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Jack Black officially gets his first franchise with Kung Fu Panda 2, the sequel to the hugely popular 2008 CGI adventure that improves on its parent by being a little less frenetic and, surprisingly, adopting a somewhat darker tone.

It finally happened. Pixar, the studio which has churned out one great film after another (Toy Story, The Incredibles, WALL-E, etc.), finally produced a bit of a dud. This might be a little unfair, since Cars 2 suffers most from comparison with other Pixar releases–less so when pitted against the work of rival [...]

The family-friendly Zookeeper posits the idea that animals apparently have been able to talk all along, but don’t want us to know they can. Naturally, they decide to reveal this earth-shattering secret for the most important of reasons: to give Kevin James romantic advice.
You see, a shallow but gorgeous blonde (Leslie Bibb) [...]

Myriad are the reasons the $150 million Mars Needs Moms bombed so badly at the box office. My guess, aside from it being based on a children’s book by “Bloom County” creator Berkeley Breathed, hardly the best source for a family-friendly flick, is that for all its impressive visuals, the movie, [...]

The Perfect Game has finally been released. This is a solid kid and family movie, based on a true story, about a Mexican Little League team that went on to compete in the Little League World Series in the U.S. It’s not necessary to be a baseball or sports fan to [...]

It finally happened. In the arena of 2011’s animated films, Pixar has been decisively bested. Who’s the new champion? Well, of course it’s still too early to say, but my money is on Rango. Produced by Paramount in conjunction with Nickelodeon, for all intents and purposes it is actually a creation of Industrial [...]

Being the 11 year old I am, I would say that the ongoing garden gnome battle of the Reds and Blues would be better if there were more than just one death. But it is of course a Disney movie, so kids from the ages of 3-8 would enjoy this. But, [...]

Disney apparently wanted to go back to its roots with its 50th animated feature, and so, a la Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, took yet another dark children’s story about a girl in trouble and turned it into Tangled, a sprightly and thoroughly entertaining family flick full of beautiful animation and bouncy musical numbers.

Steve Carell makes for a very funny sort-of-bad-guy in Despicable Me, a CGI ‘toon with an amusing premise that kids will find irresistible but as a whole isn’t half as funny as it should, or could, have been.

I love and respect Emma Thompson, and if you do as well, you will approach the Nanny McPhee franchise in the proper spirit. Emma Thompson produces and stars in the original and the sequel as the enigmatic, magical Nanny McPhee (“little ‘c’, big ‘P’”), a nanny in the tradition of Mary Poppins who appears [...]