"Ransom" (18)

An untypically dark and morally complex drama thriller for director Ron Howard, this taut thriller features Mel Gibson as an airline tycoon with a shady past. Gary Sinise is impressive as the corrupt detective who kidnaps his son. Howard builds and sustains the tension until the alltoo-conventional final reel.

"Fly Away Home" (Gen)

Handsomely photographed by Caleb Deschanel and sensitively directed by Carroll Ballard, this factually-based tale is a warm-hearted children's movie for all ages. Anna Paquin, the Oscar-winning young actress from The Piano, plays a girl who loses her mother in a car crash and is reunited with her estranged father (Jeff Daniels), an eccentric inventor, when they teach a brood of goslings to fly.

"Walking And Talking" (15)

Talking And Talking might have been a more apt title for this loquacious movie of neuroses and romantic problems which inevitably evokes the influence of Woody Allen. Directed by Nicole Holofcener, it is amiable, well-observed and played in fresh, naturalistic performances by Anne Heche and Catherine Keener as two women, best friends since their schooldays and now at the end of their twenties.

"Welcome To The Dollhouse" (15)

Todd Solondz's Sundance prize-winner is carried much of the way by the remarkable 11-year-old Heather Matarazzo. Wearing geeky glasses and even worse clothes, she plays the hapless Dawn Weiner who gets a hard time from her fellow students, is virtually ignored by her parents, and has only one friend, a boy who is also regularly reviled at school. In its unsentimental picture of adolescent angst, the movie yields more than a few acute and cringe-inducing observations on the cruelty of youngsters to each other and on the solitary turmoil of Dawn.

"Home For The Holidays" (15)

Jodie Foster's disappointing and irritating second feature as a director features mannered Holly Hunter as a single mother who must cope with being fired from her job at a Chicago museum, with the sexual awakening of her teenage daughter (Claire Danes) and with the annual ritual of spending Thanksgiving with her dysfunctional family in a small Baltimore town. The cast also features Anne Bancroft, Robert Downey Jr., Steve Guttenberg and Geraldine Chaplin.