In Bringing Up Baby, a psychiatrist explains that “The love impulse in man frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict.” That idea may not always be true of romance, but it is at (where else) the heart of romantic comedy. That conflict is metaphor for the two steps forward-one step back or sometimes one step forward-two steps back progress of intimacy. The outlandish situations are a metaphor for the loss of control as we allow ourselves to become vulnerable (there’s a reason it’s called “falling” in love). And all of that can be fun to watch.

The Coen brothers have produced their first all-out romantic comedy, a throwback to screwball classics like The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story, with glamorous people trading wisecracks in escalatingly crazy situations. And that is fun to watch. Lots of fun.

George Clooney plays Miles Massey, a take- no-prisoners matrimonial lawyer who specializes in persuading juries to give everything to even the most apparently guilty spouses. The first thing we see of Miles is is teeth. He is having them whitened. Troughout the movie, he keeps checking his teeth. Miles is the lawyer as pitbull.

Wealthy Rex Rexroth (Edward Herrmann) is not just apparently but actually guilty of adultery. His wife Marilyn (Catherine Zeta Jones) has hired a private detective (Cedric the Entertainer) who filmed Rex at a motel with a girlfriend. Miles, despite finding Marilyn the most enthralling woman he has even seen, manages to win the day for Rex, leaving Marilyn with nothing.

Marilyn finds another rich husband (Billy Bob Thornton) and goes to Miles to get the legendary “Massey pre-nup” which has “never been penetrated.” It is an agreement to forego any claims on her new spouse’s assets if there is ever a divorce. “Only love is in mind if the Massey is signed.” Miles, knowing that Marilyn is up to something but not able to figure out what, has finally met a woman as devious as he is. He is utterly smitten.

Before it is over, in classic romantic comedy fashion, everyone will be turned upside down. It is pitbull Miles who gets bitten, literally and figuratively. And Rex may be “nailed” by one video, but a very different video will nail Miles as well.

The entire cast is just plain magnificent, tossing off the Coen brothers’ trademark corkscrew dialogue with just the right mix of understatement and deadly accuracy. It is an affectionate salute to the conventions of the classics — it even has a spit take — but it is contemporary enough for a Clarence Thomas joke and a rendition of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” played on bagpipes. Like the classic screwball comedies by Preston Sturges and the rest of the Coen movies, there are a bunch of colorful supporting characters, particularly Cedric the Entertainer as the detective and a hired assassin named Wheezy Joe (Irwin Keyes). Clooney and Zeta Jones turn in two of the finest comic performances in recent memory. Part of it is sheer physical grace. Clooney owns his moment by the way he adjusts his cuff and cocks his head as he meets with his new client. Zeta Jones owns hers by walking down the stairs. Both are triple threats with impeccable comic timing, frst-rate acting talent and all the movie star magic in the world as well, which keeps their characters both real and sizzlingly sexy.

Parents should know that the movie has some mature material for a PG-13, including adulterous situations and some mildly kinky sexual references (nothing explicit and no nudity). It has strong language for a PG-13. There is comic violence that includes guns and one character is killed. Families who have dealt with painful divorces may not find the depiction in this film very entertaining. Some viewers may be disturbed by a character who is very ill. The characters are greedy, manipulative, and unethical, all played for humor.

Families who see this movie should talk about why independence was so important to Marilyn and why she thought that marrying a wealthy man was the only way she could achieve it. What do you think will happen to Marilyn and Miles next?

Families who enjoy this movie will enjoy Preston Sturges classics like The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story along with other inspirations for this film, including My Favorite Wife (and the remake, Move Over Darling) and The Awful Truth. Fans of dark comedies about greedy characters will enjoy Ruthless People. Fans of this film will also enjoy the Coen brothers movies The Hudsucker Proxy, inspired by classic Frank Capra movies of the Depression era, and The Man Who Wasn’t There, inspired by the films noir of the 1940’s. They might enjoy the unforgettably creepy John Collier short story The Chaser, which inspired a classic episode of the Alfred Hitchcock television series.

“Good Boy” is a not-so-good movie, but it is not so bad, either.

It’s a watered-down canine version of “ET.” It is not particularly imaginative and it goes on too long, dragging through the last half hour. But it has a cute kid and some even cuter dogs. The children at the screening I attended laughed and “awwwed” and applauded, and I found myself smiling a couple of times, too. That makes it a mild little entertainment suitable for a second-grader’s birthday party outing.

Owen (Liam Atkins) is the only child of loving but preoccupied parents (Saturday Night Live’s Molly Shannon and Kevin Nealon). He has been working hard walking dogs all summer long in order to earn the right to get a dog of his own. He picks a dog from the pound and names him Hubble. But Hubble turns out to be an inspector from the Dog Star who has been sent to earth to see how well the dogs are doing in establishing dominion over the planet. If not, all the dogs on the planet will have to go back to the Dog Star for retraining.

The dogs try to persuade Hubble that they do control humans (“You don’t see us picking up their poop!”). When that doesn’t work, they try to figure out a way to fake it so that when the ruler of the Dog Star arrives, she will let them stay. Meanwhile, Owen needs to find a way to deal with some bullies and to make friends with a dog-loving girl named Connie (Brittany Moldowan).

Atkins has a nice screen presence and a terrific smile. Shannon and Nealon are wasted in under-written roles. The script saves its best moments for the dogs, and top-notch stars lend their distinctive voices to the dog characters. Highlights include Matthew Broderick as Hubble, Vanessa Redgrave as the ruler of the Dog Star, along with Cheech Marin, Carl Reiner, Delta Burke, and Donald Faison.

Parents should know that there are some naughty words in the movie (“screwed up”), a couple of mild double entendres, and some potty jokes. The dogs are exposed to laughing gas and get a little tipsy. Characters face a little mild peril and some tense situations, but everything turns out fine. One of the movie’s strengths is its understated, even casual, portrayal of a diverse community, including a nice friendship between an African-American girl and a white boy.

Families who see this movie should talk about why it was hard for Owen to make friends and why Connie kept hanging out with the two bullies. What makes people act like bullies? What does Owen teach Hubble about the importance of encouragement? What do they teach each other about friendship? What does it mean to say that “dignity comes from within?”

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy the similarly-themed Cats and Dogs and the classic E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. They should also try the under-appreciated The Iron Giant. And they might want to check out this site to see pictures from the Hubble space telescope, which inspired the name of Owen’s dog or this site for pictures of the real dog star, Sirius.

John Sayles is not going to make it easy for you.

He is much more interested than questions than answers. Sayles is the ultimate “on the other hand” guy, which may make for more thoughtful understanding but which is difficult to translate to film, a medium better suited to the dynamic, the opinionated, and the one-sided.

Most directors try to grab you. But from the matter-of-fact opening of “Casa de los Babys”, showing an unspecified Latin American city waking up with people coming down from the hills to work and the street urchins beginning to stir, director John Sayles gently tugs on your sleeve.

One of the most prolific of American directors, Sayles has a knack for bringing together complex characters, a sense of history, and subtly revealed longings to create a photo album of being human onto which the audience can project its own conclusions. Here, with an ambitious kaleidoscope of images to coordinate, Sayles does the directorial equivalent of tossing them all into a shoe box to let the characters –- and the audience -— sort them out. The end result is a handful of memorable scenes amidst a jumble of vignettes that never quite feel like a story.

The camera cuts between six visitors and several locals, as their lives cross in that unnamed Latin American city. The visitors are American women, come to adopt local babies and waiting out the months of paperwork, isolated by language. They have nothing in common except for the one thing that matters more to them than anything else. They are together by necessity and get to know one another with a traveler’s intimacy, fully aware they are unlikely to ever meet again, and maybe a little relieved about it.

They represent a spectrum of personalities, from the world-weary Leslie (Lili Taylor) to the childlike Jennifer (Maggie Gyllenhaal), each there for the same reason — a child — and yet each for different reasons, with different dreams.

With one simple scene where she mutely inspects a doll, Nan (Marcia Gay Harden, Oscar winner for Pollock) shifts from tense future soccer mom to truly sinister suburbanite with an understated psychosis reminiscent of Annie Wilkes (Cathy Bates in Misery) on a bad day. Gayle (Mary Steenburgen) is a study in bland normality, attending AA meetings despite the language barrier, while Skipper (Daryl Hannah) is a soft-spoken exercise addict, using her incessant workouts as penance for her inability to have children. Susan Lynch gives a stand-out performance as the down-to-earth and sweetly natural Eileen, who is rapidly running out of money for her stay.

The limbo which these women occupy is a peaceful hotel enclave decorated in light pinks and populated by more staff than guests. The hotel is run by Sra. Munoz, a stern vision in coiffure and heavy jewelry played by the always impressive Rita Moreno (West Side Story). She has her own maternal concerns — her revolution-minded son, recently released from jail for starting fires is talking alarmingly about the parasitic capitalists who come to snatch babies from local women.

While the Americans wait for their promised babies to be relinquished by the stork of bureaucracy, the audience gets to know some of the locals, including one of the hotel maids whose youth belies her responsibility as household head, and a young girl whose pregnancy rests in the hands of a forceful mother, intent on putting the baby up for adoption. A homeless little boy, trying each day to scratch out enough money to buy spray paint to inhale with his two brothers, dashes in and out of the street scenes and adds one of the movie’s more disturbingly lovely shots as he lies on the beach at night with his cherubic features smudged with gold paint and watches the falling stars.

Sayles wants to keep you off balance, never letting you root for any character for more than a few minutes. Is it wrong to have the country’s primary export be its babies? Is it more wrong to leave the babies where they are and let them grow up to be homeless? There are some beautifully written scenes, especially Gyllenhaal on the phone with her husband and the exquisite dialogue between the young maid and Eileen, connecting despite language.

Parents should know that the movie contains strong language in both Spanish and English, and mature themes. The young boys live in extreme poverty, are addicted to paint sniffing, and support themselves by begging and stealing. One of the adult characters lies and steals from the hospitality cart at the hotel. Discussions between characters cover topics including infant illness, medical procedures for fertility and sexual orientation. A character is an alcoholic. Two characters are encouraged if not forced to put their babies up for adoption.

Families who see this film should discuss the different worlds that people are living in within the same hotel. The man at the fort who explains some of the city’s history is desperately trying to leave his country for Philadelphia. Movies directed by Sayles often have history as a theme. Why does history matter so much to the character of the desperate tour guide? Why would Sayles introduce this character in a movie about the “house of the babies”? Characters in this movie have to decide how much they can do to address the problems they see. Families might want to discuss one’s existential response to the question of what to do about an unfit mother: “Be really good mothers to ours.”

Families who enjoyed this movie might wish to see other John Sayles films including The Return of the Secaucus Seven (which is said to have inspired The Big Chill). For those who enjoy Susan Lynch’s performance, Waking Ned Devine is a wickedly funny little movie. One of Francois Truffaut’s best films is Small Change, a lovely and touching film about children.

“Looks like damaged goods to me,” says a character at the beginning of this movie, and that could refer to everyone we will meet in a story that explores the impact of an unbearable tragedy on two generations in a community bounded by the river of the title.

It wants to be a big, serious movie. It has big, serious star power and big, serious themes. There are moments of power and flickers of meaning but it is ultimately hollow and unsatisfying.

Three men are forever bound to each other by something that happened when they were children. Jimmy, Sean, and Dave were playing street hockey and writing their names in wet cement when a man got out of a car, flashed a badge, and then told just one of them — Dave — to get in the back of the car. The man was not a cop. He was a pedophile. He and another man molested Dave for four days until he ran away.

As adults, Jimmy (Sean Penn), Dave (Tim Robbins), and Sean (Kevin Bacon) are no longer friends but they have stayed in the same neighborhood and are always aware of each other. They are brought back together by another devastating loss, the murder of Jimmy’s daughter Katie (Emmy Rossem).

Sean is the police detective assigned to the case, along with his partner Whitey (Laurence Fishburne). Dave and his wife Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden) provide comfort and support to Jimmy’s family after Katie’s death.

As Jimmy and Sean both use whatever resources they have to find out what happened to Katie, the past pulls at them.

The characters and their stories grow more and more tangled, like strands of seaweed swept by strong current.

A lifetime of history in the same place has all of the characters overlapping, intersecting, and echoing each other’s lives. Katie’s boyfriend has a brother who is mute. Sean has an estranged wife who calls him but cannot bring herself to speak. Other characters speak, but not about the things that tear at them. Or they speak, but they lie. Three wives must respond to their husbands’ involvement in terrible deeds. A child loses a parent and a parent loses a child. We see the sacred (Bacon’s character is named Devine) and the profane (Jimmy’s hoodlum buddies are the Savage brothers). The names are another indicator of the movie’s heavy-handedness.

Jimmy and Sean, like characters from an old James Cagney/Pat O’Brien movie, are boyhood friends who ended up on opposite sides, one cop, one ex-con with strong ties to unsavory characters. Each struggles in his own way with survivor guilt over not being the one who got in the molester’s car and with a resulting sense of what it takes to achieve justice. Each struggles with the attempt to find meaning after an incident with such a sense of randomness and such devastating consequences. Dave struggles with his sense of himself as “the boy who escaped from the wolves” but who never really escaped. In one of the movie’s most chilling moments, he tells his wife that he was no longer himself after the assault and that “once it’s in you, it — stays.”

Director and jazz fan Clint Eastwood plays his big, showy cast like a jazz ensemble, giving each one a chance to step forward for a spotlight moment. Rossem’s brief appearance makes her character’s death a wrenching loss. Robbins, Harden, Robbins, Laura Linney, and Penn are each given a moment to step forward and pull out all the stops. This is a cast that can deliver the goods in the big moments, but at other times the performances feel condescending, as though the actors have to work hard to play characters who are not as smart as they are. At the end it is all about the show, not the substance, and these themes and these stories deserve better.

Parents should know that the movie has graphic violence, including murders. While some of the violence and the child molestation occur off-screen, the depictions are still deeply disturbing. Characters drink and smoke a great deal and use very strong language.

Families who see this movie should talk about the way that even people who are not directly victims of tragic events can be as haunted by them as those who are. They should also talk about the way that different characters in the movie think about justice.

Families who appreciate this movie will also appreciate The Shawshank Redemption.

“Duplex” is a cartoonish black comedy about a young couple driven to financial ruin and finally to plotting murder by their elderly tenant.

Alex (Ben Stiller) and Nancy (Drew Barrymore) think they’ve found their dreamhouse, a spacious duplex in Brooklyn with three fireplaces. At first, their upstairs tenant, Mrs. Connelly (Eileen Essel), seems like a sweet old lady with a lilting Irish accent. They also figure that she’s so old, she won’t be around long. But after they move in, she constantly interrupts Alex, who is trying to finish writing a book, to ask for help or complain about a problem with the apartment. Her television blasts all night at full volume. And she seems to be determinedly healthy.

As in director Danny DeVito’s other comedies, Throw Mama From the Train, The War of the Roses, and Death to Smoochy, the humor stems from watching nasty people torture each other. Co-screenwriter Larry Doyle’s background writing for cartoons may be the reason this feels like it was written for Sylvester and Tweetie-Pie. Except with less heart.

There are some funny moments as Alex and Nancy helplessly try to set some boundaries only to find themselves caught up in yet another excruciating errand for Mrs. Connelly, and when their schemes to get her out of the house backfire (once literally). Barrymore is refreshingly without any movie star vanity and seems to relish the chance to look silly. But with no one to root for, it all gets tired quickly, even at less than 90 minutes running time, and the pay-off is not worth the wait.

Parents should know that the movie has a lot of comic violence (as in a cartoon, everyone survives without serious injury), including a gunshot wound. There are some gross-out moments. Characters use strong language and there are non-explicit sexual references and situations.

Families who see this movie should talk about how they have handled difficult people and situations.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy that classic of the hit-on-the-head comedy genre, Weekend at Bernie’s and the wildly funny Ruthless People (for mature audiences), with DeVito as a man who plots to murder his wife (played by Bette Midler). One possible inspiration for this movie is the brilliant British comedy The Ladykillers, about a group of crooks who rent a room from a genuinely sweet old lady. That movie does everything right that this one does wrong. It is scheduled to be remade in 2004 by the Coen brothers (Fargo). Families who’d like to see this situation played for terror may like Pacific Heights with Michael Keaton as the memorably creepy tenant of Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith.