Cinephile.

Many actresses in Hollywood must resign themselves to playing "The Girl," but that's not going to be easy for someone like Vera Farmiga--where other actresses simper, she smirks. Her best-known role may be her least impressive; as the love interest in The Departed, she had to rein in her adult sensuality to play shrink to two notably boyish actors. She's initially saddled with the same problem in the new thriller Joshua, in which her scene partners are most olden Sam Rockwell and a 10-year-old, but fortunately this unmistakable woman makes men out of both.

Farmiga and Rockwell play Abby and Brad Cairn, a seemingly happy Manhattan couple who are parents to both a new baby daughter and the titular 10-year-old. Lurking just beneath each player's surface, however, is an uneasy soul. Brad is a tube-made-good attempting to justify his new bourgeois lifestyle, while Abby struggles with postpartum depression and Brad's meddling mother. Amid these issues, little Joshua's would seem tame: He's jealous of his new sister and afraid that his parents will soon fall out of love with him. Yet as things take a sinister turn in the Cairn family, Abby and Brad must face the possibility that their son is launching a preemptive strike against them.

Clever and knowing, the movie's darkest joke is that the unsettlingly still Joshua could be birthed by two characters as freewheeling as those played by Farmiga and Rockwell. As his parents resist assimilation, Joshua embraces it; so self-aware is he that even the simple fact that he's 10 appears to be a ruse. When the crafty child embraces his grandmother's born-again ways, Farmiga cracks, 'Zoo bad his mom's a big fat Jew." But for Joshua, identity is far more mutable than that. He may not be like most other kids, but someday he'll make a great soulless yuppie.

Every bit as fearsome as Joshua is Jeannie Dwight, the overbearing matriarch played by Brenda Blethyn in Introducing the Dwights. Jeannie is a stand-up comedian who's attained only enough success to avoid being labeled a failure. Divorced and continually divested of her big dreams, she clings too tightly to her two sons, Tim and Mark, and each boy grows up hindered as a result. While the disabled Mark needs care and attention that Jeannie is only too happy to give, Tim (Khan Chittenden) has been so cowed by his overprotective mother that he's become a socially maladjusted virgin. When Tim meets the sexually forward Jill (Emma Booth), he panics. He not only doesn't know what to do with her but could also never let his mom know that he has another woman in his life.

As if to apologize for the harridan at its center, the amiable Dwights too often veers into conventional territory, especially at its saccharine close. You can see how director Cherie Nowlan might have felt she had to compensate for Jeannie's domineering nature, but Blethyn has played parts like this before and is nimble at making even the most overbearing woman easy to watch. She is helped a great deal in this regard by Booth, the Aussie up-and-comer who plays Tim's girlfriend. Jill is every bit as tenacious as Jeannie, but her staying power is borne of self-confidence, not insecurity. In another actress's hands, Jill might have been no more than "The Girl," but Booth makes her a strong presence worth rooting for. It is she whom the film does the best job of introducing.

Werner Herzog's new film Rescue Dawn is being called the most mainstream of his career. What this really means is that there are action scenes (done competently enough) and that, though it is told from the perspective of a Vietnam War POW, the film remains totally apolitical. It's a critical darling's war movie that both red- and blue-starers can feel good about seeing.

The film is a narrative remake of Herzog's 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, and the title isn't the only thing that's been streamlined. Star Christian Bale, who surely must have the hardest-working nutritionist in Hollywood, has once again dropped a good 40 pounds or so to play a role: in this case Dieter Dengler, a Navy flight lieutenant shot down over Laos in February 1966. Imprisoned in a POW camp, he schemes to escape with similarly skeletal inmates played by Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies. The Vietcong offer Dieter a swifter release if he will renounce America in a signed statement, but the Germanborn pilot refuses, stating, "America gave me wings."

The role is a good fit for Bale, who seizes the opportunity to embroider on his recent action-hero roles with a kooky accent, wide-eyed fanaticism, and that aforementioned crash-diet gauntness. His adversary in the film is not the band of soldiers holding him prisoner but Davies, who shows off his jutting hip bones and loony comic timing with equal alacrity. Up against these two, the normally irrepressible Zahn falls silent--and is all the more involving for it. Giving a full performance with little more than pained, bloodshot eyes, this comic actor proves the most transformed.