Opens Fri Feb 6.
The prominent display of muscular young men achieving glory through physical exertion is not the only way in which sports movies are like pornography. The other big similarity lies in audience expectations; because the destination is a foregone conclusion in both forms, the pleasure of watching has got to be all about the journey. Miracle is a good sports movie because it delivers a solid 90 minutes of credible buildup to a finale that is a matter of public record. In 1980, the U.S. Olympic hockey team beat the Soviet national team, which was unarguably the greatest team in the history of the sport at that time, and had 16 years' worth of gold medals to prove it. The road to Lake Placid is beset with endless drills run by the world's most hard-assed coach (Kurt Russell, whose performance is as comically accurate as the plaid pants grafted to his ass), but by the time our unlikely heroes skate out to meet the commies, they're in great shape. Not a lot of time gets wasted on their lives, their hardscrabble backgrounds, or any of the usual accoutrements of movies like this, which makes Miracle all the more satisfying. Sports movies are better than sports; all you see are highlights. The team sucks, then they work really hard, then they win. Grown men cry. The end. Perfect. Which is why the end credits, in which we learn that the heroic athletes we've just spent two hours rooting for grew up to be total corporate whores--all motivational speakers, bankers, and real estate agents--sting like a stick-check. As with porn, sports films outlive their usefulness as soon as your blood stops boiling, and it's possible to feel dirtier on the way out than you did on the way in. SEAN NELSON

ByDesign 04

Plays Fri-Sun Feb 6-8 at the Little Theatre.
ByDesign is meant to examine the intersection between graphic design and film, but it ends up being a sort of catchall for unclassifiable films, usually but not always animated, sometimes commercial, sometimes nice little standalone pieces of art. What makes this whole program worthwhile is a two-minute gem called The Critic. It's got some nice '60s-style animation by Ernest Pintoff and, more to the point, a hilarious voice-over by Mel Brooks in his best Old Country-inflected old-guy mode. ("Vat iss diss? Diss is crap, iss vat it iss!") The Critic will be shown in Historic Shorts: Graphic Films of the '60s, along with Why Man Creates, which is in part a lovely, long-sustained bit of Saul Bass scribbling insanity--a tower of civilization that will leave you quite breathless (the rest of the film, an allegory about invention and problem-solving, is more Sesame Street in flavor). Entropy, a program of shorts and music videos, is a mixed bag, as such things usually are. On the one hand there's a rambling, pointless video by Roman Coppola (for the Phoenix song "Funky Squaredance") that is the video equivalent of writing a term paper about how you wrote the term paper, the oldest trick in the book when you've let the thing go until the last minute and have no ideas (although not all of us get to pimp our famous father and sister, or our sexy girlfriend dancing around in a bikini and heels). On the other hand there's a sly, funny Brian Lee Hughes short called Superwinner that is smart and perplexing (at first) and features a lot of really good-looking Scandinavians. Plus a whole program on the UK collective Shynola, which has made music videos in just about every animation style you can think of; it's amazing that something made just two years ago looks so incredibly dated. Well, The Critic looks dated too, but that didn't hinder my enjoyment of it one little bit. I laughed my ass off, is what I did. EMILY HALL

Catch That Kid

dir. Bart Freundlich

Opens Fri Feb 6.
This review would be a whole lot easier to write if I were writing about a movie that had any sort of substance. But I'm not writing about a movie that has substance, I'm writing about Catch That Kid. So instead of delving into great depth about the possibility that this film is a social commentary on America's health-care system in disguise, I'll keep things simple: This movie is about go-carts.

Maddy is a feisty eighth grader whose mother (Jennifer "I need to pay rent" Beals) designs bank security systems and whose father is the owner of a popular local go-cart track. Back in the day, Daddy used to climb big mountains like Everest and stuff, but gave up that hobby after nearly losing his life from a fall (Maddy, however, picked up where Daddy left off and is often climbing whatever she can get her hands on... trees, water towers, whatever).

Suddenly, Daddy's fall comes back to haunt him--he collapses in the kitchen, and is unable to use his legs. So, unless his family can procure $250,000 for an experimental surgery, he'll be forever paralyzed. Tragic, I know.

Out to save the day, though, are Maddy and her two best friends, the geek and the jock. The three of them join powers (brains, strength, and Maddy's fearlessness) and decide the only way to save Maddy's dad is to rob the very same bank that Mom is currently working for. (I'm really trying to make this interesting, guys, honestly....)

Anyway, with their powers combined, the trio get their hands on the bank's floor plan, design high-speed go-carts (for the getaway, duh), and so begins Operation: Save Daddy. I won't spoil the end for you, but those go-carts sure are fast. MEGAN SELING