What do you get when you cross the best parts of Footloose with your favorite Australian popcorn flick, a slightly startling aural aesthetic, and several engaging performances? Well, I don’t know what you’d get, or what I’d get, but second-generation writer/director Dagen Merrill gets Broken Hill, one of the most engaging teen melodramas I’ve seen in a long, long time. In a wondrous treat for the audience, Merrill’s script brings us into Tommy McAlpine’s conductor-wannabe mind through creative orchestration and unexpected visuals. I won’t say more than that… but sometimes cinematic magic is just about connecting certain familiar dots in ways that are engagingly fresh and off-beat—leveraging and exploiting expectations, rather than defeating them outright.

I enjoyed Rain not so much for its creativity, “freshness,” or daring (of which you may find plenty), but simply because it took me—in a convincing and non-distracting fashion—into a different and interesting world. Better, Govan opts for subtlety in many of the plot details (such as the backstory behind Coach Adams’ rift with her own father, or putting the story in the proper sub-tourist context) rather than a sledgehammer. The information you’re after, in just about every case, is there if you care to pay attention, but Govan isn’t going to lead you by your nose. If Hustle & Flow, as just one example, left you feeling like you’d been conned a little bit—like the “hard life” didn’t seem as hard as it should have—here’s the slice of life you might be looking for… sans the hype.

For the most part, the script makes all the right moves, and the direction strikes the proper tone in emulation of The Princess Bride. The visuals are also appealing. But The Princess Bride also succeeded because it was refreshingly original—and because it was directed by Rob Reiner. Instead, clever as it is, Jack and Beanstalk often feels like a retread. Ten minutes in, I was thinking Jack might be turn out to be a minor low-budget classic—and my wife and I enjoyed it well enough. But the film simply doesn’t sustain that level of ingenuity. As Jack and Jillian, however, Colin Ford and Chloe Moretz turn in very solid performances. (The latter will soon be a household name, I expect.)

Dave fancies himself a “player” whose sure-fire gift with the gals is guaranteed to, uh, jump-start a new love life for his two-years-gone widower grand-dad Joe. As Dave is putting his plans through their, though, he’s learning lessons about companionship from Joe. Joe, meanwhile, is learning from Dave about the more physical side of romance—that companionship is deep and satisfying, yes; but that an active sex life is pretty sweet, too. But writer/director/producer Marc Fienberg is not just after an SNL wink-wink, nudge-nudge sensibility. No, watch closely, stick things through to the end, and you might be thinking you just watched the rom-com equivalent of an M. Night Shyamalan film. Fienberg knows what he’s doing behind both pen and camera.

A focus on “us” is the right place to end a conversation about War Child. Like one-time voluntary child soldier Emmanuel Jal, we all have “a responsibility” toward our fellow children of God. And as Jal notes, “people sing a lot before they go to war.” We need to be especially careful when we’re asked to sing any tune that’s not God’s. As one Sudanese policy expert who appears in War Child notes, “counter-terrorism trumps everything” in American global policy right now; and as long as we keep singing that tune, evil will continue to prevail in Darfur. Pray to God that our hearts will change. War Child is a strong step in that direction.