Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

The cinema release of Spielberg's Tintin was met with predictable howls of outrage from certain quarters - mostly middle-aged, male Guardian writers - for whom the movie seemed a betrayal of their childhoods. But a film made from such well-loved source material will always be measured against the original. How does it fare?

The halfway-between-cartoon-and-real-life visuals manage to avoid Polar Express creepiness by concentrating on a warm period feel. Bell's Tintin retains the blankness of Herge's hero, while motion-capture wizard Serkis actually fills out the irascible Haddock with his performance. The mostly inventive script hamfistedly welds two of the orginal adventures together but this allows Spielberg his best scene; a plane caught in a storm and brought down in the desert is, by turns, exciting and funny.

However, where Herge's ligne claire drawings kept Tintin's world anchored and legible, Spielberg allows the CGI to get the better of him, constructing elaborate sequences which are both thrilling and heartless. [Keir Roper-Caldbeck]