Twas ever so and will always be: Teenage girls are convinced that their fathers are from another era and will never understand the new and exciting changes going on in the world. And in “The Croods,” dad literally falls a few steps behind on the evolutionary ladder, while the world really is changing, complete with lava, earthquakes and continental drift.

After the dreary “Ice Age” movies made Pangaea tedious and stridently unfunny, it’s a thrill to get a movie that gives tectonic shift a good name. This new effort from writer-directors Chris Sanders (co-director of “How to Train Your Dragon” and...

Arguably the smartest person ever to appear regularly on MTV, high-schooler (and cartoon character) Daria Morgendorfer once noted, “As far as I can make out, ‘edgy’ occurs when middlebrow, middle-aged profiteers are looking to suck the energy -- not to mention the spending money -- out of the ‘youth culture.’ So they come up with this fake concept of seeming to be dangerous when every move they make is the result of market research and a corporate master plan.”

I found myself thinking a lot about MTV in “Spring Breakers,” Harmony Korine’s laceration of American youth and its annual rites. The cable network probably went...

Desperate for publicity, old-school Vegas magicians Burt Wonderstone (Steve Carell) and Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi) decide to spend a week locked inside a plexiglass box suspended over the Vegas strip. “Remember,” advises their assistant Jane (Olivia Wilde), “all you have to do is nothing.”

It’s a funny line, but one also suspects it was the production motto for “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone,” a movie that always seems poised to deliver big laughs but, once the smoke and the pigeons clear, leaves you only with a mild chuckle or two.

The film falls squarely into the formula that Will Ferrell popularized -- let’s find something dorky and...

The clown always longs to play “Hamlet” and, apparently, the guys who wrote “The Hangover” want to end the beer blast with an honest talk about feelings and adult responsibilities.

At least that’s what happens in “21 & Over,” the directorial debut of “Hangover” writers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, who prove themselves masters of on-screen debauchery while still facing a steep learning curve on poignancy.

If you want to make “Animal House,” make “Animal House,” and if you want to make “The Breakfast Club,” make “The Breakfast Club.” Trying to do...