In 1979, long before Charlie and Donald Kaufman adapted The Orchid Thief, a hero emerged from a swamp to fold his life story into a multifaceted meta-movie, blurring content into form. His name: Kermit the Frog. No less a figure than Harold Pinter would "borrow" Kermit's film-within-a-film structure two years later for The French Lieutenant's Woman. But he didn't keep the wondrous, profoundly mysterious image of Kermit riding a bicycle--which is why you can see Kermit's movie in revival these days and not Pinter's. Watching the Muppets' first star vehicle a quarter-century later, with my own movie-obsessed child, I confess it wasn't exactly the experience I remembered. A movie about the Muppets screening a movie about the making of the Muppets' first movie, mixing in real locations and guest stars for a weirdly prosaic effect, it has less of Sesame Street's winsome sweetness and more of The Muppet Show's self-aware showbiz mockery; the strain of keeping kids, wiseguy adolescents, and adults equally enchanted really shows in painful running gags about Hare Krishna and the like. (My little girl eventually opted for Ariel the mermaid over Miss Piggy, choosing Disney's more svelte and less complicated anthropomorphic brand.) What remains delightful are the bouncy Paul Williams-Kenny Ascher songs, the ever-surprising cameos (from Orson Welles and James Coburn to Steve Martin and a willfully innocent Richard Pryor), and the warm, all-embracing, fondly countercultural community that the late Jim Henson constructed around his amphibian alter ego. Ironically, the film that turned the Muppets into a mass-media juggernaut may be the only children's movie ever made about the fear of selling out. Henson needn't have worried: From the moment a swooping crane shot singles out the movie's hero, plunking the lovely "The Rainbow Connection" on the banjo in his swampy home, Kermit remains--in every sense--deeply felt. (Jim Ridley)

Review by Jim Ridley