The mother of all recent monster-mommy novels, Janet Fitch's acclaimed and Oprah-approved White Oleander has been turned into a respectable big-screen coming-of-age survival saga that won't disappoint fans of the book. Michelle Pfeiffer as the beautiful but deadly Ingrid -- wisely reimagined in the film as an artist instead of a poet -- steals the show. But as her 15-year-old daughter Astrid, Alison Lohman is a real find; she snares the character's malleable identity as she's bounced from foster homes and a juvenile facility and slowly emerges from her mother's shadow to forge her own self.

The movie has all the melodrama of the book without Fitch's vivid prose. Director Peter Kosminsky creates a series of vignettes that captures each foster home's universe and set of rules, and he depicts Los Angeles as a sprawling nowhere land with pockets of beauty and shame. And Robin Wright Penn as the trashy, born-again Starr and especially Renée Zellweger as the fragile, maternal Claire stand out as a pair of foster mothers who must compete with Ingrid from the prison yard, where she hovers over the movie and her daughter's life with the grotesque, chilling power of a modern Mildred Pierce. (108 minutes) At the Entertainment, Flagship, Providence Place 16, and Showcase cinemas.