THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE (2005). C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were friends and colleagues at Oxford, so it's apt that the new film version of the first of Lewis's seven Narnia volumes plays like The Lord of the Rings with training wheels. Andrew Adamson, director of the Shrek films, has hardly put the auteurist stamp on the material that Peter Jackson did with Tolkien's trilogy, but he hasn't screwed it up, either. Four London children -- siblings Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy -- are taking refuge from the Blitz in a musty English country house when they discover in an antique wardrobe a portal to another world, Narnia. There, thanks to Jadis, the White Witch (Tilda Swinton), there's been 100 years of winter but no Christmas. The children's arrival, however, heralds the return of spring and of Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson), the talking lion who is Narnia's savior. The Christian allegorical subtext is no more obtrusive than that of the Matrix trilogy; what's obvious and overdetermined here isn't the subtext but the characterizations. The sole character who seems to have a rich inner life, thanks to the impossibly adorable Georgie Henley, is Lucy, whose mischievous smile and wide eyes suggest boundless playfulness and curiosity. Perhaps the filmmakers are saving the characters' subtler traits and additional dimensions for the sequels, as Lewis did. (140m)

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