Secretariat (2010)

Walt Disney airbrushes life. That is its specialty. And in “Secretariat,” the studio does a splendid job: This biopic of the horse that won Triple Crowns shows no grit and grime of track racing, nor does it delve into race issues, Vietnam, drugs and sex, or feminist issues despite its 1960s-1970s setting. When Tea Party Patriots talk about the gleaming glory days of American history, they mean the America depicted in this movie. Not reality. But I digress, because this is a rousing lump-in-your-throat film. It focuses on Penny Chenery (Diane Lane), a housewife compelled into taking over her parents’ horse farm. Born with horse sense, Penny knows there is a champion soon to be born in her stable and so she marches full force into a sport run by cigar-smoking old men. You know the rest. From Lane’s whip smart take-no-crap aura to the beautiful cinematography (by Dean Semler) to the long finale where the horse gallops to glory, my snob standards fell and I smiled big. A must-show to girls looking for female heroes. B

Untraceable (2008)

The critical blurbs of the serial killer thriller "Untraceable" compare it to "Se7en" and "The Silence of the Lambs." I only can assume the critics who said this were paid by studio maker Sony. "Untraceable" is never less than intriguing, but it's a washout. Here, the murderer kidnaps first a cat then a series of people, and then live streams their tortuous deaths on the Internet. The sick joke: The more people who watch, the faster and grislier the death. Our hero is Jennifer March (Diane Lane), who works the FBI's cyber unit. Plot holes abound: Marsh and family are threatened by the killer who stalks their home, and yet no one is offered protection. When the murderer hacks her computer, they never think to investigate the data he's stolen. Not even SpyBot is employed. The movie pretends to preach against audiences hooked on gore, yet it all thrives on just that. Think back to "Se7en" and "SOTL," there's no or little actual on-screen violence. And they worked. I was terrified. Here, director Gregory Hoblit has the camera stare as acid eats away a man's skin. Terrified? No. I was going, "Good makeup." C