Splits: "Knock at the Cabin"

It's been quite the ride, worthy of one of his better scripts. Turn-of-the-millennium M. Night Shyamalan: promising to masterful. Mid-Noughties to late 2010s Shyamalan: disastrous, such that you could barely believe this was the same individual. Recent Shyamalan: rehabilitation, of a sort. This writer-director is the Cristiano Ronaldo of the contemporary cinema: capable of brilliance, not lacking in self-regard, and mercurial to say the least. As with studio chiefs, audiences have found out the hard way that you never know what you're spending your money on when it comes to this guy. After a run of medium-cost, high-reward B-movies (the continuation of the Unbreakable saga with Split and Glass, the Twilight Zone-ish Old), Knock at the Cabin marks a return to the politics of 2004's The Village, Shyamalan's riff on American insularity at the time of the Second Gulf War. Its startpoint - from which the film reportedly then deviates - is a prime slab of Trump-era pulp fiction (Paul Tremblay's 2018 novel The Cabin at the End of the World); from it, Shyamalan has extracted the set-up of a forced houseshare in a house divided. A gay couple (Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge) are holidaying in the New Jersey woods with their adorable adopted daughter (Kristen Cui) when a pack of fervent believers, headed by Dave Bautista's Leonard, show up to inform them the end of the world is nigh - unless, that is, two of them sacrifice the other. Clearly these rival tribes are coming from very different places and positions; Groff's Eric initially wonders whether the intruders are here as part of some violent conversion-therapy program. The question the film is pondering is that America itself now seems to be pondering: is there any way of squaring these divergent perspectives that doesn't end in bloodshed or loss of life?

It's a nifty premise, granted - an inversion of Richard Kelly's The Box, where a couple were handed a device that killed complete strangers and - with it - a deathly responsibility few of us would ever want to have to consider outside the cinema. Shyamalan first sets his characters to having what apologists for right-wing quackery insist on calling "a conversation", trying to hear both sides out equally. The intruders aren't swivel-eyed zealots, exactly: they include a nurse, a gas company worker, and - in Big Len's case - a teacher. Were it not for the bizarre, medieval-looking armaments they've been encouraged to take up, and their willingness to sacrifice their own as a sign of their sincerity, they could be regarded as responsible citizens. Slowly, Shyamalan scatters the action with crumbs of backstory, plugging some of the holes in the picture: I enjoyed Eric's derisive "Messageboard?" upon learning where the intruders met. At the same time, you feel the filmmaker using whatever resources a studio is now willing to trust him with to re-test his yarnspinning abilities: he's seeing how long he can string this standoff out before he has to admit one side or another has it right, or - an outside bet you can't dismiss with this filmmaker - that both sides are so entrenched inside their echo chambers that they're very much mistaken. We're meant to be here to bear witness to a gradual fraying of the American social fabric, yet there's a niggling mismatch between the scope of the events being described and the scale of the production, because Shyamalan is still on probation. (Those apocalyptic events we see are framed as news footage on the cabin's flatscreen - and, in reality, some of that footage would be impossible to retrieve or unlikely to make it onto the airwaves.) It's a tense watch, but much of that tension isn't the tension Shyamalan wants to cultivate or remind us of - it's a tension that comes from us feeling this story could fall to pieces, The Happening-style, with one false move in the screenplay.

Perhaps the real story with Knock at the Cabin, then, is that it hangs together for as long as it does. There are flashes of the Shyamalan A-game, not least in his work with these actors: he coaxes a genuine distress out of Cui, and is quite clever about finding ways not to deploy Bautista's bulk. (The presence of Broadway regular Groff, and of the West End's own Nikki Amuka-Bird among Leonard's crew, suggests Shyamalan understood this project represents a form of fringe theatre - one location, words as weaponised descriptors, a concerted push to wring maximum resonance from a controlled scenario and a confined space.) Some good news: he's regained his ability to work the frame, to shift the viewer's eyes around from shot to shot. His extreme, angular close-ups allow us to scan each face here for signs of weakness, doubt or dissemblance, and there's some nice, macabre detail along the way. (Hitch would have chortled at the character who plants down in a rocking chair to slit their own throat, so the lifeless body bobs back and forth.) Yet again the camera has had to pick up the slack from a wobbly penhand, top-heavy as that is with its bearer's saviour complex (and fascination with same). In the final third, Shyamalan writes everybody into not just a tight spot but a dead end; his payoff begs for a credulity at least 50% of the audience isn't going to have. This viewer, certainly, wasn't buying it, and I'm not sure I can really even sell Knock at the Cabin as a fun time at the movies, exploiting as it does real-world neuroses and insecurities, a general feeling that everything's falling apart all at once. You leave the cinema with a sense that M. Night Shyamalan is working his way back towards the light, albeit in an America that finds itself in a most unhappy if not entirely hopeless place. I mean: swings and roundabouts, right?

Knock at the Cabin is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Fear and loathing: "Blue Jean"

The writer-director Ron Peck, who died just before Christmas, earned his place in British cinema history on the strength of a single film: 1978's Nighthawks, a rough-edged, naturalistic study of a gay geography teacher at an inner-London school, obliged to patrol the boundary he'd set for himself between his day job and his party-hearty social life. With her terrific debut Blue Jean, Georgia Oakley offers a refining of the same set-up, even as she turns it in the direction of the commercial thriller. Oakley's heroine Jean (Rosy McEwen) is a lesbian PE teacher in a North East coastal town ten years on from the Peck film, at a point when the Thatcher government had mandate enough to push through Clause 28, a legislative agenda specifically intended to root out and disenfranchise these nefarious queers Tory MPs felt were subverting British society. As someone entrusted with shaping the minds and bodies of the Red Wall's children, we sense Jean is tiptoeing on thin ice even before problem student Lois (Lucy Halliday) walks into the gay bar she's taken to drinking in. A scene evoking a familiar sixth-form weirdness - seeing a teacher during a night on the town - assumes an additional edge in this new context: now Jean's secret is out in the public domain, at a time where there are serious consequences for having such secrets to keep. "Not everything is political," Jean blithely retorts to on-off lover Viv (Kerrie Hayes) after the latter deigns to suggest Cilla Black's godawful Blind Date is a state-sponsored plot to batter the British public into heteronormative submission. Well, here's our Georgia with a quick - and very timely - reminder: it is, you know.

One of the surprises of Oakley's film is that it doesn't quite play out the way you suspect, which is to say it keeps a wise distance from Fatal Attraction. Instead, the tension manifests as a low-level, everyday disquiet; the girl gets inside the teacher's head, not her bed. Nevertheless, Jean can't sleep, and she can't relax, especially given the comments made by colleagues unaware they themselves have a lesbian in their midst. At the same time, a strange but perhaps not entirely unexpected bond develops between Jean and Lois, converting outcast Lois into the super-sub of the school netball team. (This is likely the only thriller you'll have seen where netball serves as a plot point, the girls' locker room proving as reactionary in its attitudes as the staff room upstairs.) That after-hours encounter reveals to Jean and Lois both that they're not alone; they are, instead, living parallel secret lives. Oakley, we sense, isn't just prising open Thatcher's crypt for the hell of it (though there the old bat is, taking up dispatch-box arms against what she dubs "the inalienable right of children to be gay"), and she's not here to prey on pre-existing fears or spark another moral panic. (Everybody's jumpy enough nowadays as it is.) Instead, quietly and rather brilliantly, Blue Jean begins to formulate its own counterargument in favour of gay teachers: that they might be able to share a measure of life experience, or the right words of encouragement, at a moment when it doesn't take much to make a kid feel like a pariah.

The film builds that rhetorical force in large part by getting the details right. It's recognisably 1980s, without going full dayglo legwarmer on us; there's a bit of "Blue Monday", but otherwise the soundtrack goes for less familiar (and thus presumably cheaper to licence) pop. All the while, Oakley reveals herself as an exceptional director of actors. McEwen, a newcomer to this viewer, has the same upright alertness Tilda Swinton has, and no less of an ability to loose a tell-tale tremor across a snow-white face, like a ripple on a lake. (I couldn't tell whether this was a make-up choice or mere subdermal serendipity, but the rash observed on her neck during a pivotal scene in the headmaster's office is uncomfortably persuasive.) She constructs a loving but intriguingly tentative bond with Hayes, here pierced and tatted and all but unrecognisable from the juvenile lead who energised 2009's Kicks; there's a deft sketch of a small but vibrant and defiant gay community; and, back at school, the teenagers are properly inchoate, not stage-schoolers who wouldn't be seen dead in Blyth. (No surprise, come the end credits, to see the name Shaheen Baig, the casting director who's done as much as anyone to shake up the look and sound of British cinema these past two decades.) Right through to a third-act crisis in which our sympathies are torn every which way, Oakley's deft, economical scripting puts her protagonist in a bind without ever appearing to force the issue; her raw materials are those unspoken but deeply felt pressures that follow from having to justify who you are, and why you have every right to remain in the room. It's identifiably a 21st century movie about identity. But it's also a really smart and gripping movie, however you identify, whether or not you can remember this grim period of recent British history.

Blue Jean opens in selected cinemas from Friday, with previews across the country from tonight.

For what it's worth...

Top ten films at the UK box office (for the weekend of January 27-29, 2023):

1 (1) Avatar: The Way of Water (12A) ***

2 (new) Pathaan (12A) ***

3 (new) Plane (15)

4 (new) The Fabelmans (12A) ****

5 (2) M3gan (15) ***

6 (3) Babylon (18)

7 (5) Roald Dahl's Matilda: The Musical (PG)

8 (4) I Wanna Dance with Somebody (12A)

9 (new) The Wandering Earth II (12A)

10 (new) Billie Eilish: Live at the O2 (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Saint Omer

2. Roman Holiday [above]

3. The Fabelmans

4. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

5. Pathaan

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Black Adam (12)

2 (4) The Banshees of Inisherin (15) ****

3 (5) Top Gun: Maverick (12) ****

4 (3) Elvis (12) **

5 (9) The Menu (15)

6 (8) Jurassic World: Dominion (12)

7 (2) Halloween Ends (18)

8 (7) Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile (PG)

9 (13) Prey for the Devil (15)

10 (11) Sing 2 (U)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Decision to Leave

2. Watcher

3. The Banshees of Inisherin

4. Crimes of the Future

5. Bros

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. A Matter of Life and Death (Sunday, BBC2, 2.45pm) 

2. The Lady Vanishes (Saturday, BBC2, 3.05pm)

3. The 39 Steps (Saturday, BBC2, 1pm)

4. Con Air (Friday, ITV1, 10.45pm)

5. The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (Friday, C4, 12.35am)

You be the judge: "Saint Omer"

Saint Omer marks the French filmmaker Alice Diop's transition into full-length fiction from acclaimed documentaries, and you can tell. For the last 105 of its 122 minutes, Diop's latest project offers a soup-to-nuts account of a trial held in the market town of the title, centred on a Senegalese student, Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), who's been accused of murdering her 15-month-old daughter. Yet this courtroom drama is prefixed by an unusual prologue introducing us to Rama (Kayije Kagame), an academic looking on at the trial from the gallery. Diop shares a lot of information here that doesn't initially seem all that relevant from a narrative perspective: what Rama is teaching (Marguerite Duras, how female collaborators were treated after WW2), dramas within her family, what she saw out the window of the train that took her to Saint Omer, even what she does with her hotel bedlinen. As is apparent from the small handful of less than glowing reviews of Diop's film, one response to this scene-setting might be a restless "get on with it". What becomes clear is that this is Diop showing her working - as modern documentarists are encouraged to do - because it turns out she, like Rama, sat in on a real-life trial of this kind, and found herself negotiating certain issues as events played out before her. The film's insistently frontal framing represents an attempt on Diop's part to bring a renewed honesty and transparency to cinematic fiction - to meet the audience on the level, and from the off try and show exactly where everybody on screen is coming from.

This is important, because the case under discussion is an odd one, at once open-and-shut and far more complex besides. In a move typical of the upfront approach, Diop has her judge (Valérie Dréville) lay out the established facts in an early monologue for jurors and viewers alike. The dead infant was left to drown on a beach; after initially denying culpability, Laurence copped to the crime; and now, finally, here we all are. In her opening remarks, the accused maintains she has no clue what drove her to this heinous act, instead expressing a sincere hope the trial (the French procès feels more resonant in the context) will illuminate her motives; she then pleads not guilty. The implication is that there may well be extenuating circumstances, not unlike the extenuating circumstances that prologue entered on Rama's behalf. Thereafter, the uncluttered clarity of Diop's blocking and framing underlines the parallels between these two women. Both have spent time thinking about crimes and punishments. Both have issues with their extended family: in Laurence's case, she believes someone put the evil eye on her. Both are alert to the sore spots of race and gender that flare up during the trial, and such is the fierce directness of this camera that we too become attuned or reattuned to them: the all-white jury, the child's father - a befuddled older fellow - ducking out of taking responsibility for pre-natal care because "men didn't do that sort of thing in [his] day", the blithe racism of Laurence's PhD supervisor, who wonders why an African student would have any interest in an Austrian philosopher like Wittgenstein. Here, as elsewhere in Saint Omer, you can almost literally feel the air being sucked out of the courtroom; what Diop must have realised, sitting up in the gallery, is that a trial can recreate the perfect storm of indifference and insensitivity that leaves people in handcuffs and lives hanging in the balance.

She counters that indifference with thoughtful presentation; this isn't just a lesson in citizenship, but a richly rewarding lesson in film style. Saint Omer immediately distinguishes itself from movie norms by setting us down in the middle of the calmest, least fractious courtroom in screen history, overseen by a judge who barely raises her voice - it is a place, crucially, where you can hear yourself think. What you often find yourself thinking about, when you're not busy mulling the particulars of this case, is the assurance and elegance of Diop's camera set-ups. Laurence's testimony, to isolate one element, is recorded in a single medium shot, with no movement to stir false action, nor straining close-ups at moments of high emotion. Diop displays a documentarist's readiness and determination to let her camera run - to hear out her subjects without distraction, allowing them in turn to underline or undermine their own account of themselves. When the framing is this simple (by narrative cinema standards), any subsequent reframing - and any shift in the judicial balance - registers as doubly potent. There's an astonishingly effective (and suggestive) sequence late on in the trial, where we observe Rama zoning out as two white barristers argue among themselves on the topic of female genital mutilation; just by the sheer drift of its camera, the film shows us someone becoming alienated from language itself, in a way that might have inspired Wittgenstein to fill several more volumes. And yet the movement connects the characters, and connects those characters to the audience. Rama knows how Laurence feels; we know how Rama feels; ergo, we know how Laurence feels, in as much as anyone can ever truly know how anybody else feels.

Far from superfluous, then, that initial framing story represents the run-up in the leap of empathy Diop wants us to take: Rama is another of those onlookers who arrived horrified by this crime and then came to consider the plight of the accused, to walk a mile in shackled shoes. This is where, for all its perspectival clarity, Saint Omer gets actively tricky: it's a film offering a retrial to someone who was found legally culpable, so as to determine whether or not she can also be considered morally and spiritually culpable. Parsing that may require our reaching an understanding - uncomfortable as the process might be - that the circumstances as presented here meant the victim stood even less chance than the woman who rather shruggingly carried her into this world. When Laurence confronts the prosecution lawyer with the freighted question "So why did I do it?", she's asking everyone - Rama, the jury, those of us in the cheap seats - and there aren't easy answers, let alone comforting ones. At least one onlooker has arrived at the conclusion Saint Omer may represent the year's best advert for infanticide, but this is surely to overlook the implications of the film's closing images, which return Rama to everyday life, and show her persisting in the face of the horrors the trial brings up. There is still hope, but perhaps it now has to be cultivated from within. Diop, with her documentary grounding, trusts we can handle the truth - jagged, incendiary, awful though it often is. Saint Omer, the first great film of 2023, serves as its own kind of evidentiary proof - not least that the notion of a cinema for adults, a cinema of ideas and emotions, isn't as dead as we might have feared.

Saint Omer opens from today in selected cinemas.

Cat power: "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish"

Consider this the Spider-Man effect, and an illustration of how our franchises might usefully learn from one another. The generally beloved Shrek series begat 2011's Puss in Boots, a spin-off that made an awful lot of money despite seeming sketchy indeed at 75 minutes; the lack of any immediate follow-up only heightened any suspicion that this lineage had finally run out of puff. (Compare that burnout to the number of Minions movies squeezed out of Despicable Me in the meantime.) Over a decade on, however, Puss finally gets a part deux with The Last Wish, a surprisingly successful revival that owes its existence to two distinct forces: one, the creative and commercial triumph of Sony's 2018 spin-off Into the Spider-Verse, which may have persuaded the suits that franchises benefit when creatives are afforded a freer hand; and two, a post-lockdown need for high-profile content with which to re-establish the DreamWorks brand. The studio's animation division has thus been granted cartoon blanche to do more or less what it likes with its second-string characters, in whatever style they prefer; while the resulting film doesn't go what you'd call full Spider-Verse, it has the advantage of doodling over a script bursting with ten years' worth of ideas, many of those good and fun. Foremost among them: that - much like the franchise itself, one supposes - preening swashbuckler Puss (again voiced by Antonio Banderas) is in the last-chance saloon, having exhausted eight of his allotted nine lives. Pursued by a wolf who claims to be a bounty hunter but may even be Death himself, and then driven from the cat shelter he'd hoped might serve as his retirement home, Puss becomes involved in a madcap chase to catch a fallen star (dare one say a fellow fallen star), competing for ground with tyrannical pie magnate Jack Horner (John Mulaney), former flame Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek Pinault), a Cockney Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and her illustrious Three Bears (Olivia Colman, Ray Winstone and Samson Kayo: the voice casting alone is enough to make you chuckle). One way of approaching The Last Wish: as the It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World of Shrek spin-offs.

Clearly, we're still in sidebar territory, yet if the cultural urgency of the Shrek movies now feels a long way distant, we're heading back in something like the right direction. Abundant effort has been expended on The Last Wish, and I wonder if this was one of those projects that got lucky with lockdown, allowing the writers and animators time to polish their plot and images to an appreciable sheen. Visually, the film travels some distance beyond any of its predecessors. In their central Dark Forest, directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado plant this series' own idea of a multiverse, namely multiple paths that unfurl before us in multiple styles, depending on who's in charge of the map; sometimes the screen resembles a 1970s prog album cover, sometimes Mario Kart's Rainbow Road, sometimes an expressionist Sergio Leone landscape. (Contrast this with the Shreks, which had a shed, a blocky castle, and some trees.) As befits the last-life set-up, there's more jeopardy and risk, too. Pity Horner's baker minions, degloved by hungry orchids and speared by stray unicorn horns; the Three Bears find their signature bowls of porridge weaponised against them. Parents be forewarned: it's been rated PG with good reason. (The furry Reaper, voiced by the Brazilian actor Wagner Moura, is a genuinely eerie creation, often recognisable as no more than red eyes in the dark.) Yet even this is a consequence of creatives making conscious choices, rather than simply deferring to the whims of the marketplace or their own processor chips. A sure sign of the new movie's success: Eddie Murphy, who until recently wouldn't have struck you as a man unduly concerned with the fate of the Shrek franchise, has been heard wondering why his Donkey hasn't yet secured his own spin-off. He may have to wait, given that The Last Wish also introduces optimistic canine crossdresser Perrito (What We Do in the Shadows' Harvey Guillén, doing just enough in the booth to stop you and the Disney lawyers thinking of Ellen DeGeneres as Dory), a cockroach with the voice and mannerisms of Jimmy Stewart, and Ray Winstone singing "Who Ate All the Pies?". Banderas, sensing this might be as good a retirement plan as any, sounds like he's enjoying himself immensely. You might likewise.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

The mule: "EO"

2022 ended with the British film industry converting Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru into Living. 2023 begins with the Polish veteran Jerzy Skolimowski either remaking or riffing on Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar. Both projects are far from the fist-in-mouth disasters they might have been, yet neither entirely shakes the idea that the cinema is struggling to conceive of a viable forward path for itself; even those directors who aren't retreating into outright reminiscence appear stuck with their head over their shoulders, backtracking along tried-and-tested arthouse routes. (When Nicolas Winding Refn announces his update of The Seventh Seal next year, we can officially call cinema's time of death.) As early as its opening title card, EO is turning circles, setting its eponymous hero - a donkey; his name is apparently the Polish equivalent of ee-aw - down in the dispiriting confines of a touring circus's big top. And this is the highlife: thereafter, he trots downhill in poor Balthazar's hoofprints. Liberated from the circus, EO is employed as a corporate mascot (where he at least gets a necklace of carrots for his troubles), taken in by a working farm (only to be overlooked in favour of the poncy show ponies, suggesting some equine class system; his eventual escape involves a nice sight gag), resurfaces in a muddy, impoverished backwater, incurs the wrath of football fans, gets an unlikely twirl around the dancefloor, goes through the donkey version of rehab, and is finally - brutally - dispatched to the knackers' yard. It's the circle of life, in a way - and a hell of a role for the six donkeys credited with playing EO. Take a bow Tako, Ola, Marietta, Ettore, Rocco and Mela; next to them, Cate Blanchett's Lydia Tár begins to seem a trifle underexercised.

Whether or not you buy into EO as fiction will depend upon your readiness to project emotion onto a creature who, by his or her very nature, cannot act in a way, say, even Gerard Butler can act. (Favourable responses to the film are as the "aww"s occasioned in petting zoos.) As allegory for Man's Suffering, EO can't work because, as wasn't the case with its inspiration, its construction and execution keep getting in your face and in the way - Skolimowski's plainly enjoying himself too much, in short. (Bresson never thought of blaring death metal over the ride into oblivion, for better or worse.) Only auteurist noblesse oblige can account for the film's madly pinballing tone: why it resembles a kids' film until the scene where somebody gets their throat slashed, and then sends on Isabelle Huppert for an utterly baffling cameo. For a while, though, the film proves diverting enough as one of the Polish cinema's documentary-adjacent texts: non-fiction, accompanying a donkey or six as they have a jolly day out in artfully shot and lit locations. In this reading, EO would be as the cow in Andrea Arnold's Cow, given greater freedom to roam - from inner city to Poland's rural outreaches - before arriving at much the same destination. EO is never less than visually dynamic: one minute, Skolimowski's ziplining his camera over a river, the next he's falling in synch with a churning wind turbine. That makes it move, yes, but nothing here comes close to the austerely involving and affecting Bresson film. EO makes quite a good advert for donkeys - steadfast, docile, a handy way of getting from A to B, and Skolimowski pays his weary four-legged trooper-in-chief the compliment of shooting him like a 7 Series BMW. But does a dotty footnote like this deserve an Oscar nod ahead of Decision to Leave? One again concludes the Academy is an ass.

EO opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

From the archive: "Puss in Boots"

The Toy Story series has kept its universe intact over the course of its sequels, so maybe we have the Shrek films to thank for the current state of play in the digimation game. After 2009's very ordinary Shrek Forever After, the producers retired their hulking green star and instead pushed on with Puss in Boots, an origin story for one of the franchise's more popular supporting players; that it played as successfully as it did on release in 2011 explains why we now have movies about Madagascar's penguins and Despicable Me's minions. (With the market growing increasingly competitive and desperate for new angles, every last pixelated clump began jostling for its own spin-off.) Where the Shreks were old-school 2D propositions, bedtime stories rewritten with a newly knowing tone, Puss (again voiced by Antonio Banderas) is very much a 21st century conception: a posturing superhero whose derring-do, leaps and swashbuckling are meant to be viewed in 3D. Around him, however, the film gets more than a little hesitant and defensive. Puss is given not one but two sidekicks - a crafty love interest (Salma Hayek) and a treacherous Humpty Dumpty (Zach Galifianakis) - which speaks to a certain writers' room uncertainty as to whether their lead can actually carry a movie on his own. The story, meanwhile, is the kind of quest narrative that these diversions got bogged down in from the mid-Noughties onwards, no matter that it takes in magic beans, the Golden Goose and a sprouting, curling beanstalk that practically begs for the third dimension. Like the majority of DreamWorks' sequels and spinoffs, it's at least proficient about delivering more of what audiences enjoyed elsewhere: briskly paced, pleasingly sunny of hue, unobjectionable in its outlook, there's nothing here to leave you feeling ripped-off, exactly. Still, it seems telling that it barely runs to 75 minutes, and that there have been no further sequels since: what you're watching are the last drops of inspiration being squeezed from the tube.

(December 2014)

Puss in Boots is now streaming on Netflix, and available on DVD through DreamWorks Animation; a sequel, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, opens in cinemas nationwide Friday, and will be reviewed here in the days ahead.