FAMILY FILMGOER By Jane Horwitz Special to The Washington Post Friday, April 6, 2001

Also Playing Okay for Kids 7 and Older "Spy Kids" (PG). Imaginative, tongue-in-cheek, futuristic fantasy about brother and sister whose parents, former spies, are taken hostage by maniacal inventor; siblings learn spycraft to rescue them. Scary bits for kids under 7 or 8—robots that look like children, huge threatening mechanized thumbs, underwater chases, attack helicopters, fights, parents in danger; toilet humor. PG-13s "The Dish." Sam Neill in thoroughly enjoyable, off-center comedy based on real events in July, 1969, about men operating huge radio telescope dish in rural Australia and how, despite many glitches, they came through for NASA and captured first video sent back by Apollo 11 from the moon. Occasional profanity; drunkenness. Okay for space-obsessed preteens, too. "Someone Like You." Ashley Judd as career woman, Greg Kinnear as lover who dumps her, Hugh Jackman as playboy pal, inspiring her to write column likening men to barnyard bulls in enjoyable if uninspired romantic comedy based on Laura Zigman novel, “Animal Husbandry.” Steamy but non-graphic sexual situations, innuendo; crude language. Not for preteens. Rs "Blow." Johnny Depp as real-life, currently imprisoned cocaine smuggler George Jung, in effective, chilling chronicle of how Jung went from selling pot in 1960s, to become chief U.S. smuggler for Colombian drug cartels, got rich, ruined his life. Brief intense violence; drug use, shown without serious side effects; drinking; sexual situations, partial nudity; profanity. High-schoolers. "Tomcats." Lewd, awful male fantasy farce about guys who put money in a kitty so whoever avoids marriage the longest gets all of it; Jerry O’Connell, Jake Busey as final holdouts, with O’Connell trying to trick his playboy pal into marriage so he can get the cash to cover gambling debts. Graphic sexual situation, sexual language; crude sexual innuendo. None under 17. "The Brothers." Morris Chestnut, D.L. Hughley, Bill Bellamy, Shemar Moore as thirty-something pals, all successful professionals, dealing with love and marriage issues in bawdy romantic comedy with heart. Lewd sexual talk; steamy but non-graphic sexual situations; comic scene with gunfire. Older high-schoolers. "Memento." Terrific time-twisting existential thriller with poetic film noir soul stars Guy Pearce as man obsessed with finding wife’s killer, but hindered by fact he has no short-term memory and can’t tell friend from foe. Gun, fist violence; profanity; mild sexual innuendo; semi-nudity; drug use. High-school cinema buffs. "The Tailor of Panama." Pierce Brosnan as caddish British spy in Panama, Geoffrey Rush as ex-patriate tailor he hires to snitch about local resistance activities, only there aren’t any so he makes them up, in droll, martini-dry adaptation of John le Carre novel; perhaps too subtle, slow, even for oldest teens. Graphic sexual situations; muted violence, profanity, ethnic slurs. Oldest high-schoolers.

"Pokemon 3: The Movie" (G, 93 minutes)
Yikes. A third feature-length Pokemon animated adventure in less than two years! Adults who find “Pokemon 3: The Movie” just as incoherent and endless as the other two can turn to children—tots on up—for explanation. Only kid fans of the Pokemon (short for Pocket Monsters) culture can give a who’s who of the fanciful creatures on-screen and a play-by-play of their battles. These involve hurling fire, water and electricity, but apparently without harm. It looks like mayhem to the Family Filmgoer, but at a preview she attended, kids seemed cheerfully unfazed.

“Pokemon 3” begins with a short adventure for Pikachu in the big city. The main story involves Pokemon trainer Ash Ketchum, who must rescue his mother from a mythical Pokemon named Entei who kidnaps her on behalf of a lonely little girl in a crystal palace after her father disappears while researching ancient Pokemon symbols. This American version, rerecorded to match the Japanese animation, makes a hash of the plot, and barely scratches the surface on ideas such as loneliness or loss of a parent.

"Just Visiting" (PG-13, 88 minutes)
This clumsily contrived, unfunny fable is an American remake of the hugely (and inexplicably) successful 1993 French comedy, “The Visitors” (R). French actors Jean Reno and Christian Clavier reprise their roles as a medieval French knight and his peasant slave, who travel accidentally through time when a bumbling wizard (Malcolm McDowell) zaps them to present-day Chicago while trying to get them out of 12th-century trouble. They encounter flush toilets, cars and other wonders. Kids 10 and older may laugh at their silly reactions, but also ask why they can instantly speak modern English, albeit with accents. The rating covers profanity, mild sexual innuendo, brief violence, and, in an early scene, hallucinations.

Charming Christina Applegate plays a young princess the knight was to marry in olden times, and also his present-day descendant, an antiquities expert at a museum where the medieval men just happen magically to land, smack in the middle of an exhibit on the knight’s own castle.

"Along Came a Spider" (R, 103 minutes)
Morgan Freeman’s quiet, cerebral performance as forensic psychologist Alex Cross holds this mediocre thriller together, despite a flat-footed script, bland supporting characters and a dizzy plot. That and the occasional bursts of action may be enough to hold high-schoolers’ attention. Based on the novel by James Patterson, the movie turns on the kidnapping of a senator’s daughter, and shows the 12-year-old child rendered unconscious, held captive and in mortal danger. There are bloody shootings, profanity and sexual innuendo. (Freeman played Cross in “Kiss the Girls” [R, 1997], a better but more violent movie, based on another Patterson novel.)

Mika Boorem plays the spunky preteen, who’s kidnapped in her Washington, D.C., prep school by a man (Michael Wincott) posing as a teacher. Monica Potter plays the chagrined Secret Service agent who’d been, somewhat improbably, protecting the girl. She teams up with Cross, who comes out of retirement after the kidnapper chooses to deal with him.