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.

Thematically, the subject is survivor’s guilt. Both Marie and Maurice really can’t get over the fact that one boy had to die—in much the same way the whole town can’t get over the fact that most of the male populace won’t be coming home from some unspecified war. The moral seems to be: if you can’t find a way to reconcile yourself with your past, and insist on reclaiming it, it’s like living with the dead… and it will kill you. What’s done is done, and trying to answer the question “Why?” is most often futile. Stylistically, The Shadow Within is unlike just about anything else out there that you’re likely to see.

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.

In an industrialized area of China, a girl infant is born deformed—and abandoned in a field. A young married worker finds the child, and against his wife’s wishes, adopts it. The girl grows up completely sequestered, hiding behind a veil even in her own home. In Malibu, meanwhile, Katie grows up as the spoiled only daughter of a squabbling twosome, lawyer Steven and his too-idle wife Bridgette. Katie naturally acquires the chronic American “whatever” attitude. When she’s challenged by a teacher to participate in an overseas relief effort and runs across the story of Mr. Matthews’ abortive encounter with Lin and Daniel the previous year, she’s hooked. By that time, most likely you will be, too.

Who owns an animal? Is a dog the same thing as a chair, an automobile, or a cigarette lighter? Is the human side of the relationship more akin to that of a guardian? Or a friend? One thing is certain: Pezanoski’s subjects all feel a special, inviolable bond with their dogs. And they all feel, to a degree, that their rights have been violated. If you’ve ever owned a pet you really might want to consider watching this dogs-and-their-masters documentary. Given that the film follows several dogs (and their corresponding people) displaced in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, you might also want to turn flinchingly away.

This is a decent little Big Hollywood picture that may, like Michael Clayton, remind you of classic thrillers from the 1960s and early 1970s. Despite what the trailers show you, it relies more on characterization and engaging dialogue than on flash, chase, and sizzle. And probably no CGI whatsoever. The heart of this Darkness is the surprisingly moving and convincing tale of a father’s relentless love for his daughter. The tension is derived from the narrative invention that this particular father is a Boston police detective. The wheels within plot wheels concern eco-terrorists, dirty-bomb terrorists, conspiratorial politics, and slimy corporate schemers. Oh, and little dashes of radioactive isotopes thrown about for good measure.

Raise your hands. How many of you grew up reading Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, or Happy Hollister mysteries? Personally, I can remember spending many an engrossing summer afternoon with such simple-minded but entertaining kid lit… though, even at the time, I felt slightly embarrassed reading them. That feeling of adventurous innocence—coupled with a B-grade, TV-movie Mummy aesthetic—is captured perfectly in Walmart’s second foray into feature filmmaking. Yes, the legacy of the cliff-hanger tradition has us aping Raiders more than Tarzan these day—and Secrets is no Raiders. But if you’re okay with it not trying to be, you will probably enjoy it just fine.

Feeling like a cross between Stand by Me, Leave It To Beaver, and a 1960s Sunday School film strip lesson, The Secrets of Jonathan Sperry is yet another preaching-to-the-choir, family-friendly program for the faithful… but then again, it isn’t, either. There’s so much about Dustin’s experience with Mr. Sperry which rings true that I have to admit, as much as many critics might not care to, that filmmakers Rich and Dave Christiano have not made some ersatz nostalgic reflection on a rural-suburban America that never was. No, they have captured a one-time reality pretty accurately—if not compellingly so, from a narrative standpoint.