"The Spiderwick Chronicles"

Grade: B

With Freddie Highmore, Nick Nolte, Mary Louise Parker. Directed by Mark S. Waters. Rated PG (fantasy violence, and might be too intense for the very young). At metro theaters. 1 hour, 37 minutes.

Bottom line: Some fine magic for those going through Harry Potter withdrawal.

Harry Potter may spend his afternoons zipping around the Hogwarts sky in search of the Golden Snitch. But Hollywood studios have their own magic object to pursue.

The Next Big Fantasy.

They've tried, hard —- "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," "The Golden Compass," "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events," among others. Of those three, "The Lion" did well, "Compass" fared better overseas, and "Snicket" sank like a stone.

But now they've tried again —- and won, if not the gold prize, than at least the silver.

The new "The Spiderwick Chronicles," which opens today, is based on a recent young-adult series, but it has older roots, some going back to Victorian England. It's a story about young children, true, particularly teens and tweens squabbling with each other and their mother. But it's also about the Little People —- hobgoblins, brownies and fairies.

And a particularly nasty ogre who wants to destroy all of them.

For all its water-colored fantasy, though, "Spiderwick" feels nicely rooted in the real world. Partly that's because of a smart adaptation (co-written by John Sayles); mostly it's in the direction by Mark S. Waters. Waters' previous credits include "Freaky Friday" and "Mean Girls," two of the most grown-up of tween movies. He approaches the material on its own level, and the characters without patronizing pats on the head.

Sometimes it's the fantasy, actually, that gets a bit overlooked. The goblins aren't a particularly inventively imagined crew —- just a lot of froggy creatures, bossed about by a slimy fellow in a pirate's hat. Some of the other creatures are a little too cutesy, too, although the ogre —- as played by Nick Nolte —- is a gimlet-eyed giant wrapped in an old overcoat and the vague scent of decay.

And that's even before Nolte gets into his makeup.

But he makes a truly terrifying monster, once the computer-generated imagery kicks in (for an otherwise PG movie, the climax is definitely PG-13), and there are other fantastic pleasures as well, including a stalwart old griffin, a house full of secret passages and an eccentric old aunt who may not be as crazy as everyone thinks.

It is, though, the people who make this movie work, and they include apart from Nolte, Mary Louise Parker as the frazzled Mom and Joan Plowright as the dotty old relative. Better still are the three children, and the two actors who play them —- the sly Sarah Bolger as bossy sister Mallory, and Freddie Highmore as her twin brothers.

Highmore, of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "Finding Neverland," is particularly good as the two boys, giving the pacifist Simon and the obstreperous Jared richer defining characteristics than just a separate hairstyle. He creates two different young people, each so distinct that you forget about the trickery that allows them to interact —- and that's a bit of trickery all its own.

It's not the only magic that "The Spiderwick Chronicles" has to offer, or its greatest pleasure. Whether or not it gives rise to other sequels, it will certainly fill in nicely while small fans patiently await the next Narnia film, or Harry Potter epic.