Jay Russell's treatment of the Natalie Babbitt children's novel posits a backwoods family with a private Fountain of Youth (more than that, a Fountain of Indestructibility), and it weighs the merits of an eternal life ("What we Tucks have, you can't really call living. We just are. We're like rocks stuck at the side of a river") against those of a full life. The height of the corn is established straightaway, with the garden-variety overhead shot of a nubile teen (Alexis Bledel, a younger Robin Tunney or slightly younger Thora Birch) lying supine on the grass, a garland of flowers around her head, a sort of Baby Chatterley awaiting her woodman. The ensuing romance with a hundred-and-four-year-old boy (Jonathan Jackson, with novelty-shop plastic lips) and the intrusion of a plundering Ponce de León (Ben Kingsley) bring things, as it were, to a head. If the outcome does not make you feel like a child again, it should at any rate remind you how it felt to be addressed as one. With William Hurt, Sissy Spacek, Amy Irving. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd