By Jane Horwitz
February 19, 2005

"Because of Winn-Dixie"

(PG, 1 hr., 40 min.)

A sweet story of a lonely little girl and the shaggy stray dog who teaches her how to make friends and bring happiness to others, "Because of Winn-Dixie" includes more real sadness and religious content than many mainstream films geared to children. It also unfolds a tad slowly for some fidget-prone kids. However, the movie has many rewards – a strong cast playing complicated, flawed, but likable adults, an adorable pooch, and an eccentric, small-Southern-town atmosphere that avoids many stereotypes. Credit director Wayne Wang for his light touch.

The Family Filmgoer recommends this film for children 8 and older, but parents should note the more somber elements in what is, overall, an optimistic film. These include the fact that the young heroine's mother walked out on the family years before. The girl barely remembers her and begs her father to recall her mother for her. There are several discussions with him and other grown-ups about adults with troubled pasts – drinking problems, jail, lonely lives. The script contains one middling swear word, a bit of doggy-poop humor, gross, kid-type insults and upsetting moments when officers try to take Winn-Dixie, or when a surly landlord remarks how he once shot a dog.

Young Opal (AnnaSophia Robb) narrates her story, referring to her Baptist minister dad (Jeff Daniels) as the Preacher. They move into a trailer park in a small Southern town where her dad takes over a congregation that meets in a convenience store. One day, in the Winn-Dixie supermarket, Opal meets a mischievous stray mutt. She names him Winn-Dixie and takes him home. A wise dog with a faint smile, he helps Opal befriend an elderly librarian (Eva Marie Saint), a blind recluse (Cicely Tyson) and a shy pet shop manager (musician Dave Matthews).

"Constantine"

(R, 2 hr., 1 min.)

Keanu Reeves brings a stylish, if poker-faced intensity to the title role in "Constantine," as a seer-psychic who spots "half-breed" demons in human form, then exorcises and destroys them. Despite a few scenes of emotional oomph and some stunning visuals (shattered glass suspended in mid-air, scenes of perdition recalling 15th-16th-century painter Hieronymus Bosch), this disjointed, supernatural thriller makes little sense. Director Francis Lawrence, a music video whiz, has made another overproduced, underconceptualized epic based on characters from comics (in this case "Hellblazer" graphic novels) and by ripping off "The Exorcist" (R, 1973). Anyone not familiar with "Hellblazer" will be lost for the first hour.

High-schoolers who like occult thrillers laced with religious mysticism may find "Constantine" intriguing anyway. The film is violent, but the gore is understated – more glitzy than gooey. Still, demonic characters do morph into worm-snake-and-bug infested creatures before Constantine blows them to ashes. The film shows someone smashed by a speeding car. There are two suicides, one of which implies cut wrists and shows a little blood but no wounds. Other scenes portray characters nearly drowning, getting electric shock, pushing a corkscrew into a hand and coughing up blood. The film also contains profanity, smoking, drinking and mild sexual innuendo.

As the balance in the tug-of-war for humankind shifts between emissaries of heaven and hell, Constantine battles both Satan (Peter Stormare) and the angel Gabriel (Tilda Swinton) for his own soul. When a devout Catholic police detective (Rachel Weisz) asks him to investigate her twin sister's suicide, his efforts to get her sister's soul out of hell could lead to his own redemption.

PG-13:

"Hitch" Slick, glib, irresistible, perfectly cast romantic comedy with Will Smith as Alex "Hitch" Hitchens, a "date doctor" who teaches shy New Yorkers like Albert the accountant (Kevin James) how to woo the women they love; then Alex meets a smart, gorgeous gossip columnist (Eva Mendes) who makes him forget he vowed never to fall in love himself. A relatively chaste PG-13 by current standards, but with much verbal sexual innuendo, some of it crude and misogynistic; a man is kicked in the crotch and slammed against an anatomically correct bronze bull; fairly strong profanity; character gets high on antihistamines. Teens.

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