 It may not have received the promotional push that Chicken Little did, but Sony's Zathura: A Space Adventure, from Jon Favreau, the actor-turned-director who helmed 2003's surprise hit Elf, could prove to be another sleeper hit, several critics suggest. Indeed they are giving it the kind of praise that Disney must have hoped for when it released Chicken Little, its first fully computer-animated feature, last weekend. On Good Morning America, critic Joel Siegel called it, "The best family film so far this year." In the Baltimore Sun, critic Chris Kaltenbach writes, "Zathura is pure imagination and incalculable fun -- a guaranteed good time." Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times comments that "it works gloriously as space opera." There's no hyperbole in Stephen Holden's review in the New York Times. Instead, he writes, "In the enchanted limbo between waking and sleeping, Zathura feels both real and unreal, like a dream you could shake off at any moment." On the other hand, the film also receives some scathing criticism. "Rarely is a movie audience asked to put up with so much noise for such a thankless payoff as it must with 'Zathura, a loud, endless family picture," writes Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe. Lou Lumenick in the New York Post calls it "a singularly loud, charmless and overbearing family movie that could use a hit or two of Ritalin." Then there's Michael Phillips, who begins his review in the Chicago Tribune this way: "For a kid-aimed PG-rated fantasy you could do worse than Zathura: A Space Adventure. Now there's a ringing endorsement. You could do worse." |
