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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 [...]

Disney makes a much-heralded return to its 2D hand-drawn animation roots with The Princess and the Frog. The return to a medium considered dead (at least in the eyes of dimwitted studio execs) is historic enough. But it also marks the debut of Disney’s first black princess, Tiana. The setting for the [...]

After his turn in the delightfully dark World’s Greatest Dad, it’s a little disappointing to see Robin Williams go back to starring in a broad Hollywood comedy. Yet without him, or co-star John Travolta, the lazy and predictable Old Dogs would have little going for it.
The nearly 60-year-old stars play single childhood buddies and co-owners [...]

First of all, anyone worried about this film staying true to the art of the original should know that author Maurice Sendak gave his full approval to director Spike Jonze, writer Dave Eggers, and their conceptual interpretation of his classic of childrens’ literature Where the Wild Things Are. This is not the Sendak book I [...]

Anybody reading this who knows the name Hayao Miyazaki probably won’t need any convincing from me to check out his latest film Ponyo. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Japanese master animator, he is widely and ever-increasingly recognized as one of the greatest filmmakers working today, and you owe it to yourself [...]

I’m not overly familiar with the 1980 version of Fame aside from its hit title song, but I do know it was rated R, which alone gives it an edge over this slick, but bland PG revamp that, despite periodically producing a beat you can dance to, acts too much like a soap you’d see [...]