Like all Oprah-selected books, White Oleander is the story of a girl who has to overcome the most severe trauma and abuse. The book’s language was both vivid and lyrical, making the terrible events more epic than sordid. The movie tries to achieve the same standard, going for prestige drama over soap opera. But even the an exquisite performance by Michelle Pfeiffer and powerhouse appearances by Robin Wright Penn and newcomer Alison Lohman cannot keep the endless series of tragedies from melodrama.

Pfeiffer plays Ingrid, an artist who prides herself on her strength and independence. She murders her lover with poison from white oleander blossoms, and is sent to prison, leaving her daughter Astrid (Lohman) to a series of foster homes. First, she lives with Starr (Wright Penn), a former topless dancer who has found Jesus and is trying to hold on to her own rebellious daughter. Starr is kind to Astrid until she begins to see her as a rival for the attentions of her live-in boyfriend. Astrid protests that she has no designs on the boyfriend, but she cannot resist his attention and they become involved. Jealousy and insecurity cause Starr to begin drinking again and in a drunken rage she shoots Astrid.

Astrid’s other foster homes include Claire (Renée Zellweger), a weepy actress with a distant husband, and Rena (Svetlana Efremova), a money-hungry Russian who presides like Fagin over a ragtag group of orphans. In between, she stays at an institution, where she is beat up by tough girls but befriended by a sensitive boy named Paul (“Almost Famous” star Patrick Fugit).

Each setting provides Astrid with a new identity to try and a new opportunity to be hurt. Through it all, she visits her mother in prison, and it becomes clear that the woman who killed the man who tried to leave her would also do anything – and destroy anyone — to hold on to her daughter. Whenever Astrid seems happy or at home, Ingrid finds a way to poison her environment. Finally, Astrid is so determined not to allow herself to be vulnerable again that when she has a chance for a home with a kind, loving couple, she insists instead on going with Rena, where she is sure not to be disappointed again. She even turns away from Paul. Finally, though, she learns that even then she is reacting to Ingrid, and that to be fully her own person she must find her own way to intimacy and expression.

A Jungian analysis might suggest that the story is a metaphor for the inevitable separation in all mother-daughter relations. All of the mother figures, including not just Ingrid, Starr, Clare, and Rena but also the foster mother Astrid rejects and the social worker responsible for placing her are like one mother splintered into many extreme versions, as though reflected through a prism. All children find their mother to be many things, from the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving figure of their earliest memories to the extremely demanding and ultimately rejecting caricature she can appear to a teenager struggling to know herself.

Parents should know that the movie includes brutality of a modern-era Dickensian quality. Astrid is seduced by one foster parent and shot by another. A third commits suicide. Astrid is subjected to physical and emotional abuse. Ingrid murders her lover. There are non-explicit sexual situations and references. Characters drink, smoke, and use drugs. Characters use strong language and mock religious faith.

Families who see this movie should talk about how Astrid changes her appearance and manner to reflect each of her “homes,” while Ingrid seems almost untouched by her surroundings.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy the book. They may also like to see some other classic dramas of difficult mother/daughter relations, like “Terms of Endearment” and “One True Thing.”

“City by the Sea” is an ambitious drama that never reaches any of its goals but has some watchable moments along the way.

It is based on a true story, but one so improbably agonizing that it feels more like an ancient Greek drama. A boy whose father was executed for murder is raised by the cop who arrested his father. He grows up to be a cop himself, with an exemplary record until, investigating the murder of a drug dealer, he begins to believe that the killer he is looking for could be his own son, a drug addict.

Robert DeNiro plays the cop, Vincent LaMarca, a man who has survived since he was a child by being unarguably on the side of the good guys to distance himself from his father. He also distances himself from his ex-wife (Patti LuPone), his girlfriend, Michelle (Frances McDormand), and his son, Joey (James Franco, last seen as Peter Parker’s best friend and romantic rival in “Spider-Man”). The pain of his loss is so profound that he cannot bring himself to share it with anyone. Yet he finds himself continuing the cycle of abandonment, and when the movie starts, just before the drug dealer is killed, Vincent has not seen Joey in years.

The drug dealer’s body washes up in Manhattan, where Vincent works. But his driver’s license shows that he lived in Long Beach, so Vincent begins a physical and emotional journey to the place he once lived with his wife and son, a once-beautiful, now decayed and deserted beach town.

When Joey is implicated, Vincent is clear about his obligations as a detective and as a father. He wants to bring him in before he gets hurt or hurts someone else. But he wants to bring him in – as they walk up to his ex-wife’s house, Vincent tells his partner to cover the back door in case Joey is inside and tries to flee. Joey is not there, and things get complicated. Vincent’s chief removes him from the case. Another person is killed. And Joey wants his father to be less of a cop and more of a dad.

The movie tries to accomplish too much and ends up getting lost. It uses the almost pornographic seediness of the location and the drug subculture to illustrate the emptiness of the lives of the characters. The movie raises issues of choice and fate that tie in to its overtones of Greek drama. Its female lead makes the typical movie relationship demand that her beau tell her more about himself (“Sometimes I think I know you and other times I don’t think I know you at all”). But then, when he does, in a scene that was so awkward it provoked some laughter from the audience, the movie takes an almost unprecedented chance by showing that she is so stunned that she is not sure she can stay in the relationship.

This is another in the series of movies that the New York Times has called the 2002 summer of the sad fathers (with movies like “Minority Report” and “The Road to Perdition”), and, as in “Minority Report,” there is a maudlin watching-the-old-family-movies scene that feels very heavy-handed. Director Michael Caton-Jones handles the atmosphere well, and DeNiro, McDormand, and LuPone are always worth watching, though this is probably DeNiro’s weakest performance, especially in his final scene with his son.

Parents should know that the movie has violence, including shooting and murder, graphic drug use, very strong language, and sexual references and situations, including a child born out of wedlock. Characters drink and smoke. There is a reference to domestic abuse. A character attempts suicide.

Families who see this movie should talk about Vincent’s statement that he doesn’t like to have dinner at his partner’s home because “You got a lot of love in your house and when I go there I feel uncomfortable.” Different characters make reference to “the real me” or “the real you.” What do they mean? How does the director use the burned-out landscape of Long Beach to tell us something about the characters?

Families who enjoy this movie will enjoy The Big Sleep and Insomnia. For a classic, preposterously melodramatic and very creepy movie that raises questions about a genetic predisposition to murder, see The Bad Seed. Families may also want to take a look at this website about the real City by the Sea, complete with live webcams showing what the beach looks like right now.

It’s a bad sign when a movie can’t make up its mind between two titles and just goes with both of them. In the case of “K-19: The Widowmaker,” that is an accurate indicator of its ambivalent, pretentious, inflated, and heavy-handed tone.

It begins with that dreaded signal of fake profundity, the notice that what we are about to see is “inspired by real events.” That all too often means that we will see a lot of fake human drama around some real-life challenge or turning point.

And what that means in this case is a tired retelling of the submarine movie conventions that we have seen in much better form in movies like “The Hunt for Red October” and even potboilers like “Crimson Tide.”

The setting is the USSR in 1961, at the height of the cold war. “Comrade Captain” Polenin (Liam Neeson) is the honorable and beloved leader of the Navy’s flagship, a zillion-dollar nuclear-powered submarine. Moscow is eager to get it out onto the water, but Polenin says it is not ready. So, he is replaced by taciturn tough guy Captain Vostrikov (Harrison Ford), the kind of officer who fires the ship’s only reactor specialist on the spot and whips out his stopwatch to call simultaneous drills.

Thus, we get some good comrade captain/bad comrade captain moments, the kinds of scenes where someone says “You’re pushing them too hard!” and someone responds by saying that it is the only way to teach them what they are capable of. Then it’s good ship/bad ship, as a perfect test missile firing is followed by a reactor leak that puts not only the ship but the whole world at risk.

If you don’t know what is going to happen when you see one sailor hanging a little white mouse in a cage over his bunk and we see one handsome young officer (played by Peter Sarsgaard of “Boys Don’t Cry) just out of school both (1) extol the wonders of atomic energy and (2) jump off of the truck to the sub to kiss his pretty girlfriend goodbye, then there are plenty of better movies that will give you the answer in a manner that is less ham-handed than this one.

Neeson and Sarsgaard do their best, but Ford, in trying to make his character complex, just makes him muddled. Director Kathryn Bigelow has a marvelous fluidity in maneuvering the camera within the tightly confined spaces, but her gifts are best used with action (as in the under-rated Point Break), not tension, which is what is called for here. The movie effectively conveys the decay of petty bureaucracy, but it is slow and too long. And it has one of the worst uses of music in years, all plinking balalaikas, syrupy strings, and, in the moments of greatest peril, angelic choirs, like a Carol Burnett Show parody of a WWII-era propaganda film. And then there is the old-age make-up in the last scene, which is just silly.

Parents should know that the movie is at the farthest edges of the PG-13 rating, with very graphic and tragic scenes and intense peril. Major characters die. There is drinking (some tipsiness) and smoking. There are also some bare bottoms.

Families who watch this movie will want to talk about many of the choices faced by characters in this movie, including those who knowingly sacrificed their lives – or who ordered others to sacrifice theirs — for their country and for their colleagues. The men on the sub watch propoganda movies about the Klu Klux Klan and other problems in the U.S. How do we know that what we hear about other countries is a fair and accurate picture? They should talk about how people can strike the right balance between insisting on a high standard of performance and making sure they have enough information to make the right decisions. U.S. examples like the Challenger disaster and the corporate corruption of 2002 raise these issues. Families might also want to look into some of the issues raised by the use of nuclear power and the problems of disposing of all of the hardware from the Cold War that gave rise to the acronym MAD for “mutually assured destruction.”

Families who enjoy this movie will enjoy The Hunt for Red October and Crimson Tide. They may also want to try Das Boot, probably the most vivid depiction ever of the terror submariners live with. For movies about the complexities of command, try “Patton,” “A Few Good Men,” and “The Caine Mutiny.”

Plot: Pollyanna (Hayley Mills) arrives in Harrington to live with her wealthy aunt, Polly Harrington (Jane Wyman), after the death of her missionary parents. Polly is generous with money, buying Pollyanna lots of beautiful clothes, but is reserved and joyless. She uses her influence to run all aspects of the town, even telling Reverend Ford (Karl Malden) what to preach on Sundays. His fire and brimstone sermons make the congregation miserable. Pollyanna’s friendliness and her expectation that everyone else will be friendly, too, endear her to everyone from Polly’s servants and Reverand Ford to a cranky invalid (Agnes Moorehead as Mrs. Snow) and the town recluse (Adolphe Menjou as Mr. Pendergast). She teaches her friends “the glad game,” finding something to be glad about in any situation.

When the people in the town decide that instead of accepting Polly’s charity, they will give a bazaar to raise money for a new orphanage, Polly forbids Pollyanna to go. She sneaks out by climbing down a tree and has a wonderful time, but falls on the way back in and is badly hurt. She no longer wants to try to play the glad game, until the whole town shows up to tell her how much she means to them. She leaves for an operation, confident that she will soon be well.

Discussion: This is Disney at its finest, a lavish and gorgeous fantasy of an idyllic American past. Using first-rate actors (including two former Oscar-winners) and sumptuous period detail, this movie is a delight for the eyes as well as the spirit.

Pollyanna is best remembered for “the glad game,” in which the challenge is to find something to be glad about, no matter how bleak the situation. But what really makes her special is the way that she expects the best from everyone, and the transforming effect it has on each person she meets. Pollyanna wears on a chain a quote from Abraham Lincoln: “When you look for the bad in men, expecting to find it, you surely will.” She thanks Aunt Polly for her generosity, and the clothes become a gift instead of a duty or a way of establishing position. (Cedric has the same effect on others in “Little Lord Fauntleroy.”) Pollyanna expects Mrs. Snow and Mr. Pendergast to want to participate in the bazaar, and they do. She quotes her father to Reverend Ford. He told her that with 826 “happy texts” in the Bible, God must have wanted people to be happy. Pollyanna helps Ford find again not just his own joy in preaching, but also his integrity in preaching what is in his heart, and not what Polly Harrington tells him to say. At his next sermon, he tells everyone to enjoy the beautiful day (and to come to the bazaar), and admits, “I should have been looking for the good in you, and I failed, and I apologize.”

Many of the mistakes people make in this movie come from trying to protect themselves from hurt. Polly, hurt by her estrangement from Dr. Chilton, relies on her sense of duty. Mrs. Snow, worried about illness and dependence, tries to blame others and achieves some sense of control (and some attention) with her contrariness. Mr. Pendergast just avoids any contact at all. Pollyanna shows them how to make sure that fear of pain and loss do not prevent opportunities for joy.

Pollyanna, like George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” gets a rare opportunity to have all she has done recognized and acknowledged by the community. Ask kids who in their community has had a beneficial impact, and how it could be acknowledged.