What To See, Hear and Do This Week

The Spiderwick Chronicles

Article Tools

Moving with his family into an old, dark house, troubled preteen Jared (Freddie Highmore) finds a land of fairies and monsters. Conflating the five books of Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black's Narnia-lite saga into one brisk epic, Spiderwick pirouettes smartly between wondrous and scary, mixing kid-movie sentiment into its horror-film chills.

Grade: B