Zathura

Zathura is a rarity: a stellar fantasy that faces down childhood anxieties with feet-on-the-ground maturity.Read Full Review »

Will work better for younger viewers than older ones. There's not much plot to absorb and there's plenty of action, so this is the kind of spectacle that will appeal to those without long attention spans.Read Full Review »

Jon Favreau, the actor-director who made the delightful family film "Elf," has a firm grip and a light touch with this material about bickering brothers who find a board game that zaps the family home into hyperspace.Read Full Review »

It works gloriously as space opera.Read Full Review »

This handmade feel gives Zathura an appealing, childlike sense of wonder, an element too often forgotten in movies with many times the budget and technological resources.Read Full Review »

In the enchanted limbo between waking and sleeping, Zathura feels both real and unreal, like a dream you could shake off at any moment.Read Full Review »

The movie has a lot of the elements that might make it thrilling and it's visually arresting, but it's missing the emotional connection necessary to make it interesting.Read Full Review »

Tim Robbins plays the working dad, and the movie misses him once he bails out early.Read Full Review »

One thing: Perhaps my studio-cynic hackles are raised imprudently, but either Favreau reimagined the boys' teenage sister to read as matinee sex bomb, Tootsie Rolling around in pink boxers for half the film, or children's books have become a lot hotter since I put down Seuss and Sendak for Encyclopedia Brown.Read Full Review »

Rarely is a movie audience asked to put up with so much noise for such a thankless payoff.Read Full Review »