Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Critic Reviews

A jaunty and forthright production with a lively look reflecting the book's illustrated pages [that] does a great job of being in two places at once: In the head and gangly bodies of kids, and in the hearts of those of us who have survived grades 6-8.

Looks drab and drained of color, and can't even muster the antic buoyancy of an average episode of iCarly.

It's an interesting idea, deserving of a more interesting treatment, but this is just dopey and patronising.

There's something silly-sweet about this movie. It avoids talking down to kids or being didactic, while still projecting an overall wholesomeness.

Kids who realize they're fully ordinary -- that is, pretty much all of them -- will be pleased to see a world they recognize on the big screen.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a movie that needs to go back to the drawing board -- literally.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid is sweet and funny at either end, but in between, it sags with endless repetition of gross bodily functions and Greg's torment at the hands of larger, angrier, or more popular kids -- in that order.

The young cast is all game, and sidekicks Robert Capron and Grayson Russell are a real hoot. Slumber party viewings are inevitable.

What sets this kid comedy apart is how well it resists the temptation to clobber the bullies and crown the underdog.

What the movie gets right, sometimes in agonizing detail, are the humiliations and horrors of school...

It's nimble, bright and funny. It doesn't dumb down. It doesn't patronize. It knows something about human nature. It isn't as good as A Christmas Story, as few movies are, but it deserves a place in the same sentence.

The casting's pretty fair, and if they had better material, Steve Zahn and Rachael Harris would have been real assets. But the story lurches from indignity to ill-starred wrestling match to gross-out gag, without any momentum or surprise.

The movie is remarkably attuned to that awful period when you're not just known but sometimes doomed by the company you keep.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid, based on the popular illustrated tween books by Jeff Kinney, deserves a B- for effort and a C for execution.

No kiddie movie would be complete without spazzy supporting characters, booger jokes, yucky food and toilet humor; Diary delivers them in abundance without straying too far from Disney Channel wholesomeness.

The problem with Diary of a Wimpy Kid is the wimpy kid is a jerk.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid is an amusing romp through the awkward years of middle school.

An above-average and sometimes surprising kid movie based on the first of a popular series of cartoon books by Jeff Kinney.

The friendship message that comes wrapped in the world of Wimpy Kid gives the movie its centre and its heart, along with a reminder that there is no greater act of devotion than a kid who will submit himself to the cheese touch for a pal.

Too soon though -- maybe 30 minutes in -- audience laughs turn to chuckles, fading to worn smiles.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a likable movie for kids that will make adults chuckle as well because of the movie's key ingredient -- wit.

In transferring the clean, precise humor of Kinney's illustrations and prose to the big-screen, the material loses just a bit of its charm.

A fairly forgettable and polarizing comedy that's strictly targeted to the preteen boys of the audience, all of whom are convinced this is how middle is and will be like...

Conveys, in a good-humoured, sharply observed way, the small, painful cruelties and unpredictable rules of early adolescence, and it celebrates awkwardness without feeling the need to convert it into cheap triumph.