The Video Station: (303) 440-4448

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 [...]

It’s gotten to the point now where the mere mention of M. Night Shyamalan elicits either a laugh or a groan. It wasn’t so long ago that he was producing some truly phenomenal films–I for one believe that The Sixth Sense is a genuine masterpiece, even (or especially) when you look past its [...]

The CGI people in A Christmas Carol, director Robert Zemeckis’ latest performance-capture piece, certainly look more realistic than the creepy-faced things that populated The Polar Express. But they’re still just a little off, enough to make this otherwise entertaining version of the beloved Charles Dickens tale feel as cold-hearted as Ebenezer Scrooge himself.

I hated this lazy family flick with, well, a vengeance. It’s awful. Basically an hour and a half of star Brendan Fraser being humiliated by a bunch of animals. You might be able to tolerate it if you’re under 9, but adults should try not to look directly at the screen while it’s [...]

For this review of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, I asked my grandkids, Jack, age 10 and Abbie, age 9, for their input. We all watched it twice and the kids watched the Deleted Scenes in the Special Features. We all really loved this movie. Jack and Abbie liked it because it [...]

In director Tim Burton’s marvelous version of Alice in Wonderland, 6-year-old and very sleep-deprived Alice has continuing strange dreams of a white rabbit (Michael Sheen), a giant rabbit hole, a mad tea party, and plants and animals that can talk. About 13 years later, a less than enthusiastic Alice (Mia [...]

Calling this follow-up to the 2007 box-office hit a “squeakquel” is bad enough, but it also begs to be the answer to a question on Jeopardy, as in, “What 88-minute movie about a trio of talking rodents has more subplots than Spider-Man 3?”

I can still recall the resonant voice of Roald Dahl reading aloud his classic children’s book “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” on my oft-played book-on-tape version (yes, I was a cassette-tape-listening child of the 80’s). Since I, at one point, pretty much knew the book by heart, I had to fight hard [...]