"Stardust"

Keeping that many golden balls in the air at once surely must take balls of steel, and Vaughn, apparently, has got 'em. Vaughn is an action guy, not a fantasy guy -- he produced "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" and "Snatch," and made his directorial debut with the 2004 gangster thriller "Layer Cake" -- and his sensibility serves him well here. "Stardust" is an adventure-romance with just the right proportions of each. There's some nicely staged swordplay and a few thrilling, galloping chase sequences. And the love story here develops slowly and naturally, a narrative that unfolds even before we're fully aware of it -- kind of the way love sometimes happens in real life. Cox is a relaxed, likable presence -- he never makes the mistake of working too hard to be charming. And Danes, in addition to being suitably luminous, is funny and sweet here, although she also gives Yvaine an appealing crankiness: This is a star who doesn't suffer human fools gladly.

The script, by Jane Goldman, is solid and sturdy -- the plot details dovetail together nicely at the end -- and Vaughn and Goldman both seem attuned to Gaiman's slightly grim and grisly sense of humor. (The witches divine the future by reading animal entrails, and while the actual slaying of the poor creatures takes place discreetly off-screen, there's something gleefully ewky about the way these crones coo and cackle over the bloody bits.)

The humor in "Stardust" is lanky and sly; the picture is reminiscent of "The Princess Bride," except, as a friend of mine pointed out, the jokes are more English than Borscht Belt. Ricky Gervais shows up as a wily, crooked merchant, and Robert De Niro plays a gruff pirate captain who pretends to be a tough guy to maintain the respect of his crew, but who has a closet full of girly costumes that he wears in his private moments. The performance doesn't quite work -- De Niro never stretches it beyond camp -- but it does provide the foundation for one of the sweetest fillips in the movie.

There are some wonderful, fanciful effects here, including a dirigible pirate ship that drifts through the air, and Pfeiffer's zillion-year-old witch, who ages and youthens before our eyes. (I know "youthen" isn't a word, but in the age of Botox, it ought to be.) Yet the simplest effects here -- a magical silver chain that mends itself after being snapped, the rapturous, radiant glow of Yvaine's hair when she's at her happiest -- are the most beautiful. The picture, shot by Ben Davis, with production design by Gavin Bocquet, is lovely to look at: Its palette of greens, golds and grays suggests the ways in which the natural world informs even our fantasies. After all, what else do we have to go on? We humans get our ideas from looking at the ground beneath us, the sky above, and everything in between. "Stardust" draws both from the world we know and from one we can only imagine. Its glow isn't just painted on; it comes from within.

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