The original Annie was such a feature of my childhood that I can’t even properly say if I “liked” it or not—did I like the bed I slept in or the house I lived in? It just was. But going in with a head full of nostalgia might not be the best way to approach the new Annie, which stars Beasts of the Southern Wild’s QuvenzhanĂ© Wallis as the titular moppet and Jamie Foxx as Will Stacks, a cell-phone tycoon who gambles that adopting a foster kid might help his campaign for mayor of New York City. This Annie is a shinier, more calculated affair than the 1982 original, even if the bones are mostly the same: Annie is a friendly foster kid (not an orphan, she sternly insists) in the lackluster care of booze-addled Ms. Hannigan (Cameron Diaz). When she’s picked up as a campaign prop in Stacks’s mayoral bid, she helps warm up his image
 AND MAYBE HIS HEART?

And while it’s packed with winks for grown-ups—at one point, Foxx sings a few bars of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, a nod to producer Will Smith—it’s ultimately a kids’ movie, designed for a generation of cyborgs who grew up perfecting their selfie game. The addition of cell phones, hashtags, and YouTube will no doubt be inherently horrifying to many adults; it’s also a perfectly reasonable and target-audience-appropriate set of updates. Wallis is profoundly adorable, but her Annie is, if anything, a bit too scrappy—there’s no pathos, only pluck. And the leaden original songs are dull filler, making the already long two-hour runtime feel even longer. Overall, though, it’s a perfectly reasonable adaptation: silly and high energy, adorable, with enough shoehorned-in talking points about wealth and opportunity to placate the whining of your liberal conscience. recommended