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.”

Plot: This is the story of the Birdwells, a loving Quaker family in the midst of the Civil War. Eliza (Dorothy McGuire), a devout woman, is the moral center of the family. Jess (Gary Cooper) is a thoughtful man, not as strict as Eliza on prohibitions like music and racing his horse, but with a strong commitment to his principles. Their children are Joshua (Anthony Perkins), a sensitive young man who opposes violence but feels that he must join the soldiers; Mattie (Phyllis Love), who falls in love with Gord, a neighbor who is a Union soldier; and Young Jess, a boy who is fascinated with the talk of war and battles.

A Union soldier comes to the Quaker prayer meeting to ask the men to join the army. They tell him that they cannot engage in violence under any circumstances. “We are opposed to slavery, but do not think it right to kill one man to free another.” Even when the soldier points out that this means others will be dying to protect their lives and property, no one will support him.

The Confederate army approaches, and Joshua and Enoch, a freed slave who works on the Birdwell’s farm, decide to join the Union. Eliza does everything she can to keep Joshua from going, even telling him that in doing so he will not only reject what he has learned in church but he will reject her, too. Jess says that Joshua has to make up his own mind. “I’m just his father, Eliza. I’m not his conscience. A man’s life ain’t worth a hill of beans unless he lives up to his own conscience. I’ve got to give Josh that chance.” Joshua prays for guidance, and leaves to join the army the next morning. At first Eliza won’t respond, but then she runs after him to wish him well.

As the war gets closer, Jess and Eliza refuse to run away from their farm as others are doing. When Josh’s horse comes back without him, Jess goes looking for him. He finds his good friend Sam mortally wounded by a sniper. When the sniper shoots at Jess, too, Jess takes his gun away, but will not harm him; he tells the sniper, “Go on, get! I’ll not harm thee.” Josh is wounded, and deeply upset because he killed a Confederate soldier. Jess brings him home.

In the meantime, the Confederates ride into the farm, and in keeping with her faith, Eliza welcomes them and gives them all her food. But when one of the soldiers goes after her beloved pet goose, she whacks him with the broom, amusing her children and leaving herself disconcerted and embarassed. Jess and Josh return, and the family goes off to church together, to continue to do their best to match their faith to their times.

Discussion: This is an exceptional depiction of a loving family, particularly for the way that Jess and Eliza work together on resolving their conflicts. They listen to each other with enormous respect and deep affection. Jess does his best to go along with Eliza’s stricter views on observance, because in his heart he believes she is right. Nevertheless, he cannot keep himself from trying to have his horse beat Sam’s as they go to church on Sunday, and he decides to buy an organ knowing that she will object. In fact, he doesn’t even tell her about it. She is shocked when it arrives and says that she forbids it, to which he replies mildly, “When thee asks or suggests, I am like putty in thy hands, but when thee forbids, thee is barking up the wrong tree.” Having said that if the organ goes into the house, she will not stay there, she goes off to sleep in the barn. He does not object — but he goes out there to spend the night with her, and they reconcile and find a way to compromise.

All of this provides a counterpoint to more serious questions of faith and conscience. In the beginning, when the Union soldier asks the Quakers if any of them will join him, one man stands up to say that nothing could ever make him fight. Later, when his barn is burned, he is the first to take up a gun. Even Eliza, able to offer hospitality to the same men who may have just been shooting at her son, finds herself overcome when one of them captures her beloved pet goose.

Jess is willing to admit that the answer is not so simple. All he asks is that “the will of God be revealed to us and we be given the strength to follow his will.” He understands the difficulty of finding the right answer for himself and for Joshua. He resolves it for himself in his treatment of the sniper, and he respects Joshua and the issues involved enough to let Joshua make his own choice.

The movie is a rare one in which someone makes a moral choice through prayer, which many families will find worth emphasizing. Josh, who was able to respond without violence to the thugs at the fair, decides that he cannot benefit from risks taken by others unless he is willing to take them, too. He cries in battle, but he shoots.

The issue of how someone committed to non-violence responds to a violent world is thoughtfully raised by this movie.

Questions for Kids:

· How is the religious service in the movie similar or different from what you have experienced?

· How was the faith of the characters tested in this movie? What did they learn from the test?

· How should people who are opposed to violence respond to violence when it is directed against them? When it is directed against others?

Connections: The screenplay was written by Michael Wilson, who received no screen credit because he was blacklisted during the Red Scare. His involvement makes the issues of conscience raised in the book even more poignant. The book on which the movie is based, by Jessamyn West (a Quaker, and a cousin of Richard Nixon) is well worth reading. Cooper faces some of the same issues (and has a Society of Friends bride) in “High Noon.” “Shenandoah,” with Jimmy Stewart as the father of a large family who tries to keep his sons out of the Civil War, raises some of the same themes without the religious context. It later became a successful Broadway musical.

Paula Alquist (Ingrid Bergman) falls in love with Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer), a musician, and once they are married, he persuades her to move into the house she lived in as a child, which has been closed since her aunt was murdered there.

At first very happy, Paula soon becomes confused and insecure. While Gregory appears to be solicitous and caring, in reality he is cutting her off from all contact with anyone but himself, and making her doubt herself and her sanity. He convinces her that she is always losing things, that she sees things that are not there, that she is unstable and untrustworthy. Every night he leaves to play the piano in an apartment he has rented, and while he is gone the gaslights flicker and she hears mysterious noises from the attic. Gregory persuades her that these are just her delusions.

Just as Paula’s fragile hold on reality is about to break, she is visited by Brian Cameron (Joseph Cotten) of Scotland Yard, with information about Gregory. But can she trust him? Or is he just another illusion?

This classic of suspense is a good way to begin a conversation about vulnerability and manipulation. Gregory is almost able to drive Paula mad by making her think she is mad already. By cutting her off from any outside reality, by cooly denying what she sees and hears for herself, by telling her over and over again that she is helpless and incompetent, she begins to turn into the person he tells her that she is.

Families who see the movie should talk about these questions: “Gaslighting” someone is now an accepted psychiatric term, based on this movie, and its predecessor, the play “Angel Street.” What do you think it means? How does Gregory get Paula to doubt herself? How does the director help the viewer get some sense of Paula’s feelings of disorientation and doubt? Can someone make another person doubt him or herself as Gregory did? Can someone affect other people positively along the same lines, helping them to believe in themselves? How?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy “Dial M for Murder” and “Suspicion.”

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.

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).