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Azur & Asmar
Directed by Michel Ocelot
C+
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Feb. 13

Though not nearly as baffling as when David Lynch swore off celluloid or when Al Green went full gospel, French animator Michel Ocelot's decision to go computer animation is still a damn, dirty shame. Best known for the beloved West African-set Kirikou films, Ocelot stands out from the 'toon lot with his flat, two-dimensional images and his refusal to stray from drawing by hand. Now that even Disney is retreating back to cel animation, Ocelot makes a too belated segue into the world of 1s and 0s. And with that, one of the most instantly recognizable imagists of our time has made a film that could easily be confused with some anonymous videogame.

Azur & Asmar tells the story of Azur, a blond, blue-eyed boy, raised alongside Asmar, the dark-skinned son of the family maid. Those fearing some Fox and the Hound/Boy in the Striped Pajamas-style sermonizing needn't worry. The kids are separated almost immediately by Azur's cold-hearted pop and aren't reunited until later when Azur, now a young adult, ventures to Asmar's unnamed Middle Eastern homeland. To do what? Why, to track down the Djinn Fairy from a story Asmar's mom used to spin when they were children and which, in this otherwise realistic film, is completely legit.

That's one of the striking elements of Azur & Asmar--its strange, unwieldy mix of realism and fantasy, as well as its even wobblier melding of racial politics and eye-popping fantasy. Ocelot's original (though cheerfully derivative) Arabian folk tale may be told through a Westerner's eyes, but his take on Euro-Muslim relations proves sly and utopian. By the second half, race evaporates as an issue as the characters unite in their quest. (Although the Arab characters, curiously, remain unsubtitled Others.)

The film's first half is too literal and chatty, but partly by design. Once the hunt for the Djinn Fairy is on, the film positively explodes in retina-searing colors: palaces designed in monochromatic tones, houses painted the brightest of blue, a scarlet-colored lion and so on. It's so visually transplendent that it's easy to ignore the characters bumbling in front of them. This is good: Bland and animatronic, they move with an awkward stiffness that makes Robert Zemeckis' creepy motion-capture technology look positively lifelike.

The Class
Directed by Laurent Cantet
A
Reviewed by Sean Burns
Opens Fri., Feb. 13

Winner of the Palme D'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival and current Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, Laurent Cantet's The Class would've ranked highly on my 2008 Best List had the marketing geniuses at Sony Pictures Classics bothered to let me see it.

Sour grapes aside, this is a marvelous film. Based on an autobiographical novel by Fran�ois B�gaudeau, who co-wrote the screenplay and also stars, The Class finds endless complexity within the simplest structure. We spend an academic year in the classroom of B�gaudeau's Mr. Marin, an effete, exhausted teacher working in a run-down Parisian neighborhood. He attempts to engage and enlighten a rough-and-tumble class of students of mixed races, most of whom return the favor with bad attitudes and bored disinterest.

But before you can start comparing it to that dumb Bruckheimer movie in which Michelle Pfieffer saved the 'hood by teaching gangsta kids Bob Dylan lyrics, I must point out that this is as far from a boilerplate inspirational teacher flick as humanly possible. Cantet keeps a deliberate distance from his subject, shooting the heavily improvised classroom interactions with discreet handheld cameras. The absence of any musical accompaniment or cinematic editorializing gives the project a loose, documentary feel. Everything feels organic, as if caught on the fly instead of staged for an audience. Only after the movie can you appreciate what tight thematic focus and control Cantet and B�gaudeau have over their material.

It's also exasperating, viscerally conveying the day-to-day grind of a modern educator. Marin is presented as a flawed man doing the best he can within a broken system. The curriculum is outdated, the school board's draconian rules are inflexible, and as is sadly true in all walks of life, people seem to listen to each other only about 50 percent of the time. Conflicts flare up, only to simmer down again in unexpected ways. By the end of the year, some have learned a lot, others not so much, and that's just how it goes. See you in September.

Push
Directed by Paul McGuigan
C+
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Now playing

In the age of shows that should've been movies (see: Lost and Heroes), it's perversely refreshing to see something that pretty obviously should've been an epic TV show crammed into a standard-length movie. A franchise is surely what the makers of the ludicrous battling-psychics saga Push were after--not likely, given its feeble opening-weekend haul--but even as a stand-alone intro, you've got to half-admire the chutzpah of making something so willfully, mind-hurtlingly convoluted.

To wit: There are no fewer than 10 different telekinetic, telephatic and clairvoyant abilities in Push, ranging from "watchers" who can see the ever-changing future (Dakota Fanning, rocking an Avril Lavigne-esque "punk" wardrobe) to "movers" who can physically move people and objects with their mind. The latter ability belongs to hero Chris Evans, an expat hiding out in pretty Hong Kong. He gets roped into intrigue involving a group of shadowy U.S. government baddies led by Djimon Hounsou (a "pusher" who can "push" lies into another's mind); a runaway super-psychic who's also his ex-girlfriend (Camilla Belle); a rival Chinese gang; and an old-fashioned MacGuffin stored, amusingly, in a briefcase.