ReelViews for PG movies

While many movies claim to be based on true stories, Dreamer takes it one step further. The film's official name is Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story. The word "inspired" allows a lot of creative license. In fact, very little of what happens in ...

Driving Miss Daisy, the first movie to win the Best Picture Oscar during the decade of the 1990s, is, at its heart, a buddy film. Although some may see that as degrading something that addresses serious issues (like racism and anti-Semitism in...

Dumbo is a perfectly adequate family film. While that may seem like damning with faint praise, keep in mind that this movie was never considered to be among Disney’s 2019 big guns. It fills a niche and does so nicely with a style and approac...

E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial is one of the biggest money makers in box-office history. It is quite possibly the best known of all Steven Spielberg's films. Even at the relatively young cinematic age of two decades, it is beloved by multiple gener...

I suppose it would be fair to characterize Earth to Echo as an homage to E.T. Or at least I assume that's what director Dave Green and screenwriter Henry Gayden were going for: a gentle throw-back to the kinder sorts of science fiction films of t...

Warning: Extreme spoilers. I will write openly about the ending. Okay, the movie came out 35 years ago but don’t say you haven’t been warned… To me, Eddie and the Cruisers has always seemed like a missed opportunity. The premise is ...

Eddie the Eagle is a classic “underdog overachieves” sports story complete with all the trappings. It’s the kind of film that pulls out all the stops to get an applauding audience to its feet. Terms like “feel good” and “upbeat” apply. ...

Emerging from its Cannes debut, Elemental has received mixed reviews. The reason for the lack of enthusiasm seems to be related to expectations by some critics that the film doesn’t take a more aggressive stance in the culture wars. There’s a ...

Elf is being hailed in some quarters as the next great Christmas classic. The people making such a pronouncement must have seen a different cut of the movie than the one shown to me. Elf is a feather-light motion picture that embraces the Christm...

William Shakespeare. Charles Dickens. Jane Austen. Those three authors are perhaps the most frequently adapted writers of classic novels in the relatively short history of cinema. There’s a reason for that. The timeless nature of their outpu...