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ARTHUR AND THE INVISIBLES The wildly uneven French writer/director/producer Luc Besson has a fondness for worlds and lifestyles that lie outside the margins of conventional society: the neon-lit labyrinths of the Paris Metro (Subway); the pristine depths of the ocean (The Big Blue); exotic but treacherous visions of the future (The Fifth Element). His latest finds him subterranean once again, this time burrowing down to a fantastical universe where elves and fairies — so small that they are invisible to human eyes — live in harmony with nature. Adapted from a series of children’s books authored by Besson himself (based on an original idea by Céline Garcia), this live-action/computer-animated hybrid follows 10-year-old Arthur (Freddie Highmore), who, in order to save the home he shares with his somewhat addled grandmother (Mia Farrow), must decipher a diary left by his grandfather before he mysteriously disappeared four years ago. Following the clues, Arthur, now a 3-D animated figure sporting cool shades and spiked hair, enters the mythical Seven Kingdoms, where he joins forces with sexy CGI Princess Selenia (voiced by a delightfully unrecognizable Madonna) and her chubby, rubber troll of a brother, Betameche (Jimmy Fallon), as they battle the evil Lord Malthazard (David Bowie) for buried treasure. Predictable and overly busy, this sci-fi adventure should nonetheless appeal to computer-game-savvy tots, especially those familiar with the source material, while boring their parents silly. Highmore is sweetly exuberant, but the voice talent is uneven, and the only really clever bits find the CGI characters navigating real live foliage. (Beverly Center) (Jean Oppenheimer)
BLACK CHRISTMAS Ever the devoted public servant, I went to see this grisly little horror movie (which opened without benefit of preview screenings) by myself, on Christmas. That makes me sound like a real loser, but in truth, going alone to scary movies takes me back to adolescence, when my folks would drop me off at the local twin theater and I would gleefully experience soul-warping chillers with titles like Sssssss and Asylum. Writer-director Glen Morgan, who co-produced the Final Destination films, appears to have had a similarly unhealthy youth, because whenever he gets a hankering to direct, he remakes a horror classic of the 1970s. First came 2001’s Willard (which wasn’t bad at all), and now there’s Morgan’s fast-paced but unsatisfying remake of a 1974 film by director Bob Clark (Porky’s, A Christmas Story) that few saw at the time, but which has since been credited with influencing John Carpenter’s Halloween and the 30 years of slasher-movie brutality that followed. The gimmick, first devised by screenwriter Roy Moore, is simple: On Christmas Eve, a snowbound houseful of sorority girls are picked off by a killer who calls the house phone in between killings to rant in a variety of voices, all of them creepy. In Clark’s version, we never saw the killer’s face or knew his reasons for killing. Here, in a series of flashbacks, Morgan tells of a boy who grew up in the house with an evil mother who drove him mad. The flashbacks are wittily gothic, and the present-day murder scenes have the absurdist, chain-reaction intricacy of the Final Destination deaths, but the sorority girls — buxom babes all — are so interchangeable, and so uninteresting, that I got to wishing that Morgan and all those who tread the lucrative horror remake market would take the time to create a bona fide heroine whose survival we could cheer. Hey, does Jamie Lee Curtis have an actress daughter? (Citywide) (Chuck Wilson)
THE DEAD GIRL Karen Moncrieff’s dark, showily acted ensemble piece begins where torture-porn flicks typically climax and move on — with a girl’s mutilated body. Here, the discovery splits the film into five stories of women somehow linked by the murder, four afters and a before, each providing its own partially obscured angle on the crime. Moncrieff, who made a promising debut in 2002 with Blue Car , doesn’t force some overlay of cosmic linkage on the stories: The plot strands that connect the five women are direct and plausible. Most often, images and details rhyme between the stories in mysterious ways — the wife’s pet rabbit and the dead girl’s stuffed bunny, for example, or the burning of news clippings by two characters for gravely different reasons. The top-notch cast includes Toni Collette, Marcia Gay Harden, Mary Beth Hurt, Kerry Washington, Rose Byrne and Brittany Murphy. The truncated stories force the actors to start at a high pitch and keep going, but they — and the director — work wonders at low volume. (Sunset 5) (Jim Ridley)
FACTORY GIRL See film feature (Westside Pavilion)
FAST TRACK Being cast out by the Weinstein Company into the wilds of January with barely a blip of advertising support, director Jesse Peretz’s Fast Track doesn’t stand a chance at finding an audience — which is a shame, because when it works (which is at least half of the time), this antic romp has the off-the-wall, go-for-broke zaniness of that other great modern screwball comedy, David O. Russell’s Flirting with Disaster. When career slacker Tom (Zach Braff, keeping his “look how cute I am” tics to a welcome minimum) gets fired from his latest job, he packs up wife Sofia (Amanda Peet) and their newborn kid and trades life in the Big Apple for the calming pleasures of small-town Ohio — Sherwood Anderson country. There, he takes up his sad-sack father-in-law (Charles Grodin) on the offer of an “assistant associate creative” position in a new-agey advertising company, where Tom soon finds himself under the thumb of Sofia’s paraplegic former classmate (and possible ex-flame), Chip (Jason Bateman), a seemingly benevolent cripple who’s really a Machiavelli on wheels. That’s an inspired starting place for a farce, and Peretz (working from a sometimes tasteless, often insidiously funny script by first-time screenwriters David Guion and Michael Handelman) has a knack for casting the kind of bright comic talents — Amy Adams, Donal Logue, Mia Farrow and Paul Rudd round out the ensemble — who more or less just have to show up. The movie is Bateman’s to steal, however, which he does early and often, whether re-enacting an old high-school cheerleading routine or trying to seduce Sofia by showing her the money shot from one of his favorite movies: Coming Home. (Beverly Center 13) (Scott Foundas)
