Going Out Guide’s family movie reviews

8 and older

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (PG). This movie is too brightly colored and silly to be very scary, even though it’s in 3-D. Most kids 8 and older, and even some a little younger, will have fun with it. Sean believes all of Jules Verne’s science-fiction fantasies. His stepfather, Hank, helps him decode a radio message with coordinates for the Mysterious Island, which Verne described in his novel of the same name. Hank takes Sean to the South Pacific, where they hire a helicopter pilot whose teenage daughter makes Sean tongue-tied. The chopper flies into a hurricane and crashes onto an island where elephants are tiny and hummingbirds are huge. They have a series of adventures until they realize the island is sinking.

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THE BOTTOM LINE: Kids 8 and younger may be scared when the protagonists are chased by giant lizards and hummingbirds. Flying into the hurricane is also a little frightening. Underwater scenes are tense, and a volcano erupts. There is very mild toilet humor and sexual innuendo.

10 and older

Big Miracle (PG). This 1980s true story, based on news accounts and a 1989 book, could have been a treacly, unchallenging “family film.” Instead, it’s a sharply defined, lightly comic slice of Americana for anyone 10 or older. The story is about three whales trapped under ice off the coast of Alaska, and the film examines the political and philosophical fault lines of the Reagan era as different people work together to save the whales.

THE BOTTOM LINE: The strongest element for kids will be the sheer suspense about whether the whales will survive. The script contains some salty language. Spoiler alert: There is one whale death. We don’t see it happen, but we do see its injured snout and hear its labored breathing.

PG-13

The Woman in Black. Based on a novel by Susan Hill, this movie is a well-made throwback — a handsome rendering of a ghost story set in Victorian England. Many high-schoolers will revel in its rich atmosphere and shriek-inducing ghostly visits. That overall spookiness may be too much for middle-schoolers. In a prologue, we see three girls jump to their deaths, seemingly hypnotized by the spirit of the title. Years later, lawyer Arthur Kipps has come to the village to settle a dowager’s estate. He is determined to get to the bottom of the ghostly mystery.

THE BOTTOM LINE: The film depicts ghostly spirits, many of them children. Children are led to their deaths by the Woman. A spirit reenacts a hanging suicide, and other flashbacks show a child drowned. We see bloody sheets where Arthur’s wife died in childbirth. Characters drink.

Chronicle. On a whim, three high school boys explore an unusual cave in this cleverly made sci-fi saga, and the telekinetic powers they develop after their exposure to an unearthly material there leads them first to fun and then to tragedy. “Chronicle” is an absorbing adventure but perhaps too violent and emotionally tortured for middle-schoolers, despite its rating.

The bottom line: One of the boys lashes out violently. The violence is not graphic, but it is loud, fast and upsetting. One incident involves an impalement. Characters use occasional profanity, and it’s implied that teens drink beer. One boy’s dad is usually drunk; his mother is on oxygen and looks very ill.