The film opens with a man carrying a boy out of a cornfield as the camera pulls back to reveal the wreckage of a plane crash. The film ends with a recreation of the crash that is astonishingly immediate and real. The lack of a widescreen edition of Peter Weir's masterpiece is criminal.

Yeah, I know, this one makes everybody cry.

Director Luc Besson is the first major artist since Dickens to mix crime stories with unabashed sentimentality... and it works. The scene at the end when Mathilda (Natalie Portman) extracts a profession of love from emotionally-stunted Leon (Jean Reno) before he sends her escaping down a ventilation shaft is three-hankie time.

The John Ford film is astounding but stops a few pages short of the novel's excruciating conclusion. Ford didn't get me, but Steinbeck did.

When Scarlett Johansson cries, "No one will ever love me," you'll cry, too.