The Spiderwick Chronicles

Amazing Graces
Short Attention Span Summary (SASS)

1. Helen Grace moves into the Spiderwick Estate with her three kids, Mallory, Simon and Jared. Simon and Jared are twins (played by the impressive Freddie Highmore)
2. It doesn't take the kids long to find a secret room, a locked chest and a book marked "Do NOT read"
3. You can guess what happens next
4. Up pops a tiny Brownie named Thimbletack (Martin Short) who changes into a Boggart when riled up.
5. He gets riled up a lot
6. There's an evil Ogre named Mulgarath (Nick Nolte) who commands an army of Goblins, and really, really wants the aforementioned book
7. The Ogre can change his appearance, and is at his most frightening when he looks like Nick Nolte.
8. During the machinations and shenanigans to protect the book, the kids meet a scene stealing Hobgoblin named Hogsqueal (Seth Rogen) who has a talent for expectorating and a penchant for bipedal, endothermic vertebrate animals that lay eggs (also...

The Spiderwick Chronicles
Helen Grace (Parker) and her kids Mallory (Bolger) and twins Jared and Simon (both Highmore) are starting fresh after Helen's separation from the kids' father. They are moving into the Spiderwick Estate, a mansion that Helen inherited from her Aunt Lucinda (Plowwright). The estate has an interesting history though. 80 years ago, Arthur Spiderwick (Strathairn) wrote a "field guide" to the world around him. This guide includes all kinds of fantastical creatyres. By writing it, he unleashed some terrible forces and now an army of goblins is amassing. Led by the ogre Mulgrath (Nolte), they seek to take the book away from the protection of the house. The kids are all that stands between Mulgrath and world domination.

"The Spiderwick Chronicles" is a surprisingly well done movie. For a movie that covers five books, there isn't a feeling that much was lost in the translation. There is a lot of action that keeps the moving quickly. The child actors do a good job in the...

Fun fantasy flick
The Grace family moves into an old family estate, long uninhabited - or so they think. In fact the house has an inhabitant. More to the point, the woods around the house have their own trolls and gnomes, unfriendly ones, who want something that's inside the house.

So starts this kids' fantasy, with a big element of "the grownups just don't get it." In this case, young Jared not only finds that thing that the invisible ouside beings want, he also perceives their threat first. A kid-empowerment fantasy ensues, with the grownups (including a teen sister in a half-grownup kind of role) finally catching on just barely in time.

If you want a bit of fantasy without overt violence (or not much), and with people keeping their clothes on, you came to the right place. There's a suitably scary buildup at the end, with some great CGI effects like those toad-like outside beings. Maybe it's not memorable, but it's fun anyway.

-- wiredweird, reviewing the theatrical...

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