Star Trek has a language and following all its own. For those who are not devotees of the series, the way the characters speak often needs to be decoded, causing the viewer to spend more time trying to figure out what the characters are saying rather then why. After a while, if the story doesn’t make itself clear somehow, the viewer loses interest.

This is important to remember during the latest installment of the ever going “Star Trek” franchise, “Star Trek: Nemesis.” The story follows the “Next Generation” crew and their captain, Jean-Luc Picard (the always wonderful Patrick Stewart). A clone of Picard’s younger self, Shinzon, has somehow overtaken the Romulan senate and wants to make peace. Picard and his crew don’t trust this sneaky “clone,” and are suspicious of his origins and what they portend. Of course, treachery is afoot and the crew must stop the Romulans before they destroy or conquer, well, pretty much everything.

The series has had its up and down moments, ranging from excellent, (“The Wrath of Kahn”), to overly silly (“Star Trek V”). It has also had its share of “we’re running low on new ideas,” and “Nemesis” skirts the edges of that territory.

The film does have a few good action sequences, and some solid acting from Stewart, Brett Spiner as the android Data, and Tom Hardy as Shinzon. Hardy’s performance carries the movie in many of its otherwise sub-par scenes, and he and Stewart give the dialogue a lot of help. But the film is too muddled in “Trek talk” and way too overdramatic at times. Its conclusion is not just easy to predict, but laughable. “Star Trek: Nemesis” is not a bad film, but one that will most likely only leave the ever-devoted “Trekkers” as the only completely-satisfied customers.

Parents should know the film contains some violence, most of it sci-fi oriented. Lots of laser beam shooting occurs, almost all of it bloodless. The villain cuts his hand at one point and gives the bloody knife to Data. The beginning contains a rather intense and scary sequence in which a Romulan places a disk in the senate which lets out “spores” that land on the Romulans. These “spores” make the aliens begin to wither away, and then turn them to stone. One then crashes on the floor. There is also a quite surprising and graphic love scene in which two senior officers who have recently married begin to sleep together. During the scene, Commander Troy begins to see Shinzon instead of her husband, and struggles to get him away from her.

Families who see this film should discuss the many positive messages in the film. “Star Trek” has always been about gaining peace, and unlike many movies now, one gets the sense the crew does try to use the least amount of violence necessary to accomplish this mission. Parents may want to discuss why this is, and point out Picard’s constant reluctance to fight. Parents also should discuss the idea of forgiveness preached in the film. Why does it bother Picard so that this clone reminds him of his former self? Another discussion topic may be how we deal with loss, since a major character does meet his end in this film. Why do Picard and his crew toast their fallen comrade and hide their grief?

Families who enjoyed this movie will also like “Star Trek: First Contact,” “The Empire Strikes Back,” and “Minority Report.”

Even by the low standards of Saturday Night Live-alumni movies, and by the even lower standards of Adam Sandler-produced movies, “The Hot Chick” is simply excruciating. It is loathsome, offensive, vile, and, even worse, it is not funny. To add insult to injury, it is also much too long.

This is yet another body-switching movie. There is a pointless introductory scene in which an ancient princess uses some enchanted earrings to switch bodies with a servant girl so that she can get out of an arranged marriage. Cut to the present day where Rob Schneider plays a petty thief who switches bodies with a bitchy blonde high school princess named Jessica (Rachel McAdams), after she steals the earrings from a store specializing in ancient artifacts.

The rest of the movie is about Jessica (now played by Schneider) trying to get back into her old body. Along the way, we are subjected to horrifyingly awful jokes about the different ways men and women go to the bathroom, a cross-dressing child, priest molestation of young boys, the thief (now in Jessica’s body) having to buy tampons, bulimia, places to hide marijuana, parents of different races, homosexuality, and incest.

There is a lot of blame to go around here – from producer Adam Sandler (who appears in dreadlocks long enough to make the same joke about marijuana three different times in another one of his stupid silly voices) to star and co-writer Rob Schneider (who, bi-racial himself, should be especially ashamed of the racist stereotyping of a Korean woman and her bi-racial daughter), to director Tom Brady, who brings out the worst in his cast and has no sense of comic timing whatsoever. But we have to reserve a special blame category for the MPAA, which gave this horrendously crude and vulgar film a PG-13 rating, when its content is closer to NC-17.

Parents should know that the movie includes extremely explicit and offensive humor in just about every category. A father complains to his daughter (not knowing it is his daughter) that his wife won’t give him oral sex (making this the second movie this season with such a parent-child conversation, after “8 Mile”). A mother grabs the person she thinks is their gardener (not knowing it is her daughter) and kisses him passionately. A child is a cross-dresser. Teenagers drink at a bar and a character talks about places to “hide weed.” There are jokes that are racist and homophobic.

Families who like this movie should see the far better “Tootsie” and “All of Me.”

Plot: When Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) and Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon) “encounter” a UFO, they travel to its landing site, Devil’s Tower, Wyoming. Jillian is seeking her son, who disappeared with the alien ship, but Roy is strangely compelled to go in a way that is incomprehensible to him. Obsessed with recreating the monolithic Devil’s Tower out of shaving cream, the mashed potatoes on his dinner plate, and finally out of mud, in a massive sculpture that takes over the living room, Roy drives his family away.

Roy meets Jillian, also drawn to the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. They find that they are not the only ones who feel they have been called there. French scientist Claude Lacombe (Francois Truffaut), a top-secret U.S. government installation, and others feeling the same compulsion are there to meet the enormous spacecraft, which returns dozens of humans taken over decades (including Jillian’s son). Then the aliens leave the ship, and Roy joins the group boarding the ship in an intergalactic exchange program. In the reissue, which added some new scenes, we get a glimpse of the inside of the spacecraft.

Discussion: This is a thrilling adventure story and a brilliant example of the art and craft of movie making. The craft is in the way the story is told. It unfolds with extraordinary power, involving us as much in Roy’s inexplicable compulsion as in Jillian’s search for her son. The art is in the story itself, the idea not just that “something” is out there, but that it is something wonderful. Watch how Spielberg lets us know that the aliens are friendly. In one of several tributes to Disney, the interplay between the large and small spaceships has a fond, protective, almost maternal quality. This is a device Disney uses over and over, perhaps most memorably with the dancing mushrooms in “Fantasia.” And there is something very believable and compelling about the way that the aliens use music to communicate, and to teach the people on earth. They use art as well — Roy’s sculptures and Jillian’s drawings help the message to reach their conscious minds. Spielberg creates a sense of wonder not just in Jillian’s son Barry (Cary Guffey) but in the adult characters and in the viewers, making them children again, with the aliens as the “adults,” who reassuringly, look and behave like gentle children, giving us a sense of comfort.

Questions for Kids:

Why was music a good way for the aliens to communicate with the people on Earth?

What did the scientist mean when he said it was the first day of school?

What movie did Roy want his family to see? What does that tell you about him? How does that movie relate to this one? (Hint–listen for a familiar song.)

Do you think aliens will come to Earth? What will they be like?

What do you think would happen in a sequel to this movie?

Connections: Francois Truffaut was a distinguished French film critic and director (“The 400 Blows,” “Small Change”).

Activities: Kids can draw a picture of what they think the aliens’ planet looks like. Do they live in cities? What kinds of inventions do they have that we don’t have? Make a model or draw a picture of the planets in our solar system. Go the library or a museum to get information about space travel. Check out NASA on the World Wide Web at http://www.nasa.gov to get information about the next space mission. Or write to The SETI Institute, 2035 Landings Drive, Mountain View, CA 94043 for the latest research on UFOs and extraterrestrials.

Comedians use humor to transcend norms and act outside the rules of civility to express the feelings we strive to keep inside – anger, insecurity, resentment, and selfishness. Many of them assume the freedoms of childhood to unleash the superego and say and do and grab and insult without any restrictions. Adam Sandler is very much in this tradition. His comedies are based on essentially the same character — a sweet but immature guy with an anger management problem. They have been been very successful with adolescent (and formerly adolescent) male audiences, topping the box office almost without exception.

Writer-director P.T. Anderson (“Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia”) has taken that same character and created around it a highly original and intelligent movie. It’s still about a sweet but immature guy with an anger management problem, so I can’t say that the performance is a stretch for Sandler, but he deserves a lot of credit for playing that character straight, without the distance and comfort (and hostility) of laugh lines.

Sandler plays Barry, a man whose affable exterior hides enormous fear and fury. We first see him in a bright blue suit sitting at a desk in a bare corner of a warehouse, talking on the phone to some low-level staff person about the intricacies of a promotion that gives frequent flyer miles for purchases of groceries. Two stunning, almost hallucinatory events occur that no one seems to see but him. First, there is a massive truck accident that just seems to evaporate. Then, a small piano-looking instrument called a harmonium somehow just seems to appear on the sidewalk. He picks it up and brings it inside, and we see that he has an office in the warehouse and is in fact the boss of a business that sells novelty toilet plungers.

All of this tells us that we are embarking on a journey inside Barry, who through the course of the movie will unstop his clogged up feelings, chart a course between the sacred and the profane, and reach toward love and harmony. And it works very, very well on this level, as we see Barry no longer able to bear his current life and therefore willing to take risks, some wiser than others, to allow him to change. Anderson shows us Barry over and over again running through hallways. He confides to his brother-in-law that he needs to talk to someone. He calls a 900 number just to have someone to talk to. Both violate his trust in the most shattering manner, and both unleash siblings (played by real-life siblings) who abuse him emotionally and physically.

His fascination with the frequent flyer mile opportunity leads him to buy hundreds of boxes of chocolate pudding. Even though he does not yet know where he wants to go, and has never really been anywhere, at some level he knows he yearns to go somewhere. When he meets Lena (Emily Watson), he feels that she is what he is longing for. He tries to use his absurd pudding miles to follow her to Hawaii, and when that does not work, he jettisons all dodges and maneuvers and just pays for a ticket. In a tradition that goes back to Shakespeare, it is only in an exotic natural location away from home that the lovers can tell each other the truth and find one another. And, as tradition requires, there is a second-act complication as Barry’s call to the sex line results in a disastrous attempt at extortion.

Watson is luminous, if enigmatic, as the warm-hearted girl who is a little surprised at how drawn she is to Barry. Anderson regular Philip Seymour Hoffman is outstanding as the would-be extortionist.

Audiences are likely to feel a bit punch drunk themselves as they try to make sense of this odd romantic journey with its offbeat dualities, combining extremes of chaos and harmony and love and anger. In one scene Barry and Lena tenderly kiss as they describe the violence of the way they would like to express their feelings. Still, Lena is so completely warm and healthy that the story seems lopsided, even if seen from Barry’s point of view. But it is undeniably an arresting and challenging film. Those expecting an Adam Sandler movie or a romantic comedy will be disappointed, but those who are open to something a little twisted and messy will find it very rewarding.

Parent should know that this movie has a good deal of mature material, including very strong language, sexual references and situations including a call to a telephone sex line, and violence. Parents of Adam Sandler fans should know that this is very different from his other movies and should exercise caution in allowing teenagers to see it.

Families who see this movie should talk about the use of symbols in the movie. Why is the word “love” spelled out in the abrasions on Barry’s knuckles? Compare that to Robert Mitchum’s famous portrayal of a con man posing as a preacher in “Night of the Hunter,” with “love” tattooed across the knuckles of one hand and “hate” tattooed across the other.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy “Raising Arizona.” Families looking for a more conventional Adam Sandler comedy will enjoy “The Wedding Singer” and “Happy Gilmore.”