Premium Rush, Happy Feet Two, Mr Peabody and Sherman and The LEGO Movie

Quite a parade this time out, as I catch up on some things I've missed posting on.

Premium Rush is a small-scale action movie, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a New York bicycle messenger. Postgraduate law dropout Wiley lives for his work, dodging traffic around the city to deliver packages on his single-gear, brakeless steel bike. Hired to courier a receipt across town, he finds himself pursued by a corrupt cop and unwittingly embroiled in the world of Chinese hawala moneylenders and snakeheads.

JGL is an actor I have a lot of time for, especially since Brick and 50:50 showed that his younger performances (Third Rock from the Sun, 10 Things I Hate About You) were just the tip of his range. Here, he kind of takes second fiddle, not to the plot but to the deadly labyrinth of New York City traffic. The city is shot at a breakneck pace, only slowing down when it comes off the bikes, or to illustrate Wiley's navigational skills through slow-mo projected courses in a style similar to the fight planning scenes in Sherlock Holmes.

The action is small scale, our heroes tiny figures weaving between the lethal, anonymous mass of the traffic, the story simple, but the film successfully portrays this small conflict as being as real and meaningful as any world-saving quest.

Happy Feet Two is a very different affair, although it too has its depths, in particular a strong environmental message. Once again, it is about a penguin seeking for his own method of self-expression, although in this case Mumbles' son Eric can't dance or sing in the traditional style, only finding his voice in a very different genre.

It's a sweet little film, with a fine voice cast and a decent message about global warming not too heavily delivered. As with the original, it has some good songs, although not every one works perfectly.

Mr Peabody and Sherman is a reinvention of a pairing from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, for those of us who remember that; a hyper-intelligent dog and his human adopted son.

After years of living with Mr Peabody and taking regular field trips into the past via the Wayback, a time machine remarkably similar to the one in Free Birds, but not voiced by George Takei, Sherman starts at school with other humans, where he immediately gets into a fight with a spoiled little girl, provoking a rabid overreaction from the monstrous child services rep Ms Grunion.

The film has some cracking sequences. Mr Peabody is dry and sarcastic, with a ready line in puns that appeals to me, and the slightly awkward father and son chemistry with Sherman is delightful. Penny is a complete bitch, but grows on you as she softens, and the historical characters are wonderful parodies of their most famous distillation. Ms Grunion...

Okay, so, wow; this is a character that deeply, deeply disturbs me. Horrid, racist, overbearing, self-righteous and, above all, violent towards children, she is almost too much of a grotesque for me to deal with. Fortunately, her appearances in the film are minimal, and the rest is highly enjoyable.

Finally, The LEGO Movie, a hyperkinetic, technicolour romp through every pop cultural phenomenon with a LEGO franchise and then some. It's a pretty hardcore nerdfest, from the relentless stream of references to the fact that it is computer animated in the style of stop motion.

Emmett is a generic construction worker in a LEGO city, until the Piece of Resistance (I lolled) gets stuck to his back and throws him into an adventure beyond his understanding and outside the instructions. Working with the Master Builders - people capable of reconfiguring ordinary LEGO buildings and vehicles into anything they can envisage - he must confront the evil Lord Business and his plan to freeze the world in his quest for perfect order.

For the most part, it's a fun ride, but what lifts the film above an extended advert for LEGO is that its central message is not that you should buy lots of LEGO sets, but rather than each LEGO set can be anything you want it to be, not just what is in the instructions. As someone who used to have an enormous sack of mixed bricks, I can get behind that message.