This movie is not very interesting, imaginative, engaging, or exciting, but at least it avoids being too sugary. And it is is truer to the stories and spirit of the original books by A.A. Milne than some of Disney’s Pooh videos. It is suitable for children as young as 4, which is a relief in an era where even PG movies contain material that might be unsuitable for middle schoolers. The children in the audience laughed at the slapstick. There are a couple of brief moments of animation that rise above the straight-to-video level. But that’s about all the praise I can muster.

Little Piglet, the smallest of the creatures who live together in the 100 Acres Woods, wishes that he could help his friends, Pooh, Rabbit, and Tigger. But there is no place for him in their big plan to capture some honey by redirecting the bees to a new hive, so he wanders off by himself. When his friends realize that Piglet is missing, they understand for the first time how important he is to them. They search for him, using his book of memories to help them think of places he might be. The pictures in Piglet’s book remind them of happy times together and all that Piglet did to help them along the way.

Parents should know that there is some mild peril and the most sensitive younger children might believe that characters have been hurt for a few moments, until it turns out that everyone is fine.

Families who see this movie should talk about how we can let those we care about know they are appreciated, about the importance of making plans, and about making memory books to help us keep our happiest moments close at hand.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy “The Tigger Movie” and the superior production values of Disney’s 25th anniversary edition of “The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.”

It is unlikely that there will ever be a better horror movie about the relationship of a repressed young man to his ravenous rats than this remake of the 1973 version starring Bruce Davison and Ernest Borgnine.

Crispin Glover plays the title character, a quietly desperate man who lives in a huge, decaying mansion with his even more decaying mother. He works at the business his father once owned, for Mr. Martin (R. Lee Ermey), a man who constantly humiliates him. Willard does what he is told. When his mother tells him to kill the rats in the basement, he goes to the store to buy traps and poison. But when a small white mouse is caught in a trap, he carefully rescues it, names it Socrates, and it becomes first a pet and then his only friend.

Willard then discovers that he has a psychic connection to the rats, especially a huge one he names Ben. They become the embodiment of his id, the unleashed resentment and anger of 20 years. He looses them, with great satisfaction on Martin’s fancy new Mercedes. But then, like the sorceror’s apprentice, he finds he is no longer in control. The rats are hungry.

The movie’s strengths are Glover’s genuine weirdness and the stunning production design. Screenwriter/director Glen Morgan has both passion and feel for the material and a macabre sense of humor. Fans of the original will enjoy seeing Davison’s appear in a portrait and photos as Willard’s father and a reprise of Michael Jackson’s “Ben,” the hit song from the sequel to the original movie, now even creepier than it was back then.

Parents should know that this is a horror movie with real horror, including some scary shocks, some very tense and suspenseful moments, and some very grisly images. Characters are in peril and some are killed.

Families who see this movie should talk about why Willard felt he had no alternatives, and how stories like this are often inspired by the consequences of keeping feelings inside and a sense of powerlessness. Why was Willard unable to accept Katherine’s offer of friendship?

Families who enjoy this movie should see the original, but not waste time on the sequel, “Ben.”

This dreary generic chase movie is so thoroughly formulaic that not even the presence of two wonderfully talented three-named Oscar winners can inspire a flicker of interest.

Benecio del Toro plays Aaron, a former special forces killing machine who has finally snapped. He lives out in the woods and is either so far gone that he believes deer hunters are really CIA agents sent to kill him or he is so far gone that he just kills anyone who crosses his path, especially if they hurt animals.

Tommy Lee Jones plays L.T., a survival expert who trained Aaron and hundreds of other soldiers. He, too, seems to like animals more than people. We see him tenderly rescue a beautiful white huskie from a snare and then slam the head of the guy who set it against a table.

L.T. tracks down Aaron quickly, but he escapes, so L.T. has to track him down again. That’s pretty much the whole story. There is an attempt at making it all about something more, from the opening with Johnny Cash reciting Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61” and encounters with three little girls that may be intended to raise the issue of how our society can turn men into killing machines and then expect them to hold on to human values (or sanity). But it doesn’t work. Del Toro and Jones do their best, and the fight scenes are refreshingly real in this era of fight choreographers and tricks on wires. These fights are awkward, exhausting, and desperate (except when everyone stops what they’re doing to forge some new weapons in a completely over-the-top moment of idiocy). But overall, the movie is simultaneously lightweight, pretentious, and forgettable.

Parents should know that the movie has brutal violence, including battle scenes. Characters are in intense peril and many are killed. Characters use strong language. Minority and female characters are strong, capable, and loyal and diverse characters clearly respect each other and work well together.

Families who see this movie should talk about whether L.T. feels responsible for Aaron. Should he have answered the letters or alerted the authorities to a problem? How do we train people to become killers and then expect them to go on with their lives? Is it possible to give someone like Aaron justice?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy a similar story in “Rambo.”

Two kinds of audiences will appreciate this movie. The first are those who will be so taken by the flashback scenes of first love between two bright, engaging 15-year-olds that they will be willing to sit through the literally murky present-day scenes that show how the events of the past continue to entangle us. The second are those who are interested in figuring out why an award-winning screenplay will not always make a good movie, especially if you let the screenwriter direct it. There are some things that work on paper and things that work on screen, and unfortunately there was no one connected with this film who knew the difference.

It’s a shame, because the flashback scenes are exceptionally well handled, with newcomers Lindley Joiner and Brooke Harmen as Sam Franks and Silvy Lewis. Sam is the son of a man who does not show him any warmth or affection, and he is not sure of how he will handle the feelings in his life. But he cannot help responding to Silvy. She is his closest friend and they communicate perfectly, whether they are challenging each other with a word association game, trading glimpses of strange and wonderful sights, or just sharing unspoken understandings.

When we first meet Sam, he is an adult speaking to a classroom of psychiatric students about how and why people block memories. His father’s death forces him to return to the place where he grew up, where it seems that his own repressed memories are waiting for him, along with a mysterious woman named Ruby (Helena Bonham Carter) who is having some memory problems of her own and is not even sure who she is. Sam meets her briefly on the train and then sees her try to drown herself. He rescues her, then takes her to the home he shared with his father to help her remember who she is. But the glimmers of memory seem to connect back to a devastating loss that Sam himself is not willing to remember.

The story is ambitious and impressionistic. Is Ruby real? Is Silvy? But it is also very clunky, especially with characters like Silvy’s father, who might as well be wearing a sign that says, “I am here to represent earthy wisdom” as try to handle the dialogue he is asked to deliver. The ending is both too revealing and not concrete enough. And the movie makes a crucial error in not exploring Sam’s role in the tragedy and how that affects his response to it.

Parents should know that the movie has a very sad death and some disturbing themes. Characters drink.

Families who see this movie should talk about the impulse to shut down our emotions to protect ourselves from being hurt. What will change for Sam and why?

Families who like this movie should see the better “Truly, Madly, Deeply.” They should also read the T.S. Eliot poem that gives the movie its name.

This movie feels like a script written for John Wayne that someone finally got around to filming 40 years later without any sense that times have changed. There are some good action sequences, but it is shamelessly one-sided and has cheesy wooden dialogue and even cheesier and numbingly predictable plot developments. This movie has every cliché except one — instead of a peppery commanding officer barking “That’s an order!” into a scratchy communications device, we get the underused Tom Skerritt pretty much telling his team to do whatever they think is best. Yeah, I’m sure that happens all the time.

Bruce Willis plays Lt. A.K. Waters, a guy who completes his missions. The latest is the rescue of an American (by marriage) doctor who runs a clinic in Nigeria that is in the path of rebel forces. The doctor is the kind you only see in movies or bodice-ripper novels — a beautiful woman whose shirt is always getting ripped in just the fetchingly right place while her make-up stays perfect, a spitfire who stamps her foot and tosses her fetchingly tousled hair and slaps A.K.’s cheek but later has to tell him that she now understands what an honorable and brave guy he really was all along.

Meanwhile, we get to see A.K. say, “I broke my own rule. I gave a ****.” For his own survival, he had shut down his emotions. But the beautiful doctor and the ravaged people taught him that what he should do is ignore his orders and put the lives of his men at risk. He and his men go into a town where the bad guys have already killed almost everyone and just mow the bad guys down with machine guns. He puts his men at risk. Many are killed and the others are severly wounded. He defies American diplomatic policy going back to the Monroe Doctrine. But the point of the movie seems to be that this is unqualifiedly a good thing and that in fact it is the job of a Navy Lieutenant to determine what our foreign policy should be and then just carry it out. There is no sense of the complexity of American intervention into a tragic civil conflict and no sense of the consequences of his choices.

A.K. may have learned to care, but that does not appear to be true of Willis. He does all right with the weary, man-of-the-world, let-me-handle-this moments. But, for example, when he is called upon to give a stirring “be a man” pep talk to a shaken Nigerian who has just seen everyone he cares about killed, the best he can do is bark, “Cowboy the **** up!” Monica Bellucci may be as talented as her press reports claim, but there is no way to tell that from her kittenish performance here.

Parents should know that the movie has very strong language, including racial epithets, intense peril, execution of non-military citizens, and brutal battle violence. Many characters are wounded or killed. A woman is mutilated.

Families who see this movie should talk about how countries decide whether to intervene in other countries’ fights. Does the movie intentionally comment on the current international situation? How well does or doesn’t it make its case? Why did A.K. stop caring and when did he start again?

Families who enjoy this movie will also appreciate “Platoon” and “Apocalypse Now.”