Every moment, we face a thousand seemingly inconsequential choices that can have the most profound impact on our lives and those around us. In “Frequency,” a fireman gets a message from his son, 30 years in the future, to turn the other way when he is trying to escape an upcoming fire. That night, in 1969, when the father takes another exit from a burning warehouse, we see the policeman in the present as his mind fills up with 20 more years of memories of life with his dad.

As the movie begins, John (James Caviezel), the policeman, is deeply sad in a way that isolates him even from his wife, and we see that this relates to the loss of his father. When he is able to talk to Frank (Dennis Quaid) over his old ham radio, his yearning for a way to express his feelings is truly touching, as is his joy in having had his father alive for 20 more years. But in changing history, John and Frank have set into motion a chain of events that will result in an even deeper tragedy. John finds himself even more bitter and devastated, because his father’s survival left his mother in a location that led to her being the victim of a serial killer.

The story turns into a tense mystery-thriller as the policeman and the fireman, thirty years apart, try to find the killer before he can find John’s mother (Elizabeth Mitchell). As every event in 1969 has ripple effects into 1999, only John can remember all of the parallel strands. Old newspaper clippings change before his eyes and events from 30 years before change the way he sees the world in the present. When his father was killed in a fire, he was so hard to live with that his wife left him. When his father survived but his mother was murdered, he was so unable to open himself up to another person that he never married. Like George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” John gets to see how one person can make all the difference.

Caviezel perfectly conveys John’s sense of loss and his integrity, subtly showing us how each set of experiences affected his behavior and his life in a different way. His talks with Frank are very moving. Quaid has his best role since “The Big Easy,” and gets a chance to let us see his enormous charm in the character’s devotion to his family and his job. Mitchell is lovely, warm, and, in a scene with André Braugher as Frank’s policeman friend, as strong and determined as her husband and son.

It does get pretty confusing. This is one of those movies where the audience walks out saying things like, “Wait a minute! You mean when the guy came down the stairs it meant….?” “How did that other guy get there?” But it is good enough that like “The Sixth Sense,” it may attract a lot of second-time viewers just to straighten it all out. Warning, though: it has some of the worst old-age make-up ever.

Parents should know that there are some very tense scenes, with characters in peril, and that there are some grisly shots of dead bodies. A character drinks to anesthetize sorrow. There is a lot of smoking, though the movie makes it clear that smoking leads to lung cancer.

Families who watch this movie should talk about the interconnectedness of everything we do – and don’t do. Talk about the way that John and Frank made their talks about baseball into a way for them to feel close to one another. Watching this movie can be a good opportunity to talk about how we tend to take precious family connections for granted until they are gone, and to ask family members what they would say or ask if they had a chance to talk to someone close to them who has died. It can also be a good opportunity to remind us to say those things now, while we can.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy another drama in which a father and son reach out to each other across the time-space continuum, “Field of Dreams.”

This is the movie equivalent of a beach book, a glossy story about beautiful, wealthy, people that not only doesn’t require much thinking but actually repels it. Think too much (They allow briefcases and food in the galleries of a major museum? You can get a search warrent for a hunch? Have any business negotiations ever included such ridiculous posturing? What are these thrill seekers going to find to thrill them if they do make their getaway? You can do that to a painting? What is the purpose of that last fake-out?) and you’ll miss the slight but real pleasures of this remake of the 1968 version starring Steve McQueen as a wealthy but bored businessman who robs a bank and Faye Dunaway as the insurance company investigator hired to solve it.

In this version, Pierce Brosnan (who also produced) plays Crown, now a wealthy but bored businessman who robs the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Rene Russo as the investigator. Faye Dunaway appears briefly as Crown’s therapist, to let us know that all of this is just acting out due to his fear of, guess what, intimacy. That is just one example of the movie’s biggest failure — more clever than smart, it tells us instead of showing us such major points as the main characters’ fear of trusting someone else and the fact that they find each other uniquely not boring. But in late summer we are willing to let movies like this one carry us along in exchange for some steamy moments, some crafty twists, and some beautiful scenery — Brosnan and Russo included.

Parents should know that the R rating comes from some swear words, nudity (Russo appears topless and Brosnan appears bottomless), and a steamy but not very explicit sex scene. Families should discuss what makes people afraid to trust others, and the consequences of that fear, and what people do to make themselves feel alive and involved.

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.