Opening This Week: “Wreck-It Ralph” and “Flight”

This week, a new film from Disney pays tribute to the early years of video games, when designers were limited to 8 bits and you had to go to the arcade and pay in quarters.  “Wreck-It Ralph” is a fictional game that feels completely authentic, and the story is about what happens when Ralph gets tired of being the bad guy and visits some other games to try to become a hero.  John C. Reilly plays Ralph and Sara Silverman plays a bratty little girl from another game.  There are many in-jokes and appearances from classic video game characters in what has been called the “Roger Rabbit” of computer games.

Coincidentally, the director of “Roger Rabbit” also has a movie opening up this week.  Robert Zemeckis has spent the past few years making motion-capture animated films like “Mars Needs Moms,” “Disney’s A Christmas Carol,” and “Beowulf.”  He’s back to live action for the first time in more than a decade with “Flight,” starring Denzel Washington as a pilot who is first acclaimed as a hero when he saves the passengers after his plane crashes, and then is the subject of an investigation.