As the father of three young adults, I remember clearly those days when we’d watch just about any new kids movie that was released. And I also remember feeling like studios took advantage of that desperation for entertainment, filling the latest unoriginal script with enough silly gags that the little ones would giggle as the parents checked the time. I was always so thankful for those rare family films made with the same kind of care that went into the latest arthouse flick.
We’re keeping a running list of the latest movies for children for you to peruse and find something that the whole family might enjoy. We’ve included a synopsis of each.
Here are eight of the biggest new kids movies from the last few months:
1. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
Release Date: Jan. 3, 2025
Directors: Nick Park, Merlin Crossingham
Stars: Ben Whitehead, Peter Kay, Lauren Patel, Reece Shearsmith
Rating: PG
Paste Review Score: 8.7
Even if you’re unfamiliar with the beloved British stop-motion icons in the Netflix-hosted feature film Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, within minutes you’ll feel like you’ve known the titular duo for decades already. Wallace (Ben Whitehead) is an eccentric and highly optimistic if impractical inventor living in a small, Northern English hamlet, and his faithful dog and best friend Gromit is the beagle whose lot in life has seemingly been to frequently clean up his absent-minded master’s messes. They are the classic comedy dyad in action: Wallace is the enterprising kook who is constantly coming up with questionable new inventions that will supposedly make life easier or more enjoyable, and Gromit is the more earthy, grounded and sensible straight man whose apprehension is perpetually ignored. Wallace’s work creates mischief and chaos; Gromit’s tenacity and faithfulness helps to set things right again. The takeaway, of course, is that Wallace is lucky his indefatigable friend is always there for him, rather than Gromit finally cutting bait to find a new partner who generates fewer calamities. And the silent Gromit has good reason to be fed up, this time around, as Wallace has outdone himself in the invention department with the creation of “Norbot,” a mechanized, robotic garden gnome intended in theory to lighten Gromit’s load. Indeed, the invention actually succeeds well beyond Wallace’s aspirations, becoming the talk of the town as neighbors cajole him for their own Nortbots to take care of all the yardwork and home maintenance. But Wallace simultaneously begins to drive a wedge between himself and Gromit through his tunnel-visioned focus on this new, seemingly “superior” companion, introducing a little, largely unspoken jealousy into the duo’s dynamic. And this (lightly) fractured friendship is still enough of a fault for the dastardly genius of Feathers McGraw–the returning antagonist of 1993’s The Wrong Trousers–to exploit when he reprograms what is now a veritable army of Norbots for evil mischief. Vengeance Most Fowl indeed. —Jim Vorel
2. Mufasa: The Lion King
Release Date: Dec. 20, 2024
Director: Barry Jenkins
Stars: Aaron Pierre, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Mads Mikkelsen, John Kani, Tiffany Boone, Preston Nyman, Seth Rogen, Billy Eichner, Blue Ivy Carter
Rating: PG
Paste Review Score: 4.4
The astonishing technology that the Walt Disney Company utilizes on movies like Mufasa: The Lion King is like something out of a science fiction story–specifically, a cautionary tale that features some kind of cosmic-ironic curse. Here is a virtual filmmaking rig that can conjure vast landscapes and photorealistic animal characters, allowing the artists total freedom of camera movement and image design, and yet no matter how much talent is thrown into its ravenous maw–Barry Jenkins! Lin-Manuel Miranda! A rotating/accumulating group of fabulously charismatic actors and singers!–it spits out the same lifeless talking-animal dross, while demanding further victims to fuel the creation of sequels, prequels, and, presumably, eventually higher-tech remakes of high-tech remakes. —Jesse Hassenger
3. Sonic the Hedgehog 3
Release Date: Dec. 12, 2024
Director: Jeff Fowler
Stars: Jim Carrey, Ben Schwartz, Krysten Ritter, Natasha Rothwell, Shemar Moore, James Marsden
Rating: PG
Sega’s lightning-fast blue mascot returns for a threequel, and this time the fate of the earth hangs in the balance, as Sonic, Tails and Knuckles must stop Project Shadow’s evil plot to destroy the planet. Jim Carrey stars as both Sonic’s archnemesis Dr. Ivo Robotnik and the mad scientists’ grandfather Gerald.
4. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
Release Date: Dec. 13, 2024
Director: Kenji Kamiyama
Stars: Brian Cox, Gaia Wise, Luke Pasqualino, Miranda Otto
Rating: PG
The latest adaptation from J.R.R. Tolkein’s Middle-earth fantasies, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim in an anime retelling of battles that took place nearly two centuries before the events in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
5. Nutcrackers
Release Date: November 29, 2024
Director: David Gordon Green
Stars: Ben Stiller, Linda Cardellini, Edi Patterson, Toby Huss, Homer Janson, Ulysses Janson, Atlas Janson, Arlo Janson
Rating: TV-PG
Paste Review Score: 5.5
Ben Stiller, returned after a hiatus in lead acting roles since 2017’s Brad’s Status, steps into a role with obvious Uncle Buck allusions as Mike, a bigshot Chicago real estate agent who is roped into looking after his recently deceased sister’s four sons on a rural farmstead in the weeks leading up to Christmas. It effectively reverses the Uncle Buck dynamic, in fact: Whereas Buck was a blue-collar grifter unaccustomed to the cushy confines and niceties of upper-middle-class suburbia, Mike is a polished urbanite (complete with Ferrari) who is immediately a fish out of water among the feral rural kids who have grown up in a world outside of cell reception and internet access. The miscalculation (the first of many) in the Uncle Buck comparison the film would so dearly like you to make, on the other hand, is that Buck was stepping in for what was supposed to be a last-minute pinch hitting assignment while the kids’ parents were away. Nutcrackers instead kills off both Mom and Dad, people that we never meet, which simultaneously limits the depth of the audience’s empathy and loads the entire cast with an aura of inescapable grief that it then has little interest in addressing and processing. The entire story is framed around this tragedy, but actually engaging with it meaningfully would be too much of a bummer, so the film instead just decides to half-ass it. —Jim Vorel
6. Moana 2
Release Date: Nov. 27, 2024
Directors: David Derrick Jr., Jason Hand and Dana Ledoux Miller
Stars: Auli‘i Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson, Rachel House, Temuera Morrison, Nicole Scherzinger, Hualālai Chung, David Fane, Rose Matafeo, Awhimai Fraser, Gerald Ramsey, Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda
Genre: Animation, Kids
Rating: PG
Paste Review Score: 6.5
She is Moana! And, frankly, she deserves a little more respect than this. Moana 2, the sequel to the 2016 Disney movie about spunky teenager who saves her people with the help of a fast-talking, narcissistic demigod arrives at the same time as another long-awaited musical involving misunderstood mythical creatures. Although not as good as the original film (sequels rarely are), this second outing brings together all that fans loved about the original in a brand new story. And, frankly, the more we see of Disney heroines who can fend for themselves and not only don’t need a man to save them but also don’t need a romance as a central story point, the better. Set three years later, an older (but still wearing the same outfit!) Moana (once again powerfully and perfectly voiced by Auli‘i Cravalho) now has an adorable baby sister Simea (Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda). That’s right, not only are Moana’s parents (Temuera Morrison and Nicole Scherzinger) still alive in defiance of animated film precedent, they are procreating! A hero among her community, a bevy of younger girls known as the Moanabes (two of whom are voiced by Dwyane Johnson’s daughters) follow Moana around hanging on her every word, mimicking her every movement. After the song aptly titled “We’re Back,” Moana sets out on another adventure to save her people. —Amy Amatangelo
7. Wicked
Release Date: Nov. 22, 2024
Director: Jon M. Chu
Stars: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Bowen Yang, Marissa Bode, Peter Dinklage, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum
Genre: Fantasy, Musical
Rating: PG
Paste Review Score: 8.5
It’s more than fair to say that the Broadway show Wicked is pop-u-lar. With more than one-and-a-half billion greenbacks earned since its debut back in 1995, the Stephen Schwartz penned musical with a book by Winnie Holzman based on Gregory Maguire’s novel has proven that its verdigris is more than skin deep. Ever since its storming the stage there’s been talk about a film version, with the project wrapped in development for these many decades, with generation upon generation of fan continuing to embrace its story of perseverance and powerful transformation while wanting something … more. At long last director Jon M. Chu has managed to get the pieces in place for a big-budget telling of the Wicked Witch of the West’s origin story, employing a mix of grand theatrical sets and CGI to both expand the stage musical and to bring this story to millions more around the world. For those not already versed in the storyline, Wicked: Part One traces the early connection and complicated friendship between G(a)linda (Ariane Grande), a pink-frocked, privileged student with a cutting soprano and arrogance to match, and a green-skinned tempestuous young woman named Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) whose dark demeanor and gift for empathy make her a direct contrast to her newfound companion. —Jason Gorber
8. Red One
Release Date: Nov. 15, 2024
Director: Jake Kasdan
Stars: Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, Lucy Liu, J.K. Simmons, Kiernan Shipka, Bonnie Hunt, Kristofer Hivju
Genre: Holiday, action
Rating: PG
Paste Review Score: 2.5
How grim have things become when an uncomplicated yarn about the core principles of Christmas—warmth, charity, and cookies for all—can’t hit multiplexes without the digital rock-em/sock-em oomph of a superhero movie? Strip away its tinsel-and-ribbons finery, festooned with tongue firmly in cheek by director Jake Kasdan, and suddenly Red One isn’t fit to be a holiday perennial; it’s too hellbent on blockbusting to spread any enduring goodwill. Here’s a Christmastime caper attempting to be so many things in the name of broad appeal that it ends up being rotten at all of them—a White House kidnap thriller, a midstream Marvel movie, and an inoffensive holiday trifle armored by the most dismissive of yuletide messages: It’s fine to be naughty, as long as you’re nice about it. How novel. Spike your eggnog, and you can almost see how the movie’s disparate parts fit together. The North Pole, home to Santa Claus’s (J.K. Simmons) global merry-making concern, is now a teeming metropolis hidden from mortal eyes by a force field that could have been conjured in Wakanda. Santa’s looking positively yolked these days, too, with a physique that suggests all those cookies he’s housing are actually protein bars. He bellows like Thor and hurtles through the sky on a racecar sled powered by an armada of digital reindeer adorned with glow-in-the-dark antlers. Despite his awesomeness, St. Nick has a bodyguard, the even more jacked (and dubiously monikered) elf—er, E.L.F. agent—Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), who, after centuries of duty, has announced his retirement. And on Christmas Eve, of all days! Doesn’t he know how these movies work? Hasn’t he seen In the Line of Fire?—Jarrod Jones