Let’s imagine a movie. This film will be produced by Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy). It will star Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek as lovers on a quest for redemption and justice. We’ll throw in comic relief from Zach Galifianakis in skin-tight golden spandex and Billy Bob Thorton and Amy Sedaris as a couple of hillbilly psychopaths. That sounds like a movie I’d watch. No, Robert Rodriguez isn’t adding a fourth film to his Mariachi Trilogy — this is Puss in Boots.

About 15 minutes into Puss in Boots, I became deeply concerned. I was being... entertained. How could this be? There are few animated movies I despise more than the Shrek series, and despite a few recent gems, DreamWorks Animation is still responsible for 20-something downright awful films over the past decade. My terror turned into skepticism before dissolving into joyous acceptance after a roller-coaster ride of stunningly animated 3D chase scenes, slapstick humor, wink-wink adult jokes, an expertly choreographed dance off and a flurry of cat puns.

My praise is difficult to utter. It lingers in my throat like a massive hairball I hesitate to vomit free, but I must: This is an entertaining movie. I would recommend people see this.

Though Puss in Boots was born from the painfully unfunny Shrek films, which suffered from a case of Family Guy humor (i.e., mistaking pop-culture references for jokes) and Mike Myers, it has little in common with its forebearers and is much more like DreamWorks Animation’s best work, Kung Fu Panda and How To Train Your Dragon. It’s a family-friendly action-adventure, a PG take on Zorro with universally relatable characters and top-notch visuals and exceptional performances. 

Though the lack of competition may take some of the punch out of this statement, Puss in Boots is the best animated film I’ve seen this year.

--Eric Pulsifer

Ahhh....it’s finally fall. There’s a crispness in the air, everyone’s a-buzz about Halloween, and Austin Film Festival is literally right around the corner. For me, Oscar season kicks off the moment I hit my first AFF screening, as it’s usually a smorgasbord of festival favorites and early Oscar front-runners. So what films do we recommend catching this year?

Check out our list after the jump!

Being a writer sucks sometimes. Like today, for instance, when my lovely computer crashed and ate my entire Footloose review, which was quite eloquent and insightful. Trust me, you would have loved it. But, because I'm lazy, you're stuck with this one instead. I promise it will be concise and straightforward with small nuggets of insight.

Footloose, for any of those who've lived under a bridge for the past 27 years, is about a city boy, Ren (newcomer Kenny Wormald) who moves from Boston to Bomont, GA after his mom dies. Quickly he learns that the small town has some weird laws prohibiting public dances outside of church functions because some high schoolers died in a drunk car crash several years before (why they don't just outlaw driving instead is beyond me). Upon his arrival in Bomont, Ren catches the eye of the minister's wild child daughter, Ariel (Julianne Hough) and befriends a yokel named Williard (Miles Teller). Somewhere in there Ren does an angry dance in a warehouse on his yellow VW bug, and my friend, who never saw the Kevin Bacon version, snickered profusely.

Director Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow) has lovingly remade Footloose with much of its original elements. Ariel's red boots pop up, as does Ren's red velvet prom jacket. While most of these elements are welcome additions, such as new renditions of popular soundtrack tunes, the film is almost too similar to the original. The 2011 version wasn't given enough license to make it feel new and fresh and become its own film. I wish they could have made it just ever so slightly different from the original. Although, all the Step Up type choreography was pretty entertaining.

The performers are decent. While Bacon had a dance double, Wormald is a backup dancer turned actor, and it shows. Same goes for Hough. Both actors are slightly wooden and don't really light up the screen until they start dancing. Teller, on the other hand, lends the movie most of its comic relief and steals the show, much like his original counterpart, Chris Penn.

I went into Footloose prepared to dislike the remake. Why remake such a cult classic? But I couldn't help wanting to kick off my Sunday shoes and cut loose. I hate myself for admitting that...

--Darcie Duttweiler

What to say about The Thing that hasn’t been said about the million other remakes, reboots and uncalled for prequels? Well, for starters, it’s another one of those. A film that no one asked for. A movie no one ever knew they didn’t need.

The Thing (1982) — the real one, the John Carpenter-directed one with a bearded Kurt Russell — is a grim, tense and terrifying thriller with groundbreaking special effects and a palpable air of paranoia. 

The Thing (2011) — the brainless yawn-fest of a prequel released this week that stars a beardless Mary Elizabeth Winstead (the object of Michael Cera’s affection in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the cheerleader from Death Proof) — leads into the opening of the original film by telling us the story of the poor bastards who first come into contact with The Thing. The Thing — the titular shape-shifting alien life form that can morph to mimic its victims — is introduced in The Thing (2011) as a 13-foot tall black bipedal creature with claw-like hands that has been frozen in the ice outside of its spacecraft, which apparently crashed in the middle of Antarctica centuries ago.

This Thing — the appearance-absorbing alien — creates some interesting dilemmas if you’re isolated with a small group of scientists in a remote research facility in Antarctica. Who can you trust when you know the enemy is among you?

Luxurious beards and flamethrower porn after the jump!

Although The Ides of March is one of those movies my dad would have tried to get me to see and 12-year-old me would have wrinkled her nose at, the fourth film from director George Clooney is a well-written and acted film that dives into the last days of a presidential primary. While it may not be the “political thriller” the trailers are trying to sell you, the film is still engrossing and engaging.

Read more after the jump!

What’s not to get excited about when you hear the phrase “robots boxing?” It sounds like an awesome spectacle of machinery and special effects in an era where Transformers has made us bloodthirsty for robots beating the shit out of each other. Real Steal attempts to make robots fighting less fantastical by putting them in the boxing ring in a near future when humans grow weary of seeing just regular ol’ dudes fighting each other. It’s not so far-fetched really, but after watching robots claw away at each other via the commands of a controller, Real Steel made me long for an old-fashioned boxing flick any day. Especially one without a precocious little kid.

Real Steel opens with a down-on-his-luck Charlie (Hugh Jackman) who’s lost his robot in a fight with a bull at a country fair. When he finds out his ex-girlfriend has died and left him a child he’s never met, he realizes he can basically sell the 11-year old to a rich aunt in exchange for some dollar dollar bills to buy another robot. Only catch is that he has to watch the kid for the summer, so Charlie and his son Max hit the road to fight robots and learn life lessons from each other.

Along the way, Max digs an old sparring bot out of a junkyard and cleans him up. Turns out it mirrors the actions of the person in front of it, so Max does what any kid would do--teaches it how to dance. Oh, and Charlie, a boxer from days gone by, trains it out to be a real boxer instead of a flashy, splashy robot fighter, and the little bot ends up winning some major fights. This journey eventually sets up Charlie and Max to pit their small bot up against the world champion robot in a robot version of David versus Goliath.

And Evangeline Lilly is in there somewhere as the owner of the boxing ring Charlie used to train at and his sub-plot love interest.

Real Steal isn’t BAD. In fact, some critics are really applauding this film. But, for me, it just felt so schmaltzy. Sure, robots fighting is pretty cool, I’ll give you that. But, the human element the film kept trying to cram down my neck was this father-son dynamic of a dad who needs to grow up and a boy who just needs a dad. This may make me sound hardhearted, but it just felt so forced. I didn’t really feel it at all, and I hate any movie that tries to manipulate my feelings so blatantly. Plus, Max was so obnoxious to me that I couldn’t get behind him at all--or his weird robot dancing. Furthermore, the brief romance with Lilly’s character was so tacked on that it just didn’t seem necessary.

This movie made me long for a real boxing flick, with real blood, sweat, and tears, not something that is praised for being “almost human.”

-- Darcie Duttweiler