Released yesterday on DVD: "Fantastic Mr. Fox"

Grade: A

The wry stop-motion delight Fantastic Mr. Fox feels lovingly fussed over. With its papier-mache skies, animal characters sporting glued-on tufts of fur, landscapes that seem to be cobbled together from spit and plasticine, it's a defiantly handmade artifact - a tabletop movie.

In other words, it's like every other Wes Anderson film (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited), just without the pesky actors. This turns out to be critical. By forgoing actual human beings, the director has made his most charming, least annoyingly fey film - a thing of lovely comic wisdom. Other filmmakers turn to children's stories when they have kids of their own. Anderson seems to have made this one for his inner child.

The movie has been adapted by Anderson and Noah Baumbach (writer-director of The Squid and the Whale) from the 1970s kid's book by Roald Dahl. It jettisons Dahl's coolly subversive tone, as well as large chunks of the plot, to make room for Anderson's (and Baumbach's) usual obsessions: feckless parents, hesitant kids, the endless family struggle between the ones who take and the ones who get took.

George Clooney exudes slippery vocal charm as Mr. Fox, a natty former carnivore turned newspaper columnist who tries to solve his midlife crisis with a raid on the three meanest farmers in the land. Meryl Streep plays Mrs. Fox, anxious when things are calm, calm in times of crisis. Anderson regular Jason Schwartzman is their son Ash, glowering with resentment over a father who hogs the spotlight.

Bill Murray provides the voice of the badger attorney, Owen Wilson a rabbity coach. Willem Dafoe? A rat, of course. Hearing these familiar voices issuing from the bristling animal forms is one of the daft pleasures of Fantastic Mr. Fox, which at times feels closer to Kenneth Grahame's beloved The Wind and the Willows than Dahl. Like Grahame, Anderson doesn't humanize animals so much as animalize humans, holding on to our joys and doubts, hopes and delusions, the small daily lies we tell each other and ourselves.

So Mr. Fox hits the henhouses and storerooms of farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean - Michael Gambon gives amusingly splenetic voice to the latter, a rawboned country sharpie - because it makes him feel young again, no longer tied to a desk job and a mortgage on a tree. The adventure blows up in his face, obviously, and an early casualty is Fox's fine red tail, shot off and turned into Bean's necktie. Fantastic Mr. Fox goes further, though, and traces the consequences of one creature's middle-aged folly until it ensnares the entire forest ecosystem and there's nowhere to dig but down, sideways and hopefully up.

Is this really a family film? No more or less so than The Incredibles, which covered similar psychic turf in a more exuberant, less eccentric fashion. Actually, Fantastic Mr. Fox rescues the very phrase "family film" from an industrial entertainment complex that has warped it beyond all recognition. Anderson deals with generational dynamics - a dad who needs to be forever young, a son looking for the best way to grow up - in a way everyone can access, from kids to grandparents. The movie isn't funny ha-ha but funny-beguiling, and I think most children will be puzzled and fascinated with it, the way you can be taken with something weird but true.

Which is to say that Anderson's whimsies work better in this context - with more wit and playful warmth - than in his ostensibly grown-up movies. It's the small, funky details of Mr. Fox that stick with you. The way Kylie the Possum (Wally Wolodarsky) has eyes that turn into spiral buttons whenever he spaces out, the mole that plays Art Tatum piano riffs, the single word "cuss" that the animals use as an all-purpose expletive, or the way these civilized beasts sit down to meals and rip into them like temporary carnivores.

That's the moral, if you're looking for one. Why do we do the stupid things we do? Because we're wild animals pretending to be grown-ups and grown-ups betrayed by our wildness. ("I used to steal birds, but now I'm a newspaperman," sighs Mr. Fox and I knew exactly what he meant). This is a little further up the evolutionary and maturity ladder than, say, a Wild Thing, but still not far enough to keep us out of trouble. Fantastic Mr. Fox is a fairy tale for adults that's gracious enough to let everyone play along.

Released yesterday on DVD: "Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day"

Grade: D

Considering that die-hard fans made the first Boondock Saints a much-watch action movie for the college crowd, it makes sense that writer-director Troy Duffy would craft the sequel with them in mind. As such, All Saints Day focuses less on bringing newcomers up to speed than in injecting all the elements that presumably made the original such a success.

The movie opens in the Irish boondocks, with brothers Connor (Sean Patrick Flanery) and Murphy (Norman Reedus) sporting big, bushy beards and playing house with Poppa M (Billy Connolly) in their remote hideaway. Though the first movie ended with the trio promising to punish criminals whom the justice system couldn’t touch, they’ve evidently spent the past eight years trying to escape the law themselves.

When they hear their old neighborhood priest has been executed in their signature style — two gunshots to the back of the head and pennies on the eyes — the boys hop on the first slow boat back to the States, making friends with a feisty Mexican fighter (Clifton Collins Jr., the brother of casting director Veronica Collins Rooney) en route. The murder may have been a setup, but it’s enough to make the mob nervous that the Saints are back in action, leading to the same mix of bumbling comedy and trigger-happy panic that permeated the original.

In place of Willem Dafoe’s gay detective, we get his equally over-the-top protégé, Eunice Bloom (Julie Benz of TV’s Dexter), introduced via extreme closeup of her stiletto heels and exaggerated walk, echoing her mentor’s philosophy that the best special agents dress like tranny hookers. She also shares his crime-scene m.o., plugging her ears and re-orchestrating the events for the benefit of the three goofy detectives who aided the Saints in the first film.

Duffy is a capable enough director, but no visionary — the blue-collar version of guys like John Woo and Quentin Tarentino (who aren’t exactly highbrow to begin with), mixing self-conscious theatrics with the corniest of vulgar un-PC dialogue.

What the Boondock Saints series delivers — and the ending makes it perfectly clear we can expect more of them — is a reliably stylish, action-packed experience that reinforces the straight, white fratboy’s view of himself as top of the food chain. Collins’ character is an excuse for off-color Mexican jokes, and Duffy doesn’t seem to recognize how including gratuitous rear nudity of the two male leads might contradict the "not in a gay way" qualifiers his characters are constantly making.

Of course, there’s an appeal to such above-the-law rule-breaking, and the picture feels like a throwback to the likes of Dirty Harry and Shaft. But Duffy’s delusions of grandeur extend even further, with All Saints Day serving as his Godfather: Part II, complete with Coppola-lite flashbacks to the incident that launched Poppa M’s score-settling career.

It’s all meant to come together in a big confrontation with a sinister Mafia puppetmaster called "the Roman," whose identity is not revealed until the end, but Peter Fonda’s presence made little impression on the folks I saw this with, while his accent merely underlined the miscasting (was Christopher Walken not available?).

The film’s style mirrors that of the original, which was already late to the Reservoir Dogs ripoff party and feels doubly dated now, with Duffy still relying on his old trick of cranking up the heavy metal and techno music to boost excitement. Action has evolved past the slow-motion, two-guns blazing approach seen here, though it is refreshing to take in stunts without the distraction of shaky cameras and hyperkinetic cutting.

Released this week on DVD: "Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant"

Grade: C-minus

For whatever reason, vampires are all the rage in popular culture right now. The latest high-profile attraction on DVD is Universal's Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, which derives from a series of successful fantasy novels by U.K. author Darren Shan.

While no vampire film, no matter how bad, is going to drive a stake through the heart of such films, Cirque du Freak does remind viewers that lately these films are suffering from very tired blood.

Freak might rent well this first week out thanks to interest in the books and blood-suckers in general. But viewers might get lost in this unwieldy mixture of the undead, teenage antics, failed comedy and circus freaks. One of the film's bigger burdens is to establish characters and subplots for potential sequels. Based on these results, the likelihood of such a series is unduly optimistic.

The director is Paul Weitz, and he appears miscast. Because comedy is his forte with such hits as American Pie and About a Boy, the tone is comic. But nothing in the script he wrote with Brian Helgeland is remotely funny. And turning the vampire fights and their warp-speed travels into opportunities for special-effect slapstick undermines the creepy darkness you crave in any vampire tale.

As with the Twilight saga, the next chapter of which was done by Weitz's brother Chris, teen angst mingles with traditional vampire fare. The hero is young Darren Shan (Chris Massoglia) -- yes, the novelist names his protagonist after himself -- whose best friend, the unstable Steve (Josh Hutcherson), talks him into attending a freak show that has come to their unnamed town.

There, the duo encounters a 220-year-old vampire named Larten Crepsley (John C. Reilly, who seems to be playing every one of those years). Steve, a fan of vampires, instantly recognizes the dude for who he is -- something about seeing his picture in a book once -- and the two, rather unconvincingly, become involved in the lives of Crepsley and the freak show.

Mixing vampires with freaks certainly has no tradition, but for a while, the film picks up a little energy from this twist. The freaks are entertaining CG-enhanced characters, ranging from Ken Watanabe's Mr. Tall, who runs the place, to Orlando Jones's Alexander Ribs, Frankie Faison's two-bellied gourmet, Jane Krakowski's woman with detachable limbs and Jessica Carlson's monkey girl. However, these creatures are but dress extras other than Carlson, who becomes Darren's love interest.

The story has the two boys trigger a war between clans of vampires that destroys a shaky truce. But this is dull and uninvolving. Nor is there any reason for their participation in this political strife. What's at stake (pardon the pun) for them?

The trouble is, too many characters must be introduced in the interest of future episodes without having much to do in this one. These include Salma Hayek, a bearded lady whose beard mysteriously disappears most of the time, and Willem Dafoe's vampire with a John Waters pencil mustache who literally does nothing.

Miscalculation runs through the entire movie. The tone is all wrong, the effects are poorly used and the acting styles range all over the place. Actors playing one-note minor characters are encouraged to exaggerate, and the youngsters would not be out of place in a Disney film. Sets and cinematography emphasize the story's creepiness, but the action runs counter to any chills or thrills.

Making a vampire movie without any bite is like removing guns from a Western.