The teen son (Michael Angarano) of two superheroes begins his first year at a hero-training high school in this Frankenstein’s mishmash of other, better kids’ films. The movie might as well split its poster into thirds, with one panel devoted to Spy Kids, another to The Incredibles and the third to any one of the

This holiday exploitation piece, based on John Grisham’s “Skipping Christmas,” beats a dead reindeer for most of its 99-minute running time. A married couple (Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis) decide to conduct a “total boycott” of the holiday season, and each time they announce this, their friends, neighbors, colleagues, etc. stare at them open-mouthed

I’ve never quite understood the appeal of the sentient car, from KITT to Christine to Herbie, who is literally saved from the junkyard by Lindsay Lohan for Herbie: Fully Loaded. (The car is cute enough, but how many times can it spurt oil on someone for laughs?) Like 1969’s The Love Bug, this is harmlessly

This adaptation of the Nurse Matilda books wants to be an amalgam of Mary Poppins, the Harry Potter films and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events – Emma Thompson, also the screenwriter, plays a magical governess of sorts who tends to a rowdy British brood of seven children – but the movie really belongs

This is about as unimaginative as children’s movies come. It’s a remake of a 2002 Danish film, for starters, and also an amalgam of every junior James Bond story since 2001’s Spy Kids. In other words, the picture is a rip-off of a rip-off of rip-offs. The movie follows an aspiring mountain climber (Kristen Stewart)

I’ll leave the debate over the significance of the 1970s cartoon “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids” to those who spent their Saturday mornings watching it, but one thing I do know: The series has made for a lousy, live-action movie. With nostalgia as its ace card, this slaps together familiar characters, old catch phrases

This adaptation of Louis Sachar’s novel, which follows a young nerd (Shia LaBeouf) who is mistakenly sent to a juvenile detention facility and forced to dig endless holes in the desert, may have worked on the page, but stretched out onto the big screen it’s a collection of would-be goofy moments that are almost painful.

A lame-duck movie about pigeons. The title hero is a pipsqueak of a bird who joins Britain’s Royal Homing Pigeon Service during World War II. He has the voice of Ewan McGregor, and like McGregor’s other animated incarnation in 2005 – Rodney Copperbottom of Robots – he suffers from a case of terminal niceness. I’ve

Painful to watch, on just about every level imaginable. The bleary 3-D sequences induce headaches, as does the strained, after-school-special narrative. Then there is the fact that writer-director Robert Rodriguez created the movie with the help of his 8-year-old son. Not only did I have to suffer through the film, but reviewing it made me