Ratatouille (Movie)

Ratatouille will make you wonder why animation needs to hide behind the mantle of 'it's for children, but grownups will like it, too.' This one's for Mom and Dad, and yep, the kids will like it, too. No kidding.

What is most lovable about Remy is his modesty and shyness, even for a rat. He has body language so expressive than many humans would trade for it.

The storyline supplies the film with witty humor and physical comedy in just the right places while holding it together with child-friendly themes, such as the importance of family, loyalty towards friends, and the ever-important message that your size, shape, or species shouldn’t stop you from obtaining your dreams.

The Motorcycle Diaries (Movie)

Alberto (Rodrigo de la Serna, back) and his best friend Che (Gael Garcia Bernal) take to the open road on a dilapidated old motorcycle for a journey that takes them from Argentina to Peru in 1952.

"The Motorcycle Diaries" tells the story of an 8,000 mile trip by motorcycle, raft, truck and foot, from Argentina to Peru, undertaken in 1952 by Ernesto Guevara de la Serna and his friend Alberto Granado.

By the end of the journey, Ernesto has undergone a conversion. "I think of things in different ways," he tells his friend. "Something has changed in me." The final titles say he would go on to join Castro in the Cuban Revolution, and then fight for his cause in the Congo and Bolivia, where he died. His legend lives on, celebrated largely, I am afraid, by people on the left who have sentimentalized him without looking too closely at his beliefs and methods. He is an awfully nice man in the movie, especially as played by the sweet and engaging Gael Garcia Bernal. Pity how he turned out.

The real star of the film is South America itself, revealed in the cinematographer Eric Gautier's misty green images as a land of jarring and enigmatic beauty. It also unabashedly revives the venerable, romantic notion that travel can enlarge the soul, and even change the world.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (Movie)

In AWE of pirates:

One longs for more scenes featuring Captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp's indelible and beloved character in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, and less of everything else in this bloated, overwrought and convoluted three-hour misfire.

Depp is in only about half of the movie, which is a tactical error in this third — and worst — installment of the 2003 surprise hit. Instead, the movie is overloaded with extraneous characters and weighed down by muddled seafaring mythology.

But let's be honest: It's all about Jack. He's what made the first movie a hit. And, as a Hollywood dealmaker might put it, the franchise hinges on him. So why crowd the movie with an ever-expanding cast no one cares about? And why run aground a seafaring adventure saga with tedious scenes of a pirates' council as they discuss administrative matters?

Worth seeing for the jaw-dropping action, the doses of irreverent humor and of course the star power of Depp.

Man On Wire (Movie)

To Reach the Clouds

Wire-walker Philippe Petit crosses between the World Trade Center twin towers in 1974.

The film shows the towers growing, huge steel beams being lifted, the puzzle being put together. As it happens, 9/11 is not even mentioned in the film, which is the right decision, I think. "Man on Wire" is about the vanquishing of the towers by bravery and joy, not by terrorism.

The installation of a wire between the two towers was as complicated as a bank heist. He and his friends scouted the terrain, obtained false ID cards, talked their way into a freight elevator reaching to the top -- above the level of the finished floors. Incredibly, they had to haul nearly a ton of equipment up there. You may have heard how they got the wire across, and how they guy-wired it, but if you don't know, I won't tell you.

Philippe Petit was arrested and eventually found guilty. The charge: Disturbing the peace. Man on Wire is a documentary with heart -- but heart so intense at the time that it turns out impossible to maintain in the long term. (The caper cost Petit at least two of the closest relationships he had.) Is it worth it?

Face Time -- Mount Rushmore

Gutzon Borglum is the man who sculpted or blasted (or whatever you want to call it) the four presidential faces at Mount Rushmore.

Much of the carving of Washington, Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt over 14 years of construction did not go as Borglum first planned. The monument's original design called for the Presidents to be finished down to their waists.

He sits back and thinks Well, now I've done it. Now I've created the damnedest art work in the whole world. I saw the blank rock side of a mountain in South Dakota, and I conquered it. I must be a genius.

The truth of the matter is that Gutzon Borgium was no genius. he was a klutz when offered hammer and chisel. His real talents were in other fields.

It takes a while, looking at Rushmore, to figure out the problem. The scope is all wrong. The whole of it is poorly defined, and wretchedly executed. Being so massive, we think it is artistic per se. The physical size of it overwhelms us, makes us say "Wow!" and "How did they do that?" But the truth of the matter is that Borglum wouldn't know good sculpture if it sat on his lap and stuck its tongue in his ear. The placement of the four heads is all wrong. Why is Teddy looking so hard at Lincoln's non-existent ear? Why does Jefferson look to be stoned, as it were? Why does Washington appear to have just eaten a bug? Most of all --- what's with the scale of it? Despite its massiveness, it has a vague ill-conceived feeling, a feeling of tentativeness that tells us that the artist was not quite an artist, but rather, a dandy political string-puller and fund-raiser (for Gutzon Borglum).

After reading this all-too-detailed life of Yet Another Pained and Tedious Artist, we are surprised that they didn't inscribe these words on his gravestone:

I'm not dead.
It's just a rumor.
Spread by my enemies.
So they can steal my ideas from me.