Family Films
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Song of the Sea (PG)
Come away, O human child To the waters and the wild With a fairy, hand in hand For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. This quote from Yeats fittingly opens Tomm Moore’s Song of the Sea, which seeks to understand a world full of weeping through the eyes of a human […]
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Where the Wild Things Are: Put Off All Your Beast (PG)
“Inside all of us is a Wild Thing,” goes the tagline to Spike Jonze’s 2009 film Where the Wild Things Are, based on the popular children’s book by Maurice Sendak and Max is the wildest of the wild, son and younger brother in a broken family. Jonze with co-adapter Dave Eggers craft a touching film […]
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Grimm Tales: Into the Woods (PG)
The woods of classic fairytale lore are the locus of secrets, danger, and freedom. The wolf knows he is safe to stalk Little Red Riding Hood behind the trees; the witch trusts that no one will find Rapunzel’s tower in its depths. Fast forward several hundred years, and Disney cartoons have scraped much of the […]
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Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas (PG)
Having spent the last several days reading reviews of Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas, and now sitting down to write my own take, I am reminded of the 2000 presidential election in which both Bush and Gore hired teams of lawyers to sue one another over the results before the votes were even cast. Saving Christmas […]
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The Giver (PG-13)
A brilliant sunset. A wedding dance. The color red. Each person who reads these words will see a unique image. Humanity may share experiences, but because of our memories—and our emotions—we approach these commonalities in vastly different ways. Variety and choice aren’t just the spice of life. They make us human. In The Giver, a […]
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Boyhood (R)
Boyhood is heartbreaking for this reason; in a scant 164 minutes this mortal life is seen in full Solomonic brevity, breathlike and fleeting. Mason (Ellar Coltrane) is six when the film begins and he ages, along with his co-stars Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette and Lorelei Linklater, at such a breakneck pace that there’s an inescapable desperation over youth, its opportunities and misfortunes.
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How to Train Your Dragon 2 (PG)
Pet dragons, taken as a whole, are worth any trouble they might cause. At least that’s what the Vikings of Berk have learned five years after the chief’s son, Hiccup, trained his first dragon. How to Train Your Dragon 2 endeavors to fly above its predecessor but, like many sequels, fails to capitalize on the […]
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Falling Down (R)
I used to live about three miles from where I worked, which is close enough, although twelve stoplights separated the front door of my house from the front door of my place of business. On the wrong afternoon drive home, the fact that Cain’s first great project after slaying his brother was to build a […]
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Maleficent (PG)
The Walt Disney Company, 20th century curator of childhood-born romantic prejudices and sundry other idiocies, has a bone to pick. With itself. In the latest adjustment of the Grimm’s work, Disney takes itself to task for all the delicious animated lovey-dovey nonsense they packed into kid’s heads back in the 50s and 60s. That prince’s […]
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How to Train Your Dragon (PG)
According to ancient British legends, King Alfred wasn’t a big fan of the Vikings. He spent several years of his reign ousting the Danish warriors, who burned monasteries and killed unarmed monks. Good thing the real Vikings didn’t train dragons. The warriors of How to Train Your Dragon, a 2010 animated hit, bear practically no […]
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Million Dollar Arm (PG)
Whenever a movie is sold as a “feel good” movie (inevitably the “feel good movie of the year”) I feel my heart grow cold despite the assured “heartwarming” results. It’s even worse when it’s based on a true story. Often this sort of fare is as savory as the organic pellets soaked overnight to be […]
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What If… (PG)
In Nancy Meyers’ What Women Want, Mel Gibson played a male chauvinist who was miraculously granted the ability to hear the thoughts of women as though those thoughts were being expressed verbally. Gibson was Nick Marshall, ad exec and lady killer, who never gave a second thought to what women wanted, but took what he […]
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Mr. Peabody and Sherman (PG)
Walking into the multiplex, I looked forward to Rob Minkoff’s Mr. Peabody and Sherman with an anticipation I usually do not feel for animated cartoons. Mr. Peabody’s Improbable History, the source material for this new release, stands high among the best animated series of all time and has been unjustly neglected by those who profess […]
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The LEGO Movie (PG)
I experienced the collective cringe we all felt at the announcement of The LEGO Movie. Does their avarice know no bounds? They’ve made billions of dollars, saturated childhoods for generations, moved into video games. Nobody doesn’t know what Lego is. Do they need the marketing? A movie at this point seems cynical, doesn’t it? It’s […]
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The Magnificent Ambersons (G)
Orson Welles’ movies are generally too good to be simply “issue” movies. Citizen Kane is conversant about “the press.” Touch of Evil touches on “corruption.” The Magnificent Ambersons raises the question of “industrialization.” But the movies always invest more deeply in characters and the strangeness of human behavior. Using an “issue” of the day as […]
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A Christmas Carol (1938 Version) (G)
Of all the works of Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol may have acquired the most settled place in the popular imagination. It is one of a very few books which one need not even have read to recognize a character from a picture or a well-worn quotation. It is also the simplest major work composed […]
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True Grit (G)
Well, not really women, since True Grit stars a fourteen-year-old girl with John Wayne in his only Academy-Award-winning role. He plays Rooster Cogburn, a name that captures his arrogance and stubbornness. Wayne fulfills our expectations as a bandit-chasing U.S. Marshal but surprises us with his soft side. He calls Mattie (Kim Darby) “little sister”. He shifts between […]