Movie Guide

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Director: Wil Shriner. With Logan Lerman, Brie Larson, Luke Wilson. (90 min.)

This family film aimed at young adults is adapted from the Newbery Award-winning book "Hoot" by Carl Hiaasen. Set in fictional Coconut Cove on Florida's Gulf Coast, it's an eco-fable about a new kid in town (Lerman) who teams with two teenage brother-and-sister guerrilla activists to save endangered burrowing owls from being paved over by a pancake house franchise. Shriner's direction has an Afterschool Special blandness, but those mechanical owls are quite realistic. While the film was in production Hiaasen said that he had "nightmare visions of the gopher in 'Caddyshack.' " He needn't have worried. Grade: C+
- Peter Rainer

Sex/Nudity: None. Violence: 10 instances. Profanity: 2 mild expressions. Drugs/Alcohol/Tobacco: None.

Director: John Hillcoat. With Ray Winstone, Guy Pearce, Emily Watson. (104 min.)

"The Proposition" is an antiwestern - Aussie style. Set in the outback in the late 19th century, it stars the always-dependable Ray Winstone as a newly appointed sheriff whose highly cultured wife (Watson) is at odds with the bristling frontier life. When the sheriff captures two Irish outlaw brothers, he makes a proposition to one of them (Pearce) - if he brings his older, crazier brother (Danny Huston) to justice, he can go free. The veteran rock musician Nick Cave wrote the screenplay and John Hillcoat directed, both somewhat in thrall to Sam Peckinpah. The bonds of family are the centerpiece of this highly uneven, hyperviolent film. Grade: B
- P.R.

Director: Paul Greengrass. With Khalid Abdalla, Denny Dillon. (111 min.)

It is one thing for us to have witnessed 9/11 as it elapsed on TV. But what we have here is a dramatization of what happened aboard the terrorist-commandeered flight that went down that day in a Pennsylvania field. The director is undoubtedly sincere in his desire to make a movie that dignifies the memories of the fallen. But I think the gut appeal of this film is more primal than that. What it demonstrates is that it is too soon - it may always be too soon - to sort out the feelings from that day. Grade: A
- P.R.

R.V. (PG)

Director: Barry Sonnenfeld. With Robin WIlliams, Cheryl Hines. (98 min.)

Bob Munro (Williams) is told that he must cancel his family's Hawaii trip to put together a corporate merger in the Rockies. To salvage the vacation, Bob rents a motor home and takes his wife and kids camping near the site of the deal, planning to sneak over the hill when nobody's looking. Moments of wit mitigate occasional tendencies toward gross-out humor and Disney-itis. Grade: B
- M.K. Terrell