The film begins with SpongeBob dejected that his boss, Krusty Krab, did not promote him to manager of the local burger bodega. However, when Krusty Krab is framed, SpongeBob must exonerate his boss to get the promotion he seeks and prove to himself that he is a man.

The film takes the audience on a fantasy underwater ride through the depths of a sponge’s soul, testing his courage and self-identity. The movie is about laughs and good times. At one point, SpongeBob and his starfish friend Patrick can’t stop laughing after someone uses the word “weed.” This was one subversive message I could pick up. Wink.

The film reaches its climax on the back of David Hasselhoff, who turns himself into some sort of jet-ski to bring SpongeBob and Patrick back to their home so they can save the day and have a big party. The movie, I think, is more intelligent than I think it was. It is also quite funny. I would recommend it to any audience. If you’ve recently become a baby mama, step out to your local movie theater and see SpongeBob for some old-fashioned family fun. With all-star additions like the aforementioned Hasselhoff, Alec Baldwin and the lovely Scarlett Johansson, this movie receives three sponges and a starfish.

—Theodore B. Bressman

Finding Neverland

Directed by Marc Forster

Miramax Films

Art imitates life; after all, we can only work with what we see. Sometimes—or even frequently—life imitates art. Beneath these well-known aphorisms is something more profound and meaningful: fantasy. Fantasy can also imitate life and, as Finding Neverland lovingly shows, life can imitate fantasy, too.

In his newest film, director Marc Forster makes a drastic break from his previous work. In Monster’s Ball, he explored themes of racism, deceit and capital punishment; in short, he depicted reality at its darkest. Finding Neverland couldn’t be more different. Johnny Depp plays James “J.M.” Barrie, in the process of writing his masterwork Peter Pan. Like most of Depp’s characters, Barrie is more than a little strange. He lives in an odd mix of the real world—London in 1904—and his own imagination, a combination that Forster masterfully depicts by intercutting shots of Barrie’s London and his fantasy world. This kind of trick has the potential to devolve into a gimmick, but Forster doesn’t overindulge and, as a result, these rare and privileged views into Barrie’s mind remain are fantastical and awe-inspiring.

This is not to say that Barrie leads an idyllic life; this isn’t a Disney fairy tale, after all. His last play was a flop, his marriage has deteriorated to the point that he and his wife (played by Radha Mitchell) barely speak to one another, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, he prefers the company of his dog and his own imagination to most of his peers. This all changes, however, when he meets a family of muses in the park one afternoon. Barrie quickly befriends Sylvia Llewelyn Davies—played with daring and grace by Kate Winslet—and her four sons Michael, Jack, George and Peter to their mutual benefit; Barrie needs them for inspiration and to inject some warmth into what was rapidly becoming a hollow life and they need him to help them get over the recent death of Sylvia’s husband, the boys’ father. Peter, played by 12-year old Freddie Highmore, has been especially affected by his father’s death. It is only with the introduction of James’s imaginative story-telling abilities that he begins to enjoy life again.

Wearing Depp’s signature wide-eyed, magically faraway look, Barrie brings a much-needed world of fantasy to this family’s life. He does not bring escape from reality, but merely a nuance of it, a lens through which to view the world in one’s own terms. Neither the film nor James skirt around the harsh and depressing facts of life, but the reality they present is tinted with the innocence of fantasy, a fantasy which—in the form of Peter Pan—both takes cues from and strongly influences real life.

Depp, Winslet, Highmore and Julie Christie—who plays Sylvia’s domineering mother—all deliver strong performances, adding a level of sophisticated emotion, grounding the film in a paradoxically fantastical reality. Occasionally, the tone can be a little too sweet and sentimental: this is not a movie for the hard of heart. However, like Peter Pan says, if you really believe, at times the movie feels like it’s flying.

—Steven N. Jacobs