Movie reviews

“It’s time to play the music / It’s time to light the lights …” The Muppets (G) seem to have been away for a very long time, a fact not lost on Walter (voiced by Peter Linz), a lonely young Muppet who grew up with Gary (Jason Segel) for an older brother.

When Gary and his sweetheart Mary (Amy Adams) travel to Hollywood to celebrate their anniversary, Walter tags along, only to discover, during a tour of the dilapidated Muppet Museum, that dastardly oilman Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) plans to buy the museum and tear it down in order to drill for oil. Can Walter, Gary and Mary get the Muppets back together for one last fundraising show? Directed by former Ali G and Flight of the Conchords writer James Bobin, The Muppets is a suitably barnstorming return to form by Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, et al. The movie is as happy poking fun at the Muppets’ legacy as it is in providing some classically hopeless slapstick courtesy of Fozzie Bear. The Muppets are a little less anarchic than of yore, but Segel’s script is largely intended as a heartwarming homage to the timeless charm of the Muppet Show, and may well end up as the dictionary definition of entertainment for all the family.

Keira Knightley’s performance in A Dangerous Method (16s) is so outlandish at times that you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she’d been taking method acting lessons from Muppets drummer Animal. David Cronenberg’s film about the relationship between Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) puts her in an almost impossible position, playing Sabina Spielrein, a woman so conflicted by her masochistic sexual desires that she is at times reduced to a desperate grunting while hunching over like a wounded bird. Sabina recovers to become a well-respected psychologist, although the main thrust of Cronenberg’s narrative veers away from this potentially fascinating tale to concern itself with Freud and Jung, adroitly played by Mortensen and Fassbender, respectively, who are so restrained by comparison with Sabina that they tend to fade into the backdrop whenever she appears. Uneven in tone and fatally unfocused, in terms of its narrative drive, it surprisingly peters out with a whimper rather than a bang.

The Woman in Black (15A) opens with widower and lawyer Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) travelling to a remote village in late Victorian England, there to settle the affairs of a dead woman. Obstructed by the locals, Kipps takes the bold move of going directly to the dead woman’s mansion, where things very quickly begin to go bump in the night. The second adaptation of the Susan Hill novel of the same name, James Watkins’ movie ticks virtually every box required of a gothic horror, and may well have been entirely convincing but for the presence of Radcliffe in the lead role. Far too callow to be persuasive as bereft widower, he further lacks the craft and physical presence to compete with Ciaran Hinds, who is excellent in the role of the village’s sole voice of reason.

The Vow (12A) stars Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum as a newly married couple, Paige and Leo, whose idyllic relationship is rent asunder when Paige wakes from a coma with no memory of Leo and their life together. Blackballed by Paige’s family, Leo is determined to make Paige fall in love with him again — but what if Paige decides her preppy, pre-Leo life is the one she prefers? A sparky performance from McAdams is rather muffled by Tatum’s attempts to emote here; a solid action-adventure star, Tatum spends his time growling and frowning, and generally looking like he’d much rather whip out a sub-machine gun and mow down anyone who stands in the way of his happiness. That kind of plot-twist has no place in an against-the-odds love story that is the celluloid equivalent of a comfort blanket woven into a patchwork quilt of clichés.

Also re-released this week are Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace (3D) (1999) and Casablanca (1942), the latter 70 years young and still the most quote-friendly film ever made. If they’re still quoting chunks of dialogue from The Phantom Menace in 2069, I’ll eat my Millennium Falcon.