The Best
"Coraline" (2009) - Roger Ebert writes of Henry
Selick's "The Nightmare Before Christmas," "go back just to look
in the corners of the screen, and appreciate the little visual surprises and
inspirations that are tucked into every nook and cranny." "Coraline"
has the same luxury, only it now has an added dimension to work with. The
shimmering and eerie quality of Selick's original and lovingly stop-motion
animated film is remarkable. –Brian Welk
"A Christmas Carol" (2009) - The aesthetic Robert Zemeckis has been
aiming for and failing to achieve since "The Polar Express" and
"Beowulf" came to near perfection in the umpteenth adaptation of
Charles Dickens's novel. Zemeckis's "Christmas Carol" is convincingly
dark and fantastical thanks to the careful image capturing on Jim Carrey and
the stunning work done with shadows to create the Ghost of Christmas Future. –BW
“Avatar” (2009) – James Cameron’s 2009 box office record-breaker has become not only synonymous with what 3D technology is capable of but what computer-generated imaging in general can do for a film. The lush forests of Pandora and the Na’vi who inhabit it were painstakingly modeled for over a decade, and Cameron was finally able to release the film when the technology finally caught up with his vision. The result is one of the most visually satisfying 3D films ever made. –Brad Sanders
The Worst
“Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare” (1991) – It’s easy to forget that 3D movies are not a wholly new phenomenon created in the last two years to charge people more for movie tickets. The technology has improved, but the premise has existed for decades. One particularly awful entry in the 3D canon is “Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare,” the last true film in the series before Wes Craven’s postmodern “New Nightmare” and the spinoffs and remakes of the 21st century. It’s typically campy early ‘90s horror fare, that is, until the closing scene, in which audiences would don their red-and-green cardboard glasses to see some objects unconvincingly fly toward them until the ubiquitous female protagonist yells “Freddy’s dead!” Perhaps mercifully, the DVD rerelease did not include 3D glasses. -BS
“Toy Story 3” (2010) – Even people with a natural bias against 3D films assumed that nothing could ruin “Toy Story 3,” so they paid the extra ticket costs in droves to see Woody and Buzz appear life-like and, against their better judgment, wore the glasses. They were right, nothing could ruin “Toy Story 3” – but there was no need to make it 3D. A movie with a story and ending like that can't be made better by having the characters run towards you once and a while. Hollywood should leave 3D for films like the “Transformers” sequels, not Pixar gems. –Julia Shedlin
"Alice in Wonderland" (2010) - After "Avatar," Tim Burton's
"Alice" was one of the first films to be shot in 3-D that actually
mattered, and Burton's work with it dropped at least a half star from an already
disappointing adaptation of the Lewis Carroll novel. No, few things actually
jut out from the screen in the ultimate gimmicky fashion, but they do
annoyingly and peculiarly brush up against a now cluttered frame, most notably
as Alice plummets down the rabbit hole. -BW
