Image Credit: DreamWorks Animation Taking your child to an afternoon at the movies is one of life’s great pleasures — as long as your child doesn’t start crying because of an unexpected fright and the characters on screen aren’t irritating and loathsome and you don’t start checking your watch every 20 minutes wondering if the both of you will make it out alive. Occassionally we will offer you a new movie review column written from the point of view of a parent that will complement the Okay for Kids? feature in our official reviews. We’ll expound on the basics when it comes to family film-going: Is the movie scary? Is it sad? Is it delightful? Most importantly, will you the parent be bored and wish you were anywhere else? (Some background: Me and my 4-year-old daughter saw 
The trailer for Rise of the Guardians, about the efforts of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Sandman, and Jack Frost to spare children from the Boogeyman, is scarier than the actual movie. I was nervous taking my 4-year-old and resigned to the fact that we might have to bail midway. The premise sounds terrifying and there’s an early scene — in which the Boogeyman interrupts a child’s happy dream about a unicorn and turns it into a nightmare about sinister black horses with gnashing teeth, yikes! — that suggests what a dark movie this could have been. Can you imagine a worse idea than taking your child to a movie about uncontrollable nightmares run amok? You’d be sentencing yourself to years of him or her waking you up in the middle of the night and begging just this one last time to sleep in the big bed. But the scares pass quickly and any sad moments of the movie are brushed off before they can penetrate a child. SPOILER ALERT READ FULL STORY »
