Watch With the Kids
The Pitch
World-famous boy adventurer goes on world-famous boy adventure.
Age Recommendations
Content Advisories
Some intense gun violence. Explosions, cannons, crashes, fire, sword fights, more. Captain Haddock’s alcoholism is alternately played for laughs and used as a driver of the plot. Your children may not have seen a character drink a bottle of medicinal alcohol or hallucinate as a symptom of withdrawal.
A boy, a drunk, and a dog.
What made Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull such a slog was its reduction to a series of action set pieces lacking any emotional stakes. Freed from the bounds of camera rig technology, practical stuntwork, physics, and human emotion Spielberg’s same set of impulses are here able to create the ultimate action-movie thrill ride for grade-schoolers. There is nothing world-weary or sarcastic about boy-journalist Tintin, who practically bursts with exposition and emphasis as he dashes, leaps, careens, crashes, and shouts through one improbable scene after another. The orchestra performing John Williams’ boisterous score seems to be having more fun than anyone’s had since the Carl Stalling days at Warner Brothers. If the grownup in you asks “Seriously?” it has entirely missed the point. —