Warm Bodies

Directed by Jonathan Levine

(PG-13)

**

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This “cute and amusing” genre mashup does a reasonably good job of sustaining its central gag, said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. When a teenage zombie named R first sees, and decides against eating, a tasty human named Julie, it’s not just “one of the better cute meets in recent romantic comedy.” It’s the beginning of a teen romance whose arc never feels entirely rote because it makes the young lovers’ age-old struggle to control violent appetites so literal. Leads Nicholas Hoult and Teresa Palmer display “a lovely, natural chemistry, even when the circumstances are grisly or silly—or both,” said Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times. It’s just too bad that the gravest threat to their romance—a band of zombie-eating zombies called “bonies”—are cheap-looking CGI animations. But this often amusing movie also badly needed a second big idea to move its story off the track we expect it to take from the start, said Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Because Warm Bodies lacks the ability to surprise, it seems longer than it is, and it isn’t long at all.”