FAMILY FILMGOER By Jane Horwitz Special to The Washington Post Friday, May 18, 2001

Also Playing Okay for Kids 7 and Older "Spy Kids" (PG). Imaginative futuristic fantasy about brother and sister whose parents, former spies, are taken hostage by maniacal inventor; kids learn spycraft to rescue them. Scary bits for those under 7 or 8 – robots that look like children, huge mechanized thumbs, underwater chases, attack helicopters, fights, parents in danger; toilet humor. Kids 10 and Older "Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles" (PG). Paul Hogan as the likeable Australian crocodile wrangler, visits L.A. to help his journalist lady love solve a movie studio mystery in bland, aimless, yet amiable update. Fake-looking crocodile, snarling lions; fights, gunplay; rare crude language; mild sexual innuendo; jokes about gay bars; toilet humor. PG-13s "A Knight's Tale." Heartthrob Heath Ledger as 14th-century English peasant who pretends he's aristocrat to enter jousting matches, in thuddingly silly but handsomely decked out romantic adventure that backs endless joust scenes with today's rock music and character named Geoffrey Chaucer as hero's publicist. Knights get thwacked, horses fall, but no graphic injuries; image of a hanged man, another corpse; back view of naked man; mild sexual innuendo. "The Mummy Returns." Loud, silly, effects-laden, derivative yet likable adventure stars Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz as archaeological adventurers, now married with a son, exploring Egyptian tombs and stalked by cult seeking artifact to raise mummy from dead. Bloodless gun, sword, dagger mayhem; grotesque skull, bone, sinew of mummy; mother and son kidnapped; snakes, scorpions, spiders, rats. Iffy for preteens. "Driven." Sylvester Stallone as former race car driver coaching star rookie, and Burt Reynolds as owner, in dopey, dull, cliched soaper about lives, loves of drivers. Boredom relieved by spectacular action sequences. Frightening crashes; sexual innuendo; rare profanity; 195 mph race through city could give hotdog teen drivers bad ideas. Rs "Bridget Jones's Diary." Renee Zellweger as insecure, love-starved London career woman, Hugh Grant as flirty boss, Colin Firth as lawyer she sort of hates in delectable romantic comedy based on Helen Fielding's pop novel update of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice." Explicit sexual situation with nudity; milder love scenes; profanity; sexual innuendo; Bridget drinks, smokes, eats when dateless. 16 and older.

"Shrek" (PG, 84 minutes)
A hilarious fractured fairy tale about a grumpy ogre, a donkey, a princess and an evil lord, "Shrek" will tickle 6-year-olds, their grandparents and everyone in between. The latest computer animation techniques look like a 3-D storybook come to life, and the tale's moral – don't judge people by their looks – comes without a sermon. On a subtler level, the film pulls the legs of many a Disney cartoon character and spoofs Disneyland itself. Problematic as a treat for tots, "Shrek" contains occasional head-banging comic violence, an initially scary fire-breathing dragon, toilet humor and gross visual gags about ear wax, male bottoms and birds that explode after hitting a high note.

Based on the picture book by William Steig, Shrek (voice of Mike Myers) tells of a smelly, slug-eating, mud-bathing ogre who's furious. The evil (and very short) Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow) has banished all fairy-tale creatures, and they've taken up residence in Shrek's swamp – dwarfs, elves, Pinocchio, the Three Bears, everybody. Befriended by a blabbermouth donkey (Eddie Murphy), Shrek goes to Farquaad, who says he can have his swamp back if he retrieves Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) from the castle where she's under a spell. She's to marry Farquaad, but perhaps an ogre-princess romance will bloom.

"Angel Eyes" (R, 104 minutes)
"Angel Eyes" is an oddly put-together, only occasionally effective hybrid – part action flick, part sentimental weeper. Still, high school audiences will be eager to see Jennifer Lopez as a tough cop. Even they may giggle at the treacly preaching about giving love a second chance. And adults will squirm at the equivocal tone in a subplot about spousal abuse. "Angel Eyes" is appropriate for most high schoolers age 16 and up. It contains strong language, a couple of violent fights and shootouts, a moderately explicit sexual situation, sexual innuendo and drinking.

Lopez, whose acting has improved, plays Sharon, a hot-tempered police officer estranged from her parents because she had called the cops when her father was beating her mother. (The odd note is that the family's view – that wife-beating is a forgivable character flaw – is actually given credence early in the film.) Separately, we meet Catch (Jim Caviezel), a mysterious loner who roams the city doing good deeds. He saves Sharon from a gunman and they start a romance. She discovers a tragedy in his past. Mystical psychobabble ensues.

"The Golden Bowl" (R, 130 minutes)
This sumptuous costume drama takes a good hour to warm up to human temperature, so archly do the actors play their upper-class, turn-of-the-century characters. Even after the drama builds steam, it rarely heats our emotions in the way that past literary adaptations by the same team (producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory, screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala) have done. Though not inappropriate for most teens, only the most bookish will like this take on Henry James's novel. There is a central theme about adultery and one muted sexual situation. Characters smoke and drink.

Uma Thurman plays Charlotte, a penniless American debutante, circa 1903, who marries a kindly robber baron, Adam Verver (Nick Nolte), to be near her former lover, an equally penniless Italian prince (Jeremy Northam), married to Verver's daughter (Kate Beckinsale). In true Jamesian fashion (yet shorn of the writer's wordy dissection of his characters' psyches), the story becomes a chess match as Charlotte lures the prince back into an affair, betting the father and daughter won't catch on.