Plot: Luke hears about witches from his grandmother (Mai Zetterling). She says they have to wear gloves to hide their claw-like hands and shoes that fit their square feet without toes, and that they are bald and scratch under their wigs. They have a purple gleam in their eyes. They are evil and they steal children, who are never seen again.

Luke’s parents are killed, and his grandmother takes him to England. When she is diagnosed with mild diabetes, the doctor advises a vacation, so they go to Cornwall. As it happens, a convention of all the witches in England is staying in the same hotel, posing as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Their leader is slinky, black-clad Eva Ernst (Anjelica Huston). Luke overhears her telling the witches to wipe out all the children in England by turning them into mice, and he watches as she demonstrates by giving a potion to a greedy child named Bruno, transforming him into a mouse. The witches find Luke, and after a chase, capture him and turn him into a mouse. With the help of his grandmother, he steals some of the potion, and puts it into the soup to be served to the witches, who are all turned to mice, except for Eva’s assistant. Luke manages to get Eva’s trunkful of money, along with her notebook listing the addresses of all the witches in America, and he and his grandmother plan to go after them.

Discussion: This story has a genuinely twisted flavor that some children will love and others will find disturbing. Luke is exceptionally brave and enjoys being a mouse (in the movie, he is changed back, but in the book, he stays a mouse). Children may be upset not only by the witches, but by the death (offscreen) of Luke’s parents, and by his seeming indifference to it.

Questions for Kids:

Plot: Sara Crewe is brought to Miss Minchin’s boarding school by her adored father, and promises to be “a good soldier” and be brave about staying there without him. She is the brightest girl in the school, with exquisite manners, but her odd fancies and her father’s lavish provisions for her make the other girls uncomfortable or jealous. Her only friend in the school is Ermengarde, a pudgy girl who has trouble with her lessons and is ver grateful for Sara’s attentions. Sara also befriends Becky, a scullery maid.

Captain Crewe is missing in action. Miss Minchin takes everything from Sara and has her stay on at the school as a servant, living in an attic next to Becky. She continues to think of herself as “a good soldier,” and tries to imagine she is a princess undergoing a trial to keep her spirits up despite deprivation and abuse. One night, while she is sleeping, her little attic is transformed into a comfortable bower with delicious food. She shares it with her friends. It comes from the gentleman across the street. It turns out that he has been befriending her father, not knowing that he was a close friend of his late son. Sara goes to thank him, and her father, seeing her, regains his memory. Sara leaves the school, taking Becky with her.

Discussion: Unlike Cedric in “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” Sara Crewe cannot be accused of being perfect, though she is not as deliciously unlikable as Mary in “A Secret Garden.” It takes her a long time to lose her temper and snap at Ermengarde, but she does, and she almost gives up hope. Her imagination is an important source of solace for her, and in a sense she is a stand-in for the author herself when she uses it to create stories for her friends.

This is also a wonderful movie to use for a discussion of empathy and compassion. Although Sara is desperately hungry, she gives almost all her food to a beggar child who is even hungrier. Note the way that her compassion inspires others; the baker who watches her give the buns to the beggar child is so moved that she gives the child a home.

Questions for Kids:

This “Formula” is missing some key ingredients – like plot, characters, and dialogue.

Here is what it does have: the undeniably cool Samuel L. Jackson (who co-produced) in a kilt, fending off attackers with golf clubs and one funny joke. Unfortunately, it also has Samuel L. Jackson fending off some other attackers by inducing what I will tactfully call severe intestinal distress. And the joke is stolen from “Pulp Fiction,” in a much better scene featuring, um, let me think, yes, Samuel L. Jackson. It also has lots and lots of violence, with many people getting shot or blown up. And there are, oh, about 20 or 30 words in the script that are not profane, though none profane or otherwise that are particularly witty or memorable. It has kilt jokes, though none that are particularly original or memorable, plus I can’t figure out why so many people who live in England which is right next door to Scotland seem never to have seen a kilt before or at least know what it is called.

Jackson plays Elmo McElroy, a pharmacist by training who never got his license because of a drug conviction. So, he spent 30 years cooking up concoctions for a very mean drug dealer (played by rock star Meat Loaf) who not only speaks of himself in the third person but when doing so actually calls himself “The Lizard.” McElroy has an idea for one last big deal to buy his freedom. All he has to do is blow up all of his current customers and sell his latest invention, a drug 51 times more powerful than any ever invented before while avoiding the beautiful assassin who is trying to kill him.

Director Ronny Yu brings out the tired old Hong Kong camera tricks. Every other scene is either sped up or slowed down. He wastes the talented Robert Carlyle and Emily Mortimer. They play characters who have different motivations and even different personalities from scene to scene. They do whatever moves the story forward, which means whatever will cause the most destruction.

Parents should know that the movie has extreme graphic violence and non-stop profanity. The language used includes many exceptionally vivid British swear words, the literal meaning of which may not be familiar to some viewers. The characters are drug dealers (who generally themselves do not use drugs), and there is a generally lax attitude toward substance abuse of all kinds. There is one sex scene that is moderately explicit and brief non-sexual nudity.

Families who see this movie should talk about how McElroy developed the plan that would allow him to achieve his dream (which is not fully revealed until the credit sequence). Why was that dream so important to him? Speaking of dreams, they might like to talk about what it was about this material that made Samuel L. Jackson want to produce and star in it.

Families who enjoy this movie will enjoy the far better “The Transporter” and Jackson version of “Shaft.”

It is fifty years from now, in Washington, D.C., where familiar landmarks like the Washington Monument are surrounded by vertical highways and where computers in The Gap not only recognize you when you walk in the door but remember what you bought the last time you were there.

John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is a top detective in an experimental “pre-crime” unit. An experimental program wires the brains of genetically altered “precogs” (short for “precognition”) to computers that display their glimpses of the future. Anderton stands before the display like he is conducting a symphony and directs the images so that he can find the perpetrators before they kill. There is no way to know if everyone who is arrested under this program would in fact have become a murderer, but the fact is that since the program has been in place, there has not been a single murder in Washington. It has been so successful that it may be expanded to the whole country.

Anderton only feels alive when he is stopping a crime. When he is not at work, he numbs himself with drugs and watches his old home movies. He was so devastated by the abduction and probable murder of his son that his marriage fell apart. The only feeling he allows himself to feel is the satisfaction that he is sparing others from the agonizing pain that he has suffered. And then the precogs’ next vision identifies Anderton himself as the next killer. He has to run, and as he is running he has to figure out how you prove that you are not going to commit murder.

As with Blade Runner, also based on a story by Philip K. Dick, this is a very traditional noir-ish detective plot set in an ominous future where the apparent ease created by technology has overtaken human individuality. How much privacy and justice would you be willing to give up to bring the murder rate down to zero? Anderton finds that it is less than he thought.

The three precogs are named for mystery novel greats: Agatha, Arthur, and Dashiell (for Christie, Conan Doyle, and Hammett). They turn out to be the result of an experiment that went wrong. The most striking scene in the movie is Alderton’s meeting with the scientist who created them (a brilliant performance by Lois Smith). This is yet another tradition of movies – and before movies, fairy tales and sagas, as the hero makes a journey through thickets of plants to the isolated home of the wise person who will give him the answers he needs to help him solve the mystery. These creatures who can predict the future were ironically the product of a scientist who never anticipated the direction her experiment would take. Like Odin, Anderton must give up his eyes to find wisdom; it is only when he literally sees through someone else’s eyes that he can understand what he is seeing.

The movie is visually stunning, with brilliantly staged action sequences and vividly realized characters. Colin Farrell is mesmerizing as Anderton’s rival and Ingmar Bergman star Max von Sydow brings great depth to his role as Anderton’s boss.

Parents should know that the movie has some graphic violence, including sci-fi shooting, fist-fights, brutal and graphic murders, and suicides. Anderton abuses illegal drugs. We see a flashback of his son’s abduction. The movie also has some gross and grisly visuals, particularly when Anderton has his eyes replaced as a way of avoiding the retinal scans that the police use to track everyone’s whereabouts.

Families who see this movie should talk about how it relates to the challenges our FBI and CIA are facing right now in interrogating and imprisoning possible terrorists. Is it worth violating the rights of some innocent people in order to prevent another terrorist attack? How would Anderton answer that question at the beginning of the movie, and how would he answer it at the end? What about the rights of the precogs? Is it fair to ask them to give up any kind of normal life if it will prevent people from being killed? Families should also talk about Anderton’s inability to come to terms with the loss of his son. How do people go on after devastating losses? And they should talk about their own notions of what life will be like half a century from now.

Families who enjoy this movie might like to take a look at Spielberg’s other movie about the future, A.I. Critics and audiences were not enthusiastic about this collaboration with Stanley Kubrick (“2001”), but it makes an interesting companion piece to “Minority Report.” Families will enjoy Spielberg’s more successful movies about contact with extraterrestrials Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. They may also want to try Blade Runner.

More meditation than story, “Solaris” is a series of images and moments that address themes of identity, memory, and loss, ambitious in both form and content.

George Clooney plays Chris Kelvin, a psychiatrist who receives an urgent SOS from a friend on a space station. He gets there to find everyone dead except for an oddly detached crew member (Jeremy Davies) named Snow and the captain (Viola Davis), who won’t leave her room.

Snow says cryptically, “I could tell you what’s happening but I don’t know if that would tell you what’s happening.” And it turns out to be just that mysterious. Kelvin is awakened the next morning by his wife Rhea (Natascha McElhone), who is not only not on the space station with him but who died long before. He shoots her off into space, looking back at him out of the spacepod window. But the next morning, she is there again, and this time his longing for her overcomes his fear, and he reaches out to her.

It turns out that there is something about the planet Solaris below them that is sentient. It reaches into each of them to send them what appears to be the person they most want to see. Kelvin’s friend who called him to the spaceship saw – or conjured up – his young son, who even after the friend’s death is still racing around the space station, oddly ignored by the remaining humans. Snow says that his entity was his brother. Whatever the captain’s was, it is keeping her in her room, but it is unclear whether that is to say close to it or away from it.

The story is told impressionistically, as we go back and forth between the scenes on the space station and scenes from the past. Flickering through his struggle to understand what is going on, we see Kelvin and Rhea meeting, falling in love, and then we see his angry departure and her suicide. And then, back on the space station, it seems he does not want to understand it. He would rather lose himself in the fantasy (if that is what it is) than lose her again.

But just as that happens, Rhea (or whoever she is) does want to understand. She, or the part of her that is not Rhea, wants to be more than just a reflection of his memories, even if that means losing him and losing whatever it is she does have.

I suspect this will not be a popular movie. Most audiences, like Kelvin in the early part of the movie, want to understand things. But if you open yourself up to the ambiguities, this can be a very rewarding film.

Parents should know that the movie has a deeply unsettling feeling and some disturbing violence. We see Clooney’s bare behind as he tenderly embraces his wife. There is some strong language.

Families who see this movie should talk about how we can stay close to those we have lost.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy 2001: A Space Odyssey. They might also like to see the original Solaris, made in the Soviet Union in 1972.