The Golden Compass

Laurie Sparham/Newline.wireimage.com

Review in a Hurry:  A young girl is the only hope of a parallel world filled with talking animals, sky cowboys, polar bear death matches and a totalitarian regime that would bring tears of joy to Dick Cheney's eyes. Based on the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, this adaptation is a gorgeous, overstuffed contender for the box-office crown of Harry Potter.

The Bigger Picture:  Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards) is an orphan in a world parallel to ours, where people's souls live outside them in the shape of talking animals called daemons. Alchemy is science here, and the bad guys, called the Magisterium, run almost everything. Think 1984 set in Narnia.

But things aren't too shabby for Lyra. She lives at a college that's the last bastion of freethinking, and her uncle is James Bond...sorry, Lord Asriel, an adventurer and scholar played by Daniel Craig. Asriel thinks he's found a way into other parallel worlds, and this discovery kicks off a battle against the Magisterium with Lyra at its center.

If you've read Pullman's books, you know all this—in fact, you're probably in line for the movie already. For everyone else, this is where Lyra is forced to confront her destiny. Standing in her way is Nicole Kidman, whose porcelain exterior hides a heart as cold as Darth Vader's.

Lyra's journey is a pretty standard trip down the hero path: orphan, check; magic object, check; war between good and evil, check. But it's a quest through a fully realized world, filled with an attention to detail that's far too rare in most films. From the airships above the Byzantine cities to the expressions on the faces of the animals, the magic seems almost real enough to touch.