Joan Plowright

You'll empathize with Plowright's appropriation from Dorothy Parker: 'What fresh hell is this?'

The Carmen sequences, though consistent with Callas Forever's washed-out '70s look, have a beauty and immediacy which the rest of the film lacks.

The skillful 2D-CGI animation hybrid starts out charmingly enough, with cute sight gags and general monkeying around, but...even kids may lose interest in the labored story.

For a movie about magical beasts, The Spiderwick Chronicles does an awfully good job of pegging childhood emotional realities, particularly in a context of divorce.