Labirintus

When you’ve had a career as long and illustrious as Joe Dante’s, you sort of get a lifetime supply of free passes. It doesn’t matter that the man’s most recent feature, last year’s Burying the Ex, got uniformly and deservedly poor notices upon its release. And it doesn’t matter that his feature before that, 2009’s The Hole 3D, was shuffled around, maligned, and forgotten prior to a quiet theatrical run that actually lost money for the presiding studio. It doesn’t even matter that Dante’s been paying the bills in recent years by taking gun-for-hire TV direction work, slumming it with gigs on CSI: NY, Hawaii Five-O, and Witches of East End. None of that matters, because we now have a new Joe Dante movie, and hope springs eternal in the human breast.