Reviewed: The Road and Fantastic Mr. Fox Viggo Mortensen outwits cannibals, grimaces; Mr. Fox steals chickens, has a lot more fun.

It’s not unusual in film to find a parent whose protective instinct is so fierce he will unthinkingly endanger his own life to save his child. But teaching your kid how to blow his own brains out in the event of your own premature demise—that’s a whole different dimension of tough love. Such grim practicalities are strewn throughout The Road, John Hillcoat’s adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel that amounts to two hours of bleak with rare, faint glimmers of hope.

Entertaining it is not. “Each day is grayer than the one before,” says the father credited only as Man (Viggo Mortensen), who is traveling with his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) through the ashen, fiery landscapes of the post-apocalypse, one void of zombies, Terminators, or breathtaking special effects. Viewers don’t find out what kind of catastrophe ended life as we know it in McCarthy’s story (adapted by Joe Penhall), though there are brief, more colorful flashbacks to the pair’s former reality, one replete with laptops, quaint kitchens, and Mom (Charlize Theron). Leaving their home—and, you get the impression, fighting back in the first place—was not a decision on which husband and wife agreed. “They’re going to rape me, and they’re going to rape your son, and then they’re going to kill us and eat us,” she argues through tears in an attempt to keep her family together.

Although “they” is never defined, good versus evil and the bond between father and son are the themes propelling The Road. The former was also the business of 2007’s No Country for Old Men, another McCarthy adaptation, though that film offered a superior storyline and a variety of characters that kept the audience engaged—even enthralled—and earned it a Best Picture win. Here, Mortensen and Australian newcomer Smit-McPhee may deliver intense, often gut-wrenching performances, but their journey is too mysterious and soaked in one-note misery to keep you rapt: When they come across bodies hanging in a barn and the son asks why, the father merely answers, “You know why.” The few people they come across are nearly feral and, except for one old man (Robert Duvall), ready to hurt and rob them—even though money no longer has value. When the boy tells Dad that he had a bad dream, you can’t help but wonder what could be worse than their present reality. (Even in the apocalypse, however, there’s room for product placement: They eventually find a bomb shelter in which Spam and Vitamin Water exist in abundance.)

What is regarded as invaluable in this story—and what a person can’t be robbed of—is a sense of right and wrong, a moral burden often referred to as “the fire.” The man and his son, for example, talk about how they won’t resort to cannibalism, because “we’re the good guys, and we’re carrying the fire.” Faith is apparently important as well, with the Man’s narration boasting that if his son isn’t “the word of God, then God’s never spoken.” Ultimately, The Road is about their relationship, and about the lengths a parent will go to in order to provide. And if the end of this pair’s journey is actually hopeful, you’ll likely feel too battered by the horrors that came before to revel in the moment.

Maybe it’s not surprising that it took a fox to help burrow Wes Anderson’s head out of his own ass. After Anderson devolved from endearing quirk to annoying preciosity over the course of his five-film career, the director’s first animated feature, Fantastic Mr. Fox, feels like a reinvention—or perhaps a realization that his live-action caricatures would be more entertaining as actual cartoons.

Fantastic Mr. Fox, of course, is adapted from the Roald Dahl book and expanded à la Where the Wild Things Are to big-screen depth by Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach. The gist of the story involves the domestication and subsequent restlessness of the titular character (George Clooney), a fast-talking, sly you-know-what who spent his early years living underground and stealing chickens with his better half, Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep). When she becomes pregnant with their son, Ash (Jason Schwartzman), though, she asks him to change his ways.

Twelve years later, they’re living in a tree condo (albeit one they hope to “flip”). Mr. Fox writes for a newspaper but gets lured back to his old lifestyle when he discovers that his neighbors are greedy farmers by the names of Boggis (Robin Hurlstone), Bunce (Hugo Guinness), and Bean (Michael Gambon). “One more raid”—with the help of his partner, a dopey opossum named Kylie (Wallace Wolodarsky)—becomes a series of them. Mrs. Fox can’t help but eventually notice, and when she confronts her husband, his unapologetic apology is, “I’m a

wild animal.”

On its deepest level, Fantastic Mr. Fox deals in existential dilemmas (“Who am I?” Mr. Fox ponders) and the compromises of marriage. Mostly, though, the film is fun. The characters’ A-list voices (which also include Willem Dafoe, Owen Wilson, and Bill Murray) lend a velvet sophistication to the dialogue. The jokes are charming and low-key, such as Kylie’s whirling eyes whenever the opossum zones out during Mr. Fox’s fast-talk or the use of the actual word “cuss” as the characters’ go-to imprecation (“Are you cussin’ with me?”).

The animation, too, is top-notch. The eyes on these animals—even Kylie’s—are more expressive than anything Robert Zemeckis has ever motion-captured, and their

intricately rendered bristles of fur seem virtually tactile. The film as a whole is smart

and entertaining and achieves that near-impossibility of being equally fit for kids and adults. One asterisk: It’s still not Pixar. But it’s not The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, either, and for hungry Anderson fans, that’s enough of a triumph.