Plot: The story takes place in the Scotland of 1912. Mary MacDhui (Karen Dotrice) is a little girl whose mother has died. She loves her cat Thomasina more than anything in the world. Her father Andrew (Patrick McGoohan), a veterinarian, is a very rational man who has trouble communicating and tends to see his animal patients in economic rather than emotional terms. He has a hard time showing Mary how much she means to him, or understanding how much Thomasina means to her. He is unable to cure Thomasina when she is hurt, so he puts her to sleep, a choice that is rational, but insensitive.

Mary’s friends help her plan a funeral with an enthusiastic chief mourner (He says with pride, “I can cry very loud!”). They reassure her that the whole town will understand the magnitude of the loss: “Everyone will say, ‘There goes the poor widow McDouhi a-burying her dear Thomasina, foully done to death, God rest her soul.” The funeral is interrupted by Lori MacGregor (Susan Hampshire), a beautiful and mysterious woman who lives in the forest outside the town. She cures animals with herbs and affection and is thought to be a witch. Lori finds Thomasina, who is not dead; she has just used up one of her nine lives. In a fantasy scene set in Cat Heaven, Thomasina is reborn, with no memory of her previous life.

The people in the town begin to bring their sick animals to Lori, upset because Andrew put his daughter’s cat to sleep. Mary, pining for Thomasina, glimpses her, and runs after her, becoming drenched in a storm. She gets ill, and Andrew, desperate, goes to Lori for help. Lori tells him that his love is what Mary needs. Thomasina appears outside Mary’s window, and Andrew brings her inside. Thomasina has brought them all together, and Andrew and Lori are married.

Discussion: Andrew represents the head, and Lori the heart. In the beginning of the story, both are isolated. Thomasina and Mary bring them together. Children may be interested in the way that the funeral arrangements are such a comfort to Mary. They may also want to know more about why Andrew had such a problem communicating his feelings. WARNING: Some children may be upset over the notion that a cat can die and come back; some who have lost a pet (or a family member) may be upset that they don’t come back.

Questions for Kids:

· What do you think about Mary’s decision not to talk to her father? Was that a good way to solve the problem?

· What was her father’s reaction? Was that a good way to solve the problem?

· Why is it harder for some people to talk about their feelings than others? Is it ever hard for you to talk about yours?

Connections: The children in this movie, Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber, also appeared in “Mary Poppins,” released the same year, and “The Gnome-mobile,” released in 1967.

In honor of this year’s B-Movie celebration, the DVD pick of the week is one of the films they are showing at the festival, the classic George Pal version of the H.G. Wells fantasy. A man named Wells (Rod Taylor) invents a time machine and uses it to travel to the future, where he finds a post-apocalyptic world of gentle Eloi and monstrous Morlocks. It is an exciting adventure, and well worth discussing, to ask kids why Wells thought that this was where the future would lead and what he would predict if he set the story 100 years from now.

Once upon a time there was a princess. She discovered that she was not the real princess after all. Her late father had imprisoned the real king and queen. All were now dead, but the real rulers had produced a son, who was now in hiding with two scholars. The princess determined to find him and give him back the throne that was rightfully his.

So, the princess went to spy on the prince and, this being a fairy tale, she fell in love with him at first sight. But no women were allowed near him. The scholars kept him in total seclusion, not just to protect his life, but also to protect his heart. They believed in pure rationality and spurned emotions, especially love. So the princess and her lady’s maid dressed up as boys and arrived at his doorstep, whereupon various complications ensue.

This story comes from a play first produced in 1732, now adapted to the screen by Clare Peploe and produced by her husband, Bernardo Bertolucci. Peploe keeps the setting of the story within its period, filming on location at magnificent houses dating back to the 18th century, but there are flickers of theatricality and modernity. A character appears to glimpse an audience in modern dress, seated on the magnificent lawn. Antique instruments on the soundtrack are briefly joined by an electric guitar (played by Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour). And at the end, the performers come out in for a curtain call, wearing their own clothes.

These references to the dualities of 18th/21st centuries and male/female roles are supposed to echo the story’s themes of duality and disguise. But it does a disservice to elements of the story that can only be understood in the context of their era. The princess (Mira Sorvino) has only three strategies – she commands, she bribes, and she seduces. Most of the story has her seducing the scholars Hermocrates (Ben Kingsley), his sister Leontine (Fiona Shaw), and, of course, the prince (Jay Rodan). In each succeeding conversation with the first two, she tells more and more lies. With the prince, she begins with lies, and then tells more and more truth, revealing more to him each time they meet.

Kingsley and Shaw are magnificent, but the clash between the artificial structure of the story and the more contemporary, naturalistic tone of the film only makes it more painful for us to see them manipulated so horrendously by the princess. Rachael Stirling (daughter of “Avengers” star Diana Rigg) is delicious as the lady’s maid and brightens the film whenever she appears.

Parents should know that the movie includes gender-bending seductions, including a same-sex kiss. There are no four-letter words, but there is some spicy language and brief nudity.

Families who see this movie should talk about how people right the wrongs of their forebears and about the complications of getting to know someone and have to decide how much of the truth about yourself to share.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, also featuring Kingsley and the romantic complications of a woman dressed as a man.

Most of E.B. White’s elegant language is missing and the animation is nowhere near the Disney level, but the new animated version of “Trumpet of the Swan” (G, some tension and peril) is still a very good family movie with much to enjoy and talk about.

As the movie begins, proud and loving trumpeter swans Father (Jason Alexander) and Mother (Mary Steenburgen) are awaiting the hatching of their new children. The young cygnets are all they dreamed of, except for Louie (Dee Baker), who is mute. This creates two problems. Louie cannot express his feelings without words, and he cannot attract a mate without the ability to make the trumpeting sound that gives this breed of swans their name.

Louie tries to solve the first problem with the help of a human friend named Sam, who takes him to school so that his teacher, Mrs. Hammerbottom (Carol Burnett) can teach him to read and write. Father tries to solve the second problem by stealing a trumpet from a musical instrument store. Even though Father knows it is wrong to take something without paying for it, he feels that he must do it to help his son.

Louie’s skill at reading and writing does not do him any good with the swans, who cannot understand him, but he does find a sweet girl swan named Serena who understands him without words. But he cannot settle down with Serena until he puts his father’s heart at rest by finding a way to pay for the trumpet. After many adventures, Louie and Serena are able to live happily ever after.

Families who see this movie should talk about the importance of finding a way to communicate and the value of people who can understand us. They will also want to talk about the conflict faced by Father, who wanted so desperately to help his son that he was willing to risk his life and do something he knew was wrong.

Families who enjoy this movie should read the wonderful book, along White’s other classics, “Charlotte’s Web” and “Stuart Little.” They will enjoy the movie versions of those stories as well.

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.”