Family Filmgoer

Watching With Kids in Mind

Australia (PG-13, 155 minutes)

If teens can leave their cynicism at home and just let this sprawling film wash over them, "Australia" will be a hugely entertaining experience. A lot like a western, Baz Luhrmann's film is a genuine throwback to the days of love stories told against sweeping vistas. He boldly mixes old-fashioned visual techniques with new ones. A cattle stampede and Japanese bombing raid look clearly computer-animated, or at least enhanced. At other times, the backdrop seems like an old-style matte painting, though the film was shot on location. This should interest teen cinema buffs.

The film deals candidly -- and in ways that may surprise American teens -- with the long ingrained racism against and mistreatment of Australia's Aboriginal people by whites.

At the movie's core are big, starry performances by Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. It takes place just before and during World War II, and is narrated by a boy named Nullah (an excellent Brandon Walters) who is half Aboriginal and half white. He tells us how prissy Lady Sarah Ashley (Kidman) comes to Australia from England to confront her estranged husband on the cattle ranch he owns. She discovers he has been killed. The police suspect a mysterious native shaman (David Gulpilil), who becomes a recurring, very spiritual figure. Sarah soon realizes her real enemy is the cattle station's corrupt foreman (David Wenham). She fires him and hires the fiercely independent cowboy Drover (Jackman) to get her cattle to market. Of course she and Drover fall in love, despite their contrary natures and his wanderlust. She also becomes the orphaned Nullah's protector, though white authorities have other ideas about how and where such mixed-race children should be raised.

The film shows killings by gun and spear, children in danger, a man trampled to death, a child's mother drowning, cattle falling off a cliff, but all in an understated style. There is drinking, smoking, an implied affair, racial slurs and rare profanity.

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6 and Older

"Bolt" (PG). If it weren't for a very funny hamster and his exercise ball, "Bolt" would not make much of a blip on the radar screen. It's too riddled with tired inside jokes about Hollywood and greedy agents. Bolt (voice of John Travolta) is the canine star of a TV series who believes he's got real superpowers. He and his little-girl co-star, Penny (voice of Miley Cyrus), are pals, but even she doesn't tell Bolt the show is make-believe. When he's mistakenly shipped to New York in a crate, Bolt meets a kitty named Mittens (Susie Essman) who tags along on the trek back to Los Angeles. Not until they encounter a hamster in a trailer park do things get funny. Little Rhino (Mark Walton) is a huge fan of Bolt's TV show. When Rhino is center-screen, "Bolt" is funny and the kids in the audience stop fidgeting. Kids may get scared near the end, when Bolt and Penny are caught in a studio fire.

"Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" (PG). This deliciously dizzy animated sequel has mildly earthy humor aimed at older audiences but also plenty of raucous slapstick and character-driven wit to delight kids 6 and older. Alex the lion (voice of Ben Stiller), Marty the zebra (Chris Rock), Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer) and Gloria the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) escape from the Central Park Zoo and wind up in Madagascar in the first film. Now they try to fly home in a rattletrap plane, joined by King Julien (Sacha Baron Cohen), the dance-crazy lemur. They crash into an African nature preserve, where Alex finds his father, Zuba (the late Bernie Mac). Gloria flirts with a hippo (will.i.am of the BlackEyed Peas), which adds mild sexual innuendo.

PG-13

"Four Christmases." It's hard to imagine teen audiences warming to this sour holiday comedy about an insufferable 30-something couple forced to visit families they can't stand. Brad (Vince Vaughn) and Kate (Reese Witherspoon) take luxury trips at Christmas, lying to family that they're doing charity work. When stranded at the airport due to fog, their parents see them on a TV news story. Their cellphones ring, and they're committed to visits. With both sets of parents remarried, that means four Christmas Day drop-bys. In the film's most painful sequences, they visit Brad's emotionally barren dad (Robert Duvall), where Brad is head-locked by his macho siblings, then they visit Kate's newly pious mom (Mary Steenburgen) and are forced to play Mary and Joseph in a church Christmas play. Between that and the baby spit-up jokes, "Four Christmases" feels like eight. There is sexual innuendo, crude language, profanity, smoking, drinking, homophobic humor and a marijuana joke.

"Twilight." Teens who love the books by Stephenie Meyer will find much to swoon over in this moody film, adapted from the first novel in Meyer's series about a girl who falls for a vampire. While the Goth-inspired vampires pose like fashion models in the movie, the story is still a poignant, occasionally thrilling (also occasionally silly) meditation on the struggle between desire and restraint. Bella (Kristen Stewart) moves to a small town in Washington state to live with her dad (Billy Burke). She meets pale, sullen Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) in high school. Attracted and fascinated, she learns he is a vampire whose family never drinks human blood by dint of moral willpower. Edward fears his feelings for Bella will destroy his willpower. So their love is about sacrifice, too. There is understated sexual innuendo and one kiss. The finale fight against murderous rogue vampires involves blood but is stylized in gravity-defying kung-fu style. Other vampire attacks are very understated.

"Quantum of Solace." This 007 adventure artfully boils the James Bond formula down to its essence: frenetic chases, bone-breaking fights, impossible stunts and gunplay, sex appeal, exotic scenery and an ironic world view. The villains and the femmes fatales aren't that compelling, but Daniel Craig's unsmiling, lethal 007 is, and he suits the film's jumpy, paranoid visual style. The mayhem is intense but non-graphic. There is mild sexual innuendo, an implied sexual liaison, rare profanity, muted talk of violence against women, drinking and smoking. Okay for teens.

R

"Milk." Sean Penn gives a bighearted performance as Harvey Milk in this sprawling, emotional account of the birth of the gay rights movement in San Francisco. Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, the first openly gay person elected to prominent public office in the country. In 1978, Milk (Penn) and Mayor George Moscone (Victor Garber) were assassinated by Dan White (Josh Brolin), an embittered former supervisor. Director Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black don't dwell on the murders, though. Buoyed by a terrific cast, their film chronicles Milk's messy life, along with the growing empowerment in San Francisco's gay community in the late 1970s and Milk's key role in that. It is a civil rights story in essence. Sexual situations are stylized and less explicit than many heterosexual scenes in R-rated films. There is a suicide victim seen hanging, a murder victim in a body bag, semi-nudity, pot smoking, drinking and profanity and sexual language. Violence is non-graphic but intense. For mature high-schoolers.