Directed by Steven Spielberg
(PG)
**
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“For about an hour,” Steven Spielberg’s other holiday-season feature is “an exhilarating ride,” said David Denby in The New Yorker. Spielberg and producer Peter Jackson obviously put their hearts into bringing the adventures of the boy reporter Tintin to the screen as a digitized animated feature. But after getting the look just right, they forgot to give the 1930s comic-strip hero soul or a story. “The great thing about Tintin is that it never stops moving—and the terrible thing about it is that it never stops moving.” It’s a virtually perpetual scramble of “running, jumping, plunging, and flying,” and it’ll wear you out before it’s over. Younger audiences will probably appreciate it most, said Leslie Felperin in Variety. As Tintin and a sea-captain sidekick circle the globe seeking a hidden treasure, “the action is so relentless” that the film “nearly comes to feel like a video game.” The motion-capture technology used here also “makes the characters come off as if their souls were made of sponge,” said Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly. They look “just human enough” that “what’s missing from their eyes” is oddly disquieting.
