ReelViews for PG-13 movies

Scary Movie 4 is better than Scary Movie 3. Writing that sentence falls into the category of damning with faint praise, because the experience of sitting through the third installment of the comedy series was as pleasant as spreading organic ferti...

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, based on the novel by Alvin Schwartz (with illustrations by Stephen Gammell), is three-fourths of a good horror movie and one-fourth disappointing. The film, constructed as a series of episodic vignettes conn...

School for Scoundrels feels like a wasted opportunity. This is a case of a motion picture failing to unlock the promise of a ripe potential. As black comedies go, this one is too tepid to hit any mark by which a movie is deemed successful. The d...

I don't want to call Richard Linklater a "sellout," since that's probably as unfair as it is unkind. But The School of Rock is clearly Linklater's attempt to develop some box office clout – something he has not achieved with critically acclaimed...

Woody Allen fans were thrilled when his 2005 feature, Match Point, signaled a return to form for the respected director. That, as much as anything, fueled anticipation for Scoop. There were reasons for optimism. The film, like its predecessor, i...

Watching The Scorpion King, the question that came to mind was whether Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson could become a Schwarzenegger for the '00s. Having asked that, however, it's worth considering whether Schwarzenegger in his prime could have had th...

It does not follow that a parody has to be funny but, in the case of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the humor is there. A clever send-up of comic book and video games (circa 1990), this movie illustrates that writer/director Edgar Wright can rise to...

At the age of 26, Ramon Sampedro misjudged the depth of water he was diving into and broke his neck. For the next 29 years, he lived the life of a quadriplegic - one that he considered not worth living. Despite having lost the use of his body bel...

Seabiscuit is the great hope of the adult movie-going audience: a summer motion picture that is not designed to appeal to teenage boys. Ordinarily, one might think it would be a risk on Universal's part to release the movie in late July, but the a...

The stylistic approach employed by director/co-writer Aneesh Chagantry – that of having the movie screen show only what’s on a computer’s desktop – is both Searching’s greatest asset and its most significant drawback. Although observ...