Kurt Loder Reviews A Million Ways To Die in the West and Maleficent

Seth MacFarlane finally appears in the flesh in A
Million Ways to Die in the West. Unfortunately, the flesh is
weak. As he has demonstrated in the long-running Family
Guy and his phenomenally successful 2012
film Ted, MacFarlane is an overflowingly talented
comic writer and voice actor. Kurt Loder writes that here, though,
stepping into the spotlight and directing himself in a parody
western he cowrote, MacFarlane’s anachronistic joke-cracking
persona seems too small-screen to anchor a full-scale movie. Loder
writes that Maleficent—a live-action take on the studio’s
1959 animated classic Sleeping Beauty—is an honorable
enterprise, an often-gorgeous kids’ movie featuring two strong
female characters and dominated by Angelina Jolie in a performance
of wonderfully silky restraint.

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