Gladiator” is a movie of such astounding scope and sweep and such masterful story-telling that it makes its storyline seem classic rather than clichéd. Breathtakingly sumptuous visuals credibly re-create the world of Rome in 180 AD, a world of unimaginable reach and power. The aging Caesar (Richard Harris) watches as Maximus (Russell Crowe), his most trusted general, fights the barbarians in Germania. His motto is “strength and honor.” He tells his men, “At my signal, unleash hell!” and leads them through a terrible battle to triumph. And the battle is terrible, an ancient version of the opening of “Saving Private Ryan,” with burning, bleeding, stabbing, smacking, and just plain carnage wherever you look.

Caesar’s son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) wants to succeed his father. But his father says no. Commodus does not have the virtues that Caesar wants: wisdom, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Commodus says that he has other virtues: ambition, resourcefulness, courage, and devotion. Caesar tells Maximus he wants him to lead the people back to democracy. But before he can send that message back to the senate, he is killed by Commodus, showing his ambition and resourcefulness, if not his courage and devotion. Commodus orders that Maximus and his family be killed.

Maximus escapes, is captured, and sold into slavery. He becomes a gladiator. He knows that if he wants to confront Commodus, he has to become successful enough to be called to Rome. Meanwhile, Commodus is using festivals and spectacles to distract the populace while he disables the Senate. The only one he trusts is his sister, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), who pretends to support him to protect her young son.

Director Ridley Scott (“Thelma and Louise,” “Blade Runner”) stages the fight scenes brilliantly, each more inventive and gripping than the last. He must identify with Proximo (Oliver Reed), the owner of the gladiators, who tells Maximus that it is not the opponent he must conquer, but the crowd. He advises Maximus to kill his opponents in a more elaborate and interesting way. Proximo is always looking for something new to engage the attention of the audience, and the results are something like a deranged computer game, with new peril coming literally from all sides.

Fellow gladiator Juba (“Amistad’s” Djimon Hounsou) explains the appeal of the fights when he says that fear and wonder are a powerful combination. Two thousand years later, little has changed. We may not pay to see people kill each other any more, but we pay to see them pretend to do so (in this movie, for example, which elicited applause and hoarse cheers from the audience in its bloodiest moments), and we pay to see them come pretty close in sports like boxing, hockey, wrestling, and football.

Parents should know that this is a very, very violent movie. A woman and child are brutally tortured and killed (mostly off-screen). People are sliced up, burned, and crucified. There are references to rape and incest.

Families who see the movie will want to talk about why it is that people are drawn to watch other people battle and what the appeal is of movies like this and full contact sports. Notice that, like Odysseus in the land of the Cyclops, Maximus will not use his name until he has done something he can be proud of. Why didn’t Commodus just have him killed? Why did Commodus (a little like the WWF’s Vince McMahon) decide to participate in the combat? What does it mean to “smile back” at death? Compare the lists of virtues claimed by Caesar and Commodus. Which are the most important? One of the movie’s great challenges is making its world seem very different to us without making it impossible to identify with the characters. The story is told without any sense of irony or distance. Some older kids will have some good thoughts on how that is accomplished. Families who enjoy this movie may want to see some of the other classics set in this era, like “Ben Hur” and “Spartacus.

Five exquisitely beautiful sisters dazzle and beguile the boys around them in this movie, set in the mid-1970’s. Amid the idyllic suburban stillness, there are intimations that all is not right. Huge elm trees are diagnosed with Dutch Elm Disease and ordered to be cut down. And the youngest of the Lisbon girls, only 13, tries to kill herself. The doctor shakes his head, “You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.” She looks up at him, sadly, wrists wrapped in white gauze, “Obviously, doctor, you’ve never been a 13 year old girl.”

A quarter of a century has passed, but the boys who longed for the Lisbon sisters cannot forget them. They hold on to relics and totems: a diary, scribbled notes decorated with hearts and stickers. And they tell each other over and over the events of that time, hoping that this time they will make sense.

There is no explanation for the unthinkably terrible act, and the movie does not try to provide one. Like the boys, we pore over their lives, looking for a point at which they might have made a different choice.

First-time director Sophia Coppola, who also wrote the screenplay, based on the book by Jeffrey Eugenides, has a wonderful eye for detail and composition. The production design is perfect in every detail. There are painfully accurate moments as teenagers try to make conversation (“How’d your SATs go?” “You’re a stone fox!”) and connection (when the boys finally call the girls on the phone, all they can bring themselves to do is play records to them). The narration, beautifully read by Giovanni Ribisi, is lyrical and moving. But ultimately, the movie falters. It tries for metaphor — those dying elm trees, an asphyxiation-themed debutante party at which people wear gas masks decorated with glitter, the girls as princesses in a tower waiting for princes who cannot save them. And it tries for distance from its time or milieu. But like the collection of ephemera the boys hold onto for years, the movie has “not life, but the most trivial list of mundane facts.”

Kirsten Dunst is marvelous as the most adventuresome of the girls, and Josh Hartnett is fine as the high school hunk with a broken heart for every puka shell around his neck.

Parents should know that the movie’s theme may be very upsetting to teen-agers, some of whom may think it suggests that suicide is a romantic and powerful response to overly strict parents. In addition to the overall theme of sexual longing and repression, there are some sexual references and situations. One character smokes pot constantly (he is shown as an adult in a treatment center for substance abuse). Teenagers smoke and drink.

Families who see the movie should talk about what has and has not changed since the 1970’s, about why the girls were such an endless source of fascination for the boys, about why the response of the community seemed so heartless to the boys, and, of course, what could have led the girls to take their own lives and who, if anyone could have prevented it.

Other movies about the anguish of teenagers coping with longing and frustration include “Splendor in the Grass,” “Picnic,” and “Lucas.”

This is a check-your-brain-at-the-door, dig into some popcorn, sit back and enjoy summer explosion movie, brought to you by the same folks who did “Con Air.”

Nicolas Cage again stars as the good guy in a bad world, this time a reformed car thief named Memphis who has to get back into the game to save his brother, Kip (Giovanni Ribisi). Kip reveres his older brother’s mastery of the Zen grand theft auto as a Zen art form, but he also resents him for walking away from that life and from his family. Kip is supposed to steal 50 cars for a very mean guy with an English accent and a passion for woodwork. When Kip blows it, the baddie tells Memphis that he has to get the 50 cars in four days, or Kip goes into the car-size trash compacter.

What that means is that (1) we get comfortable cheering for the car thief, and (2) it turns into one of those movies that helpfully gives us a countdown (“72:00:00 hours to deadline”) as we see him put it all together.

Part of the fun is that the movie gives us bad guys (the car thieves) who must deal with worse guys (a gang that thinks they should be the ones to get this steal-for-order assignment) and an even worse guy than that (the threatening wood-lover and some off-screen heroin dealers). Then there are the good guys (cops Delroy Lindo and Timothy Olyphant) and the not-so-good guys (homicide cops who think car theft is unimportant).

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer has this formula down cold: top acting talent (Oscar-winners Cage, Angelina Jolie, and Robert Duvall, along with rising star Ribisi and the sensationally talented Lindo), some snappy dialogue, a cool and clever hero, and lots and lots of chases, all done with such panache that even a “my dog ate it” plot twist doesn’t derail things.

Memphis and the cop both long to capture one elusive prize. For Memphis, it is “Eleanor,” the ‘67 Mustang he never managed to steal successfully. For the cop, it is Memphis himself, the one thief he never managed to catch.

Memphis says that he never did it for the money – “I did it for the cars.” He and his gang all love cars so deeply that as they go out to steal, they banter back and forth about TV car trivia, naming the make and model of any car ever driven on a sitcom or detective show. That gang includes former love Angelina Jolie, who doesn’t have enough to do, but does it well, looking very fetching in blonde dreadlocks. When she blows a kiss with those bee-stung lips, the audience lets out a collective sigh.

Parents should know that the movie includes strong language, sexual references and situations, and lots of tense scenes and explosions. Families who see the movie will want to discuss how the way that the movie “disinfects” the hero-thief by giving him (1) a good motive, (2) a commitment to going straight, (3) even worse bad guys, (4) loyal friends who demonstrate that he is worthy of respect and affection, and (5) a resolution that seems fair to everyone. They may also want to talk about how vulnerable everyone is to crime, and how to protect themselves and their property.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy “Con Air” and “The Rock” (warning: both are more violent than this one).