A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon

jumpwalker4.0

It was difficult to choose between RAMBO LAST BLOOD and FARMAGEDDON. Action movie versus old-fashioned plasticine. I chose the action movie.

davidehrlich3.5

Fans of 2015’s winsome “Shaun the Sheep Movie” would be forgiven for worrying that its sequel might betray the simple pleasures of the original (and the long-running TV series that inspired it). After all, the previous film was about a mischievous sheep traveling to the big city in order to find his missing farmer, and the new one is subtitled “Farmageddon.” But anyone bracing for the stop-motion equivalent of a Michael Bay movie — anyone convinced that Aardman Animations has abandoned the workaday joys of “Wallace and Gromit” in order to chase the hectic spectacle of most contemporary kids’ cinema — has had the wool pulled over their eyes.Like just about everything else in the relentlessly charming “A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon,” the title is played for laughs. Splitting the difference between silent cinema slapstick and the cartoon roguishness of Benny Hill, this is still the kind of old-fashioned, all-ages entertainment that Hollywood doesn’t make anymore; it’s still the kind of film in which a farm animal wears a trenchcoat and disguises himself as a tall human so that he can pay a pizza delivery man. If the scope of Aardman’s Spielberg-inflected adventure seems cosmically vast at first, the beauty of “Farmageddon” is that even its biggest moments feel handcrafted. Sometimes you can actually see the thumbprints.READ THE FULL REVIEW ON INDIEWIRE

russman3.5

Close Encounters of the Herd Kind