Adapted from Wendy Orr’s same-named children’s novel, Nim’s Island tells the story of 11-year-old Nim (Abigail Breslin, Oscar-nominated for Little Miss Sunshine), a precocious girl who lives alone on a remote island in the South Pacific with her widowed, marine biologist father, Jack Rusoe (Gerard Butler, of 300). The lack of human companionship doesn’t bother them, though — Nim plays with and talks to her pet lizard and sea lion, and enthusiastically devours a once-a-month shipment of adventure novels featuring a swashbuckling, fedora-sporting character named Alex Rover.

But when a storm unexpectedly sweeps her father out to sea, Nim finds herself truly alone, and scared. A series of research email queries from the real-life author Alexandra Rover (Jodie Foster), in actuality an agoraphobic recluse living in San Francisco, awakens, to degrees, adventurous and heroic impulses in both parties. As Nim looks to protect her island home from the intrusive tourism inroads of Buccaneer Cruise Lines — a company peddling virginal beach expeditions to their loud, gawking clientele — Alexandra faces up to her own considerable fears, packs a suitcase full of Progresso soup and Purell hand sanitizer, and embarks on a far-flung voyage to help her young fan.

More intimately scaled than a lot of other recent children’s book adaptations, the sweet-natured and light-hearted Nim’s Island nonetheless achieves a nice hold over its audience, courtesy in no small part to Barry Robison’s superb production design. Co-directed by Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin (Little Manhattan), the movie is pitched just a little to the left of naturalistic but it’s never so outlandish as to come off as completely unrealistic, as long as one is prepared to make a few acquiescences — mostly with regards to the interacting-with-animals bits.

The obvious touchstone here is Disney’s 1960 family adventure classic Swiss Family Robinson, a sick-day staple for many a kid courtesy of its theatrical reissue and subsequent VHS peddling in the 1980s. (There are a few brief allusions to that movie, and Nim and her father’s last name, Rusoe, is another nod of homage, to Daniel Defoe’s castaway tale Robinson Crusoe.) Many other movies, though — from Matilda and Zathura to Jumanji and even The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep — share the same sort of fantastical, flight-of-fancy imagination that powers this movie. While Nim’s Island is in the end far less explicitly effects-driven than some of those films, it does open and close with hand-crafted credit sequences that frames this tale as a metaphorical yarn as much as anything else.

As for the performances, Breslin is suitably bright-eyed, and energetic. Butler, meanwhile, has great fun portraying both Jack and the more rugged, roguish Alex, who appears both in Nim’s imagination during her reading and in several spirited arguments with Alexandra, who is the antithesis of the best-selling character of her own creation. The movie also benefits greatly from a pitch-perfect manic turn by Foster, who knows how to take formulaic bits of slapstick and uptight unease and make them ring amusingly true.

Nim’s Island isn’t without a few moments of over-familiarity, and in some ways it’s actually demure when compared to a lot of other movies aimed these days chiefly at kids — which may be a bit of a strike for those raised on the Harry Potter films and The Chronicles of Narnia. Its greatest success, though, is the manner in which it taps into the pleasurable feeling of awakened imagination that surges during adolescence. Rekindling fond memories of childhood is never a bad thing. For the full review, from Reelz, click here. (Fox Walden, PG, 94 minutes)

Cut from loosely the same cloth as Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of
Cherbourg, the exquisitely French (in every sense of the phrase)
mini-musical Love Songs, which played in competition at the Cannes Film Festival last year, tells a tale of “indigestible love,” in
the form of longtime Parisian couple Ismaël (Louis Garrel, below right) and Julie (Swimming Pool‘s Ludivine Sagnier, below left),
and their recently added third lover, Alice (Clotilde Hesme). How
they got to this point no one seems quite certain, and just as up in
the air is where things are headed. When unforeseen tragedy strikes,
though, everyone copes in different ways.

In mostly rearranging the preexistent pop songs of Alex Beaupain and having his cast perform them in intimate, naturalistic registers, writer-director Christophe Honoré (Ma Mere, Dans Paris) crafts a few very effective lit-pop scenes of quarter-life ambivalence, but the overall cumulative effect is a bit twee. Nothing much here cuts psychologically deeply, so Ismaël’s fraught relationship with Julie’s family, and his subsequent emotional meandering come off as hollow. In fact, so concerned with self-analysis yet totally free of any tangible angst are Love Songs‘ main characters that one might feel the entire movie — a cinematic valentine-cum-diagnosis — could just easily be performed by their therapists. Still, the work here is pretty engaging and delightful, if some of the arcs a bit dubious in their direction. For the slightly truncated original review, from CityBeat, click here. (IFC Films, unrated, 96 minutes)

In 1998, well-reviewed cardsharp flick Rounders, starring Ed Norton and Matt Damon, grossed under $23 million its entire run. Director Robert Luketic’s 21, on the other hand, outperformed that in only three days.

The film made a big splash this past weekend, refusing to hold in the high-teens, and instead rushing all the way to a $24.1 million opening at roughly 2,650 theaters, easily outgrossing spoof flick Superhero Movie, despite that film playing on more than 300 more screens. The rise in blackjack and poker as both a recreational pastime and somewhat unlikely spectator sport (more on this in a moment) has something to do with 21‘s better-than-expected success, since distributor Sony reported over half the film’s audience was comprised of those 25 and under, mostly males. But clearly this movie — about a motley group of can-do M.I.T. kids and their roguish professor taking Las Vegas casinos for a spin with a complex card-counting-and-probability scheme — also tapped into a hearty aspirant vein. That it’s based on real events, too, only likely increased fall enrollment in statistical variance classes in colleges across the country.

The story centers on Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess, above left, of Across the Universe), a brilliant but decidedly middle-class student and son of single working mother who, needing money for medical school, finds himself recruited to join an extracurricular group that most definitely isn’t listed in the student directory. Fronted and relentlessly drilled by unorthodox math professor and stats genius Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey), a quintet of the school’s most gifted students — including the sexy Jill Taylor (Kate Bosworth) — head to Vegas every weekend, armed with fake IDs and an intricate system of signals that tilt the odds of blackjack in their collective favor.

At first Ben only wants to set himself up for debt-free doctoral studies, should a much-needed scholarship not come through. Seduced by the money and upgrade in lifestyle in affords, him, though, Ben begins to push the limits. When he reneges on the agreed-upon protocol and costs Micky some money, his former mentor harshly turns on Ben. This leaves him and his peers in a difficult position, trying to quickly earn back the lump-sum nut they’d built up. The challenge becomes not only keeping the numbers straight, but staying one step ahead of the casinos’ menacing, old-school enforcer, Cole Williams (Laurence Fishburne).

Chalk it up to a need for fraternal diversion in the midst of a cruel world, or perhaps just the proliferation of cable sports channels desperate for new programming, but over the past five to seven years poker (celebrity, professional and otherwise) has experienced a surge in popularity. It’s become a staple of both the college relaxation circuit, and a surprisingly durable form of spectator entertainment in its own right. Las Vegas and Atlantic City have benefited (tourism is up 17 and 11 percent, respectively in the last half-decade), but so have any number of ancillary market players, from videogame manufacturers to how-to authors.

Still, despite the spike in popularity, recent cardsharp and gambling movies haven’t always made a killing at the box office. Sports bookie flick Two for the Money did under $23 million in the fall of 2005, despite the presence of Matthew McConaughey and Al Pacino. Drew Barrymore and Eric Bana’s Lucky You, meanwhile, wasn’t so lucky, grossing a meager $5.7 million last spring after being traded around from release date to release date like a low-value chip by distributor Warner Bros.

Sturgess, for those that didn’t see Across the Universe, reaffirms himself as a sympathetic, highly likable screen presence — perhaps even more so than in that film because here he’s front and center, without any outlandishly colorful production design and musical numbers to overwhelm him. But what helps give 21 a leg up is its story as much as its execution.

Legally Blonde helmer Luketic delivers a slick, engaging and well cast movie. Based on Ben Mezrich’s nonfiction tome Bringing Down the House, and adapted for the screen by Allan Loeb (Things We Lost in the Fire) and Peter Steinfeld, 21 artfully condenses all the necessary math-and-code bits one needs to know to decipher the art of the M.I.T. gang’s con. Then it just lets you go along for the ride. Of all the turns that the movie takes — including Spacey changing from rakish to menacing back to somewhere in between — 21 never stops surfing along on a surplus of cool. For for those that like games of chance, it persuasively pitches a winning rap — that big-play success, and all the fortune and accouterments that come with it, is right there for the taking, in the next hand. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here. (Sony, PG-13, 122 minutes)