The Adventures of Tintin: A serviceable adventure

World famous reporter Tintin and his trusty dog Snowy stumble into an adventure after he purchases a mysterious old model of a ship called the Unicorn. Along the way he must escape from the nefarious Sakharine and help Captain Haddock find his ancestors' missing treasure.

There certainly was plenty of adventure and excitement to be had in the film. Director Steven Spielberg tried to craft the title character into an Indiana Jones - like hero, putting him into dangerous situations in which he had to use his wits (and his muscle) to escape. However, if you took away the motorcycle chases, narrow escapes, and other action sequences the film essentially fell flat as its story and characters were dull and bland. One of the most glaring missteps was the fact that the audience was never given Tintin's backstory. It is explained that he is a famous reporter but that was it. It's understood that, to keep the flow of the story going, there was no need to spend a half and hour explaining how Tintin got his start as a reporter, how he found Snowy or how his hair is able to maintain its shape while he is dodging bullets but little nuggets of information here and there would have helped. The story seemed to focus more on Captain Haddock and his tale of redemption. And while that served to provide the audience with a valuable life lesson, the rest of the film was cheapened by poor storytelling and bad humor that lessened its potential impact.

The Adventures of Tintin contained breathtaking animation and enough excitement to keep audience members of all ages engrossed but it lacked the solid storytelling of those classic Disney Pixar films.

Grade: C

The Thing: Too bad it couldn't have cloned itself into a better film!

After an alien spacecraft is discovered in Antarctica, a team of scientists is dispatched to investigate it. However when the alien life form which was on board the craft is accidentally unthawed, the scientists must find a way to not only stay alive, but defeat the evil visitor.

There is little question that fans of John Carpenter's The Thing (for which this film is a prequel) are not going to be as enthusiastic with director Matthijis van Heijningen Jr.'s take. Carpenter's film was built on the tension and paranoia inherent in the story (who can you trust if the alien can clone itself into anyone?). He seized upon that to create a classic sci-fi thriller with a solid story, terrific acting and amazing special effects. This new "Thing" had its moments of tension and thrills, but never took enough time to utilize the stories' source material (the film is based upon a short story called, "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell Jr.) and make the film the kind of intense thrill ride that Carpenter's was. Instead, Heijningen Jr. focused more on the violence inflicted by the alien and all of the cool new ways he could show it via CGI as opposed to the practical effects used in the original. The results, however, were less than remarkable and the alien looked like something one would see in a SyFy channel movie, not a big budget studio film. The acting by the cast also did little to help the film, although one wishes that more development would have gone into Mary Elizabeth Winstead's character Kate. She was the only one of the cast that felt believable and it seemed as though the filmmakers were trying to make her Ripley-esque (Ripley is the heroine played by Sigourney Weaver in the "Alien" film series), by giving her a flame-thrower at the climax of the film and asking her to be a woman of action, not a shrinking violet that needed to be saved by a man. Alas there was little to no depth to her and when the film ended, it was easy to feel indifferent as to the fate of Kate.

The newest version of The Thing had a lot to live up to given the reverence that the original carries amongst fans and critics, unfortunately it failed to match the original in any way and was an underwhelming experience.

Grade: C-