Women's Western, concerned with a frontier healer (Cate Blanchett) and her relationship issues, her maternal instincts, her sexual urges. One day her estranged and very strange father (Tommy Lee Jones, as "Mr. Jones") turns up on her New Mexico homestead, having long ago gone native and converted himself into a subtitle-speaking Chiricahua; and the next day her teenage daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) gets snatched by white-slaver Apaches. Well: as the nearest lawman can tell her, "It takes an Apache to catch an Apache," but a Chiricahua adoptee will have to do. A classic Western premise, this, and perfectly watchable in its working-out, but any surviving classicist (or simple common-sensist) is apt to be unhappy when the tracker consents to take along not just Mother Courage but her younger daughter Dot, who justifies the unhappiness by getting her foot caught between two rocks in the rush of a flash flood, and later tipping off the Indians to an ambush by bouncing a sunbeam off her binocular lenses. Still, the classicist can take encouragement from the tight focus of the action. Quite simply: "If they make it to Mexico, your child is lost." (No chance, then, that this can balloon into an "epic" in the self-conscious manner of The Searchers.) Which is not to say that the tightness will fend off inflation and pretension. Director Ron Howard, now an Oscar-winner for A Beautiful Mind, has a reputation to keep up. The big innovation here, even if it would not have raised an eyebrow on an old episode of Wild Wild West, is the expansion of the weapons arsenal to include colored powders blown up people's noses and a long-distance voodoo ritual performed on a hairbrush. At such points the scarred and pockmarked antagonist (shudder) seems less a blood brother of Geronimo than of Merlin. With Jenna Boyd, Aaron Eckhart, Val Kilmer, Eric Schweig. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd