The Christian Century

In Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Frank Abagnale, the real-life con man whose exploits--posing as an airline pilot, an ER doctor, a lawyer and a college professor--had a nutty, playful, romantic quality.

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would do so much better to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost its bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm." So Graham Greene writes in The Quiet American, a novel that plumbs the moral dangers of innocence.

Hollywood used to be highly efficient at turning out enjoyable melodramas, but that hasn't been the case for such a long time that White Oleander feels like an anomaly. It's a film about the struggles of a teenage girl against unreasonable odds--a mother who's a convicted murderer, and a series of foster homes, each of which poses its own set of challenges.

The world Hayao Miyazaki conjures up in the Japanese animated feature Spirited Away is so exotic and in a state of such constant metamorphosis that you may have the impression, as you stagger out of the theater, that you've watched the entire movie with your mouth open. Spirited Away runs close to two hours, and there isn't a banal image in it.

The complicated novel Possession  by A. S. Byatt is a double-tiered romance and a literary brainteaser. Like John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman or Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia, the two works it most resembles, the novel seesaws across two centuries. Roland Michell and Maud Bailey are late 20th-century British literary scholars.

At the center of Lovely and Amazing is a dysfunctional family of mostly women. The mother, Jane (Brenda Ble­thyn), a lonely divorcée, is preparing for liposuction at the hands of a handsome surgeon (Michael Nouri). Her eldest daughter, Michelle (Catherine Keener), makes crafts she can't sell.

As played by the remarkable actor Ryan Gosling, Danny Balint is one of the most unconventional and compelling characters on the screen this year. In The Believer, Danny is a brilliant, charismatic young man who denies his Jewish parentage (he claims Balint is a German name), joins a crew of neo-Nazi thugs and rises to the forefront of a fledgling fascist organization.

Nick Hornby's novel About a Boy brings together Will, a wealthy 30-something bachelor, with Marcus, a 12-year-old who's alienated at school and miserable at home, where his depressed single mother attempts suicide. The idea is that Will, a big kid himself, can instruct Marcus on the basics of how to be a teenager.