THE BORROWERS

Yes — happily, and with the whole family. This is the rare children's fantasy that's genuinely funny for grown-ups too, built around John Goodman's gleefully over-the-top villain and a family of tiny, resourceful heroes who feel real even at four inches tall.

The special effects serve the story instead of showing off, and the humor stays wholesome from start to finish — no crude jokes, no cynicism, just a well-told tale of a family standing up to injustice. The "danger" here is the cartoon kind: falls, sprays, near-misses, nothing that will actually frighten a child watching with a parent nearby.

If you want an evening of laughter, imagination, and a story where decency and cleverness beat greed, put this one on. Worth the trip.

Young Pete Lender keeps noticing things go missing around the house — his father's watch, odds and ends here and there. He's not imagining it. Hidden beneath the floorboards lives a family of tiny people, the Clocks, who "borrow" what they need to survive without ever being seen.

Pete discovers their secret and befriends them — just as an unscrupulous lawyer schemes to evict the Lender family from their home for his own profit. The Borrowers, it turns out, may be the only ones small enough — and clever enough — to stop him.

Four stars, and the film earns every one of them. Director Peter Hewitt uses special effects to enhance the story rather than dominate it — a hallmark of the best family filmmaking. He has said he initially tried to ground the Borrowers' scale-defying antics in real physics, found it deadened the fun, and switched to instinct: "if it felt right and looked good, we did it." That choice pays off in scenes like Pod Clock scaling a kitchen table with a hook and needle, or the family's slapstick escapes through drainpipes and milk bottles.

Goodman's comic villainy anchors the film, drawing real laughs as his schemes backfire again and again. The result is a movie that's inventive, briskly paced, and consistently funny — a rare four-star family film.

This is, at its core, a story about good overcoming evil — and it tells that story without cynicism or edge. A greedy, dishonest lawyer tries to steal a family's home through deception; a family of tiny, powerless people rises up, alongside the boy who befriended them, to see justice done. The film doesn't dress this up in ambiguity. Wrongdoing is wrongdoing, and it gets answered.

The film's worldview is best described as romantic — it believes in magic, imagination, and the idea that even the smallest and most overlooked can set things right. That's a gentler frame than a fully biblical one, but it isn't opposed to it. The instinct that injustice deserves to be overturned, and that the weak can triumph over the strong through courage and cleverness rather than force, echoes something true: "But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise... God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong" (1 Corinthians 1:27).

There's nothing here to unlearn and much to enjoy — a film that trusts children with a story where honesty, loyalty, and quiet courage carry the day.

This is a movie that trusts its audience — kids and grown-ups alike — with humor, imagination, and a story where doing right actually matters. It's funny, it's clean, and it's the kind of film you can put on without a second thought. Worth the trip — for the whole family, any night of the week.