Opening with a sobering quotation from Andrew Solomon's 1998 confession of suicidal depression in The New Yorker, ''Helen'' dives into this painful mental illness with sensitivity and grace. As Helen, a successful music professor and contented wife and mother, Ashley Judd is, initially, gleamingly serene. But as the first ripples of sadness swell...
Woe to the grouchy sports hero who dares to tell children to stop believing in magic and give up their dreams. When Derek Thompson (Dwayne Johnson), a fading ice hockey star nicknamed Tooth Fairy for his habit of knocking out opponents' teeth, scoffs at the young daughter of his girlfriend, Carly (Ashley Judd), for believing in the tooth fairy, the...

When it comes to politics and the big screen, American filmmakers tend to fall into two camps, the grossly exploitative and the earnestly instructive. On the earnestly instructive side are well-intentioned downers and uppers like ''Grand Canyon'' and their lower-budget equivalents, like ''The Visitor'' and ''Frozen River,'' which offer prescriptive...