Once upon a time there was a weird little thrift shop comedy called “Napoleon Dynamite.” It came out of nowhere (well, almost nowhere: Utah) with a no-name cast, adhered to no known comedic formula, and became a smash.

Though it captured lightning in a bottle, it had unfortunate aftereffects. It gave its giraffe-like star, Jon Heder, a subsequent acting career that defines the term “sophomore slump.” And it empowered writer/director Jared Hess to keep making movies where eccentricity outweighs humor. First, there was the disappointing “Nacho Libre,“ starring Jack Black as a Mexican monk who moonlights as a masked wrestler. Now there's “Gentlemen Broncos,” a tedious and unfocused concoction involving science fiction, plagiarism and the nightgown industry.

Whereas “Napoleon's” characters were oddly adorable ugly ducklings, “Gentlemen's” are merely awkward. Benjamin (Michael Angarano) is a solitary kid who lives in a dome house with his doting single mom (Jennifer Coolidge). It's a creative home: She designs hideous fashions, and he fills notebooks with lurid sci-fi novellas. At Cletus Fest, “the best writer's camp in Utah,” Benjamin meets bossy Tabatha, a shameless tease, and his idol, Dr. Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement of TV's “Flight of the Conchords”), a pretentious fantasy author on the skids.

The flimsy plot revolves around Chevalier plagiarizing Benjamin's manuscript “Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years,” and changing the he-man hero into a lisping sissy. The film dramatizes both writers' versions, with Cyclops soldiers, flying battle stags and bald space babes. Sam Rockwell (“Moon”) earns a lifetime Good Sport merit badge by playing both bearlike Bronco and delicate, hair-swishing Brutus.

The story blows here and there like a tumbleweed, with Benjamin discovering his manhood by standing up to his false idol. Angarano, whose odd hangdog face has a winsome solemnity, is one of the few performers to emerge unscathed. The film's grotesque violence extends to firehose-caliber projectile vomit, laser-firing bra cannons and a poisoned dart shot into Ben's mother's chest.

When she's struck, you think: Look on the bright side – she may get to miss the rest of the movie.

The end, when it comes, may look a lot like this – grey skies shrouding the ash-covered ruins of civilization.

And silence. Not a single child laughing, no dogs barking, no birds or even traffic noise. Just the creaking of dead trees, the rumble as some of them crash to the ground.

Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Road makes for a bleak movie, and director John Hillcoat doesn’t sugar-coat it. This is a post apocalypse almost utterly without hope, a world with no glory or joy in surviving. The parable about clinging to the last slivers of your humanity rings clear. But the stark setting, minimalist plot and plainly-named characters make this a hard Road, if worthwhile, to travel.

Viggo Mortensen is The Man trekking south across the wasteland of America. His simple goal – keep his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) alive for another day. They forage through empty houses and abandoned cars – hunting for the last remnants of food in a land where nothing green grows, where no animals survived.

The apocalypse, glimpsed in flashback in one of the movie’s most hair-raising moments, was a series of thumps, a flash of light, and The Wife (Charlize Theron) wondering why her husband (Mortensen) is suddenly filling all the sinks and the tub with water. Whatever happened – and we’re never told – we see it on her face.

The Man and The Boy’s odyssey is largely spent avoiding the roving, ruthless bands of cannibals – drawling rednecks willing to do whatever it takes to eat. The Boy, born after the cataclysm, needs re-assurance that “we’re the good guys,” that, as The Man tells him, they’re “keeping the flame.”

The Man almost forgets his humanity, something the son, who has only known this world, must remind him of when they meet struggling strangers (Robert Duvall plays one) on their trek. The Man has a pistol with two bullets – one for each of them should starvation or imminent capture by the cannibals demand it. And he has his memories.

Mortensen breathes life into this faithfully desolate narrative, begging his wife to make it through another day in flashbacks, weeping as he remembers all that’s been lost, struggling to pass on something to his son besides the life he’s fought for years to preserve. A barn full of hanging bodies is a teachable moment.

“They committed suicide.”

“Why”

“You know why.”

Hillcoat, who did the grim Aussie period-piece The Proposition, doesn’t flinch, and that’s a serious drawback, here. “Faithfully grim” is not a lot of people’s idea of a good time at the movies.

Dystopian visions of the future have been around since H.G. Wells, so much so that we can naively root for Will Smith to live on in I Am Legend or laugh at the new rules for civilization in Zombieland. But when the bombs fall, the meteor hits or the Mayan calendar’s 2012 expiration date proves accurate, it’s too much to expect humor or hope. We may hold out long enough to see the next sunrise, McCarthy suggests. But if we don’t pass on our humanity, what will be the point?

Fantastic Mr. Fox is a magical mixing of two distinctly ingenius sensibilities. Marry the dark “scare the little darlings” playfulness of children’s novelist Roald Dahl to the quirky, comic warmth of filmmaker Wes Anderson, assign it to ever-so-patient British masters of stop-motion animation and what you get is a movie of whimsy, wit, warmth and wackiness, a Dahl parable (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) brought to animated life.

The Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums) brand of wit – dysfunctional families in cute conflict – is, oddly, a near perfect balance for Dahl’s darkness in this story of a Fox (voiced by George Clooney) who settles down, has a cub (with wife Meryl Streep) but is restless for his “wild animal” days. The comic timing -- rapid off-hand banter – the garish look and the arch, raised-eyebrow tone of Mr. Fox all point to a filmmaker known for arched, bemused detachment, a guy not afraid to fail big (The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou) in pursuit of a movie that doesn’t look or sound like any other movie. Mr. Fox doesn’t look like any other movie out there, not even the equally glorious stop-motion animated Coraline. And it doesn’t fail.

Mr. Fox loves his wife, loves his double-breasted corduroy suits. He doesn’t really love his “Fox About Town” newspaper column. What he really loves is his old life, stealing. As his son (Jason Schwartzman, whiney and perfect) hits his teen years and Mr. Fox reaches middle age, he has an existential crisis.

“Why a fox?” he wonders. “Why not a bald eagle?”

He uproots the family, moves into a tree against the advice of his badger-lawyer (Bill Murray), takes in an athletically gifted nephew and returns to his old ways – raiding the henhouse, the smokehouse and the cider distillery of three very successful but scary farmers – Boggis, Bunce and Bean. And that escalates into a war that involves all the farmers, all the foxes, and every other animal.

Hilarious touches: When the fox and badger argue, it degenerates into a growling fit, literally. Profanity is replaced with one generic cuss-word – “Cuss.” “What the cuss was that? Shoot the cuss to smithereens!” A hep-cat rat (Willem Dafoe) fights the fox as if he’s auditioning for West Side Story. And watch for the Jarvis Cocker cameo.

There are life lessons kids will absorb, about listening to good advice.Yet this gloriously retro stop-motion animation is also that rare picture that’s child-oriented yet adult friendly. If you’re a parent, you’d have to be an ornery cuss not to take the tykes to this.