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BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA There's a gentle strain seeping back into today's family films, a development that should be encouraged at every turn. When movies aimed at the smallest fry feature characters belching and breaking wind at regular intervals, it's clear that the tide has turned since the decades of such marvelous and -- I hasten to add -- enduring masterpieces like Lady and the Tramp and 101 Dalmatians; even the recent live-action take on Charlotte's Web couldn't resist occasionally pandering to the crusty-snot-nosed kids in the audience. Like the film versions of A Little Princess and The Neverending Story, Bridge to Terabithia wasn't made for them; instead, it's for bright, inquisitive children (and attendant adults) who subscribe to the theory that imagination is one of the most wonderful tools available. Based on Katherine Paterson's award-winning book, this explores the relationship between two outcast middle-schoolers (Josh Hutcherson and AnnaSophia Robb, both highly appealing) and the adventures they share as they create a magical kingdom in the woods that rest behind their respective houses. If the effects involved in the creation of their imaginary world seem on the thrifty side, that's OK, since the heart of the story rests in the manner in which children are able to cope with loneliness, ostracism and even death. Incidentally, co-writer David Paterson is Katherine's son, which helps explain the film's fidelity to its source material. ***
GHOST RIDER Is it possible that before making the big-screen version of Ghost Rider, writer-director Mark Steven Johnson had never even read a Ghost Rider comic book? The original Johnny Blaze wasn't a joke-a-second character like Peter Parker or The Fantastic Four's Ben Grimm; he was more somber, as one would expect from a biker who sold his soul to the devil (to save the life of a loved one) and then found himself living under a curse that transformed him into a flaming-skull creature whenever in the presence of evil. Of course, when you hire Nicolas Cage to star in your movie, it's safe to assume that camp was what was intended all along. Despite all the eye-popping and head-rolling, Cage doesn't deliver the movie's worst performance; instead, he lands in the show position, right under Eva Mendes as the somnambular love interest and the mesmerizingly awful Wes Bentley as one of the least convincing -- and therefore least threatening -- villains of recent vintage. On the plus side, the special effects are pretty cool, and it was inspired to cast Peter Fonda as Mephistopheles (Easy Rider, meet Ghost Rider). Otherwise, this is yet another comic book adaptation that goes up in flames before our very eyes. *1/2
THE LIVES OF OTHERS Pan's Labyrinth deserved to win the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar, of course, but the Academy's selection of The Lives of Others hardly qualifies as an outrage. While it'd be easy to cynically rack up this film's victory to the fact that the organization's septuagenarians would more readily respond to a film about the good old days of the Cold War than to a fantasy yarn that would require them to use their imagination, the truth is that this German import is both emotionally and intellectually stimulating, a winning combo under any circumstances. Beginning in 1984, the story focuses on Captain Gerd Wiesler (excellent Ulrich Muhe), an interrogator for the East German secret police. Wiesler believes in the principles of the German Democratic Republic, and he dutifully agrees to monitor the activities of a prominent playwright (Sebastian Koch) suspected of traitorous activities. But after learning that the powers of the state are being abused by a high-ranking official (Thomas Thieme) who's only interested in the writer's actress girlfriend (Martina Gedeck), Wiesler begins to soften, finally allowing a ray of humanity to crack his rigid dogma. Never mind chronology: Thanks to modern cinema (especially documentaries and films made by a guy named Spielberg), the Cold War feels even more distant and buried in the past than World War II, yet here's writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck hitting a home run with a frightening drama that expertly evokes a period when spies would routinely come in from the cold. ***1/2
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