Tweens in Love

As they ride their scooters past sexually provocative billboards and window displays, many New York children become aware of adult impulses too soon. The small-scale, perfectly acted family film "Little Manhattan" amusingly describes how the resulting neuroses complicate urges at the earliest possible age.

The movie listens in on all the doubts and desires of the 11-year-old Gabe (Josh Hutcherson) as he confronts new feelings about a girl he has known practically all his life.

In Gabe's hormonal haze, Rosemary (Charlie Ray) is emerging as a tween bombshell, and their courtship takes place at an age when playdates start to mean something more.

The very thought of her makes his thoughts race ahead of what is actually transpiring, and over the course of their mutual confusion, he speaks rashly, depending on the love or pain he is feeling. He explains his mood swings in voice-overs that are more sophisticated than those of ABC's old "Wonder Years" scripts, a number of which the film's director, Mark Levin, wrote. In this movie, the more angst-ridden main character is testing what he thinks he knows for sure, but wishes he didn't: that all love ends. The film follows the love story along the gleaming sidewalks of the Upper West Side, borrowing from the sunny aura of "You've Got Mail." The other obvious allusion is to George Roy Hill's "Little Romance," and that film's poignant gondola ride on a Venice canal is echoed when Rosemary hops on the back of Gabe's Razor for a ride along the Hudson River.

As in "A Little Romance," the young girl enjoys a regal upbringing. When Gabe sees the treetops of Central Park from her family's apartment, it seems to him as if he is visiting a princess in a tower. His parents are confronting the end of their own love while still sharing the same cramped space. Gabe explains, "My family's on a one-way ticket to 'The Jerry Springer Show.' " Even jaded connoisseurs of tween culture will credit the dead-on touches: she wears a T-shirt from the store

Dylan's Candy Bar; he suffers through karate lessons at which a taller, leaner classmate, whom he refers to as the local Ashton Kutcher, ruins his rap with the ladies. The performances keep the tale on course, especially with sweet, subtle turns by Bradley Whitford and Cynthia Nixon as Gabe's parents.

Mr. Hutcherson emerges as a child actor worth watching, without the weepy weirdness of Haley Joel Osment or Freddie Highmore. He manages never to sound like Woody Allen with a pituitary problem. LITTLE MANHATTAN opens in Philippine cinemas very soon from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.