Movie Nation

“Incredibles 2” made it an incredible weekend at the box office, blowing up with a family-friendly $180 million+ take, when all is said and done Sunday night.

Deadline.com, which consistently underestimates the Saturday take of kids/family films, was very close to the mark this weekend after earlier prognostications of $175.

For those who haven’t heard, “Incredibles” is a dazzler and loads of fun, but it may be a downer to at least one corner of the audience. It has some pretty serious strobing effects related to its villain, “ScreenSlaver.” Viewers diagnosed with epilepsy, consider yourselves warned.

“Tag” did a little better than expected Saturday and may be close to $15 million, when the weekend’s done. A PG-13 “Tag” could have cleared $20. Just saying.

“Superfly” is slick and amoral and glossy and damned quotable, but the no-name cast hurt this one and the lack of star sizzle is most keenly felt in the leading man. Might stick around and make its money in future weeks, but it’s earned $8 since opening Wed., and the weekend was a serious bust.

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor” is winning that per-screen race, still on fewer than 100 screens. We’ll see how Mister Rogers does when he’s on 500 or so.

“Gotti,” a kicked-around, supposedly unreleasable John Travolta mob bio-pic, didn’t crack the top ten. I’d better see that Tuesday, as that dog will be gone in a flash.

Mia Wasikowska has often had a light touch, but Robert Pattinson?

Take away the (literal) glitter in his makeup from the “Twilight” movies, the need to be serious most any place else, and he can do deadpan with the best of them. Yeah, he’s done comedy before, but seriously, you have never seen “R Patts” like this.

Wasikowska and Pattinson took a flyer with “Damsel,” a comic Western by actors turned first-time feature directors, the Zellner Brothers. And for 75 minutes or so, their leading man and leading lady are a sagebrush-and-saddle-sore delight.

It’s just that the inexperienced Zellners turned that into a 113 minute movie, one with too little shared screen time between the co-stars and a protracted and far less whimsical third act.

Pattinson plays Daniel Alabaster, and his screen entrance here is one of the ages. He rows to a foggy, scenic Western show, opens the crate he has on board and the cutest miniature horse ever trots out.

No, he doesn’t ride it. When Daniel gets into “town,” a veritable freak show of drunks, murderers, bad wigs, bad teeth and a short-armed piano player, he spends a lot of time explaining the horse, wincing at whisky (which he doesn’t like) and brushing off insults to his manhood.

He’s a man with a mission. He’s looking for Parson Henry (David Zellner). And once he’s sobered him up, they set to honoring their contract.

The Parson is to accompany Daniel as they travel to meet his intended, the fair and dainty Penelope (Wasikowska).

I should mention that the opening credits of “Damsel” are set at a square dance and “cake walk,” and we have rarely seen two actors on a no-budget Western dancing and interacting with more unalloyed delight.

It’s also worth mentioning that the first scene after that is between an embittered old preacher (Robert Forster) and a “Go West, young man” (Zellner) greenhorn, with whom he inveighs about trying to “spoon feed religion to the savages” as they wait for a stagecoach in the scenic netherworld of Monument Valley. The crazy old man passes on his profession, and Bible and raiments to the kid.

Daniel? He’s got a picture of Penelope in his watchcase, a guitar (he’s written her a song, “My Honey Bun,” the funniest moment in the movie), a rifle, a six-shooter and a miniature horse he knows she’ll love, a horse named Butterscotch.

“I’m just a man who believes in love.”

The preacher, in his enforced sobriety, starts to wonder what this dude’s deal is. And then a shootout and chase give away the game. Penelope’s been “kidnapped.” Daniel is hellbent on getting Penelope back. The Parson isn’t just his preacher. He’s to be his posse.

The filmmakers lean heavily on the sardonic here. This is “Raising Arizona” without the breathless pace and unrelenting dimwit buffoonery. The leads dazzle, but the film around them tests your patience, after a while.

Seriously, tighter cutting, maybe workshopping the script with folks who know Westerns could have rendered this into the bouncy, edgy delight they were going for.

The anachronisms in their speech are funny, and the supporting characters, the ones rendered into “types,” pay off. But both Zellners wrote themselves acting roles in it (Nathan plays a fur trapper/mountain man whistling “Aloutte” when we meet him). Both parts should have been smaller.

It’s the tale’s dark twists and the characters’ quirky deviations from Old West cliche that must have drawn in Pattinson and Wasikowska. But if there’s one thing those giddy opening credits show us, they needed more screen time together — preferably flashbacks.

“Damsel” could have joined the ranks of, if not great Western comedies (“Destry Rides Again,” “Support Your Local Sheriff”), at least pretty good ones (“Cat Ballou,””Support Your Local Gunfighter”).

As it is, we can guffaw at the characterizations and situations for a good hour before that horse is plum played out.

MPAA Rating: R for some violence, language, sexual material, and brief graphic nudity

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Robert Pattinson, David Zellner, Robert Forster

Credits: Written and directed by David and Nathan Zellner. A Magnolia  release.

Running time: 1:53

You always knew Moe Berg, the big league catcher and quiz show king turned OSS spy during World War II, would make an interesting movie.

And that’s what “The Catcher was a Spy” is — interesting. That it’s not riveting or fascinating or edge-of-your-seat dazzling may owe as much to the man who was the subject of that titular biography and the film built around him.

He “knows how to keep a secret,”  Berg (Paul Rudd) assures the pre-CIA OSS chief “Wild Bill” Donovan (Jeff Daniels) in an interview for what he hopes will be an interesting post-baseball career. The real Berg, smart but close-mouthed, famous but not that famous, held a lot close to his vest. The film implies this was because he was a closeted homosexual. And there’s nothing conclusively factual in that regard.

So maybe he dressed up in Japanese garb and smuggled a film camera to the roof of a building during an all-star baseball tour of Japan in the late 1930s because he was a patriot. Or maybe he liked keeping secrets from people, including the friendly college professor (Hiroyuki Sanada) who approached him and might have bedded him.

The Japanese didn’t develop radar. But gaydar, apparently, was no problem.

The film’s Berg maintained a torrid relationship with a piano teacher (Sienna Miller), never more torrid, the film suggests, than when homophobic teammates on the Boston Red Sox assumed he was “queer.”

A smart baseball player, a lifetime .250 or so hitter, so educated (with a PhD, with degrees from Princeton and Columbia) that he was known in sports columns, on radio quiz shows and around the league as “the Professor,” that sort of slur was almost bound to happen in the 1930s.

But “The Catcher was a Spy” loses some of its edge over that very mystery, the uncertainty about who this man really was. Whatever Rudd, the screenwriter and director have to work with feels circumscribed by how closely they want to hew to the historical facts of his story, handcuffed by the gay life they cannot prove he had.

What “Catcher” does best is recreate the period, the sense of a man who was much more than this game he loved and clung to beyond his prime. Even as his Sox manager Joe Cronin (Shea Whigham) insists it’s time to “hang up the cleats and coach,” Berg is hellbent on maintaining a toehold in the playing part of the game.

He shows off his multi-lingual skills in Japan (amusingly), and in tracking down the one Princeton colleague he knows can get him into Washington, post Pearl Harbor. Japanese, German, Italian, French, he speaks them all.

And when the time comes and somebody with his athletic prowess, focus and linguistic adaptability is needed, he’s off that boring desk job and in the field, trying to help figure out if the Germans are close to having an atomic bomb.

Berg’s compelling story — not quite as sizzling as most spy fiction (again, they were sticking close to the truth) — lured a dazzling cast to the film. Tom Wilkinson, Guy Pearce, Daniels and Miller, Paul Giamatti (as a scientist) and Mark Strong, playing the Nobel Prize winning German physicist Werner Heisenberg, Berg’s quarry, all signed on.

That wasn’t the case in terms of writer and director. Ben Lewin may be a veteran of decades of character dramas (“Georgia,” “Please Stand By”), but this isn’t his bailywick. He handles the limited combat sequences well, but there’s no tension or urgency to any of this.

The stakes are explained, and anybody who knows anything about Berg or World War II Nazis-and-the-Bomb movies will know the shorthand — splitting the atom, “heavy water”  and the like.

But he’s no Spielberg and this is no “Bridge of Spies.”

Rudd’s turns as “Ant-Man” underscored his physical suitability to the role. He’s a convincing, squat catcher-type big leaguer, and a somewhat interesting (short of fascinating) “man of mystery” who holds his own with the heavyweights he co-stars with.

It’s just that “Catcher,” in the end, is as superficial and glib as the punned title of Nicholas Dawidof’s biography, which became the title of the film. Here are some (not all) highlights of Berg’s storied life, here’s his Big Moment, here’s what we think underscored his personality.

The movie is imminently watchable, and the surface sheen is fine, but the real Berg remains more mystery than man with a mission.

MPAA Rating: R for some sexuality, violence and language

Cast:  Paul Rudd, Sienna Miller, Jeff Daniels, Paul Giamatti, Mark Strong, Hiroyuki Sanada, Guy Pearce, Jeff Daniels, Connie Nielsen

Credits:Directed by Ben Lewin, script by Robert Rodat, based on the Nicholas Dawidof biography. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:38

Nicolas Cage has played a few cops in his time.

Nowadays, when his character says “I’m about to retire,” we can believe it. He’s put in his time and the miles show.

“211” is a low-budget heist picture based on a real bank robbery, with Cage’s cop taking a high school kid on a “ride along” and stumbling into a long and bloody siege at that bank.

I have a soft spot for Cage and his many films in the B, C and D movie wilderness. This one could be all right, and at least isn’t cheesy sci-fi or some Bangkok-set fiasco.

As I said in my review, “Incredibles 2” is an animated Pixar pic that beats superhero comic book movies at their own game.

It’s doing that not just by being more fun, with more coherent action more topicality. The Pixar blockbuster is bowling over box office records with a whopping $175 million+ opening weekend. Not a holiday weekend, not a “open since Wednesday” padded record. Just a family-friend action romp with doses of female empowerment and American culture and politics under assault and some pretty good sight gags.

“Ocean’s 8” is dropping just over 50% on its second weekend, so call this $20 million follow up a win, too. Middling reviews and audience polling suggested that one would wither quickly, and it isn’t.

The producers of “Tag” kept their picture R rated and took a shot at counter-programming against a blockbuster. It may make as much as $15, but probably not. If they’d waited a week and delivered a PG-13 pic, they could have cleared $20.

“Superfly” opened with no buzz — zero — on Wednesday, poorly promoted (they didn’t even screen it in much of the country) and a picture that needed a more charismatic star and more dazzling, less predictable script. It’s a missed opportunity and it won’t hit $6 million for the weekend, or clear $8 million since last Wed.

“Adrift” and “Book Club” are showing off their legs at the box office, still in the top ten.

“Deadpool 2” is closing in on $300 million, for those tracking that one.

Photographer, writer, sketch-artist, production designer, charter member of the “Bright Young Things” and a “dandy” is the most pointed sense of the word, Cecil Beaton lived and worked and cut a wide and gorgeous swath across 20th century high culture like no one else.

The author of “The Book of Beauty,” the high-born (but not high enough to suit him) Brit set and re-set Western culture’s aesthetics, its standards of beauty, and shaped his own fantasy world in fashion photos and documentary (news) photography, in stage design and on the screen.

“After you’ve started for the end of the rainbow,” he once wrote in his diary, “you can’t very well turn back.”

And so he didn’t. Over a lifetime that saw him photographing and ingratiating himself with everyone from Cambridge’s smart set to Hollywood’s elite, British royalty and then Marilyn and The Rolling Stones, he made himself famous. With Oscars for designing “Gigi” and “My Fair Lady,” he demonstrated “the Beaton touch” and earned screen immortality as well.

“Love, Cecil” remembers a not-quite-forgotten figure who exercised enormous influence in his day, a vain, stylish bon vivant who may not have invented “the selfie,” but who certainly perfected it. Yes, filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland had archival TV interviews with Beaton, even access to his first on-screen essay on “American beauty” (from 1929, and he insisted there was no such thing as “American” beauty). She had Beaton’s many published diaries, and Rupert Everett (as Beaton) reading from them.

Mostly though, she had self-portraits to choose from — thousands of the damned things — preening, made-up, perfectly coiffed, perfectly lit and beautifully composed shots of the man’s idealized image of himself.

It’s funny to hear Beaton himself, or assorted biographers, apologists and others twist and contort themselves pooh pooh the “vain” label that hugged Beaton like a form-fitting suit, from birth to death, thanks to franky narcissistic portraits of himself and the peers who came to be known as “The Bright Young Things.” He makes shape-shifting artist/poseur/provocateur David Bowie look like a shrinking violet.

The film is as adoring as those self-portraits.

Filmmaker Vreeland, granddaughter-in-law- of Vogue empress and Beaton intimate Diana Vreeland, rounded up legions of those who met, knew or were influenced by Beaton’s chic tastes, eye for color and social climbing — designers like Blahnik and Mizrahi, current British “Vogue” editor Hamish Bowles among them.

She gives Truman Capote one last chance to remark on the man’s infamous bitchiness, evident at an early age and present even in his later years. He loved (and had an affair with) Garbo, loathed Evelyn Waugh and Noel Coward (jealousy) and his put-down of Katherine Hepburn, one of many he photographed over the decades, “a dried-up old shoe,” still burns.

Beaton was fired from every American magazine and studio that had employed him when he squeezed an anti-Semitic illustration into Jewish-run “Vogue,” redeemed himself with his first royal portraits in the U.K. where anti-Semitism was taken more lightly, and finally made his mark on the war effort with a haunting, iconic “Life Magazine” cover of a little girl, in the hospital, recovering from injuries suffered during a 1940 air raid.

He covered most every theater of World War II, “Love, Cecil” reports. His shots of battlefields and the gear of war have an artistic touch, his many portraits of sailors, infantry and airmen prepping to fight have a decided homoerotic touch.

And after the war, the talented fashion sketch artist and photographer got his shot at designing for the theater, and then film. His design of “My Fair Lady,” immortalizing a fantasy version of upper class England just before World War I, is his masterpiece.

He was better known when I got around to reading and reviewing a biography of him during the ’90s, but even then he was only recognized by the cognoscenti of his former realms — fashion, design and mostly gay fans of vintage gossip.  A tireless self-promoter and somewhat closeted (it was illegal then) “homosexualist” who was never happy at love, he is still not completely forgotten, but more remote from cultural memory today, almost 40 years after his death.

But Vreeland’s film, wallowing in the Beaton vision of beauty via his images, his art and his screen work, does a marvelous service in reclaiming this dandy’s dandy/designer’s designer and iconic photographer from obscurity.

The culture will never see the likes of Cecil Beaton again, a Renaissance Man with an unfailing eye for composition and color, though his record for narcissistic self-portraiture is challenged every day by the stars of Instagram.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Cecil Beaton, Leslie Caron, Manolo Blahnik, Hamish Bowles, Isaac Mizrahi, Truman Capote, the voice of Rupert Everett

Credits:Directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland. A Zeitgeist release.

Running time: 1:38

I don’t know about this title. “It Will Be Chaos” suggests some calamity that is coming, parked in the future tense.

From the images we see and the stories the Italian filmmakers follow in this new migration crisis documentary from HBO (June 18 premiere), the chaos is already here — in Europe and (not shown, and to a much lesser degree) in the U.S.

Filmmakers Lorena Luciano and Filippo Piscopo emphasize compassion in their film, a look at Europe’s ongoing mass migration crisis from ground and sea level.

That’s where the movie begins and where it climaxes — at sea. The opening images are of coffins being offloaded from one of the worst tragedies to come from the dual floods of refugees, from Africa and from the Middle East. A boatload of desperate Eritreans, Somalis and Sudanese capsized off an Italian island. Over 360 drowned.

We meet Aregai, a survivor who holds up his cell phone to show us pictures of the cousins on board with him when the boat overturned, cousins who drowned. The film will follow Aregai as he testifies in court against the inept smuggler captain, in refugee camps in Italy and on the lam as he tries to make his way into Northern Europe from the designated entry point/designated check-point and choke-hold on this human flood, Italy.

The film also follows Wael, young patriarch of an extended family of Syrians (including his wife and four very young children), desperate to get out of Istanbul and into Europe proper. They are middle class civil war refugees hoping against hope to get to relatives in Germany, where they’ll have a support system and a chance at a better life.

We meet small town Italian mayors, such as Giusi Nicolini of the island town of Lampedusa, scolding a TV reporter who characterizes the victims of that smuggling tragedy as “illegal immigrants.”

“They are refugees,” she insists, in Italian with English subtitles. Learn what they are fleeing and use the proper term because “words are important.”

Another mayor, this one of the dying village of Riace, exhibits endless patience trying to explain his budget-squeeze to hundreds of long-interned African refugees, who were moved there but given no chance to assimilate (the nearly-empty town could use the people), no further aid in starting their lives over and no chance to move on to where they could do that.

Wael, the Syrian, is impatient, as indeed are they all (some have been trapped in “the system,” such as it is, for many months). His family has been in Turkey 20 days, he’s paid the smuggler for their passage and shopped for life jackets for more than one attempt (“Remember last time?”) to escape the Middle East by sea. Wael isn’t interested in hearing about rough weather, or from relatives (by phone) to “wait” because he’s risking all their lives by putting them in an open rubber raft for a run to Greece.

“I don’t care if I die,” he bellows In Arabic with English subtitles) into the phone. “I just want to leave!”

The moment they’re at sea, his wife and others are wailing “Call the Coast Guard. Tell them we have children!”

It takes a certain amount of bending-over-backwards to “root for” this family from this point on, as they haggle with cab drivers and others on their way, refugee camp to border crossing, one after the other, on their quest north. Everybody depicted here somehow came up with big wads of cash for bribes and for smugglers.

The film samples the thought of the growing anti-immigrant movement in Italy, a movement that would sweep to power in elections after “It Will Be Chaos” was finished. That Lampedusa mayor won peace prizes all over Europe. She was voted out of office in the backlash over this torrent of refugees.

That’s one clue about the film’s title. Whatever is going on now, the “Chaos” might get worse as Europe closes its borders and struggles to stem the tide.

Then again, consider why this Italian project earned the backing of HBO. The myopic focus here personalizes the struggles of those attempting to migrate, but leaves out just enough context to make you wonder.

Yes, the filmmakers underscore, these folks are Muslims, even the supposedly secular Syrians break out the prayer mats in the third act.

Yes, they’re fleeing war and drought and hardship. And yes, humans have done this since the beginning of time. Understanding that might create even more empathy, and empathy is plainly on the retreat in post-Brexit Europe.

American viewers might reflect on how the U.S. grows more divided over the heartlessly cruel practice of separating parents from children of people caught trying to get into the country. Who can forget the haunting image of the little drowned Syrian boy, face down in his life jacket, that went viral in 2015?

But the backlash, racist or otherwise, has to be understood before empathy can truly take hold. Knowing that the “booming” economy is something of an illusion, with wages and secure full-time jobs with benefits limited to a minority, is just as important as seeing pictures of the bombed-out apartment Wael’s family (it happened after they left) used to live in.

That backlash harkening for the “good ol’days” isn’t just nostalgia, racist or otherwise. The restricting, some would say “draconian” Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 was in place for decades, limiting in-flow into the U.S., forcing quick assimilation on those few who did get in.  And during that era, a more cohesive United States wrestled with a Great Depression, won World War II, held the line in the Cold War, fought over and then embraced civil rights reform, mobilized to reach the Moon, took stock of the environment and protecting it and never enjoyed a higher status as the Beacon of Human Civilization.

Then Johnson-Reed was torn up, vastly larger numbers of immigrants poured in from Central and South America and Asia, divisions grew as the population of the U.S. cleared 300 million decades before it was supposed to.

So no, compassion alone isn’t an answer in and of itself, and certainly isn’t a winning political issue for anybody in 2018. “Wanting to come here” isn’t qualification enough, and cannot be sold politically, here or in Europe.

And waiting, doing nothing, merely putting off doing anything is one way Europe is showing the future to the United States. Do nothing, and “It Will Be Chaos,” politically and socially.

MPAA Rating: unrated, depictions of violence

Credits:Directed by Lorena Luciano, Filippo Piscopo. An HBO release.

Running time: 1:33

Well, the year’s half-gone, let’s see where we stand with the movies of 2018.

Sure, the box office has been boosted by one comic book blockbuster following another. “Black Panther” was a cultural phenomenon, “Avengers: Infinity War” sucked up all the characters and all the attention for a month or so and “Deadpool 2” didn’t embarrass itself.

But what about good films, ones that might — not likely — but just might have a prayer of being remembered as we sum up the year’s best and the various awards groups hand out their various awards?

A ten best list in mid-year is built with the idea that more than half of the movies on it won’t make the cut at year’s end. The way “prestige pictures” are released, in time for awards season, guarantees that. Better movies show up after Labor Day, after Columbus Day and occasionally as late as Christmas Day.

Still, let’s see where we stand so far.

Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” is topical, philosophical and the best Ethan Hawke vehicle since “Boyhood.” A preacher having a crisis of faith as one of his congregation (not really) questions a God who would let his Creation be doomed to climate catastrophe, it isn’t doing well with the Fox News crowd. Will city audiences be enough to give it staying power?

“The Rider” is one of those Sundance films that sticks with you, a story of a busted-up young rodeo cowboy on the edge of the Rez, facing a future where he might not get to do the only thing he knows how to do. It’s about the Way of the West, The Cowboy Way, all of that. This seems like a best director nomination for Chloe Zhao to me. The cast of non-actors make this a “docu-drama,” it’s that real.

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor” proves that unleashing a sentimental, celebratory documentary make like Oscar winner Morgan Neville (“Twenty Feet From Stardom”) on an officially sanctioned and embraced profile of Fred Rogers, “Mister Rogers” to generations, is the surest way to bring an American movie audience to tears. American TV is loaded with liars and scoundrels. But it did produce one bonafide saint. Lovely film, feels like an Oscar nominee to me.

The Norwegian World War II survival drama “The 12th Man” is the year’s most harrowing true-life adventure tale, the story of a commando, smuggled home to wreak havoc with the Nazis, injured, his unit wiped out — but kept alive by a wide cross-section of his countrymen, awakening their patriotism to resist the Huns. “Epic” in all the best ways.

A working class British drama of family, abuse, grim personal history and the guilt brought home to roost by the death of the patriarch, “Dark River” tells its sheep country story largely without words, letting the eyes and deep-seeded hurt on Ruth Wilson’s face make words unnecessary.

“Always at the Carlyle” is a funny, warm and revealing look at how the Other Half Hotels. Experts, staff and many guests of New York’s famed Carlyle expound on its ancient glories, its exclusivity and its secrets, never giving any big ones away. Just lovely, and aspirational. Yeah, this is where you go if you win the lottery.

A heist picture that shows exactly how glib and unreal most heist pictures are, “American Animals” is a tightly-wound, smartly-cast and pulse-pounding account of a real-life robbery conducted by college age guys with no criminal experience, just a lot of heist movie viewings to guide them as they attempt a rare book robbery. It’s just nuts.

“The Gospel According to Andre” is a fashion biography of a too-tall working class Carolina boy who aspired to beauty, found his way to it and made his mark upon as a style icon and “Vogue” arbiter of taste. Andre Leon Talley is a hoot, and following him around is a treat, even to non-fashionistas.

“Hereditary” is a grim melodrama about a family rent by tragedy, swallowed up by the supernatural complications of that tragedy. Stunning performances by Toni Collette and Alex Wolff, hair-raising suspense, monstrous horror.

Not a lot of people saw “Gemini,”  a taut, tense murder mystery starring Zoe Kravitz as a movie star/femme fatale and Lola Kirke as the personal assistant hellbent on figuring out who murdered her. Because people, a lot of people, they had their reasons. No, not a lot of people saw it. You should.

Yes, I loved “Neighbor,” “Carlyle” and “Andre” more than the bracing hagiography, “RBG.” 

The best film I’ve seen on cable was “Paterno.”

Best animated film so far is “Incredibles 2,” which won’t be impossible for other animation houses to top.

Best of those comic book movies? “Deadpool 2.” “Panther” and “Avengers” both his “OK, sure,” for me. The comic book mocking “Deadpool” is my guy.

Best comedy? Had to say, a lot of 2.5 star “almost terrific” ones, nothing that utterly tore me up.

Let’s hope the rest of 2018 is so dazzling as to render most of these titles forgotten by election day.

I can’t find a point to this upcoming film about…well, that’s what I cannot figure out.

Yes, we love our dogs and yes, they can bring people together.

I guess it answers the question, “Whatever happened to Vanessa Hudgens?”

Tig Notaro, Thomas Lennon, Eva Longoria, Nina Dobrev — all in it. To what end?

Aug. 10, we find out. 

An Ice Age tale of the “Quest for Fire” style, this family-friendly adventure pic uses plenty of CGI, but a real human and a real tame wolf to show how humanity might have come to embrace Man’s Best Friend.

“Alpha” comes out way in August.