Be careful what you ask for.

In my review of Kill Bill Vol. 1, I admired its pure style and mastery of the language of pure cinema but said that I hoped the sequel would provide more character and texture. Well, that is what screenwriter/director Quentin Tarantino has done, or at least tried to do with Vol. 2, but the result is a less successful movie than the original.

In Vol. 1, a woman known only as “The Bride” (Uma Thurman) awoke from a coma to seek revenge on the squad of assassins who gunned down everyone at her wedding and left her for dead. The film was dazzling in its combination of narrative minimalism with maximization of just about everything else, an onslaught of images, genres, action, and carnage.

While admiring the supercharged audacity and astonishing technical control of the first “volume,” for me it felt less pure than sterile. Revenge is the simplest and most convenient engine for a movie plot. It takes just a moment to set it up and then we are on the Bride’s side for as long as it takes for her to cross each name off her list. The hints of more details about the elite squad of assassins, each with aliases of deadly snakes, were so tantalizing. Where were they from? What did they do and how did they learn to do it? Why did it all change?

Now we get to find out much of that and you know what? It was better not to know. Tarantino is far better at, well, pulp fiction than at drama. The dialogue sounds like imitation Tarantino and the exposition plays like it should have stayed on the cutting room floor. This movie, for all of its showmanship and technique, diminishes the first one. We were better off imagining the left-out details or projecting them onto spareness of the movie like a Rorschach inkblot.

It was better to know the heroine only as “The Bride” and wonder about her name than to find out that her name is Beatrix Kiddo. It would be like telling us what really is inside the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. We’re better off putting into it what each one of us wants it to be.

The scene where Beatrice learns why she must leave the DiVAS (Deadly Viper Assassination Squad) has some juicy juxtaposition along the lines of the first one’s battle with Vernita, interrupted to welcome her little girl home from school. But the reason itself, as corny as Kansas in August, doesn’t work as drama or as archly meta-archetypical post-modern commentary. Discussions of the stringent standards of Pai Mei (Hong Kong martial arts movie star Chia Hui Liu, voiced by Tarantino), his “the wood should fear your hand, not the other way around,” and the dressing-down of a bouncer by a bar-owner put a drag on the movie’s momentum and the additional brutalization of The Bride, even in Tarantino-world, is just overkill.

There are some great set-pieces, including ingeniously constructed confined-space battles and an escape from being buried alive. And there are some great lines. A character refers to “what women call the silent treatment. We let them think we don’t like it.” I liked the discussion of what makes Superman different from other superheroes without entirely buying it. But it all gets a little too cute and self-aware, with The Bride telling us that we have referred to her “roaring rampage of revenge” and mentions of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Shogun Assassin. At his best, Tarantino runs the zillions of movies he loves through his brain, chops them up and recombines them to show us what they say about the way we want to see ourselves and the way we really do. But at his worst, it’s all just a little closed loop of inside references. To speak to him in the movie language he knows best, it’s all just a little too much “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

Parents should exercise the strongest possible caution in deciding whether this movie is appropriate for their families, even for those over 18. This movie is an outrageous and over the top story about people who kill other people for money and for pure enjoyment. It is extremely violent with graphic and exceptionally explicit fight scenes. There are many horrifying images including a squashed eyeball, a badly scarred prostitute, and a dessicated corpse. Many characters are killed. Characters use extremely strong language and they drink and smoke.

Families who see this movie should talk about what led Beatrice to become an assassin and what made her decide to quit. What do these characters tell us about their notion of justice? What are we supposed to admire about them?

Families who enjoy this film will also enjoy the original Kill Bill and Tarantino’s other films, including Pulp Fiction (extreme language, violence, and drug use).

A girl who suffers total humiliation at her 13th birthday party wishes she could be 30. The next morning, she is all grown up, living in a swanky Manhattan apartment with a gorgeous face and figure (played by Jennifer Garner). That part is pretty exciting. But the guy in the shower who seems to know her pretty well is pretty scary. And she can’t find her parents. Jenna races out of the building and a woman who seems to know her tells her to get into a limo and is talking a mile a minute about some job she seems to have as editor of Poise magazine.

Jenna will eventually realize that this is what she wished for, but she will also figure out that it was not really what she wanted. Her parents are away on a cruise, but she tracks down her very best friend, Matt (Mark Ruffalo), now a photographer. When he tells her he has not seen her since high school, she begins to understand that in order to become what she wished for, she has lost some of the things that mattered most.

Okay, we knew all of that from not only every body-switching movie ever made but from every wishing story ever told. And yes, there are all the expected collisions between the lives of the 13 and 30-year-olds. Jenna raises her hand to be called on in a meeting and responds “Ew, gross!” to the advances of her boyfriend. And darned if she won’t be the only one to come up with those save-the-day ideas for the magazine. But the script has some bright moments and there is also some nicely understated humor. The only possible environment where a 13-year-old’s sense of appropriate hair and fashion might be considered acceptable for an adult is, of course, in the offices of a fashion magazine, where the more outrageous something is, the more everyone else will feel that they are the ones who are missing something for not having it themselves. Jena writes her name at the top of the page at a meeting and keeps her office files in middle-school folders.

Ruffalo, as always, adds class and sweetness to the boyfriend role, and has impressive delicacy in providing romantic interest for someone who is, after all, emotionally just 13 years old. But what makes this one work is Garner, who is enormously touching and hilarious as the 13-year-old living in the body and life of a 30-year-old. Playing a child in an adult body gives her license to show every emotion without any pretense of sophistication. She is wonderfully open and vulnerable but she handles it lightly and with a lot of charm. And she captures it all perfectly, from her panic at not understanding what is going on to her rapture as she selects clothes and make-up for her grown-up self as though dressing a Barbie. Garner even gets the walk of a 13-year-old just right, from the shoulders, not the hips. And the look on her face as she does the dance to “Thriller” is so winning you won’t just smile with her; you might just start to dance along a little.

Parents should know that there is some sexual humor. Jenna is horrified to find a naked man in her apartment (the boyfriend of her grown-up self) and grossed-out by his advances. There are sexual references (“raunchy strip tease,” “57 ways to have an orgasm,” “jump your bones” and the 13-year-olds play a party game that is supposed to go a lot farther than Spin the Bottle. Unlike the male take on this situation in Big, the main character does not take advantage of the adult persona to have sex. Characters use brief strong language. Characters drink and drinking is shown as part of the fun of being a grown-up.

Families who see this movie should talk about how being a grown-up may be different than it appears to a child. What was the biggest surprise for Jenna? Do you agree with what Jenna’s mother said about mistakes? Families might also want to talk about the way middle-schoolers treat each other and how to make sure that you don’t grow up with the kind of regrets that Jenna does. Is/was there a “6 Chicks”-type group in your school?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Tom Hanks in a similar role in Big. There are many other movies with this theme, including Freaky Friday, 18 Again (with George Burns), 17 Again (with Tia and Tamara Mowry), Like Father, Like Son (with Dudley Moore), and Vice Versa, with Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage. Fans of The Lord of the Rings trilogy will enjoy seeing Andy Serkis, who provided the voice and movements for Gollum, as Richard, Jenna’s boss.

“Dogville” will inspire passionate responses, partly because it is deliberately provocative but more because it

In keeping with the fairy tale theme, I will begin this review with a warning: If you want to experience the real pleasures this movie has to offer, do not expect a faithful re-creation of the book. The plot, the characters, even the tone are very different, and the fans of the marvelous book, who can all but recite it by heart, may feel affronted. But the book’s theme and lessons are all there, and in its own way, the story it tells is endearing, enduring, and lots of fun.

Both book and movie start with the question a 21st century girl would ask about the classic Cinderella fairy tale. Why did Cinderella do whatever her evil step-mother and step-sisters told her to? According to author Gail Carson Levine, it’s because a well-meaning but careless fairy named Lucinda (Viveca A. Fox), tried to give a gift to Ella (Anne Hathaway) when she was born, and cast a spell so she would always be obedient. But that meant that whenever Ella was given a direct order, she had to do whatever she was told. Literally. This is an inconvenience in a loving household but becomes downright dangerous when Ella’s mother dies and her father marries nasty Dame Olga (Joanna Lumley). And it becomes downright deadly when an evil usurper orders Ella to commit murder.

Ella’s journey to find a way to break the spell has its own dangers as she meets up with elves, ogres, giants, fairies, and of course a very charming prince (Hugh Dancy).

Like Shrek, this is a fairy tale with some broad (and occasionally crude) humor and winking references to modern times. Ella attends the local community college and shops at the Galleria include the “Crockery Barn.” The soundtrack includes covers of pop classics from “Respect” to “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart.” And Ella’s support for the rights of ogres, giants, and elves (including an elf who wants to be a lawyer despite rules that require all elves to be entertainers) shows us her heart and spirit and gives her something to discuss with the prince beyond who should rescue whom and his latest appearance in Medieval Teen magazine.

The movie works so hard to be entertaining that it can feel a little hypercharged at times, cluttered with too many talented performers with too little to do. But the production design helps maintain the sense of magic, with storybook castles and forests. And Hathaway (now something of an expert in this genre after The Princess Diaries) is so radiantly lovable that she could make an ATM withdrawal feel like a fairy tale. When Ella is ordered to entertain the guests at a giant’s wedding celebration, she breaks into Queen’s “Somebody to Love” and dances across the tabletop with such joyous gusto that even Freddie Mercury would approve. Dancy makes the prince more than the usual arm candy/swordsman and the way they learn to trust and respect each other enough to stop fighting the attraction they feel is unexpectedly tender.

Parents should know that the movie has some crude language (“bite me” “cute butt”) and social drinking. It is supposed to be humorous when a character gets tipsy and has a drinking problem. There is violence, including fighting, knives, and swordplay and characters are in peril. A character is hit in the crotch in a slapstick fight. In a more serious fight, it appears that a character is killed, but it turns out not to be the case. Ella’s mother becomes ill and dies. Ella is ordered to shoplift and due to the curse, must obey. An ogre’s pants reveal the top of his butt crack. One strength of the movie is that it deals with themes of discrimination and prejudice as Ella fights the kingdom’s restrictive laws segregating giants, ogres, and elves. And Ella herself is a strong, brave, independent, and loyal role model.

Families who see this movie should talk about what it was that made it possible for Ella to break the curse? What did she have to learn or feel to make that happen? They may want to talk about the theme of discrimination and segregation in the story. What creates prejudice? Part of the fun of the movie, and explored in more detail in the book, is the way that the literal meaning of the words in direct orders to Ella have unexpected results. Families should talk about the way that the way listeners hear words can mean something different from what the speaker intends.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy another modern re-imagining of the Cinderella fairy tale, Ever After with Drew Barrymore. How does that movie handle the problem of explaining why the main character allows herself to be treated so badly? They will also enjoy more traditional versions, including Rodger and Hammerstein’s musical Cinderella made for television with Lesley Ann Warren 1965 and remade as Cinderella in 1997 with Brandy and Whitney Houston. Along with Disney’s animated Cinderella all are a treat for families. And every family should see The Princess Bride, with Cary Elwes, who plays Prince Char’s uncle in “Ella Enchanted,” as the dashing hero. Robin Wright is the woman he loves who is betrothed to a prince who is anything but charming. Families should read Gail Carson Levine’s superb book and might also want to try some other modern takes on fairy tales, including a thoughtful literary retelling of Beauty and the Beast called Rose Daughter and the story collections The Outspoken Princess and the Gentle Knight and Tatterhood and Other Tales.