Friday Flicks: Does The Raven Take Flight?

Grab some popcorn! Check out the movies you should see (or avoid) this weekend.

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The Pirates! Band of Misfits

Tagline: It’s A Plunderful Life

Now if there’s ever a group of people seemingly critic-proof, it’s the good folk of Aardman animation. You’ve loved their Wallace and Gromit, cheered along with Chicken Run, been swept up in Flushed Away and might have even shed a tear during Arthur Christmas. Can they keep the run going with The Pirates! Band of Misfits.

The odds look in their favor. The film finds Hugh Grant (finally!) starring in his first animated role as the Pirate Captain, a not-exactly-stellar terror of the High Seas. And with his hearty crew by his side (Martin Freeman, Brendan Gleeson, Russell Tovey, and Ashley Jensen), he aims to beat his rivals Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven) and Cutlass Liz (Salma Hayek) to the highly prestigious Pirate Of The Year Award.

Reviewers can barely contain their love. “A brilliant mish-mash of styles and genres, crammed with ideas and intelligence and carried off with a sense of rebellious fun and breathtaking invention not seen since, well, The Wrong Trousers,” raves Time Out London. “After dipping its toes into pure CG animation for Arthur Christmas, Aardman integrates its feted old-school stop-motion technique with top-drawer visual effects to create the irrepressibly amusing The Pirates! Band of Misfits,” writes Variety. And the Daily Telegraph quite possibly gets to the heart of what gives Aardman movies such heart: “It doesn’t look expensive; nor does it look cheap. It just looks the way Aardman films should, which is glorious.”

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