This is a ravishing fairy tale/epic, and the best movie of the year.

It is passionately romantic — the story of two sets of star-crossed lovers who face enormous obstacles, within themselves as well as those imposed by the outside world. It is a thrilling adventure saga that includes a magical 400-year-old sword called “Green Destiny,” a warrior who must avenge the murder of his master, a handsome bandit, the spoiled daughter of a high-ranking official who dreams of the freedom to do what she wants, and the bitter villain who wants to destroy them all. It is dazzling, with breathtaking landscapes, gorgeous costumes, and magnificent cello music played by Yo Yo Ma. And it has, unquestionably, the most brilliantly staged fight scenes ever put on film, possibly the best that ever will be put on film.

Director Ang Lee is best known in the United States for indoor dramas about families struggling with their feelings and with societal constructs of reputation and honor: “The Ice Storm” and “Sense and Sensibility.” He has described this movie as “‘Sense and Sensibility’ with kick-boxing,” and that is indeed very apt. As in Jane Austen’s novel and his adaptation, this is the story of two women, one led too much by her heart, one led too much by her head, and of the men they love.

Michele Yeoh plays Yu Shu Lien, who runs a company that provides secure transport for shipments of goods to be sold. She is visited by Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat), who has come to give his famous sword to Sir Te, a mutual friend, for safekeeping. Li has been a warrior-hero, using the Green Destiny sword to fight for justice. He is tired of killing and wants to retire to a life of meditation, but instead of enlightenment he has found “endless sorrow,” and that “something was pulling me back.” He has one unfinished obligation — to avenge the death of his master at the hands of a villain named Jade Fox. And it may be that there was something else pulling him back, his love, never expressed, for Yu.

At the home of Sir Te, Yu meets another guest, the pampered daughter of a governor named Jen Yu (Ziyi Zhang). Jen and Yu each dream of freedom. That night, the sword is stolen. Yu races after the masked thief to get it back. It turns out they have both achieved the highest levels of fighting skills, so advanced that they can actually defeat gravity, levitating effortlessly to float from rooftop to rooftop.

The thief has ties to Jade Fox. And Jen, soon to enter into an arranged marriage, has a secret love, the leader of a pack of desert bandits.

The fight scenes, staged by Yuen Wo-Ping (of “The Matrix”) are balletic masterpieces. Like the dance numbers of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, they are both mesmerizingly graceful and more eloquent than dialogue. Jen takes on an entire restaurant full of attackers just for sport and spite. She twirls softly down from an upper story to the ground floor, just before she annihilates them with a blinding fury of fists and feet. Jen fights Lo (Chen Chang, the bandit leader who stole her comb, with a passion that allows them to open their hearts to each other. She fights Yu, the one person she thinks can understand her, because she is impetuous and proud, and because that is the only release she has in a world of constrictions and restrictions.

The story is told with great subtlety and power, giving it the quality of a myth or a collective dream. Yu reveals the identity of the masked thief by quietly allowing a teacup to slip out of her hands. When one person is able to catch it with a lightning-fast motion before it hits the floor, Yu knows that her suspicion was correct. When Li touches Yu’s hand for the first time, it is a moment of heartbreaking intimacy. The quest for honor and justice could be set in the old West, in ancient Greece, in medieval times, in a 1930’s San Francisco detective story, or in some Luke Skywalker-esque space fantasy. Its themes are enduring because they are inside all of us.

Parents should know that the movie features a lot of martial arts battles. Most are bloodless, but one character is killed when a blade is hurtled into his forehead. Major characters are killed, and one death could be interpreted as suicide. Although the women in the movie are treated with complete equality and are equal to or superior to the men in judgment and combat, one female character expresses bitterness that she was not permitted to train as a warrior. There is brief mild language.

Families who see this movie should talk about how we balance our heads and our hearts to forge lives that are grounded in honor and in love.

Families who see this movie will also enjoy seeing other movies starring Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun Fat, but nothing they have done before comes close to this masterpiece. Families might also like to watch the director’s Sense and Sensibility to decide whether they agree with his assessment of their similarity.

George (Om Puri), who is Pakistani, marries Ella (Linda Bassett) and they settle down in Manchester to have seven children and run a fish and chips shop called George’s English Chippy.

As the movie opens in 1971, George returns unexpectedly from the mosque just as Ella and the children are marching in a church parade. George stops to watch, not seeing his family scurry down a side street. It is important to George that his children adopt the religion and customs of Pakistan, and it becomes even more urgent for him as events make him feel helpless and threatened. First, his oldest son, Nazir objects to an arranged marriage and bolts in the middle of the wedding ceremony. Second, it seems that in all the family chaos, they have neglected to have their youngest son circumcised. They belatedly take care of that, and the pain and humiliation lead the child to hide inside his parka, the hood covering his head and much of his face 24 hours a day. Third, India is at war with Pakistan, and George’s fear of the loss of his homeland and culture makes him even more concerned about passing on that culture to his children.

Ella will not let the children criticize their father. They go to the mosque, grudgingly, but they feel like Brits and only one of the seven wants to live according to Pakistani traditions. The others want the freedom of Western culture — to go to discos, study art, play soccer, eat pork sausage, and date whomever they want. They may feel English, but they look Pakistani, and George fears that the culture they want will never accept them. His neighbors support a politician named Enoch Powell who is calling for repatriation of foreigners. But George and the neighbor do not know that their children are romantically involved.

George becomes more rigid. He arranges marriages for two other sons, without consulting his wife. Finally, he becomes abusive, his frustration exploding into violence against his family.

This award-winning movie is based on the experiences of its author. The family moments, beautifully performed by the entire cast, have a tragi-comic authenticity. When George’s rage finally shatters the family’s fragile compromises, the movie struggles to recover.

Parents should know that the movie has very strong language, bathroom scenes, explicit sexual references, including depiction of male and female genitals, sexual situations, and severe wife and child abuse.

Families who see the movie should talk about the cultural heritages that are important to them and how they balance that with the pressure to assimilate. They should also talk about how husbands and wives from different backgrounds create a home that respects both of them, and how people sometimes live with compromises that may seem intolerable to others. Families who like this movie will also like “Mississippi Masala,” about a romance between an Indian woman and a black man.

William Tensy (Gene Hackman), a chain-smoking tobacco zillionaire, goes into a little rant about the ridiculous notion that second-hand smoke is harmful and turns to blast a cloud of cigarette smoke at his parrot, who immediately keels over. If only the second-hand comedy in this movie was as powerful. It is clear that the dream cast members are all enjoying themselves immensely, but that does not translate into much fun for the audience.

Sigourney Weaver plays Max, a con woman who marries wealthy men, denies them sex, and then sues them for divorce when they make a pass at her partner, Page (Jennifer Love Hewitt), who is also her daughter. Weaver and Hewitt are at their most delectable in outfits that Erin Brockovich could only dream of. If there were ever an Oscar for cleavage, this movie would be the one to beat.

After they take New Jersey chop shop owner Dean (Ray Liotta), Page is restless and wants to go off on her own. When they run into a little problem with the IRS, they agree to take on one last big con together and head off for Palm Beach. Max wants to go after Tensy, but Page is drawn to a sweet bartender named Jack (Jason Lee) who owns some land worth $3 million. Max’s challenges include a ferocious guard dog of a housekeeper (“Saturday Night Live’s” Nora Dunn), and Tensy’s constant coughing and terrible tobacco-stained teeth. Page’s challenge is keeping her plan secret from her mother and keeping herself from falling in love with Jack.

It isn’t a terrible movie, but it just does not work very well. We like the characters too much to enjoy their greedy behavior but we do not like them enough to care whether they end up happily. Max and Page are awful to just about everyone and have no sense that their behavior hurts other people. They are selfish and amoral, operating entirely out of expediency with no thought for the consequences for themselves or others. The script tries to make us believe that this is all because Max is trying to protect Page from being hurt, but that is a con job that we just don’t fall for. And despite a few con-job twists, the script is just weak and unoriginal. In real life, these con women would not fool Forrest Gump. Can it possibly be true that this is the second movie in two months to have a supposedly funny scene in which the genitals are knocked off of a nude male statue? This one is even less funny than the one in “The Wedding Planner.”

Aside from the cleavage already mentioned, the best reason to watch the movie is to see Weaver and Hewitt doing their bombshell best and Hackman’s odious performance as the mark who just might not be worth marrying to get $20 million.

Parents should know that this is yet another example of the MPAA’s comedy rule, meaning that material that would get an R rating in a drama gets a PG-13 rating because it is supposed to be funny. The movie contains continual sexual humor that can get very raunchy, including references to group sex. There is no nudity and nothing too graphic onscreen except for the statue. It has very strong language, especially for a PG-13, smoking (comic) and drinking. As noted, the main characters are con women with no concerns about stealing from anyone and everyone.

Families who see the movie should talk about how Max tried to protect Page from hurt, and whether that is wise or even possible. What does it mean to say, “you might as well get hurt in your own healthy ways?” What was it about Jack that made Page think differently about herself and about the possibilities? What do you have to think about the world to be able to rob everyone you meet? Why did it take Page so long to tell Jack her real name, and what did it mean when she did?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy one of the all-time classics, “The Lady Eve,” about a father-daughter team of con artists, and “The Sting” (some mature material), about two con men who take on an even bigger crook for one of the most intricate and satisfying con jobs of all time.

Elizabeth Curtis (Deborah Kerr) hires the best “white hunter” in Africa (Stewart Granger as dashing Allan Quartermain) to help her find her husband, who was lost searching for the legendary King Solomon’s diamond mines. At first, he refuses, saying that women have no place on safari. When she offers twenty times his usual fee, he accepts, but he remains skeptical about her motives and about her ability to survive the trip. In the traditional “road movie” fashion, they develop respect and affection through their adventures. This is the best of the many versions of the classic adventure novel by H. Rider Haggard. The story (and the performances) are a bit creaky, but it is an old-fashioned technicolor spectacular, with breathtaking and Oscar-winning cinematography. Filmed on location in Kenya, and the then- Tangynika and Belgian Congo, the out-takes from this movie were used in several other movies, including the otherwise poor 1977 remake. The footage of the landscapes and of the animals is strikingly clear and vivid, especially an unforgettable shot of a just-uncurling brand-new baby alligator and the scenes of the Watusi dancing. NOTE: Some children may be disturbed by the violence, and others may be upset by the scene in which Elizabeth Curtis admits that she did not love her husband, and that she is seeking him out of guilt rather than devotion.

Sandra Bullock the producer found a pretty good vehicle for Sandra Bullock the actress in this variation on the classic Hollywood “makeover movie.” As in predecessors from “Cinderella” to “My Fair Lady” to “Pretty Woman,” this is at its core the story of an ugly duckling who finds empowerment and a boyfriend after a few pointers on good grooming and accessorizing. But Bullock’s performance and a couple of new twists on the classic formula make it a pleasant and entertaining effort.

Bullock plays the ironically named “Grace,” an FBI agent who lives for her job. She gets in trouble for not following orders and is considered so expendable that she is the one sent to Starbucks for coffee. She is more at home subduing a suspect than having a conversation with an attractive man, and spends more time with her gun than she does with a hairbrush or make-up mirror. When the FBI needs an agent to go undercover as a contestant in a beauty pageant (sorry, I mean “scholarship pageant”), she is the only one who might be able to pass. So the Bureau hires Victor Melling (Michael Caine), a consultant, to oversee her transformation and her transition into the world of big hair and baton twirling.

There are few new jokes to be made about beauty pageants, but Bullock delivers the lines as though no one had ever said them before. The plot is so flimsy that it would disappear if I tried to explain it, but Bullock plays it as though it is really happening. She gets some fine support from Caine and from Candice Bergen and William Shatner as the pageant’s director and master of ceremonies, both far more three-dimensional than Benjamin Bratt as Grace’s FBI colleague/Prince Charming.

Parents should know that the movie has some strong language, a bulimia joke, some sexual references (“No wonder you’re still a virgin!”), including a lesbian contestant, and there are various shoot-outs and scenes of peril (no serious damage). Grace makes a joke about praying that some people might find insensitive.

Families who see this movie should talk about why “in place of friends and relationships, has grumpiness and a gun.” What does the incident from Grace’s childhood tell us about the way she turned out? Was she afraid to get close to anyone? Grace gets in trouble for not following orders in the beginning, and it turns out that she was wrong. But later on, she refuses to follow orders again, and urges her colleague to “throw out the rulebook.” What rules did she follow? How did she decide? What did she learn from the other girls? What did the villain hope to accomplish? How?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy “Some Like it Hot” and “Smile.”