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Despicable Me (2010)

In the gadget-fond super-villain ’toon Despicable Me, he plays a meanie so mean that he’ll fashion balloon animals to console distraught children, only to pop them with a pin and walk off with maniacal satisfaction. What Carell brings to this cruel mastermind, actually the hero, is a mad Russian accent, lugubrious timing, and a general air of knowing exactly what he’s doing — one not wholly shared by the movie around him.
The picture is a first venture into 3D…

Shrek Forever After (2010)

The not-so-scary villain in “Shrek Forever After,” the fourth and supposed final installment of the “Shrek” franchise, is a sleazy mortgage lender for a bank that’s too big to fail. Well, not exactly.

He is actually Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohrn), the Brothers Grimm trickster, with spiky red hair and larcenous eyes rolled up to the sky, his thin lips twisted into a malevolent smirk. As the volatile king of the land of Far Far Away in an alternate universe, he dons…

Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010)

The new family comedy Diary of a Wimpy Kid, based on the best-selling book series by Jeff Kinney, follows smart-alecky Greg Heffley (Zachary Gordon) as he begins his first year at middle school. Smaller than the other kids (but not the smallest, thankfully) and not yet smitten with the opposite sex, Greg sees this period as a silly but necessary rite of passage before he can get on with becoming the rich, famous, handsome and powerful man he believes he’ll…

Alice in Wonderland (2010)

Director Tim Burton’s motion-capture 3D Alice in Wonderland is a pseudo-sequel to Lewis Carroll’s classic tales. The film picks up 13 years after the events depicted in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, with a now 20 year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) being pressured into a loveless, arranged marriage to a nitwitted aristocrat by her widowed mother and older sister. Spotting the White Rabbit (voiced by Michael Sheen) in the bushes, she gives chase, running away from her suitor…

The Spy Next Door (2010)

The blooper reel that plays alongside the end credits of a Jackie Chan movie — a good-humored flurry of blown stunts and botched lines — is always amusing. In some cases, though, it’s more fun than what has come before, and in “The Spy Next Door” the outtakes are not all that great but still better than anything else in the movie.
I should say that Mr. Chan, a disciplined acrobat and a natural comedian, can be one of the…

How to Train Your Dragon (2010)

If ever a film was crying out for Brian Blessed, then surely How To Train Your Dragon was it. DreamWorks’ new animated opus is packed with beefy, hairy Vikings, and when the key character of Stoick first took to the screen, I was dying to hear Blessed’s booming tones. Instead, DreamWorks went with Gerard Butler, who did a decent job, but simply isn’t in the same league.
To be fair to the studio, it’s been less star-struck than usual in…

Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore (2010)

Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore is over-the-top hilarious fun… for kids ages 4 thru 11. Adults may too find some humor and enjoyment recalling the original films from which many of the scenes have been recreated using animals – but if they don’t, so what? This movie is aimed squarely at the under 13 crowd, and with the help of voices from James Marsden, Nick Nolte, Christina Applegate, Bette Midler, Roger Moore and Katt Williams it lands directly on…

The Karate Kid (2010)

You’d be forgiven for being a little sceptical about The Karate Kid. Appearing as it does in the same week as The A-Team, it’s hard not to think that I Love the ’80s-style nostalgia has reached a new nadir. What next? A biopic of Roland Rat? A live-action remake of Henry’s Cat?
Then there’s the fact that the Chinese government, which is still intent on allowing only a few Western movies to enter its domestic market each year, has ponied…

The Last Airbender (2010)

M. Night Shyamalan’s career has essentially been in freefall since 2004, after The Village started the slow process of sabotaging the goodwill that he had built up with moviegoers over the first half of the last decade. There aren’t many filmmakers who could survive three critical flops in a row, but he is still standing, and at least he has had the sense to finally switch gears and try something new. Instead of writing another original supernatural thriller with a…

Toy Story 3 (2010)

I’ll be honest. In the past the very mention of Toy Story made my blood freeze. It triggered a ghastly train of associations that went something like this: Toy Story, toy shop, retail outlet, shopping mall, Bluewater, suburban sprawl, ecological tipping point, global apocalypse. The series that, back in 1995, ushered Pixar’s reign as purveyors of some of the smartest, most loved and certainly most profitable films of recent years, seemed to me vastly inferior to the same studio’s Ratatouille…