Movie Nation

You don’t realize just how much information a film can get across visually until you stumble across one that has virtually no dialogue, nothing but images — archetypal characters and situations — to tell its story.
“Autumn Blood” is such a film, an odd, unpleasant 2011 thriller from Austria only now earning limited U.S. release. It’s a reminder of why so few filmmakers experiment with visual-only storytelling. It’s hard to pull off.
On an Alpine farm, a girl (Sophie Lowe) and her brother (Maximilian Harnisch) live with their mother, milk their cows and enjoy their remote lives. The only unpleasantness they deal with comes from assorted brutish men in the town below. As the girl blossoms into a nubile teen, their interest turns creepy and violent.
Our introduction to this world came when the kids were younger. Their father dashed off to confront the mayor (veteran character actor Peter Stormare) over something to do with the kids’ mother. No words were exchanged. Gunshots were, and dad was killed.
When mom dies, years later, the kids are afraid to tell anyone. The girl, it quickly turns out, has the most to fear. First one then others from the village figure out Mom’s not around, and rape the girl.
And when a social worker shows up asking questions, snooping around, those thugs figure they’d better get rid of the victim and the witness.
The unfortunately-named Markus Blunder, a veteran cinematographer and second-unit director, took the helm here, and the pretty pictures show that pictorial touch. Few films shot in this lovely setting make it to America, and “Autumn Blood” is nothing if not stark and beautiful.
The setting, clothing, characters and farm implements are (mostly) European. The characters speak English and one villain drives a new Ford pick-up. So this version of a classic “Straw Dogs” set up — cruel yokels hunting the hapless and helpless — is indeterminate in terms of locale. The Butcher, The Hunter, The Mayor, they are EveryCreep, man as greedy abuser — violent, sex-crazed gun nuts.
Blunder doesn’t totally botch the pursuit of the kids, but the script makes the little boy maddeningly, melodramatically inept and keeps finding excuses for the teen girl to take her clothes off.
Which adds up to “Autumn Blood” only earning limited release three years after it was finished.

MPAA Rating: R for violence including rape, and nudity
Cast: Sophie Lowe, Peter Stormare, Maximilian Harnisch
Credits: Directed by Markus Blunder, written by Stephen T. Barton, Markus Blunder. An Arc Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:40

“This is Where I Leave You” is a big, broad dysfunctional family comedy, sort of a “Parenthood” pushed into R-rated “Adulthood” territory.
Jonathan Tropper has turned his novel into a script that becomes the quintessential Shawn “Date Night”/”The Internship” Levy comedy — funny, occasionally touching, sometimes grating, always obvious.
Here’s why you want to see it. This story of unobservant Jews sitting shiva for their newly-deceased dad stars Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Adam Driver and Corey Stoll as the grumpy siblings and Jane Fonda as their over-sharing child psychotherapist mom. And assorted funny folk from Rose Byrne and Kathryn Hahn to Dax Shepard, Connie Britton and Timothy Olyphant turn up for amusing moments or tiny tastes of pathos.
As casts go, that’s an embarrasment of riches.
This is the story of the Altmans. Judd (Bateman) gets the news about his dad while in the middle of a funk over walking in on his wife having sex with his radio shock-jock boss (Shepard).
Younger brother Phillip (Driver, hilarious) is the spoiled baby of the family, a neer do well who shows up late to the funeral and invites his older, richer psycho-therapist girlfriend (Connie Britton) to the festivities.
“No no. We’re just sitting in awkward silence.”
Older brother Paul (Stoll) stayed in town to run the family sporting goods store and marry Judd’s ex-girlfriend (Kathryn Hahn), a woman Paul is trying and failing to get pregnant.
Wendy (Tina Fey) is the sister, the rock, mother of a toddler married to a callous workaholic and a busybody into everybody’s business. Which is bad, because she tends to blurt out secrets, like Judd’s impending divorce.
Mom (Fonda) is the matriarch with newly enhanced breasts, a notorious book that spilled a lot of the childhood foibles of her kids and a few secrets of her own.
With this cast, you know there’s banter. Oh my yes. Characters break off into very theatrical two-and-three person scenes for bickering, slap fights and the like.
Bateman and Fey scrap like siblings who have a lifetime of practice tormenting each other. Wendy badgers Judd to spill the beans about his divorce in the middle of a room crowded with mourners, and things devolve into a whispered, talk-over-one-another snit-fit for the ages.
“I will pinch you,” Judd insists, as Wendy never takes a breath between insisting, insulting arguments. By the time he gets to “I will PUNCH you,” we believe him, and hope it happens soon.
Driver is properly droll and goofy, Fonda as “out there” as ever and Byrne delights as she breathlessly spills her adorable guts to Judd, whom her character has had a crush on since childhood.
It’s a cluttered, messy, manipulative movie, with too many scenes giving away their finish line right from the start, too many jokes telegraphed, too many characters shortchanged in the story.
But the players are on-the-money here, and their interplay is where this flimsy funeral farce leaves you laughing.

(Roger Moore’s interview with Jane Fonda is here.)

MPAA Rating: R for language, sexual content and some drug use
Cast: Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Jane Fonda, Adam Driver, Rose Byrne, Kathryn Hahn
Credits: Directed by Shawn Levy, screenplay by Jonathan Tropper, based on his novel. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 1:43

In sports and other walks of life, they call it your “game face,” that serious expression that shows you’re serious, focused on the game or job at hand.
Soldiers might call it “mission face.” It’s what Maggie Swann, an Army medic, wears into battle. It’s confidence-inspiring to that GI with an unexploded rocket-propelled grenade jammed in his gut. He’s in good hands.
It shows she belongs, that she’s as hard as anybody serving in Afghanistan with her.
But it’s the same look she wears when she gets back to Texas, to Fort Bliss, “the world,” when nobody meets her plane, when her unreliable ex-husband (Ron Livingston) finally shows up.
And it’s still pasted on her face when she tugs and takes away the screaming five year-old (Oakes Fegley) who barely knows her after her 15 month deployment.
“Fort Bliss” is a solid tough-adjustment-coming-home melodrama built around a superb performance by Michelle Monaghan. Maybe she looked a little too glam for down-and-dirty Boston in “Gone Baby Gone,” too pretty to fit in that 18-wheeler world of “Trucker.” But she is ramrod straight, walking, talking authority as Sgt. Swann, a woman overcompensating (and aware of it) in a man’s world, a brave warrior coming home with baggage.
Her son Paul thinks her ex’s new girlfriend (Emmanuelle Chriqui) is his mom, and tosses tantrums and sleepwalks at her rigid, by-the-Army-book parenting. It’s as if she’s scared to let him see her smile, determined not to show emotion.
That goes for the mechanic (Manolo Cardona) who flirts with her when she needs her mothballed Jeep Cherokee repaired. She glares him down on his price, agrees to a date and turns that into a heated sexual encounter — heat without warmth.
“You like telling people what to do, huh?”
Writer-director Claudia Myers delivers combat zone flashbacks which are modestly gripping, if utterly conventional — survivor’s guilt, trauma, the adrenalin rush that has some eager to re-enlist because life back in Fort Bliss is just to dull.
Monaghan lets Swann’s humanity peek out in tiny increments as she re-connects with her kid, starts to develop feelings for this mechanic-with-benefits and begins to dread the idea of re-deployment, inevitable given her line of work.
But from the green recruits whose only experience of combat is training drills and video games to the cliched hard-case fellow sergeant (Gbenga Akinnagbe) who tests her, this is all standard issue GI movie stuff. Even the lecture from her commanding officer (Freddy Rodríguez) is over-familiar.
“Country first. You ever hear that?”
“Yes sir.”
“Try livin’ it!”
It’s up to Monaghan to lift this, to show us the dedication and service and sense of responsibility to her comrades that is battered by a child’s tears, tested by a drunken ex-husband’s on-the-money accusations about her priorities.
She and Livingston make that the film’s best scene, but start to finish, Monaghan never lets us forget the inner turmoil this tough cookie has learned to keep under wraps from all the men in her life — her commanders, her subordinates, her ex, her lover and her son. It’s a career-capping performance.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, explicit sex, profanity
Cast: Michelle Monaghan, Ron Livingston, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Manolo Cardona
Credits: Written and directed by Claudia Myers. A Phase 4 Films release.
Running time: 1:49

“At my age,” Jane Fonda says, “it gets hard to find a role that’s fun and sexy and a little bit outrageous.”
Which is exactly what she found in “This is Where I Leave You.” Playing the shares-too-much matriarch of a non-observant Jewish family who insists her adult kids sit Shiva with her in mourning for seven days after her husband/their father dies, Fonda “finds the grace notes in a character that might easily have become another shrill “Monster-in-Law,” Variety notes.
That’s another way of saying that the Oscar winner still has her comic chops, still can land laughs in the middle of a cast that includes comic all-stars Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Adam Driver, Dax Shepard and Kathryn Hahn. And that at 76, she coyly says, alluding to a comic plot twist in the film, “There are a few NEW things to try in this one. Uh huh.Oh yes.”
We caught up Fonda at the Toronto Film Festival.
Q: So what’s this movie saying about the state of the American family?
Fonda: “What is says is that there can be a lot of dysfunction, and that every family could stand a little — a LOT — of healing. I think audiences can identify with, to a little degree, the strangeness and hurt that comes up in this film. People keep coming up to me telling me about the family members who fall within the ‘types’ we play in the film.”
Q: Are families more mixed-up now, or are we just talking about all our problems and familial complaints more?
Fonda: “Oh, we have NAMES for things now, like ‘dysfunction’ and ‘narcissism’, words most of us didn’t know decades ago. Too much information! We know what to CALL someone we see acting differently. I think this stuff has always been around.”
Q: Your character, Hilary Altman, is the matriarch here, the psychologist mother who wrote a tell-all book about her kids, which they (Fey, Bateman, Driver and Corey Stoll) still hold against her. Is any of what’s wrong with them Hilary’s fault?
Fonda pauses, gives this some thought: “Somebody, like Hilary, who has porous boundaries, probably has issues when it comes to parenting that would have impacted her children.
“But none of the kids are MASSIVELY dysfunctional. The cops haven’t been called. They just have troubles with intimacy and things like that. REAL dysfunction, for me, is having a house full of addicts. I guess she’d have to take the hit, a little bit.”
Fonda laughs.
“Could have been a lot worse. I guess I’m getting defensive for poor, old Hilary. She probably did OK. But I identify with her and where she probably messed up. If you ask my children, they’d almost certainly say that I tended to reveal too much about them in my own books. But unlike Hilary, in my defense, I gave the books to my children before I published them so that they could remove anything they would find offensive. Hilary would NEVER have done that.
Q: OK, mothers are never supposed to play favorites, but you have one-on-one scenes with a lot of funny people playing your kids. Who was your favorite?
Fonda: “Jason is a consummate pro…Very easy to work with, because when you look into his eyes he takes you into exactly the place you need to be in the scene.
“I kind of fell in love with Adam Driver, I have to admit. I’m old enough to be his grandmother, but I wish I could date him. He’s a doll.
“But Tina Fey is a genius. The funniest riffs in the movie came out of her head right there on the spot. She’s just got one of those brains, and what I found out over the course of making ‘This is Where I Leave You’ is you either have that brain, or you don’t. You can hone an existing talent, but comic improvisation isn’t just something you can do. I did try. And when the movie was over, I got Ben Schwartz, who played ‘Boner,’ the rabbi, to let me do some work at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade with him. Me and five guys, and while I got through it and did OK, I hope, it’s plainly not my forte. I can improvise drama, but comedy is a whole different thing.
“That will help me, I think, with my new project, this Netflix series, ‘Grace and Frankie,’ that will air second quarter of next year. Lily Tomlin and I co-star in it, and even though we’ve been friends since ‘Nine to Five,’ this is the first time I’ve had any type of improv background to bring to the party. With Lily, you need that just to keep up!”

“No Good Deed” earned poor reviews and lacked the novelty of Beyonce co-starring, which had explained Idris Elba’s hit “Obsessed” a few years ago. But Idris and Tariji P. Henson and a lot of awful, graphic violence-against-women footage sold this poorly timed thriller to $24.5 million worth of Americans.

“A Dolphin Tale 2” recycled the first film’s story arc and managed only a fraction of that film’s opening weekend. Over $16, not bad, though.

“The Drop,” opening in limited release, had a solid per screen average and cracked the Top Six.

The poor box office take of the first two “Atlas Shrugged” movies make one wonder why these even get a theatrical release. Film them, with their starring cast of committed, mostly-no-name Hollywood conservatives, and broadcast them on Fox News over a slow holiday weekend.

“Atlas Shrugged: Who is John Galt” opened on few theaters and drew fewer viewers, not even making the top 25.

Terry Gilliam’s track record as a director is very much a mixed bag, in terms of box office or critical success. But the director of “Brazil” and 12 Monkeys” and “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” is often compared to the great innovators and visual stylists of the medium — Kubrick and Welles, Burton and Ridley Scott.
The screenwriter of his latest, “The Zero Theorem,” got to see why first hand. “Theorem” is an odd, futuristic dystopia about a computer programmer with the Biblical name Qohen (Christoph Waltz), tormented by his boss, Joby (David Thewlis) and assigned to computer-model a theorem that might explain the meaning of life. And writer Pat Rushin had a single line in his script — “Joby’s house, party.” What Gilliam did with that stunned college professor turned screenwriter Pat Rushin.
“Gilliam rents this huge $8 million house that was for sale, and empty,” Rushin says. “Budget-wise, he’d have to spend a lot of money to furnish that as a set.”
Gilliam never has “A lot of money.” Not any more.
“His idea was to make it a ‘moving out’ party. Joby’s moving, so all Gilliam had to show was moving boxes. That’s the background. Boxes and boxes.”
Gilliam chuckles.
“You do things like that because you’re forced to,” Gilliam says. “You don’t have the money, but it always turns out more interesting or surprising than what you would have had if we’d just had normal furniture that a set dresser had rounded up.”
Rushin’s simple “party” became “a themed costume party,” Rushin continues. The theme? “A-FREAK-a. And Qohen is the only one not in costume.”
Everybody else at the party seems a bit too self-involved to notice the tormented non-costumed “hero.”
“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great it everybody stood around looking at their iPhones and iPads, not paying attention to anybody else actually in the room with them?'” Gilliam explains.
Rushin shakes his head in amazement. He was on the Bucharest, Romania, set for that scene, Bucharest being home to many a mini-budget epic.
“I thought, ‘That’s cool. I write ‘a party,’ but Terry Gilliam? He THROWS a party!'”
Gilliam shrugs off such flights of low-budget fancy. It’s how he worked as house animator on “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” and how he’s made his films since the days of “The Fisher King,” Twelve Monkeys” and “The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen” — when he had lots more money to play around with.
“In some ways, that’s how I enjoy working these days. Instead of having unlimited funding to do whatever I want, I have to think around that.”
“Zero Theorem” has been called the final third of his “Brazil Trilogy,” but not by Gilliam. It’s easily labeled a “dystopia,” with its nightmarish vision of the visually over-loaded workplace and world of the future.
“For me, it’s a utopia! It’s the world we’re all living in now, right? And we’re all in LOVE with that world.”
Critics love to use the phrase “eye candy” when talking about it, like so many of his other films. Gilliam settles on an artist whose visual style helps him see the movie he wants to make, in this case, anachronic collage creator Neo Rauch, whose collision of colors, textures and media spoke to him. His impersonation of Rauch sets the visual tone.
“I hope it’s more than candy. Always. Maybe some vegetables, a little protein, as well. But I understand what they’re talking about.”
As he closes in on 74, Gilliam embraces the “maverick” label he’s worn for decades. One way you earn that is by being stubborn, battling studios, producers and very bad luck to get a movie made. The unluckiest director in the movies had “Brazil” taken from him by his studio, had “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” wrecked, in mid-production, by an unhealthy star and bad Spanish weather and lost his “Doctor Parnassus” star in mid-production, when Heath Ledger overdosed.
The maverick, closing in on his 74th birthday, remains undaunted. Take his ill-fated riff on “Don Quixote.” When Tim Burton was told his planned “Believe It Or Not” creator Robert Ripley bio-pic with Jim Carrey would be too expensive to make, he just moved on.
“After putting all that time into it, I’d already made it in my mind,” Burton said at the time. Not good enough for Gilliam.
“No, unlike Tim Burton, I’m stupid,” Gilliam jokes. “Plainly, he’s a shrewder man than I am.”
So whatever happens with “Zero Theorem,” “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” is back on, Spanish weather be damned.
“At the moment, I’ve got my two leads. And it’s just a question of the producer and their agents coming to an agreement.”

The biggest box office news is that “Guardians of the Galaxy” finally cleared $300 million, a week after the summer ended. It is the biggest US hit of the year, now.

Not that it won this weekend. Oh no, the Idris Elba beats up, chokes and kills women thriller “No Good Deed” did over $8 on Friday, which means it will fall short of his “Obsessed” success ($27 million opening) but should make in the $22-24 range, unless audiences come to their senses on Saturday. Bad movie, bad reviews, bad timing for the release, too.

“Dolphin Tale 2” earned mixed-to-decent reviews, but being a repeat of the first film, it is probably not clearing $17 this weekend. Been there, seen that.

“Atlas Shrugged 3” is doing even worse than the first two Ayn Rand adaptations of this libertarian’s wet dream novel — barely even in the top 20.

Screen Gems celebrates Violence Against Women Awareness Week with “No Good Deed,” a brutal thriller about, you guessed it, a “malignant narcissist” committing all sorts of violence against women.

The team behind “Obsessed” serves up Idris Elba as an escaped convict savagely menacing Taraji P. Henson and assorted other females in assaults so savage you’d think they happened in a casino elevator.

Screen Gems canceled preview showings of this, protecting a “plot twist,” they said. No, they were hoping the violence here would not take people out of the movie and into the evening news and sports talk radio, much the way the NFL is hoping images and a news story just go away.

And unlike Disney, which postponed a comic thriller which featured a bomb on a plane as a plot element 13 years ago, they’re just trotting this blood-stained melodrama out there and hoping we don’t notice.

Would “No Good Deed” have anything worth talking about without the Ray Rice sucker punch tie-in? Barely.

Elba plays Colin, serving time for manslaughter in Tennessee where the parole board has the good sense to not let him go. He escapes, and after checking in with an old flame (Kate Del Castillo) stumbles to Terry’s door in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta.

It’s a rainy night, and his disarming charm takes a while to work on Terry (Hanson). She has two tiny kids, a husband out of town and a suspicious nature. But his baritone and sleepy eyes do their magic, his cover story (he really did have a wreck in the rain) seems logical.

But once he’s inside the house, it’s just a matter of time before mayhem ensues. Who knew an 84 minute movie could seem this much longer?

Leslie Bibb plays the absurdly flirtatious neighbor-pal, whose come ons are porn-video obvious. And every so often, something hilariously coincidental changes the subject of awkward conversations — a child cries, a tree crashes through the window.

Elba’s a good actor, letting us see Colin size Terry up, reason out her situation, his eyes revealing cunning in one instant, future-tense guilt in the next.

“I ain’t got nothing to lose,” he declares, until his British grammar kicks in. “You stand…to lose ALL!”

Henson does as well as can be expected, playing a fiercely protective mom whose temper apparently takes precedence over her fear, mouthing insults like she’s arguing with her husband, but at a huge, muscular stranger with a gun.

The erotic touches, Terry’s coy attention to appearance after the audience has seen Colin as a man of violence, are a joke. And the sexualized extreme close-ups just underline how tin-eared “No Good Deed” would be, even without that security camera footage of a jock belting a woman as context.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of violence, menace, terror, and for language

Cast: Idris Elba, Taraji P. Henson, Leslie Bibb, Kate Del Castillo

Credits: Directed by Sam Miller, screenplay by Aimee Lagos. A Screen Gems release.

Running time

There have been earlier and better movies about “The Memphis Sound,” with the documentary “Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story” being among the best.

And there have been recent and better music documentaries built around the idea of giving music legends another recording session and a final moment in the sun — “Twenty Feet from Stardom” set the standard for those.

So “Take Me to the River,” a broader and shallower recreation of that magical era in rhythm & blues and soul, doesn’t cover new ground. The history isn’t extensively explored, which leaves us with the novelty of having a lot of rappers share studio time with the likes of Bobby Rush and William Bell, Mavis Staples and Bobby Blue Bland.

The rappers — from Lil P-Nut to Snoop Dogg — create new rap breaks for classic songs, which the legends sing and the rappers pitch in on — Snoop Dogg joining Bell for “I Forgot to Be Your Lover,” the late Bobby Blue Bland wheeled in to cover “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone” with the aid of rapper Yo Gotti.

It works, even when the film’s narrator, “Hustle & Flow” actor-who-once-played-a-singer Terrence Howard, who has real (guitar) musical chops, underwhelms with his singing voice on one number, and Bland plainly was twenty-five years past his prime.

Director and music producer Martin Shore stages these sessions in assorted historic Memphis studio spaces, or recreations of the places where Stax, America, Sun and Hi records were recorded in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, and the artists breaking out of there were Booker T. and the MGs’ (Booker plays on the first track), Isaac “Shaft” Hayes and others.

The musical smorgasbord includes white blues harmonica cat Charlie Musselwhite and Talking Heads R&B fan Jerry Harrison, sitting in, inventing, collaborating as they “make some noise and have fun while we’re doin’ it.”

The most valuable thing about the film, implied in the shared narration by Terrence Howard and director Martin Shore, is capturing these legends one more time before it’s too late. Bland has a lovely moment of teaching rapping savant Lil P-Nut how to properly sing a Ray Charles number, and guitarist Charlie “Skip” Pitts, who played on everything from “Duke of Earl” to Wilson Pickett records to the famous “wah wah” guitar of Hayes’ “Shaft, gets his due. Both died before the film was released.

But the whole affair is more celebratory than organized — way too many scenes of people meeting and hugging — and comes off like a well-intentioned vanity project with a few too many vanities to serve.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic material, language and smoking

Cast: Bobby Blue Bland, Mavis Staples, Snoop Dogg, Terrence Howard, Booker T. Jones, Jerry Harrison, Yo Gotti

Credits: Directed by Martin Shore. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:

You might have thought “Dolphin Tale,” the sleeper hit kids’ film of a few falls back, was a complete, compact and uplifting story that didn’t really need a second act.
And if so, you were on the money.
A fictionalized account of the true story of Winter, a badly-injured dolphin, rescued by the Clearwater (Florida) Aquarium, and how a prosthetic tail was fabricated for her allowing her to swim and survive and inspire veterans, cancer survivors and accident victims of all ages with her pluck, “Dolphin Tale” covered all the bases.
So “Dolphin Tale 2” feels, in its best moments, like little more than “Winter’s Greatest Hits.” The dolphin is in trouble again, the embattled aquarium faces the threat of losing custody of the dolphins it is rehabilitating, and Morgan Freeman shows up in the third act to complain about how tiny a baby dolphin they’re caring for is.
“I pulled anchovies off PIZZAS that were bigger than that!”
Actor-director Charles Martin Smith built his follow-up story around Winter losing her companion dolphin. Aquariums are required to pair up these very social animals as a provision of keeping them. Winter, losing her pal, seems depressed.
The Clearwater Aquarium, spruced up, well-financed and successful now that Winter has become a star attraction, has to find her a friend, a distressed dolphin that isn’t able to return to the wild. Sawyer, her human pal (Nathan Gamble), is so worried about this crisis that he may pass up the chance to attend a sea school where bright, aspiring marine biologists can get a taste of what the profession will be like.
Whatever else these films are, Smith, star of “Never Cry Wolf,” gets the righteous work of such aquariums right. Harry Connick Jr., the no-nonsense aquarium director and father of Sawyer’s gal-pal Hazel (Cozi Zuehlsdorff), refuses to bend the mission to save Winter.
“Rescue. Rehab. Release.”
The government guidelines may be inconvenient (Smith plays the inspector who lays down the law), but the adults don’t question their necessity.
And the rescue and release scenes go to great pains to show how this delicate work is handled, how labor intensive it is and how rewarding it can be to return a dolphin or injured sea turtle to the wild.
But the life around the aquarium, with its cranky pelican (friend to the injured turtle) strains to be amusing. Smith peoples the film with the same cast, including Kris Kristofferson as Hazel’s grandpa and Tom Nowicki as the aquarium’s benefactor. There just isn’t enough for them all to do. Freeman gets the few funny lines, which are all the same.
“I’ve got jars of peanut butter older’n you!”
Still, seeing what Winter can mean to a disabled child, the educational side of the story and the adorable animals make this every bit as child-friendly as the original. And if it’s more about “teachable moments” than fun ones, at least “Dolphin Tale 2” will hold the interest of its youngest viewers while it teaches, which is all any parent can hope for from a kids’ film.

MPAA Rating: PG for some mild thematic elements
Cast: Nathan Gamble, Ashley Judd, Harry Connick, Jr., Morgan Freeman, Cozi Zuehlsdorff, Kris Kristofferson, Charles Martin Smith
Credits: Written and directed by Charles Martin Smith. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 1:44