Ramona is nine years old and has imagination a little too wild. Although never meaning to, she keeps creating chaos around herself at unreal rate. This being entirely a children's movie, the chaos remains quite harmless. In addition to Ramona, the other important characters include her teenaged sister Beatrice "Beezus" Quimby (Selena Gomez) and their parents.

The plot is mostly a sequence of silly incidents involving Ramona, tied together by a storyline of her father losing his job, and facing the danger of the bank getting their house. Perhaps because the movie is based on a series of books, the action or silliness never becomes overt, and as such the movie is perfectly tolerable for an adult.

Joey makes excellent Ramona. She's very expressive, funny, and suitably silly, yet coming across like a real 9-year-old. Joey handles well also the sad and tender moments, creating a child character with more depth than the norm in kids' movies. I haven't read the books, but I find it very easy to imagine Joey's Ramona is a lot like the character in the books.

As far as movies for children go, Ramona and Beezus is a pleasant one, with likeable characters, good acting, and no excess of violence or too unrealistic plot twists. The average scores I'm giving reflects more my own movie taste than this film's perfectly good success in what it sets out to accomplish.