ReelViews for PG-13 movies

There's something a little "off" with Dinner for Schmucks. The premise, borrowed from Francis Veber's 1999 French farce, The Dinner Game, hasn't improved significantly as a result of its translation into English. The film is sporadically amusing ...

It must be that I just don't get French humor, or at least not of the sort that attracts French movie-goers to theaters like bugs to bright lights. Several years ago, The Visitors became one of the top homemade box office successes in French histo...

Dirty Deeds boasts a passably entertaining idea that is butchered in the telling. The underlying premise offers the opportunity for some Animal House/American Pie/Revenge of the Nerds-style entertainment, but the unfunny screenplay and inadequate ...

Steven Spielberg loves his aliens. Although he did make them the villains in War of the Worlds, his view toward extraterrestrial life has generally been benign, whether it's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., or Disclosure Day. The legendar...

Disturbia is a nice little mystery thriller that takes a wrong turn on the way to its climax and morphs into a slasher movie. This abrupt change in tone is as jarring as it is unwelcome and transforms what could have been an effectively tense conc...

Divergent is the “next big thing,” or at least so hopes Summit Entertainment. The latest in a growing stream of high-profile YA (Young Adult) sci-fi/fantasy series to make it to the big screen, Divergent is poised to take its place alongside Th...

For many people, there is no hell more unimaginable than having a healthy, active mind trapped in a paralyzed husk of a body. Some of those in this situation seek a quick end to their misery (as was the case with Ramon Sampedro, whose tale was dra...

Strange comic book fans, rejoice! Your hero has finally made it into the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse and with that comes the potential of reboots aplenty. The shenanigans we saw in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek movies and the X-Men series may now lie ...

Spoiler Note: The review is “spoiler lite” with nothing beyond what has been shown in the trailer and other officially sanctioned pre-release material. However, although I don’t reveal any cameos that are in the film, I mention some that are...

Of course, Dodgeball isn't a true underdog anything, but that's all part of the joke. A blistering satire of feel-good sports movies, this film makes its mark via the most direct route: it lampoons by adopting the tried-and-true "straight" formul...