Fables

Holes, based on a beloved, award-winning children's book, is so faithful to its source that legions of schoolkids and their teachers will clasp it to their hearts. After all, it's a glorified set of illustrations that will extend, or at least not get in the way of, their original reading experience. Those who come to the movie cold will find it an exasperating assembly of brutal pedantry and whimsies, boasting far less charm or grace than even the first Harry Potter picture. It's partly a broad satire on teen boot camps: The hero, Stanley Yelnats (Shia LaBeouf)

Although no longer revolutionary, Stephen Schwartz's dark 1972 episodic musical "Pippin" continues to surprise and intrigue. In a production by 2nd Star in Bowie, the spirit of the show's director/choreographer Bob Fosse again seduces us, the dancers' sharp moves synchronized to Schwartz's catchy folk-pop-rock score. "Pippin" is the story of a naïve young prince's search for meaning and fulfillment in life. Pippin's racy grandmother encourages him to savor a series of fleshly encounters, and the amoral Leading Player guides him to battlefield competitions, sensual pleasures and, ultimately, patricide — as Pippin briefly becomes king by killing his father, Charlemagne.

People have two reactions to the wild: It is either full of fresh air and renewal or gross inconveniences and terrors. The hilarious idea at the center of "Dr. Dolittle 2" is that Eddie Murphy's dapper animal-talking San Francisco doctor is the one pushing the former view on a show-biz sort named Archie: a performing bear. Catch phrases aside, this bear doesn't do anything in the woods. But Archie must learn to fight, forage and mate if the preserves north of the city are going to survive.

To stand in the gardens of the Topkapi Palace, beyond the Gates of Happiness, where turtles with lighted candles on their backs once wandered among tulips for the amusement of sultans, is to know that Istanbul is not just another tour stop.All around, defying history, is an extravagance for the senses. Palaces, mosques, bazaars, castles, tombs, gardens and ruins sing with centuries of romance, folly, intrigue, adventure and excess.Turkey has just gotten the kind of tourism boost that money can't buy: It's where John F. Kennedy Jr. and bride Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy spent the first three days of their honeymoon.

Imagine the vintage sitcom Sanford and Son somehow fusing with Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit and you get some idea of what to expect in The Soul Collector, the bright and inventive play by David Emerson Toney receiving a robust world premiere production from Everyman Theatre. The Soul Collector, at heart, is a fable, and like any good fable, it gets its moral across while spinning an entertaining yarn. Toney's tale manages to pull several surprises along the way, some purely theatrical in the best sense of the word, others involving little sidesteps of plot.

Prince Caspian, the second entry in the Chronicles of Narnia series, is a glorious medieval war movie. It's about war as the ultimate pitch of conflict that tries men's souls, and women's, too, in director-co-writer Andrew Adamson's liberated, post-feminist rendering of C.S. Lewis' novel. The battle between good and evil couldn't be more clearly drawn. But the movie also depicts the fluidity of change in every sphere of life, public or private, from a household of siblings to a civilization nearing Armageddon.

Like a few thousand other Baltimore fans counting down the days to Super Bowl XXXV, Brian Cooper can't help feeling as if he's been here before. Depending on how you look at it, he has. It was 1958 when his parents, Joseph and Annette Cooper, traveled to New York to watch the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants battle for pro football's championship in what became known as "The Greatest Game Ever Played." They left their two young sons at home, but they had company of sorts: Annette was four months' pregnant with Brian.

Their voices were filling and reassuring, the communications equivalent of meatloaf and mashed potatoes. They spoke to their audiences in the stick-to-the-ribs, common-sense argot of the rural Midwest -- even if they hailed from, say, New York or San Francisco, and even if they had long since been transplanted to some tropical oasis such as Los Angeles. And now they're either dead, in the case of Ann Landers, Jack Buck, Mike Royko and Pauline Kael, or retired, as is the situation with Walter Cronkite.

The most engaging character in the animated feature Ice Age is Scrat, a half-squirrel, half-rat creature. He scrambles across frigid prehistoric North America, trying to locate a stable piece of ice into which he can jam an acorn for storage. With curved fangs, enormous googly eyes, and hands and feet that alternately extend like a ballerina's or claw frozen surfaces like rusty ice picks, Scrat perfectly embodies hysteria. Desperation is his emotional base; any respite he wins is momentary.

Rock Star is an inept moral fable about glad rags and sad riches. Set in the mid-'80s, it centers on a Pittsburgh heavy metal fan (Mark Wahlberg) who catapults to black-leather Olympus as the lead singer for Steel Dragon, the group imitated by his cover band. Wahlberg's character loves the bellowing music of Steel Dragon; his bandmates play along simply to expand their audience. When the cover band boots him because of his perfectionism, his girlfriend (Jennifer Aniston), the band's manager, says that all the talent has left the room.