Paramount Pictures

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in "Benjamin Button"

Miramax

Meryl Streep in "Doubt"

"Bedtime Stories"

Box-office commodity Adam Sandler is repositioned as kid-friendly in "Bedtime Stories," a Disney movie that plays better on a balance sheet than a screen. Sandler brought his repertory company (Rob Schneider) to Disney for this holiday disappointment about a wacky uncle whose fantastical bedtime stories come true.

Skeeter (Sandler) is a handyman at L.A.'s Sunny Vista Nottingham, longing for the day when the hotel owner's promise to his late father -- that Skeeter would get to manage the place -- comes true. But slithery Kendall (Guy Pearce, over the top) has angled an engagement with the owner's Paris Hiltonish daughter to land that job.

Meanwhile, Skeeter's sister Wendy (Courteney Cox) is a newly divorced, newly laid-off school principal who needs him to watch her kids for a week. He'll do nights. Wendy's pal Jill (Keri Russell) will watch them during the day. Jill is just like Wendy -- a martinet who is all about health foods and no TV.

What's an Uncle Buck, er, Skeeter to do? Why, tell bedtime tales about knights and cowboys and charioteers and galactic warriors, none of whom get the respect (or promotion) they deserve. Funny thing about the stories: When the kids pitch in and "improve" them, they come true.

The comic changing of the guard that's been evident in recent years makes this a smart career move for Sandler. Wacky PG-13 character comedies are out. R-rated "realistic" comedies are in.

Disney has been hunting around for the "new Tim Allen" for a while now. Let's see -- no success in serious films, an inexpressive face, a gift for making weird voices? Maybe they've found him. The accountants must be thrilled.

-- Roger Moore, McClatchy-Tribune

★★

Rating: PG for some mild rude humor and mild language

Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes

"Valkyrie"

An unfussy, adult and stoic Tom Cruise anchors this World War II thriller. In a compact performance of nerve and rare glimpses of emotion, Cruise is a leading man who takes us through a complex story, and ennobles and personalizes events that have now almost faded into history.

This Bryan Singer film is about the most famous attempt by Germans to kill the Fuehrer who led the world into war and Germany into horror. And it is about the man at the center of that conspiracy, Claus von Stauffenberg. He was an army officer from German nobility, that rare man with the resolve, "tenacity and determination," historian Roger Moorhouse says in his book, "Killing Hitler," to carry out an attempted coup to "save Germany."

Despite taking an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler himself, Army officers were willing to attempt assassinations, especially after the war turned unwinnable. Von Stauffenberg, a Nazi hater early on, lost an eye, a hand and fingers in service to his country. But he was driven to feel he had one last duty he could perform for Germany.

Singer ("The Usual Suspects," "X-Men") ably handles the story's ticking-clock elements, the many attempts that failed, the rising stakes as the conspirators risk discovery and certain execution.

The final attempt is filmed crisply in a way that hides the outcome even as the coup unfolds. But the movie sorely needs that conversion moment, the "kill everyone" orders that tarred the army with the same civilian-murdering brush that the SS had. What resistance there was in the German military was born in those massacres.

The film introduces von Stauffenberg's wife (Carice van Houten of "Black Book"), and small children, letting us see what he has at stake. But it lacks the sense of desperation as they raced the clock trying to separate the nation and its people from the public face that the world was united to destroy.

The historian David McCullough has often said that we must remember that the people taking part in great events don't have our gift of hindsight. They don't know how things will turn out. That informs Cruise's performance as Stauffenberg. He isn't a fatalist, sprinting toward his doom. He is pragmatic, a poker-faced gambler willing to risk all because he's sure of himself and his abilities and he likes his odds.

In Cruise's hands, von Stauffenberg comes off as a very human window into history in this engrossing movie.

-- R.M.

★★★★

Playing at Valley View Grande 16 and Carmike 10 at Tanglewood Mall

Rated: PG-13 for violence and brief strong language

Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"

This movie is imaginative, evocative, long on craftsmanship but way too long. David Fincher's film, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, has moments of great beauty and tenderness.

But despite its fascinating premise -- a man is born old and ages backward -- the film is emotionally distant, its protagonist less a person than a dramatic device.

Based loosely (very) on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the film follows Benjamin (Pitt) from birth on Armistice Day to his death as a squalling infant 80 years later.

"Benjamin Button" was scripted by Eric Roth, who also wrote "Forrest Gump." Both films share an episodic narrative and unconventional heroes held up against the sweep of history.

One big flaw is that we never do get a handle on Benjamin as a personality. Pitt has no shortage of charisma, but for much of the film he's hidden behind makeup and computer effects. Aside from his Nawleens drawl and his backward aging, he's not that interesting a character. Tom Hanks faced a similar dilemma in "Gump" and solved it by stressing Forrest's sweet innocence.

This shortcoming is mitigated in part by Blanchett, whose Daisy (don't think it's a coincidence that she shares the name of the unattainable heroine of Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby") is a red-haired bohemian, as worldly and sophisticated as Benjamin is down-home. She's able to sell Daisy's love of Benjamin while making us view her character as an object of desire.

Fincher's resume -- "Seven," "Fight Club," "Zodiac" -- hardly seems like training for a big sprawling fantasy. But the man is a master film technician, who samples a stunning array of cinema techniques to tell his tale, mimicking silent film, employing sepia-tinged photography, running footage backward to suggest the reversal of time.

In just about every technical category -- cinematography, editing, sound, production design -- the film is state-of-the-art and then some.

"Benjamin Button" falls short of greatness. But no other film this year has been so open to the possibilities of cinematic storytelling.

-- Robert W. Butler, McClatchy-Tribune

★★★

Playing at the Grandin Theatre, Valley View Grande 16 and Carmike 10 at Tanglewood Mall

Rated: PG-13 for brief war violence, sexual content, language and smoking

Running time: 2 hours, 39 minutes

"Marley & Me"

It's a relief that "Marley & Me," the film of John Grogan's newspaperman-and-his-dog memoir, isn't better. That's obvious as the weepy third act unfolds. Whatever tears director David Frankel, stars Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston and a very cute dog may try to wring out of us, the almost lifeless movie that comes before guarantees those tears won't come.

"Marley" aims to draw life lessons out of years spent with an impulsive, untrained and "untrainable" dog. It promises whimsy and hijinks and little moments of learning. But the film hasn't been cast, shot or edited in a way that allows much of that to make it from book to screen.

It doesn't help that Wilson, as Grogan, plays this thing at half-speed. This was his first film after his 2007 suicide attempt, and there's no spring to his step here, no snap to his few one-liners. Aniston is stuck playing the straight man. And they're both second banana to a Lab that gets into fixes that Frankel can't seem to film funny.

The movie is better at creating a fantasy version of the life of a newspaperman (and woman, "Jenny" Grogan was a reporter, too) than at anything else. Alan Arkin is the cliched gruff editor. Eric Dane plays Grogan's single, more ambitious reporter pal as blandly as a runway model.

The book has been known to make grown men weep. But seeing the movie, you can't help but feel had. Grogan, a onetime columnist at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, got a lot of columns and a best seller out of a dog who was a lot more interesting than this.

-- R.M.

★★

Playing at Valley View Grande 16 and Carmike 10 at Tanglewood Mall.

Industry rating: PG for thematic material, some suggestive content and language

Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

"Doubt"

John Patrick Shanley won a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize for the stage production of "Doubt," but he may not have been the best choice to helm the screen version of the acclaimed play. His only other directorial credit is 1990's "Joe Versus the Volcano," an oddball romantic comedy that crashed and burned in its theatrical release (although it has since developed something of a cult following).

While Shanley's extensive theatrical experience no doubt helped him coax compelling performances from his actors, some odd filmmaking choices make for a rocky transition from stage to screen.

It's the fall of 1964, and Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is the forward-looking priest at the St. Nicholas Church School in the Bronx. "Doubt" opens with a sermon from Father Flynn on that very subject, which disturbs Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), who believes the church is all about certainty. The nun, who also happens to be the principal of St. Nicholas, is already suspicious of Flynn when young novice Sister James (Amy Adams) reports a potentially troubling incident.

Sister James witnessed Father Flynn taking a young African-American boy, Donald Muller, to the rectory for a chat. She later saw Flynn returning a shirt to the boy's locker, and worse, she smelled alcohol on the boy's breath. It's all circumstantial evidence, except to Sister Aloysius, who is convinced that Flynn is up to no good with Muller.

Unfortunately, Shanley keeps getting in the way of his own story. He tries to jazz things up with off-kilter camera angles straight out of the '60s "Batman" TV series, but "Doubt" still feels stagebound.

The play is designed to leave audiences arguing over what they have just seen, but the movie version drains too much ambiguity from the proceedings. Award-worthy performances aren't enough to keep "Doubt" from falling flat in the end.

-- Scott Von Doviak, McClatchy-Tribune

★★★

Playing at the Grandin Theatre.

Rated: PG-13 for thematic material

Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes

"The Spirit"

Frank Miller, the father of modern dark comic books and their graphic-novel offspring, steps behind the camera for this homage/adaptation of the comic book by the grandfather of comic noir, Will Eisner.

Miller has taken Eisner's grimly witty 1940s creation, a supernatural crime fighter who narrates like Sam Spade, and concocted a daft and dazzling send-up of "dark" comic-book adaptations.

Whether Miller meant to pay tribute or set out to mock, the result is sure to be a fan's dream. The rest of us? We'll get the jokes, the hard-boiled Raymond Chandler/Dashiell Hammett dialogue, the beautiful graphic-novel images, Samuel L. Jackson at his most Jacksonian.

But talk about empty-headed.

In the lingering darkness and the snowglobe flurries of The City, The Spirit (Gabriel Macht) fights crimes and takes his lumps. His stab wounds heal quickly. Bullet wounds? Even faster.

It's a city of mean streets and mean people, of dames and Studebakers and Fokker Tri-motors, but also of cell phones and TV news crews, a place where The Spirit lives to chase his nemesis, The Octopus (Jackson,) where the police commissioner (Dan Lauria) lives to gripe about the cops who get hurt along the way.

"You're going through my men like toilet paper."

Shot on that "Sin City"/"300" computer-generated set, "The Spirit" is not a place for an expansive story or subtle acting. But everybody looks gorgeous in this dark, funny cartoon of an action movie.

Which is to say, this is colorful. This is wild and kind of funny. This is adventurous, even. But don't try this again.

-- R.M.

★★

Playing at Valley View Grande 16 and Carmike 10 at Tanglewood Mall.

Rated: PG-13 for intense sequences of stylized violence and action, some sexual content and brief nudity

Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes