Children’s Movie Reviews

Winnie The Pooh

For Winnie the Pooh (Jim Cummings), the most important thing is always honey. No matter what time of day or what else might distract him, he comes back to the fact that his tummy is rumbling and he must fill it. Just so, Winnie The Pooh begins as he wakes one fine morning in the Hundred Acre Wood and, on hearing the usual noises from within his pudgy belly and sets out in search of sustenance.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

Mainly, it’s the end. The end of Harry Potter’s adventures as a child and teenager, anyway. Ten years after Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson), and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) met at Hogwarts, they’re now leaving for good. While they had been forced out in The Deathly Hallows Part 1, now, in Part 2, they return in order to save the school and then find their own lives — apart from it.
Zookeeper

Griffin (Kevin James) wants to marry Stephanie (Leslie Bibb). At the start of Zookeeper, he takes her for a horseback ride on a twilit beach, gets down on one knee with a ring, and arranges for fireworks in heart-shapes — and then she says no. For some reason, he hasn’t noticed that she wants to marry a rich man, not a zookeeper.
Monte Carlo

Grace (Selena Gomez) has been saving money for years to pay for her own high school graduation present, a trip to Paris. And so she’s not a little disappointed when her plans — a week with her best friend and coworker down at the Teeny-Town Texas diner, Emma (Katie Cassidy) — are a bust. Number one, they’re traveling with Grace’s uptight, college senior stepsister, Meg (Leighton Meester). Two, all three find their guided tour overscheduled and too fast and mostly boring. Three, they’re caught in the rain. Oh dear!
Transformers: Dark of the Moon

In Transformers: Dark of the Moon, again, the Autobots are attacked by the Decepticons. Again, their world-decimating contest makes humans look puny. And again, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is in the middle of it — though not until after a lengthy prologue, in which you learn about a not-so-coherent revisionist history, wherein President Kennedy accelerated the space race because the Autobots left a secret stash on the moon. You know, on the dark side. (Or, as the film’s annoyingly nonsensical title has it, on the “dark of the moon.”)
Cars 2

Cars 2 begins as far from Radiator Springs as you can imagine, that is, inside a James Bondy spy movie. When one spy-car sends off his last transmission from inside a villain’s secret hideout, his longtime ally, Finn McMissile (an Aston Martin voiced by Michael Caine) decides to take up the mission. He heads to the Pacific Ocean, specifically, a huge field of ominously flaming oil rigs, and spots the evil weapons designer Professor Zündapp (a boxy Zundapp Janus wearing a monocle and voiced by Thomas Kretschmann). A shootout and a chase scene later, some minion cars are dead (exploded and or drowned in the…
Green Lantern

Fear is a potent force in Green Lantern. Those who embrace it turn yellow (literally, as one victim discovers when his blood corpuscles go all sallow under his microscope). The opposite of fear is will, whose proponents glow green and get to fly around the universe without a space ship. It’s better to be green.
Mr. Popper’s Penguins

As a boy, Tom Popper (Dylan Clark Marshall) misses his dad. Forever away on adventures in places like Samoa and Papua New Guinea, Mr. Popper sometimes brings back gifts, but mostly keeps in touch by short-wave radio. When Tommy grows up (and is played by Jim Carrey), he’s deeply affected by his father’s longtime absence: he wants to be a good dad himself, but he’s so busy with work that he’s lost touch with his own kids, Janie (Madeline Carroll) and Billy (Maxwell Perry Cotton), not to mention his wife, Amanda (Carla Gugino).
Super 8

As Super 8 begins, it’s 1979, and Joe (Joel Courtney) has just lost his mother. Neighbors watch him seated on a swing, in the snowy backyard of his home, where they’ve assembled for the wake. As they look through the window, they worry that the quiet, polite 14-year-old will find it hard to live on alone with his father, Jack (Kyle Chandler), a hardworking deputy in their small Ohio town. Yes, the neighbors murmur, it will be hard.
Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer

Third grader Judy Moody (Jordana Beatty) has great plans for summer. She means to have fun, and lots of it. “I have a plan,” she tells her cat named Mouse, “for the most super-duper not bummer summer ever.” When at last the last class on the last day of school ends, Judy gathers together her three best friends to reveal her big idea: she’s got a chart, and they’ll all compete for Thrill Points, the winner being the first to earn 100.