Family-friendly film review: 'Valentines Day'

A guide to movies from a family perspective:

"Valentine's Day"

-- Rated: PG-13.

-- Suitable for: Teens and up.

-- What you should know: Garry Marshall, who made "Pretty Woman" and "The Princess Diaries," directs a huge ensemble of stars ranging from Shirley MacLaine and Julia Roberts to Taylor Lautner in a romcom set in Los Angeles on Valentine's Day.

-- Language: About a dozen mild expletives and a crude three-letter word for "derriere" are used.

-- Sexual situations and nudity: A teenage couple plan to lose their virginity in a story ultimately played for laughs, as a high-school boy is caught with his pants down and a strategically placed guitar. Couples kiss or are shown in bed, a married man is having an affair and a woman works as a phone-sex operator, which leads to talk about fetishes and other racy matters.

-- Violence/scary situations: A fender-bender, but little else.

-- Drug or alcohol use: Adults drink champagne or wine.

"Dear John"

-- Rated: PG-13.

-- Suitable for: Teens and up.

-- What you should know: Channing Tatum, a tween and teen favorite from such movies as "Step Up," stars alongside Amanda Seyfried in this movie version of Nicholas Sparks' book. Tatum plays a soldier and Seyfried a college student and they fall in love during his leave and correspond by mail.

-- Language: A couple of uses of "Jesus" and a few very mild expletives.

-- Sexual situations and nudity: Passionate kisses are exchanged and, in a discreet but unmistakable scene, a couple have sex.

-- Violence/scary situations: A nose is broken in brief fisticuffs and a reference is made to a long-ago drunken knife fight. Characters grow ill and die and soldiers are in harm's way. Shots of the 9/11 attacks on New York are shown on TV.

-- Drug or alcohol use: College students and adults consume beer, wine and other alcoholic drinks.

"When in Rome"

-- Rated: PG-13.

-- Suitable for: Tweens and older.

-- What you should know: Kristen Bell plays a New York museum curator who removes coins from a fountain in Rome, causing the men who tossed them to fall madly in love with her. Josh Duhamel co-stars.

-- Language: About a half-dozen mild expletives.

-- Sexual situations and nudity: Couples kiss. A newlywed apparently wearing nothing but an apron gets cozy with her husband, but it's discreet.

-- Violence/scary situations: Lots of pratfalls and accidents, played for laughs, and talk about being struck by lightning and a one-time lover of Pablo Picasso who committed suicide.

-- Drug or alcohol use: Adults drink wine, champagne or beer, and Bell's character drowns her sorrows by guzzling from the bottle.

"Extraordinary Measures"

-- Rated: PG.

-- Suitable for: Teens and up.

-- What you should know: Inspired by a real family, this is the story of a race against time to develop a treatment for a rare form of muscular dystrophy called Pompe disease. Harrison Ford, Brendan Fraser and Keri Russell star.

-- Language: About a dozen mild expletives plus a couple of uses of profanity.

-- Sexual situations and nudity: A married couple canoodling on a couch are interrupted by the early-morning appearance of a nurse.

-- Violence/scary situations: A disease that has no treatment or cure threatens to claim two of the three children from the family that is the film's focus. Another family shares word, by phone, that a child has died.

-- Drug or alcohol use: A scene is set in a bar and adults mainly drink beer.

"The Lovely Bones"

-- Rated: PG-13.

-- Suitable for: Mature high-school students and older, especially if familiar with the Alice Sebold novel.

-- What you should know: Peter Jackson of "The Lord of the Rings" fame directs this adaptation about a 14-year-old (Saoirse Ronan) who is murdered and dismembered and who watches her family and killer from a special-effects-heavy depiction of the afterlife.

-- Language: Generally tame, except for a single use of "Jesus Christ."

-- Sexual situations and nudity: Adults and teens briefly kiss or are shown in an intimate setting. On a more disturbing note, moviegoers may assume that a series of young female murder victims have been sexually abused, but that is not spelled out in the movie.

-- Violence/scary situations: A boy turns blue after swallowing part of a twig. A girl is lured to her death and we later see bloody evidence that she was dismembered. Other murder victims appear. A girl risks her safety and possibly life looking for clues to a killer. Adults explode in anger, some misplaced violence lands someone in the hospital and an accident proves fatal.

-- Drug or alcohol use: A grandmother has a fondness for smoking and drinking.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)

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