Movie Nation

There are so many rules for a Disney princess. Too many for Disney’s newest princess, the Scottish heroine Merida in “Brave” to remember.

“A princess does not doodle,” her mother lectures in a light Scottish burr. “A princess does not chortle.”

“A princess does not stuff her gob.”

“A princess does not raise her voice.”

But here’s the one that makes the fiery redheaded archer snap.

“A princess should not have weapons.”

Pixar’s first “Disney Princess” completes the evolution of the studio’s distinctly American take on young womanhood. Princesses have evolved from sailor-obsessed mermaids to Merida, a spunky, self-assured lass who’d rather eat an arrow than take up with some guy her parents point her way. She has duties, obligations, an arranged marriage to endure. Her mother,Queen Elinor (voiced by Emma Thompson), may insist “We can’t just run away from who we are.”

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Model turned actress Famke Janssen turns writer-director for “Bringing Up Bobby,” a lightweight drama about a gone-wrong mom who wants a better life for her going-wrong son. It has a novel setting — rural Oklahoma — a “name” cast and a potentially touching story in the “Stella Dallas/Paper Moon” vein.

But as Janssen (The “X-Men” and “Taken” franchises) should have learned, there’s more to directing than getting all the components of a picture together and placing the camera in the right spot. At some point, you have to reign in an actor, tone down the mugging and maybe get the accent that comes and goes to stick around from one scene to the next.

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Whatever happens before it, the finale is a doozy, almost certain to be satisfying to fans and impressive even to the casual “Twilight” viewer.

But so much of what comes before that payoff in “Breaking Dawn: Part 2,” the conclusion to The Twilight Saga, is mundane, dull, all talk and no action.

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The title isn’t an exaggeration. It was something of a “Big Miracle,” the way the plight of a family of gray whales, stranded under the Alaska ice, captivated the country and forced oil men and environmentalists, natives and Cold War foes to team up back in the waning days of the Reagan administration.

And it’s no small miracle that the movie about that nearly-forgotten moment made for a delightful family movie. Political cynicism, media opportunism, dogmatic native “tradition,” corporate greed and environmentalist obstinance are each, in turn, dashed against this sunny Ken “”He’s Just Not That Into You” Kwapis confection.

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The movies haven’t shown much grace when dealing with matters of faith in recent decades. Hollywood steers clear of the subject altogether, and faith-based filmmakers tend to avoid reality to avoid letting their movies become too “edgy.”

“Blue Like Jazz” is an occasionally witty, generally thoughtful attempt to bridge that chasm.

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Rob Reiner’s late-career return to the sentimental youth-oriented films of his early days as director is a welcome one for any parent who longs for movies that you can watch with your children. But much of the magic of “Flipped” is missing from his latest, “The Magic of Belle Isle,” a contrived idyll set in a summer resort community in upstate New York.

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That “tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme” returns to the screen, now in 3D. But Beauty and the Beast, the greatest animated film ever made and one of the screen’s great musicals, hardly needs this sort of sprucing up.

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There’s magic in poverty, wonder in the squalor of impoverished lives on an island that’s being swallowed by erosion and rising sea levels off the Southern Louisana coast. That’s what New York filmmaker Benh Zeitlin discovered in “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” a homespun slice of American cinematic magical realism set in the bayou of myth, among very poor people we recognize as both mythic and all-too-real.

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There will be bigger movies this summer, and better ones and worse ones.

But there will not be a dumber movie than “Battleship.”

Ponderous and pandering, shameless and head-slappingly silly, this Navy vs. Aliens epic delivers a few thrills and a few laughs. In between the head-slaps, that is.

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