Beowulf

Far down on our list of must-see movie ideas was a screen adaptation of Beowulf, the sixth-century epic poem that most high school students looked forward to about as much as a root canal. Cinematic visionary Robert Zemeckis (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forest Gump) had a different idea, though, and this motion-capture animated version is genuinely exciting to see, although the process, first used in Zemeckis' holiday flick The Polar Express, still gives us the creeps. Sure Angelina Jolie looks like herself, but you get the feeling she's walked straight out of some wax museum. The film was shot in pristine 3-D and Real D, so you wear glasses to see all the bloodletting and rockin' violence screenwriters Neil Gaiman (Mirrormask) and Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction) have brought to the table, and it makes for some thrilling action that is thankfully not 100 percent faithful to the source material. The story revolves around the mighty warrior Beowulf (an unrecognizable Ray Winstone), who takes on evil and butt-ugly demon Grendel (Crispin Glover) after he pretty much destroys and chops up King Hrothgar's (Anthony Hopkins) court, if not the king himself. This leads to a deadly confrontation with Grendel's sexy mother (Angelina Jolie), a devil incarnate, which ends in some crafty deal-making that puts Beowulf right in line to take over for the King. Beowulf is a visual feast, a surreal and surprisingly graphic (for a PG-13 movie) trip into a distant kind of hell. Zemeckis serves up the goods, and you definitely have to see it (preferably on a giant IMAX screen), but it's still a weird ride.