The fifth installment in the Pokemon film franchise exhibits all of the qualities that have made the series one of the most inexplicably successful kiddie enterprises: rudimentary animation, aggressively generic background music and a barely coherent storyline. Subjecting tykes to such shoddy junk should count as cinematic child abuse (no matter how loudly they plead

Like a child’s imagination on overdrive, this Robert Rodriguez lark careens through its espionage tale with wild abandon, following a brother and sister as they embark on a mission to rescue their kidnapped secret-agent parents (Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino). Among the movie’s clever touches are pintsize submarines, quirky castles and bad guys called Thumb-Thumbs

Watching Spy Kids 2 is a bit like walking into a little boy’s room where countless toys are scattered about in mid-play. It may be messy, but the sheer imagination on display is undeniable. Writer-director Robert Rodriguez revisits his fun, unassuming James Bond takeoff for the Happy Meal set, this time throwing in a weird

Junior James Bond Juni Cortez (Daryl Sabara) sets out to rescue his sister (Alexa Vega), who has been trapped inside a virtual-reality video game in the third installment in the endlessly inventive family action series from Robert Rodriguez. This one’s in 3-D, but it didn’t need to be: The awkward glasses and washed out colors

Clay, Play-Doh and the like always seem to end up in some sort of ball before all is said and done, and so one of the many joys of the claymation feature Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is its absolute roundness. Wallace & Gromit, an extension of the British short films about

It is no coincidence that the mermaid heroine of Aquamarine looks like a Barbie doll, for this is a sparkly endorsement of what can best be described as Barbie culture – that cruel world, governed by image-conscious magazines such as Teen Vogue, in which self-respect comes via a makeover. Two quirky best friends (Emma Roberts

Will Ferrell brings his usual dim-bulb zaniness to this holiday comedy about a human orphan (Ferrell) raised by Santa’s helpers, but most of the laughs come from easy fish-out-of-water humor. This should have been much better considering the star and the premise.