Annie movie review & film summary (2014) | Roger Ebert

The new “Annie” is getting kicked up and down Critic’s Row like an unwanted orphan, but if you see it with a big audience you’ll experience an emotion entirely different from the one being described in many reviews: unabashed cheer.This new version of the Broadway musical is the first since the 1999 ABC TV version, and the only theatrical movie version since the 1982 John Huston picture that starred Aileen Quinn, Albert Finney and Carol Burnett. (The ’99 TV version is excellent, by the way—well worth seeking out; it’s easily the best thing director Rob Marshall has been associated with.) Judged purely in terms of its production and direction, this latest “Annie” is inferior to its predecessors; director Will Gluck, of TV’s “The Marshalls” and “Andy Richter Controls the Universe,” has envisioned it as a repository of 2014 music and musical performance cliches, the actors cavorting through indifferently composed widescreen vistas, and singing in voices that have been heavily AutoTuned.An...