THE MIST If you flinched even slightly at the flesh-ripping mayhem in John Carpenter’s The Thing (which gets a shout-out here), you’ll watch Frank Darabont’s hair-raising monster movie through laced fingers: this adaptation of Stephen King’s eerie novella is balls-out abandon-all-hope horror that doesn’t relent. In 20 opening minutes of masterfully tightening unease, a freaky fogbank surrounds a small-town supermarket. As those who flee get picked off by invisible menaces, the trapped shoppers—including a poster artist (Thomas Jane), his saucer-eyed son (Nathan Gamble) and a stouthearted clerk (Toby Jones, the season’s sharpest action hero)—must grapple with nightmare beasts outside and a persuasive religious fanatic (Marcia Gay Harden) inside. Amping up the social breakdown aisle by aisle, Darabont, who made his rep with the King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, handles the Lifeboat-in-a-Wal-Mart allegory with heavy hands: the maniacal Harden makes Carrie White’s fundamentalist mom sound like Richard Dawkins. But the monstrous shapes in the nuclear-winter mist, combined with a hellish sound design, are thoroughly unnerving. And for once, when the clawed, tentacled, sharp-stingered creatures are glimpsed in full, they’re no letdown. It all leads toward the bleakest ending of any major-studio film since Seven—a warning the tenderhearted should not take lightly. —Jim Ridley (Now playing)
AUGUST RUSH Known for his galvanizing park-bench scene in Finding Neverland, in which he redeems a programmatically mawkish denouement with a survivor’s practical pugnacity, British child actor Freddie Highmore beguiles even more in August Rush. Highmore plays the apparently orphaned product of a one-night stand between two musicians (Keri Russell and Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who vanished from his life the day he was born. Now August hears a symphony in every sound of New York City—with help from Nashville music supervisor Anastasia Brown—while he combs for signs of his departed parents. Along with a thuddingly uppercase script by Nick Castle and James V. Hart, August’s heightened sensitivity may be one reason why this Dickensian melodrama feels so overexcited in its first hour. Another is that director Kirsten Sheridan, every stylized inch her father Jim Sheridan’s daughter, treats any change in the emotional or climactic temperature as an occasion for poetic cinema. It’s exhausting to watch little August fight his way to freedom and salvation, abetted and hindered by an entertainingly miscast Robin Williams as a bizarre cross between Fagin and Bono in orange hair and earrings, who seizes on August’s musical talent for his own gain. Acclimate yourself to the frenzied vibe, though, and you’ll feel the movie grow into itself as an urban fairy tale whose rapturous finale stakes a wishful claim on the redemptive power of love and art. —Ella Taylor (Now playing)
ENCHANTED A sack of cinematic Twinkies, all sugar, fluff and empty calories, this mildly spoofy Disney confection can still satisfy your sweet tooth for splashy musical numbers and baldly contrived happy endings. Its chief pleasure is Amy Adams as a cartoon princess who gets rudely shoved by a wicked witch into live-action Times Square. It doesn’t bear explaining how she ends up staying with jaded divorce attorney Patrick Dempsey and his little girl: this is one of those fairy-tale universes where people bring home a babbling woman in a hoop skirt instead of packing her off to Bellevue. But Adams brings a ditzy, appealing sweetness to the role, and as her vapid Prince Charming, James Marsden shows that between this and Hairspray he could have a future in musical comedy, if musical comedy had a future. The production values for this meringue are better than Disney’s made-for TV musicals, but the writing (by Bill Kelly) and direction (by Kevin Lima) aren’t: the movie is rarely better than mildly diverting, although the Alan Menken-Stephen Schwartz songs lend some pizzazz. In true Disney fashion, an animated chipmunk sidekick does much of the heavy lifting; in true DreamWorks fashion, he’s not above farting for instant merriment. For older kids, there’s Susan Sarandon as the villain—a bosomy femme fatale who proves the old adage that there’s nobody hotter than a Disney witch. Gentlemen, raise your wands. —Jim Ridley (Now playing)
