Movie reviews for families

6 and older

The Lion King 3D (G). It’s the same story you remember, but now digitally converted to 3-D. Set in the African savanna, it is the “Hamlet”-esqe story of Simba, a lion cub, whose majestic father is stampeded by wildebeests and falls to his death. It is an assassination engineered by Simba’s evil uncle, Scar. Simba flees to the jungle then returns as an adult to fight for the mantle of leadership in the pride.

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THE BOTTOM LINE: For parents taking children to see this rerelease, remember that a big screen and 3-D could make the film feel overwhelming to kindergartners and even some kids 6 and older. The humor and the songs will help them deal better with the scarier bits, but they could get upset. The Lion King should perhaps have been rated PG for its vivid depiction of the death of a parent and the child’s subsequent feelings of grief and guilt.

PG-13

I Don’t Know How She Does It. High-schoolers may find 90 minutes of mild diversion watching adults freak out in this heavy-handed comedy about juggling parenthood and work. Its use of crude sexual slang could make it iffy for middle-schoolers. Sarah Jessica Parker plays Kate, a busy working mom who gets a promotion at the big investment firm where she works and is wracked by guilt over how much time she must spend away from home. Her toddler son forgives everything, but her older daughter holds it against her. Richard, Kate’s loving architect husband, is flexible and willing to do most of the child care at first, but as her absences increase, he starts to lose patience. It doesn’t help that Kate’s colleague is the handsome and single Jack.

THE BOTTOM LINE: The script includes mild profanity and a few outbursts of crude sexual slang. The story hints at marital infidelity.

Contagion. High-schoolers may find this medical “procedural” thriller fascinating, but it may be too upsetting for some middle-schoolers. Beth starts to feel ill while heading back to Chicago from a trip to China. She grows sicker at home and dies in the hospital. Her son is next. Her husband, in shock as he lost his wife and stepson in something like an hour, seems immune to the virus himself. His teenage daughter comes home, and he quarantines her. Meanwhile, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is on high alert, and one of his investigators is tracking how the virus is spreading in the United States while an investigator for the World Health Organization is in China doing the same work.

The bottom line: The film shows people with the disease having seizures and foaming at the mouth. We see the start of an autopsy. The script includes rare profanity, and there is a marital infidelity subplot.

Warrior. This tremendous drama is a rough-edged PG-13 and not for middle-schoolers. High-schoolers who like action movies built upon strong narratives and filled with difficult, full-blooded characters will have a great time. Tommy is a Marine just back from Iraq. Sullen and nearly silent, Tommy wants to box again in a mixed-martial-arts championship called Sparta. He wants his father, Paddy, to train him. We learn that Paddy was a belligerent drunk who beat Tommy’s mother. There is no forgiveness from Tommy or older brother Brendan. Brendan has money troubles and decides to train for the Sparta event, too, unaware of Tommy’s plans. So the brothers, alienated from each other as well as from their father, are on a collision course.

The bottom line: The fight scenes are tough and occasionally hard to watch, but not R-rated graphic. Characters drink, pop pills and smoke. Alcoholism and its capacity to destroy families is a theme. The language includes midrange profanity and occasional crass sexual slang.

R

Drive. Too viciously violent for anyone younger than 17, “Drive” is an odd mix of high-art cinema and exploitative mayhem. The consistently fine acting in this story of lost and damned souls bristles with emotion, intense though often unexpressed. But the film’s lofty stylistic pretensions, from camera moves to editing to music, nearly drown it in style. Ryan Gosling plays the nameless Driver, a loner who rarely speaks. By night, he works as an unarmed getaway man for robbers. He also works at an auto repair shop. His boss there has business pals who are gangsters. This complicates things when Driver tries help his neighbor Irene and her little boy. Irene’s husband is just out of prison and owes money to the mob. Because Driver loves Irene — platonically — he decides to help her husband get the money. His plan goes awry.

THE BOTTOM LINE: When the violence finally breaks out in “Drive,” it is stunningly gruesome and intimate. Veins are severed, and bodies torn open by high-caliber bullets. A child is exposed to some of this. The profanity is very strong and includes ethnic slurs. The film shows topless dancers, and characters smoke and drink.

Horwitz is a freelance reviewer.