is slow going if one is not among those enamored of Pattinson's James Dean act and Lautner's rippling torso. (Men's shirts are removed without cause, like women's in horror movies.) Since even non-fanatics can tell that Jacob doesn't stand a chance against Edward, there's precious little suspense. Chris Weitz, who seems to have been hired for his experience directing CGI bears in The Golden Compass, has at least made something that resembles an actual movie, unlike Catherine Hardwicke's original. (I also suspect he doctored Melissa Rosenberg's flat-footed script with a few jokes.) The action is still done in fast slow-mo (or is it slow fast-mo?), but the soundtrack is hipper — Bon Iver, not Paramour — and the third act picks up considerably with a trip to Tuscany, where Michael Sheen is gleefully snapping the necks off vampires who displease him. Unfortunately he won't be back for Part III, which will find Bella still mired in that vampire-werewolf love triangle next summer.