Children’s Movie Reviews

Star Trek Into Darkness

Star Trek Into Darkness begins with a proverbial bang: Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) is on the run from a group of bipeds, chalky-faced and primitively dressed, while Spock (Zachary Quinto) is lowered into a volcano. Each faces his crisis as he is wont: Kirk dashes and leaps and barks orders into his communicator, Spock sets up the super-high-tech contraption with which he means to stop the volcano before it destroys the very population who is now chasing after Kirk. The Prime Directive is at stake.
Iron Man 3

Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is once again feeling anxious as Iron Man 3 begins. As much as he enjoys being Iron Man, which is to say, being a celebrity, commercial product, and superhero, he’s also worried that the suit is yet imperfect, as is his commitment to Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow), longtime girlfriend and CEO of his company, Stark Industries. Now that they’re living together fulltime, in a gigantic house on a cliff over the Malibu surf, he’s worried. He can’t say why exactly, but he does show symptoms of trauma, presumably owing to the considerable beatings he took in The Avengers.
Jurassic Park 3D

Dinosaurs are walking the earth. Again. Just as they did 20 years ago, when Jurassic Park rumbled across big screens in that quaint technology now called 2D, the dinosaurs are the best part of Steven Spielberg’s movie. They’re accompanied here by some adults in need of lessons, from the theme park impresario John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) to the paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill), and they menace children who need only to be protected by their grandfather, the same Mr. Hammond. The fact that Tim (Joseph Mazzello) and Lex (Ariana Richards) are not better protected owes to their grandfather’s…
G.I. Joe: Retaliation

“That’s what happens when you’re in trouble. You go home.” Just so, when Roadblock (Dwayne Johnson) and a couple of his G.I. Joe colleagues — Jaye (Adrianne Palicki) and Flint (D.J. Cotrona) — are in trouble, he brings them to the neighborhood where he grew up. Here he meets up with a childhood friend, Stoop (DeRay Davis), who looks the younger soldiers up and down and deems them “Miley Cyrus and Ryan Seacrest.”
The Croods

“With every sun comes a new day, a new beginning, a new hope that things will be better,” narrates Eep (Emma Stone) at the start of The Croods. “Except for me.” Poor Eep. Not only is she a teenager with an overprotective dad and a screaming baby sister, but she’s also living in the Paleolithic era. And that means she and her family are cave people, with sloping foreheads and thick limbs. They’re strong and fast and great hunters and gatherers, but not so quick or adept when it comes to having ideas.
Oz the Great and Powerful

Oscar Diggs (James Franco) is a carnival magician, which is to say he’s a con man. He performs tricks on a stage with the help of assistants, wires, trapdoors, and mirrors, and feels twinges of sadness when he’s revealed to be a fake — as when a little girl in a wheelchair (Joey King) asks him to make her walk, and he must confess that he cannot.
Jack the Giant Slayer

Long ago, in a storybook kingdom far away — or in Great Britain, anyway — two children listen to bedtime stories. One is a farm boy, Jack: his father (Tim Foley) looms almost ominously in his doorway just before he enters, smiles, and sits down to extol the courage of a brave king who saved his subjects from a clan of human-eating giants who descend from the sky. The other child is a princess named Isabelle, whose doting mother (Tandi Wright) tells the same story. And both parents, on opposite ends of the class divide, encourage their kids to seek adventure and do good for the kingdom of Cloister. Put…
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

“I’m looking for someone to share in an adventure,” announces Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) at the start of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. The giant wizard looms over Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), whom he’s come to visit in the Shire, while the hobbit, pipe clamped firmly in his teeth, peeps back up at him. Oh no, Bilbo insists, he’s not the right choice for this invitation, because in his eyes, adventures are “nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things. They make you late for dinner.”
Rise of the Guardians

As Jack Frost (Chris Pine) tells you at the start of Rise of the Guardians, the first thing he remembers is darkness. Since that moment, he goes on to say, he’s found out a little more about himself, that he can create ice and cold, that he can go barefoot in winter, and that no one else can see or hear him. While it’s fun to slip-slide on ice and deliver snow days to happy school kids, he does wish he might be seen.
Wreck-It Ralph

Wreck-It Ralph (voiced by John C. Reilly) is a villain. He’s also tired of being a villain. After three decades of smashing a brownstone apartment building in a video game named for him — and worse, having to sleep on a pile of garbage every night, alone and cold — he’s looking for some respite. He envies the warmth and community enjoyed by the hero of his game, Fix-It Felix (Jack McBrayer), whose magic hammer allows him to repair Ralph’s damage, again and again.