Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

The appeal of Wes Anderson movies continues to elude me even now I've watched Moonrise Kingdom, his 2012 - what? Adventure? Children's book come to life? - about a New England island community searching for a pair of child runaways, a story the director again presents in his trademark fastidious style with those elaborate, unwarranted visuals that stifle all else including the performances of innumerable Hollywood stars who are all forced to act like simpletons.

★★☆☆☆

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Golden Kingdom (2015)

In director Brian Perkins' perfectly imperfect narrative film populated with only first time actors, the abbot of a monastery in remote Myanmar is called away from his temple, leaving his very young charges, four novice monks, alone for they don't know how long, trying to keep on with their peaceful, ordered lives.

★★★★★

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Shazam! (2018)

A wizard grants a kid a confusing mix of superpowers, and while the kid and the audience are still trying to figure out how all these powers work, this DC superhero movie, a cross between Spider-man and Deadpool, ends, finishing with an extended sequence like a Disney/Power Rangers-esque "effects spectacular" that celebrates family and panders to very young viewers but leaves the hero poorly defined and a bit irrelevant. 

★★☆☆☆

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Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016)

Stephen King cites it as a source of inspiration and it has spawned innumerous cosmic horror boardgames, computer games, novels, tv shows and movies so it was only a matter of time before Lovecraftian horror, its psychotormented protagonists and its alien ghouls, was made the stuff of animated movies for preteens - right? - except with leaden voice acting, lifeless animation and dreary plotting that turns the Cthulhu mythos into an afternoon of decidedly unfun snowplay, this first of the Howard Lovecraft movies sucks more life out of the horror franchise than it injects new life into it.

★☆☆☆☆

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G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013)

By the time some fun stuff arrives - cliffside martial acrobatics, Mission: Impossible-style infiltrations of black tie events and the fast and furious flashbacks that made G.I. Joe: the Rise of the Cobra such unexpected fun - you'll have been burned by a dull boysy first hour where men chortle about their "girl" conquests, snigger about "girls and their guns", leer at legs and you will have already decided Hasbro's action doll franchise needs to stay in 2013.

★★☆☆☆

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Paddington 2 (2017)

This time the Peruvian marmalade-loving bear gets himself in a tangle trying to make enough money to buy his aunt a book for her birthday, even ending up in prison charged with Hugh Grant's memorable villain's theft of said book, but because Paddington looks for the good in everyone, by the end of the movie he has enchanted the whole of Windsor Gardens, Notting Hill, a veritable Who's Who of the British screen playing among others Knuckles the prison cook and Dr Jafri and prison guards and inmates and newspaper stallholders and shut-ins - and of course the Brown family - who rally behind Paddington and help him with spectacularly animated, frequently hilarious, slightly overlong but ultimately extremely touching adventures.

★★★★☆

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Pee-wee's Big Holiday (2016)

It doesn't matter how great a fan you are of Paul Reuben's manboy creation, this just isn't the classic his Adventure was but it is still a joy to watch, particularly for scenes like the one in which Pee-wee introduces an Amish (gesundheit) community to the joys of balloon music.

★★★☆☆

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A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

Have your eyelids toothpicked open while The Secret plays on repeat OR have as much fun watching this Disney fantasy as it incessantly hammers its positive psychology message - that's everything - while all else - logic and plot, story and watchability, even basic sense - is nothing. 

★☆☆☆☆

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Frog Dreaming (aka The Go-Kids/The Quest/Fighting Spirits/The Mystery of the Dark Lake) (1986)

Struth, this 1986 family adventure with a zillion different titles must be 'Stralya's answer to 1985s The Goonies cos it has a gang of loopy ankle-biters (one is Henry Thomas, the kid from E.T., fair dinkum) going bush, braving scary stuff like skeletons and crabby adults to cop a gander at what they reckon is Donkegin, a frog monster from Aboriginal mythology that lurks in a billabong up the back paddock, and the bloody flick is such an oddity and pretty good mystery, it is definitely worth a Butcher's Hook.

★★★☆☆

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Labyrinth (1996)

Imagine The Dark Crystal, Fraggle Rock, and The Muppets all rolled up in one and you've got something close to this other Jim Henson project, a 1996 musical fantasy with a cult following about Dorothy Gale-like Sarah transported to an Oz-like otherworld where she encounters characters the Fireys, Ludo, and Hoggle, who assist her on her quest to rescue her baby brother from David Bowie's Goblin King, Jareth.

★★★★★

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Tomorrowland (2015)

This is not so much a sci-fi adventure mystery for kids as a sci-fi adventure for kids that never gets to the point - or does, but only after more than two hours of slow-reveal youth-empowering positive psychology about Casey, a feisty science-loving teenager who discovers she is an all-important link between this doomed world and a handsomely-realised paradisiacal one called Tomorrowland where I think only a lucky few dreamers like her are permitted.

★★★☆☆

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Inside Out (2015)

It goes on a little bit with repetitive scenes of 'memory islands' collapsing, but Pixar's Inside Out, an animated movie-length Herman's Head about the inner workings of a depressed child's head, is surprisingly touching and a breath of fresh air for anyone who has grown weary of the positive psychology industry: the message of this film is the importance of acknowledging and sharing, and not simply blocking out or smiling through, Sadness.

★★★★☆

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Charlotte's Web (2006)

A young girl befriends a piglet and, er, saves his bacon and then a spider befriends that piglet and, er, saves his bacon, in this animatronically enhanced, treacly film version of the beloved - but for me, even as a kid, mystifying - E B White children's book: what is it the humans think is happening and why isn't it Charlotte who is celebrated?

★★☆☆☆

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The Witches (1990)

This is just exactly how you imagined it in your head as you read the Roald Dahl book as a child, with the witches a grotesque gaggle of foul bald creatures who plot to turn all the children of England into mice; one boy on holiday with his grandmother in a beachside hotel must stop the witches from enacting their dastardly plans but will he be able to after they've turned him into a mouse?

★★★★☆

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Aliens in the Attic (2009)

Teenaged cousins lead a group of children in fending off an alien attack in this part Jumanji, part Home Alone computer animation-enhanced live action kids entertainment that is a whole lot more fun in its first half before the waist-high aliens arrive.

★★☆☆☆

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010)

It is a bit hard to review the first half of a ninth instalment of a movie series when you've only ever seen number one 15 years earlier but that said, this made zero sense to me despite my nephew's constant, slightly impatient commentary (That's a mudblood! Beeecause he's a muggle! He's the real leader of Griffindor, durbrain! He just is!) and really for about an hour and a half, Harry, Hermoine and Ron walk around in circles in a woods doing nothing much at all, only occasionally encountering mumbling characters, all incoherent lest they are completely silent as in one case, some adding to the confused boredom by suddenly changing into other characters or snakes or forms I also didn't understand the significance of.

★☆☆☆☆

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Pixels (2015)

It doesn't know whether it wants to appeal to kids of the 80s or simply to kids and so for the former it is too childish and for the latter it is inappropriately adult, but if you are a kid of the 80s nostalgic for old-school video games and can look past horrible sexism and scenes of troubling male pack-mentality bullying and sleaze, this comedy about a world under attack by 80s video games is often funny.

★★★☆☆

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The Boxtrolls (2014)

Despite its beautiful and wildly imaginative stop-motion animation which recalls those Rankin-Bass Christmas specials of your childhood (Jack Frost, Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer, etc), this kids movie about underground-dwelling troll creatures who - what? - wear boxes, invent things, and raise a boy, is dreary with the voice-acting and the story hanging detached from the animation, a shame given those visuals.

★★☆☆☆

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The Book of Life (2014)

Two childhood friends, one an animal lover descended from a long line of macho bullfighters, the other the bearer of an otherworldly badge of immortality, vie for the love of the same woman in this extremely busy animation about Dias de los Muertos - a culturally interesting kids film that hits its stride in its second half. 

★★★★☆

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Paper Planes (2014)

A school kid growing up with only one struggling parent takes up a sport, is good at it, enters a competition that takes him to Tokyo, and pulls out a bird-inspired move to win the title, but this is not Daniel LaRusso, karate and the Crane Kick in The Karate Kid, but Dylan, paper-plane throwing, and the "Whistling Kite", in a feelgood Australian kids movie.

★★★☆☆

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