Minnie Driver does her best, but, sadly, she gets no help from the movie’s producers (14 of them!). She gets no help from the screenwriter, whose only previous credit was Jerry Springer’s “Ringmaster.” Driver does not even get much help from first-time feature director (but two-time Best Actress) Sally Field. In other words, this is a bad movie.

The people in this movie can’t even be referred to as “characters” because they do not behave like any human being who ever thought, spoke, or breathed. The actors might as well be wearing signs that say, “Plot device!” as they are moved around the set like chess pieces, because that is the only possible explanation for their behavior. And basic elements of plot are slapdash or just missing.

Mona is a little girl who lives with a mother who does not seem to care much about her and with her mother’s out-of-work boyfriend, who does not like her at all. So, she makes her bedroom into a private world, decorated with cheery little signs that say things like, “Never give up!” and “U can do it!” For her, beauty pageants are a vision of perfection, grace, and validation. So, she decides that what she needs to make her feel beautiful and loved is to win one or maybe all of them. She earns money for lessons and braces and does statistical analysis of each year’s winners. She picks just one girl from school to be her friend — the one who can sew costumes for her.

When she grows up, Mona (Minnie Driver) is relentless. She is incapable of any thought that does not relate to winning a pageant. Her friend Ruby (Joey Lauren Adams) is happy to devote all of her efforts to Mona’s competitions, too. When obstacles arise, Ruby takes care of them, from smoothing over allegations of cheating at a pageant to becoming the mother of Mona’s child (Hallie Eisenberg, the little girl from the Pepsi commercials). A parent or guardian is ineligible to be Miss American Miss. And nothing must get in Mona’s way.

Beauty pageants certainly provide material enough for several movies, and some, like “Smile,” manage to do them justice. But this movie has no point of view, a wildly inconsistent tone, and no understanding of its characters — I mean people.

Is Mona supposed to be a caricature? Then you can’t expect all of America to adore her at the end. Is she supposed to be a likeable person with flaws? Then she can’t possibly be as overwhelmingly self-absorbed as she is throughout the movie. It isn’t just that she responds to a question about “human interest” by admitting that there just aren’t that many humans she finds interesting. It is more that her best friend is in prison on a murder charge and it never even occurs to her that she might want to, say, get her a lawyer? Come to the trial? Try to help her in any way? And does anyone think that it is a good thing to confess your biological relationship to your best friend’s daughter on national television? Or that the daughter would consider this good news?

The movie has some funny moments. Kathleen Turner is magnificent as a beauty pageant diva. One pageant contestant announces that she has a double degree in genetic engineering and cosmetology, and another has a ventriloquist act. When a woman goes into labor in a grocery store, Mona seizes the opportunity to get some good publicity and pushes her to the hospital in a shopping cart, singing, “Wind Beneath My Wings.” But these bright spots are just not worth the sloppy mess that comes along. Maybe sixty years ago Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins or Mary Astor might have pulled off this kind of a plot (come to think of it, they did, in “The Big Lie” and “Old Acquaintance”). Maybe thirty years ago, Carol Burnett could have pulled off a parody version. But with these people and in this decade, it is not just bad — it is positively annoying.

Parents should know that the movie has occasional strong language and sexual references (mild by PG-13 standards, but still vivid). Mona cheats in the pageants, causing serious damage to another contestent’s hand, without any remorse. Indeed the injured woman’s bitterness is portrayed with as much callousness as though the screenwriter shared Mona’s conviction that all that counts is winning. There is an out of wedlock pregnancy and a minor character commits suicide by taking pills.

Families who see this movie should talk about Mona’s comment that love is a language that has to be taught, and Ruby’s comment about letting bad things go. More cynical family members may want to count up the logical inconsistencies and plot holes.

Families who enjoy this movie will like “Smile” even more. And they may also enjoy “We’re Not Married,” a cute comedy in which Marilyn Monroe plays a married beauty queen who all of a sudden becomes eligible for the single woman competitions when it turns out that her wedding ceremony was invalid.

This is an old-fashioned WWII movie, with gallant heroes and vile bad guys, romantic longing and fabulous 1940’s clothes, heartbreaking betrayal and even more heartbreaking loyalty, odious collaborators and valiant resistance fighters, a purse containing both lipstick and a cyanide pill, and characters who are idealists and cynics, sometimes both at once.

This is the kind of movie that used to star actresses like Maureen O’Hara, the kind they mean when they ask why no one makes those kinds of movies any more. And this is the kind of movie that starts with an exquisitely gloved woman riding on a train, looking out the window at the countryside and thinking to herself, “It all seemed so simple then,” while, as the wheels turn, we go back into the past to see what brought her to that point.

Cate Blanchett plays Charlotte Gray, a Scottish woman working in London who is recruited to assist the French resistance. The pilot she loves has been shot down over France, and she has some hope that if she gets there, she will be able to find him. Charlotte is brave, smart, highly principled, and well trained. But nothing can prepare her for the reality of being behind enemy lines, the relentlessness of it and the agony of the moral compromises and all-around physical and emotional grubbiness.

Charlotte, now under cover as Dominique, a Parisian whose husband is a prisoner of war, hands over the package she has been sent to deliver, only to see her contact captured with its contents. She becomes the housekeeper to a testy old man (the magnificent Michael Gambon of “Gosford Park”) who lives in a crumbling mansion. She cares for two young Jewish boys who are hiding out there because their parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. And she helps to blow up a German train, delivers messages from Britain (once with tragic consequences), and tries to find out what has happened to her pilot.

Parents should know that the movie has brutal wartime violence and wrenching emotional scenes, including children in peril and the deaths of important characters. There is some strong language and a non-graphic sexual situation. Characters smoke and drink. The issue of Nazi anti- Semitism is frankly portrayed. The female main character is brave, smart, and heroic.

Families who see this movie should talk about how we can never know what we will do until we are fully tested, which is why stories and movies about war are as much about our internal challenges as about our historical ones. An RAF pilot tells Charlotte, “war makes us into people we didn’t know we were.” How is that good, how is it bad, and how is it both? Why did Charlotte make the choice she did? Why did Julien make the choice he did? Why did the schoolmaster make the choice he did? Does war present different choices to us than peacetime, or just the same ones more starkly?

One of the most touching moments in the movie is a small act of generosity that Charlotte risks her life to perform. Families should talk about how, when it seems that nothing can be done to solve a problem, we can sometimes make great contributions with small kindnesses. Charlotte asks, “Can you forgive yourself if you’ve been part of something terrible but didn’t know?” and is answered, “Otherwise what use are you to anyone?” It is worth talking about how we learn when to forgive ourselves.

Families who enjoy this movie will also appreciate other WWII movies about the resistance effort, including To Have and Have Not, Lucie Aubrac, “The Two of Us,” a French movie about a Jewish boy who is hidden by a French farmer, and the documentary about French complicity with the Nazis, The Sorrow and the Pity.

Judith Traherne (Bette Davis) is an impetuous and headstrong heiress who lives life with furious energy. Her life revolves around parties and horses. She sees Dr. Frederick Steele (George Brent) for her headaches and dizzy spells, and he tells her she has a brain tumor. He operates, and she believes she is cured. Her soul is cured as well, because she and the doctor have fallen in love, and for the first time she feels genuine happiness and peace.

She learns that Frederick and her friends have kept the truth from her; her prognosis is negative, and she has very little time left. She breaks the engagement, telling Frederick he only wants to marry her out of pity. At first, she returns to her old life, trying to bury her fears and loneliness in a frenzy of parties. But she is terribly sad, and when Michael, her stableman (Humphrey Bogart) tells her that she should allow herself to see that Frederick really loves her, and take whatever happiness she can, in whatever time she has left, she knows he is right.

She marries Frederick, and has blissful months with him on his farm in Vermont before she dies, having had a lifetime of love and happiness in their time together.

This classic melodrama is also almost an encyclopedia of emotions. At first, Judith is in denial about her illness and about her feelings. She shows displaced anger when she breaks her engagement to Frederick. Most important to discuss with kids, though, is that she makes a classic mistake of confusing pleasure and happiness. The contrast between her frantic efforts to find distraction through parties (“horses, hats, and food”) and fast living, and the peace and joy of her time in Vermont with love and meaningful work (okay, it’s her husband’s meaningful work, but this was the 1930s) is exceptionally well portrayed by Davis and by director Goulding. This is one of the most important emotional distinctions for kids to learn, especially teenagers.

Families who see this movie should talk about questions like these: Why is it so hard for Judith to find happiness, even before she learns she is sick? How can you tell that she does not understand herself very well? Why does she break her engagement with Frederick? What does Michael tell her that makes her change her mind? Why doesn’t she tell Frederick that she is close to the end, sending him away instead?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy “The Big Lie,” another romantic drama with Davis and Brent.

Steven Seagal is definitely in “Fat Elvis” mode in this color-by-numbers honest-cop against corruption story. He’s got Wayne Newton-style black hair and a William Shatner-style sucked-in paunch, and I suspect that at least some of the cuts in the fight scenes were added to give him some time to catch his breath.

No surprises here at all. Seagal plays a break-the-rules cop who takes on a whole team of commandos to save the Vice President and then gets dressed down by his commanding officer (“You don’t follow orders! You’re unmanageable!”) and assigned to the toughest precinct in town as punishment. He even gets put on traffic duty and sent to anger management class by the gorgeous precinct commander. But somehow, wherever he goes, trouble finds him, and people we think are good guys turn out to be bad and people we think are bad guys turn out to be good. Yawn.

Seagal has aged since his “Under Siege” days, and he now does more shooting than kicking. The movie tries to help him out with a lot of support from talented co-stars. Rapper DMX has a very strong screen presence, though it wavers when he has to say more than a dozen words at a time. It is always a pleasure to see Isaiah Washington, who deserves a leading role the next time around. Michael Jai White makes the most of his brief time on screen. Tom Arnold and Anthony Anderson (quickly becoming the movies’ favorite fat funny sidekick) are there to provide comic relief. Their raunchy improvised dialogue that accompanies the credits is one of the movie’s high points. The low point is certainly the plot, which has logic holes big enough for Seagal, Arnold, and Anderson to jump through, followed by the dialogue, which is pretty much cut and pasted from a dozen other scripts of this genre. The title is just a menacing term that has nothing whatsoever to do with the story, further evidence that no one involved really cares very much about this movie.

Parents should know that the movie is very violent, with graphic injuries and the death of at least one major character. There is also the obligatory nightclub scene with erotic topless dancers smearing something all over each other. Characters use strong language and there is even stronger language in the soundtrack, including repeated use of the n-word. On the positive side, there are strong, loyal, brave women and minority characters.

Families who see this movie should talk about real-life cases of police corruption and the temptations presented to people who risk their lives for low pay and little thanks. They may also want to talk about how we decide whom we will trust, and what happens when that trust is violated, and about “anger management” and how it works.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy “Gone in 60 Seconds” and “Romeo Must Die,” as well as Seagal’s best film, “Under Siege.”

High Crimes” is merely mediocre, an all-but-thrilless thriller of the “loved not wisely but too well” betrayed-woman genre.

Ashley Judd plays spirited and telegenic defense lawyer Claire Kubik, who thinks she has things pretty well figured out. She knows just when and how much time she needs for a sexual encounter with her handsome and devoted husband (Jim Caviezel) so that she can get pregnant. She feels confident that she is doing the right thing in freeing man accused of rape by claiming that his rights were violated by a technicality. As she explains to the television cameras, “When the rights of any defendant are violated, we are all at risk until justice has been redressed.” And then, just in case we missed the message, we get to hear it again when she watches herself on the news.

But when a bungled robbery attempt leads to a fingerprint check of their house, she discovers that there are some things she didn’t know. For example, she did not know that her husband’s name is really Ron Chapman, that he was once a Marine, and that he is wanted by federal authorities for his part in a massacre in El Salvador.

He is arrested by military authorities, and Claire is almost as disoriented by her unfamiliarity with the military justice system as she is by the unfamiliarity of the husband she thought she knew. But she swings into action. The lawyer assigned to Chapman is willing, but inexperienced. Claire hires a “wild card” lawyer who has “beat the Marines before and is hungry to do it again.” Charles Grimes (Morgan Freeman) may be a recovering alcoholic with a run-down practice, but she hires him. Then there are some predictable twists and turns and betrayals and threats, and then it ends. Badly.

Freeman and Judd have a lot of chemistry, as we saw in the much better “Kiss the Girls.” But the script is at or below the level of the average Lifetime made-for-tv movie. Here’s hoping they find a better one for their next movie together.

Parents should know that the movie has some violent moments, including flashbacks to a massacre by US armed forces and a bombing that kills civilians. Characters are in jeopardy, and some are wounded, one has a miscarriage, and one is killed. A character is an alcoholic and there are scenes in a bar. There are sexual references and situations, including prostitutes, and some very strong language. The issue of betrayal may also be upsetting for some audience members.

Characters in this movie deal with many conflicts about trust. Families who see this movie should talk about how we learn whom to trust and how we feel when our trust is betrayed. Characters also have to deal with ends-justify-the-means conflicts. How do you feel about the way they resolve them? Some family members may want to talk about the choice Charles makes when he is asked to take a drink.

Families who enjoy this movie may also enjoy the much more graphically violent “Kiss the Girls” and a movie about a Justice Department lawyer on the trail of a female serial killer, “Black Widow.