Kung-Fu Panda: Colorful figure embodied in Eastern teachings

Kung-Fu Panda: Colorful figure embodied in Eastern teachings

The Kung Fu Panda animated movie, which was released in 2008 and fits the results of hundreds of people’s efforts into one and a half hours, invites us cheerfully to the mystical atmosphere of a valley village in the far east. The film presents the ancient Far East understanding in a natural and sincere way in an entertaining and thought-provoking story.

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Barbarians: The guests have arrived

Barbarians: The guests have arrived

In any event, when Barbarians opens with a promotional video in which Tom Cullen’s Lucas, an instantly smarmy beardo, touts a new idyllic community at a site in rural England called “Gaeta” (the Gallic word for “gateway”), one arches an eyebrow a little. And perhaps one also asks, “And where are they now, the little people of Stonehenge?

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Little Big Man: He is no hero at all but merely a survivor.

Little Big Man: He is no hero at all but merely a survivor.

Arthur Penn’s “Little Big Man” is an endlessly entertaining attempt to spin an epic in the form of a yarn. It mostly works. When it doesn’t — when there’s a failure of tone or an overdrawn caricature — it regroups cheerfully and plunges ahead. We’re disposed to go along; all good storytellers tell stretchers once in a while, and circle back to be sure we got the good parts.

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Bullock and Tatum serve up the charm in ‘The Lost City’

Bullock and Tatum serve up the charm in ‘The Lost City’

The Lost City is the kind of charming, star-driven, action-adventure that makes moviemaking look easy and effortless from the outside. It’s hard to imagine a world in which you pair Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum as a romance novelist and her himbo cover model on a “Romancing the Stone”-esque journey not being enjoyable.

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Linklater charmingly chronicles life in 1969 Houston

Apollo 10½: Linklater charmingly chronicles life in 1969 Houston

The geniuses at NASA accidentally build the lunar module a little too small for an adult in “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood.” In Richard Linklater’s first foray into animation since “A Scanner Darkly,” a few fast-talking NASA men (Glen Powell and Zachary Levi) recruit an average local elementary school student, Stan, to test it out for them on a top secret mission to the Moon. It’s the kind of thing kids have been dreaming about for over 50 years.

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