The Lego Movie

Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

(PG)

****

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“This is the film that our entire shared experience of pop culture has been building toward,” said Bilge Ebiri in New York magazine. At least that’s how you may feel the first time you watch America’s current No. 1 movie—a “10-gags-a-second send-up” of contemporary mass entertainment set in a world of animated Lego figures. Even the popular toy line isn’t spared this satire’s arrows, and the story eventually evolves into “a Bergman-esque inquiry into the mind of God.” Let’s not get carried away here, said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. Yes, this “dizzyingly paced” child-friendly tale about a worker drone who stumbles into a battle against a smiling despot deserves to be enjoyed for its “ingenious” animation and “rapid-fire” humor. But its critique of conformity feels in the end like just a way to make viewers feel better about remaining conformists as they walk out of the theater. Still, a movie could do worse than celebrate unbridled imagination, said Richard Corliss in Time. Especially when that movie is “the funniest, cleverest, most exhaustingly exhilarating animated feature in ages.”