One of Jackie Chan’s best Chinese films is being re-released in a dubbed version with a new score.

It is a sequel to the movie that made him an international star. Though it was made 15 years later than the first, it takes place immediately after the first, set in turn-of-the-century China. Wong Fei-Hong (Chan) is the son of a distinguished and wealthy doctor. As they board a crowded train following the purchase of herbs, Fei-Hong hides the container of ginseng in another man’s luggage, to avoid paying duty. Fei-Hong’s package is exchanged for one containing a valuable antique box. This leads to the discovery that many antiquities are being smuggled out of the country.

Fei-Hong is a specialist in “drunken boxing” (using liquor to “make the body looser and its pain threshhold higher”), and he uses his fighting skill to take on the bad guys.

The fight scenes are sensational. Chan is the most agile and acrobatic screen fighter ever. His split-second timing, imagination, utter fearlessness, and sense of humor produce mesmerizing action sequences. An early fight in a confined space beneath a train car is extraordinary, and the 20-minute final fight sequence is stunning. In this movie, even the housemaid and stepmother are kick-boxers, all the furniture seems made of balsa wood, and gangs of ax-wielding marauders can be vanquished by three or four heroes.

Fans of Chan’s American films may need to make some cultural adjustments to enjoy this movie. Although the new score and dubbed dialogue are attempts to make the movie more accessible to an American audience (one character even uses a Yiddishism to scoff at a plant: “Rootabega, shmootabega!”), some of the conventions and behavior may seem exaggerated and strange. The tone may also seem uneven, with slapstick one moment, a parent beating a child in the next, and a sad death later on. Parents may want to provide some political and cultural context to help kids understand the depiction of oppressed factory workers and the choice of the English ambassador and factory owner as the bad guy. (Interestingly, the Chinese actor portraying a bad guy is dubbed with an English accent as well!) The three stars are for those who care about what happens between fight scenes. For those who don’t care, it gets 4 1/2 stars.

Parents should know that the movie features non-stop fighting, mostly of the cartoon variety. One important character is killed, but most of the time the characters are unhurt or, if they are hurt, the wounds disappear before the next scene. There are are few uses of the s-word and other profanities. Some parents will be concerned about “drunken boxing,” in which liquor affects Fei-Hong the way spinach affects Popeye. As Fei-Hong’s father tells him, though, “A boat can float in water — and sink in it.” And when Fei-Hong overdoes the liquor, he is very sorry. Fei-Hong’s father beats him and disowns him, but later takes him back with love and pride. Fei-Hong has a warm relationship with his young and beautiful stepmother, but she is very manipulative, faking crying to get her way.

Part of the fun of a Jackie Chan movie, like a James Bond movie, is in seeing how he makes use of various props and gadgets. Kids should also note that he is as much a master of physics as of strategy in fighting. Watch how he makes use of his understanding of properties like weight, torque, and balance as he turns the enemies’ strengths against them. Watch, too, how he learns from his elders about going on from mistakes (“Tomorrow brings a whole new journey.”)

Fans of this movie will also enjoy Chan’s recent “Shanghai Noon.”

Movies are made for heist stories. Great robberies can be fun to watch on stage or read about in a book, but movies provide an immediacy and economy of narrative that no other form of story-telling can touch. Give us something worth a lot of money, whether it is money, jewels, or a secret formula, put it somplace hard to break into, whether it is a museum, a bank, or an enemy compound, and an anti-hero to root for, and we’re ready to enjoy.

The pattern may be familia, but it is reliable. Set out the task and explain the obstacles, come up with clever ways to get around the obstacles, then show us the heist itself, throwing in a few unexpected challenges and some even more clever on-the-spot problem-solving, add in some colorful characters with a few twists and turns in their relationships, and we will settle back and enjoy.

“The Score” benefits from this formula almost as much as it benefits from its Mount Rushmore of acting power. The story might not have much that’s new, but it is still fun to see a thief look at an intimidating new safe utterly undaunted, explaining that “If somebody can build it, somebody can unbuild it.” The movie’s real luster comes from stars Marlon Bando, Robert DeNiro, Edward Norton, and Angela Bassett, who are thrilling to watch under any circumstances. You can’t help wishing, though, to see them under other circumstances. I’ll be the rehearsals for some of these scenes were more fun to watch than the scenes themselves.

DeNiro plays Nick, a careful thief who plans meticulously, keeps his cool when the unexpected occurs, and lives by two rules: work alone and never rob in the city you live in. He is willing to think about breaking those rules when Max, his long-time fence Brando) offers him a job so big that he can retire and live happily ever after with the woman he adores (Bassett) and the jazz club he owns.

The job will require working with Jack (Norton), who came up with idea (stealing a priceless gold scepter studded with jewels) and who has done all of the prep work (posing as a retarded man to get a janitor’s job in the building, getting access to all of the technical specifications for the security system), but who does not know how to crack the safe. If they are going to do this job, Nick and Jack will have to work together.

There are not many surprises here. Of course Nick and Jack will have some trouble learning to work together. They will have to rely on a mother-ridden computer nerd to get the key access codes. Nick and his girlfriend will have a disagreement about this “one last job.” And there will be both honor and dishonor among the thieves. This would be a B movie without the world-class talent on screen, but even they can’t lift it to more than a B-plus. It is fun to watch them spark each other, though, and for my money, Norton (who does have the showiest role) takes the prize.

Parents should know that the movie is rated R for language, brief drug use, sexual references, and a brief, non-expliit sexual situation. The heroes of the movie are all theives, and there is no suggestion that there is anything wrong or even any harm in stealing an historic treasure.

Families who see this movie should talk about the conversation Nick and Jack have about taking risks, and how their views differ. They may also want to talk about how Nick was firm about his rules until enough money was offered to change his mind.

Families who enjoy this movie will enjoy some heist movie classics, like “Topkapi,” “The Great Train Robbery,” and “The Lavender Hill Mob.”

This movie has a lot of surface appeal, but at its core it is as vacant as the story’s main character.

It tries to be a sort of “Sixth Sense” with sex, a trippy mind game movie about a rich, successful, handsome, but superficial man named David (Tom Cruise), whose life turns upside down when he meets a woman who stirs him (because she is “guileless”). But then he must pay the price for his casual negligence. A woman becomes jealous, and drives them both off an embankment. She is killed, and he is badly hurt and disfigured. The life he took for granted is shattered.

At this point, a fairly conventional narrative is shattered, like David’s arm and his face. It becomes impossible to say much more about it without spoiling the surprises. David tries to piece together his story and we do the same, though sometimes based on conflicting information.

Like last year’s “Cast Away,” this is something of a vanity production. I suspect that Tom Hanks created the ultimate acting exercise for himself, based on what he feared most – being separated from his family. Cruise, who also produced this movie by purchasing the rights to the original, Spanish-language version, has done the same here. He may have chosen what he fears most – losing his looks and easy grace, losing his knack for owning the room. And, like Hanks, he selected a story that provides the opportunity for tour-de-force acting. In many scenes, Cruise’s famous face is covered with a latex mask, leaving him only his body and his eyes to convey all of the character’s emotions.

Cruise works hard and makes some arresting choices. Diaz turns in a terrific performance and Tilda Swinton is excellent in a brief role as an executive. But Kurt Russell seems a little lost as a therapist, and Penelope Cruz, repeating her role from the original, says her lines as though she is not really fluent in English yet.

Parents should know that the movie has very strong language and explicit sexual situations and references. One character smothers another, and a different character kills herself and is unsuccessful at killing her lover. The facial disfigurement is graphically portrayed and may be very upsetting to some viewers.

Families who see this movie should talk about why David feels unsatisfied at the beginning of the movie, and whether he should have made a pass at the woman his best friend brought to a party. How much of the world around us do we control? How much would you like to control? If given the choice presented to David at the end of the movie, what would you choose?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy “The Sixth Sense,” “The Matrix,” and possibly “A.I.” They might also like to see “Waking Life,” an animated film that makes many of the same points.

This movie has a terrific cast and some very funny moments. But there is an overall slackness and an underlying cynicism that takes this outside of the category of mindless fun and makes it uncomfortably distasteful.

Martin Lawrence plays a thief named Kevin who falls in love with a pretty English anthropologist named Amber (Carmen Ejogo). She gives him a lucky ring that once belonged to her father. He and a pal named Berger (John Leguizamo) break into what they think is the deserted vacation home of Max (Danny De Vito), only to find that Max is there, having an assignation with Miss September. Max captures Kevin and calls the police. When they arrest Kevin, Max sees the ring and tells the police that it is his. They believe him, and make Kevin give Max the ring. Kevin spends the rest of the movie trying to get revenge – and trying to get the ring back, too.

The movie’s underlying premise is that everyone is a thief and that the only difference between the businessman, the politician, the lawyer, and the man who steals is that at least the professional thief is honest about what he does. Some people, like Donald Westlake, the author of the book that inspired this movie, can make that premise seem wickedly delicious. But screenwriter and director Sam Weisman, remove the satiric twists to make it into a star vehicle for Lawrence and the result lacks any sense of dramatic build-up. Instead of two wily adversaries, it is so one-sided in favor of Lawrence’s character that any narrative arc evaporates. It’s just a string of skits.

That might be all right – some of the skits are pretty funny and I don’t insist on logic or political correctness or even trivial consistencies in a movie. But there is something unsettling about the underlying assumptions here, especially the smug self-righteousness of the thieves (including Max). Ask us to believe that Kevin is a crook and the hero of the movie, and we can accept it. But it is a little harder to accept that his girlfriend is an educated, loyal, devoted person who is happy to be a “perky” waitress and wait up nights for Kevin to come home from a hard night of packing other people’s things into his bag of loot. The mincing gay detective and the evil businessman who uses Yiddish and his long-suffering lawyer and mistress are tired stereotypes. And too much simply does not make sense. The last scene in particular is nothing more than a chance to put Lawrence in a huge Afro and pretend that everyone is living happily ever after.

Parents should know that the movie includes drinking, smoking, swearing, and sexual references and situations. A woman has sex with a man who does her a favor, and this is shown as charming and even romantic. The stereotypes mentioned above will make many families uncomfortable.

Families who see this movie should talk about the idea that everyone is a thief of one kind or another, and what they think would be a fair resolution.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy some of Lawrence’s other movies, like “Big Momma’s House” and “Bad Boys” (both for more mature audiences).

Writer Norman Maclean’s autobiographical story of growing up in Montana with his brother Paul begins, “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing.”

Their Presbyterian minister father taught Norman and his brother Paul schoolwork, religion, and fishing as though they were all one subject. He was strict and thorough in all of those lessons. Reverand Mclean believed that no one who did not know how to fish properly should be permitted to disgrace a fish by catching it. He used a metronome to time their four-count stroke between the positions of ten o’clock and two o’clock.

Norman, though more sober, loved the wild streak in Paul that made him “tougher than any man alive” but feared that it would destroy him. And it did. While Norman becomes a professor of English literature and falls in love with Jessie Burns (Emily Lloyd), Paul becomes a reporter and gets into trouble drinking and gambling. Norman is called by the police to get Paul out of jail, and ultimately, he is called again when Paul is killed.

One of the tragic realizations of growing up is that you can love someone without being able to understand or save them. Like Norman, Jessie has a brother who is self-destructive, though his part of the story is played more for comedy. In today’s terms, Jessie’s mother would be considered an enabler because she does not impose any limits on her son, and does not insist that he recognize the consequences of his behavior.

Parents should know that the movie has some mature material, including family tragedy, alcohol abuse, a sexual situation (nudity), and prostitutes. A Native American woman is insulted by bigots.

Families who see this movie should discuss what they would do in Norman’s position. What would you have said to Paul? When? Why didn’t Norman say those things? If you were Jessie, what would you say to Neal? Why was it important to have Neal’s story in the movie? What does Norman mean when he says that his father saw no difference between religion and flyfishing?

Director Redford also addresses the theme of loving families who do not communicate pain well, with one member of the family suffering the consequences in two other movies, “Ordinary People” and “Quiz Show.”